Waco Trib + Lovely Village

Lovely Village housing for women escaping exploitation gets $630K boost from Waco

Christopher De Los Santos | June 26, 2025 | Original Source

The city of Waco has approved a $630,000 grant backing the first phase of Lovely Village’s Safe Housing development that will offer two years of rent-free housing and support to women escaping trafficking, sexual exploitation and trauma.

The Waco City Council approved the grant last week for local nonprofit Jesus Said Love, which is rebranding and expanding as Lovely Village after more than 20 years helping women transition away from sex work. The grant is funded by pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act money targeted for low-income housing.

Founder Emily Mills and CEO Brett Mills said the grant will pay for labor and materials to renovate a vacant four-unit apartment building Magnolia donated in 2023. The apartments will be available to women escaping trafficking or other sexual trauma, along with their children. They will be able to live there rent-free for up to two years, when Lovely Village will provide them a living-wage job making candles and skin care products, or help them find another job. Entrepreneurial training has been part of the nonprofit’s work for years, and five women have gone on to launch businesses in the Waco area after working through its programs.

Lovely Village, a $7.7 million project, is Jesus Said Love’s first housing installment, offering two years of rent-free housing in Waco to victims of trafficking, sexual exploitation and trauma. (2023)

Fundraising for the first phase of Lovely Village Safe Housing, including the city grant, has reached $1.82 million, with a little more than $700,000 left to raise. Rebekah Powell-Lewis has already been hired as chief operating officer, and the apartment renovation is expected to start in August with Whyte Oak Homes leading the work. Phase 1 also will include hiring a program manager, case manager and housing director.

The apartments will have three studio units and a two-bedroom unit, offering room for four women with children or eight to 10 single women. Single women will have roommates, and women with children will have their own units.

Subsequent phases over the next 10 years will add additional housing, including new construction near the apartments, with the goal of creating capacity to serve 22 women and 40 children at a time.

For around the past 20 years, Emily and Brett Mills have operated Jesus Said Love as an outreach to women exploited in trafficking, strip clubs or other sex work. The ministry began with showing the women of one strip club in Waco kindness and grew to reach more than 800 women monthly in Waco and other communities across Texas.

They started work in 2023 to add safe housing to the services Lovely Village offers.

The Mills see the grant from the city as coming full circle from a policy of legalized prostitution in a red light district known as the Reservation between 1889 and 1917, to helping women escape and recover from sexual exploitation and trauma.

According to wacohistory.org, some estimates place city revenue from brothel-related licensing and regulatory fees during those 28 years as high as $336,000, equivalent to $11 million today, adjusted for inflation.

Now with the grant the city is helping women live free of trafficking, Emily Mills said.