Born from a mother's first crisis.

I am Shalana Upchurch-Quarles — a mother, a caregiver, and the founder of Lent's House. Before Lent's House was a nonprofit, it was a memory: the night my child experienced their first real sickle cell crisis. The word does not begin to describe it. Watching pain take over the body of someone you love, with no way to bargain it away, is unfathomable — and in that moment I realized something just as unfathomable. I had a home, a partner, insurance, and the language to advocate. So many children navigating that same pain have none of those things. Children in foster care. Youth aging out of systems. Young adults in the in-between of "too old for pediatrics, too new to navigate the rest of life." They were carrying a disease that already asks too much, alone.

The concept for Lent's House was born in an economics class — one of the most impactful courses I ever took. The assignment was simple and enormous at the same time: design a solution to a real, impactful situation in the world around you. While my classmates modeled markets and policy, I kept coming back to the situation living in my own home. I sketched in the margins of my notebook: a home — not an institution — where a child or young adult with sickle cell could heal in peace. A real bed. Warm food grown a few steps away. A nurse who knew their name and their pain scale. People who understood that a "good day" and a "crisis day" need very different kinds of love. I wrote one sentence at the top of that page: a place to heal, grow, and belong. It never left me.

In the years that followed, the work continued. I kept studying. I kept advocating. I read everything I could about sickle cell, about trauma-informed care, about the gaps families fall through. And then my son was born — with sickle cell — and the concept I had once sketched in the margins of an economics notebook became the very air our family breathed. Every hospital stay, every pain crisis, every quiet conversation with another parent who whispered, "I didn't know anyone else was going through this," sharpened the vision. Lent's House is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 39-3608398) — a home, on purpose, in Portland, Oregon: trauma-informed, with farm-to-table nutrition, and an informed nurse on call. We serve children and we serve the transition into adulthood, because sickle cell does not stop at eighteen, and neither do we.

This is not a group home. It is a home — endearing, compassionate, and informed by lived experience — designed to encourage the very best life for everyone affected by sickle cell disease.