Unlocked gives keys to women climbing out of homelessness

BY HANNAH HERNER

When Ray Ponce de Leon died, he left a duffle bag full of money for Alexis Cook. Ray was The Contributor’s first vendor, and Cook had become his adopted granddaughter.

Cook took that money to start Unlocked, a jewelry business that employs and houses women while helping them out of homelessness.

Ponce de Leon and Cook met through a program in which Vanderbilt students visited residents at Mercury Court, a housing complex run by Urban Housing Solutions.

Ray Ponce de Leon and Alexis Cook

“We just really hit it off,” Cook says. “You wouldn’t think we had a whole lot in common because I was 18 and at that point he was in his mid-60s, but we just started talking about Chick-fil-A and we realized we both spoke Spanish, so we started talking over people’s heads. We really became good friends.”

They’d grab lunch together, and she would scribe songs for him. The two were bonded further when they were hit with medical issues around the same time. Cook was diagnosed with Lyme disease, and Ponce de Leon was diagnosed with cancer. She had to take a semester off from school, and during that time she took him to treatments.

With extra time on her hands, Cook says she felt led to connect with people experiencing homelessness without the structure of a nonprofit.

“I started thinking there should be an organization that provided wages while addressing barriers that people experiencing homelessness face,” she says. “Actually a lot of the people I was meeting were Contributor vendors.”

With this idea swirling in her head, she visited campus, and got locked out of her car. She and her to-be business partner Corbin Hooker sketched out a little plan for an organization called Unlocked while waiting for spare keys to come. But she couldn’t decide if it was the right thing to pursue.

On his deathbed, Ponce de Leon told her about the money he had set aside. And a couple of months after Ponce De Leon passed, she and his good friend Chuck C., also a Contributor vendor, retrieved the duffle bag. It amounted to a little over $1,000 a piece. That was enough to file for LLC status, buy some equipment and employ the first maker.

“I had been walking him through my thought process the whole time and he had been helping me think through it,” Cook says. “I had never experienced homelessness, so I really appreciated his input of what would be useful, what would not, and what different services we should provide.”

A partnership with Urban Housing Solutions and Community Care Fellowship enables Unlocked to get their jewelry makers into housing first. Part of Unlocked’s model is the pathways program, which brings in nonprofits to help with career and personal counseling, and financial empowerment. Once in, they can begin to offer these services, and set goals.

One of Unlocked alum Gwen Johnson’s goals was to teach art therapy for children. Now, she’s graduated from Unlocked and does exactly that. Before Unlocked, she had just moved to a safe house from the Nashville Rescue Mission, and was supporting herself as best she could through making jewelry with Poverty and the Arts.

“They were still in college when they hired me! They put confidence in me,” Johnson says. “They saw something that I didn’t see in myself. It’s not that I was giving up on myself or anything like that. I was just taking it slow. They pushed me over the limit, like ‘hey you can do this.’ Even though I’m much older than they are, they sort of molded me into the person that I am now. I still have schizophrenic tendencies and I still have trust issues, but because of their love that they showed me, I’m able to give more back and I’m able to relax more around people.”

As the company continued to grow, Cook and Hooker decided it was important that the products they were making were ethical to the environment, too. They created their own system of wax molds and recycled silver.

When current maker Carolyn Neeley started at Unlocked in February, she had been living with a family member. Diagnoses of Crohn’s and celiac disease, among others, had sidelined her from her career since 2016. While at Unlocked, she’s working up the funds and confidence needed to get her mortgage license again.

“Being able to get up and go to work and be in my own place, not living in someone else’s house, makes me feel so much better. It’s helped my self esteem, everything,” Neeley says. “They don’t look at you as this poor pitiful thing, they look at you as an individual that needs some support and they’re willing to do that.”

Ponce de Leon was key to getting this organization started, even though he didn’t live to see it started.

“It’s been quite a journey, but it truly only is possible because of Ray,” Cook says.