LAKE COUNTY / YOUTH & HOUSING / INSPIRATION
Denise Burry
Ten front doors.
Years of care.
By Rob Urban
Ten small houses in Eustis make a very specific argument about growing up: a young person needs somewhere to do it.
Cottages on Grove opened in 2024 through Forward Paths Foundation and its partners. The homes serve young people experiencing homelessness, including those leaving foster care. Each cottage is about 600 square feet, with room for two residents. The dimensions are modest. The change represented by a dependable place to sleep, keep belongings and plan a day is much larger.
Denise Burry, Forward Paths’ founder and executive director, helped turn concern for young people into something they can actually inhabit. Her work is rooted in Lake County, with connections running through Leesburg, Eustis, local churches, builders, educators and people willing to keep showing up.
I want more stories like hers in the picture when we talk about what makes a Florida community worth living in. We are very good at announcing new places to shop. Ten front doors for young people with nowhere dependable to go deserve some attention, too.
A plan has to hold together.
Before founding Forward Paths, Burry served as a certified Guardian ad Litem in Florida’s Fifth Judicial Circuit. The foundation’s leadership page also describes her as the mother of eight children, two internationally adopted. Those facts establish a long connection to children’s lives and to the adults and institutions involved in their care.
The foundation’s published approach connects housing with transportation, education, job skills and other services. That combination is central to understanding the project. A person can have the intention to study or work and still face practical obstacles that prevent a plan from holding together.
Transportation is a good example. A job offer assumes that the new employee can reach the workplace repeatedly. Education assumes somewhere to keep materials and enough continuity to attend. A housing program aimed at independence has to think about the relationships among those needs.
Burry’s recognition in Leesburg, including the city’s Mayor’s Award and the chamber’s Humanitarian Award in 2017, reflects how established that work became locally. The cottages arrived later. The awards and the buildings belong to different stages of an organization that had to develop relationships before it could develop a site.
2019.
The land changes hands.
One of the most useful sources for this story is a page maintained by a project partner. First United Methodist Church of Eustis records the July 26, 2019 transfer of 1.58 acres north of its campus to Forward Paths for housing. The page also preserves the earlier work of preparing an existing house for occupancy and the August 2023 groundbreaking for the cottages.
The dates tell an important part of the story. The distance between transferring land and completing a housing community contains years of work. The church’s account makes visible the less glamorous sequence: existing houses, renovation plans, property, agreements and construction. A finished photograph tends to flatten all of that into one happy day.
The partnership also gives the story a useful local scale. A congregation had a physical asset. A nonprofit had a mission and experience serving the young people who needed it. Builders and other partners could contribute construction expertise. The homes emerged from those different capacities coming together.
The contribution
has an address.
HomeAid Orlando’s project record lists Taylor Morrison and Ashton Woods as the builder captains. It records ten two-bedroom micro homes, completion in June 2024 and a project value of $1.98 million, with 29.1 percent donated. The figures come from HomeAid’s construction record.
They tell a more informative story than a vague statement that businesses “gave back.” Construction has costs, schedules and specialized skills. Getting a portion of that work donated changes what a nonprofit can build with the resources it has. The contribution is attached to a completed result.
The foundation’s current mission page places the cottages within a wider housing effort. It also describes two donated houses on the Eustis property and rental housing elsewhere in Lake County. Its stated total is forty-one beds across those arrangements. The cottages are therefore one part of the organization’s capacity, rather than the entire program.
The small size of each cottage makes the domestic scale legible. These are rooms, kitchens and places for two people to organize everyday life. A front door provides a boundary between the world outside and somewhere a resident can begin to establish a routine.
Ready for
the first shift.
Forward Paths’ published examples of support costs include a birth certificate, a driver’s license, a work uniform, shoes and books for a semester. I find that list clarifying. “Independence” can sound like a quality a young person is supposed to produce from within. Here it has receipts, deadlines and things that need replacing.
Consider the gap between getting a job and being ready for the first shift. The offer matters. So do the clothes, the ride and the identification. When one of those is missing, a small expense can stand between a person and a much larger opportunity. A useful organization pays attention to the size of the obstacle from the young person’s side.
The ordinary day
after move-in.
Read the staff biographies and the organization becomes more interesting than a founder-only story. Forward Paths identifies case management, clinical support, grants, volunteering and financial-stability work among its team’s responsibilities. Linda Weekley brings decades of banking experience to teaching budgeting and saving. Ashley DeLoatch’s biography describes her own years in foster care and the understanding she brings to case management. The mix of roles makes visible how much ongoing attention a housing mission requires.
That is the part I most want to keep in view. The opening ceremony can bring a community together. A resident may need help much later, on a thoroughly ordinary day, with a problem that offers no useful photograph. Long-term support has to be organized for those days as well.
There is a related thread in Bryan Stevenson’s work on attention and human dignity: a person’s circumstances deserve close attention before outsiders reduce them to a category. Burry’s work takes place in a different setting, but the local housing and support model similarly asks people to stay involved with actual lives.
An older kindness
finds a new address.
The foundation’s housing page dedicates Cottages on Grove to Virginia Kirk Landstrom. It tells of a young woman who lost financial support at eighteen in the early 1930s, found work in a law firm and received practical help from an older colleague when her wages barely covered a room.
That dedication carries a modest, durable idea. Help offered within one person’s reach can remain meaningful long after the original encounter. The cottages give a remembered act of care a new address, where it can matter to people Virginia never met.
Forward Paths is also looking ahead. As of September 2026, its mission page describes plans for another ten cottages in Leesburg, with construction intended to begin in early 2027. The Eustis homes are the completed accomplishment on which the next ambition rests.
I admire Burry’s patience with the distance between concern and a place someone can live. The most persuasive part of her story is already standing. A coalition worked through the distance between wanting young people to have a future and giving them somewhere to begin building one. In Eustis, that work has front doors.
About Denise Burry and Forward Paths
Who is Denise Burry?
Denise Burry is the founder and executive director of Forward Paths Foundation in Lake County, Florida. Before founding the organization, she served as a certified Guardian ad Litem in Florida’s Fifth Judicial Circuit.
What are Cottages on Grove?
Cottages on Grove is a community of ten two-bedroom micro homes in Eustis, completed in June 2024 through Forward Paths, HomeAid Orlando and construction partners. Each approximately 600-square-foot cottage houses two young people.
What is Forward Paths planning in Leesburg?
As of September 2026, Forward Paths’ mission page describes plans for ten additional cottages in Leesburg, called Cottages on Palmetto, with construction intended to begin in early 2027. That project is described as planned, not completed.
Sources: Forward Paths’ mission, team, housing and support pages; First United Methodist Church of Eustis’ project history; and HomeAid Orlando’s construction record. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
Some of the work most worth understanding happens quietly over years. I write about that work, and help organizations tell its story. If you would like to read more or talk, meet Rob.