VOLUSIA COUNTY / HOUSING / INSPIRATION
Lindsay Elliott
Close enough
to keep learning.
Staying close to the families.
By Rob Urban
Lindsay Elliott’s office at Family Renew Community is on a residential campus in Holly Hill. That detail helps explain what drew her to the job. When she became executive director in September 2024, she told the Daytona Beach News-Journal about the pleasure of seeing the families and their babies in the course of an ordinary workday.
For someone responsible for budgets, staff, buildings, and donations, proximity is useful. The people affected by those decisions are nearby. Their lives continue while the administrative work gets done.
Elliott came to Family Renew after a long career with Flagler Habitat for Humanity. Both organizations work on housing, though at different stages of a family’s circumstances. Habitat helps eligible households pursue ownership. Family Renew provides temporary apartments and intensive support for parents and children experiencing homelessness in Volusia County.
The move brought Elliott into an organization with a history of its own, an experienced staff, and families already doing the demanding work of preparing to live independently. Her role was to lead that continuing effort. She did not need to invent the mission to find it worth her attention.
A career long enough
to see the next chapter.
A September 2026 Palm Coast Observer profile recorded Elliott’s twenty-three years with Flagler Habitat and her pride in its new executive director, Devrie Paradowski, who had once been a Habitat homeowner. Elliott had known Paradowski when she applied. Years later, she saw that stable home as a foundation for further opportunities.
The connection gives a long career in housing a human scale. A family’s progress rarely fits neatly into the reporting period in which an organization first helps them. Education, work, and family circumstances unfold over much longer stretches. Staying in the field can mean getting to see chapters that an initial success story cannot yet contain.
Paradowski’s path is explored in her own Inspiration Series profile. For Elliott, the connection illustrates the value of institutional memory. She could recognize the new leader and remember the applicant. Both were the same capable person, encountered under very different circumstances.
Elliott’s move to Volusia also brought her work closer to her own community. The 2024 report announcing her arrival described her as a Stetson University alumna living in DeLand with her husband, near Family Renew’s campus there. She began the new role on September 23 that year.
Family Renew had been established in 1989 by twenty religious organizations. Elliott inherited a practical coalition: congregations, donors, volunteers, and staff contributing different parts of what a housing program needs. The buildings were one part of that inheritance. The willingness of people to keep caring for them was another.
There is more
to understand.
There is another reason I admire her choice. In Sierra Williams’ January 2026 profile, Elliott acknowledged that the job had changed her understanding of homelessness. Working families and children had become far more visible to her.
Experience can make it tempting to arrive with every answer already prepared. Elliott was willing to describe what she was still learning. That gives the people around her room to be more complicated than anyone’s first impression. For a parent trying to rebuild a life, being understood accurately is a meaningful place to begin.
The same report describes her bringing volunteers back into the work. Joan Grennan recalled Elliott appealing to her congregation; Grennan returned to helping prepare apartments for new residents. I like that modest, practical evidence of leadership. Someone who wanted to help was asked, and a home could be made ready.
Room to regroup.
Work to do.
Family Renew’s program description explains the arrangement plainly. Families receive furnished apartments without rent or utility payments while working with case managers on a plan for greater stability. Parents are expected to maintain employment, follow a budget, and save half their earnings toward future housing. Staff review budgets regularly and help connect families with employment, child care, education, and other resources.
Those expectations make this a substantial undertaking for the residents. Moving into temporary housing does not remove every pressure in a parent’s life. There are still children to care for, work schedules to manage, and decisions about spending that can feel very different when the income is your own.
The apartment creates space in which to do that work. Removing rent and utilities for a period makes the savings requirement possible in a way it might not be in the open rental market. A case manager can help turn the broad goal of stability into smaller actions that can be checked, adjusted, and attempted again.
The program also describes trauma-informed case management and collaboration with counseling providers. That recognizes that a household’s finances are part of a larger life. An overdue bill is visible. The experiences affecting someone’s ability to navigate the next step may be much less so.
In Elliott’s new workplace, the distance between a program description and the people living through it is short. Her office location makes daily contact ordinary. It is easier to keep an individual in view when that person is a neighbor at work, with children whose faces you recognize.
Whose key
opens the door?
The organization’s DeLand campus contains seven apartments, with on-site case management and homelessness-prevention services. Its other residential locations include Holly Hill, Daytona Beach and Edgewater, where a newer campus has eight two-bedroom apartments. Each address puts a countywide mission into a particular neighborhood.
A smaller campus can disappear from view when community discussions focus only on large construction projects. Seven apartments, however, still mean seven households can have a private place to sleep, cook, and regroup. The importance of a building depends partly on whose key opens its door.
A dresser.
A volunteer shift.
A place to begin.
The Secret Attic thrift store in Ormond Beach contributes in several ways. Donated household goods help furnish apartments; resident families can obtain clothing and personal items through complimentary shopping; store proceeds support operations. Volunteers sort, price, receive goods, assist customers, and keep the merchandise moving.
That is a fairly sophisticated local exchange hiding inside a familiar retail format. A usable piece of furniture can help equip a home. A sale can help pay the organization’s bills. A volunteer shift can keep both possibilities available. The public has several ways to participate, including some that begin with the contents of a garage.
Elliott’s leadership therefore reaches across work that may look unrelated from the outside. A housing plan, a staff schedule, a donated dresser, and a functioning building all become part of the same effort. None can carry the whole program by itself.
After the
moving truck leaves.
Family Renew’s Beyond Homelessness initiative keeps contact with former residents and offers access to after-care case management. It also gathers information about how families fare after leaving, using surveys and checks of the local homelessness-services information system.
That follow-up asks a better question than whether an apartment has become vacant. Did the household’s next move last? If circumstances deteriorate, is there still someone they can approach? An exit is an administrative event. A stable home is an ongoing condition.
Elliott’s career has already given her one remarkable example of what a later chapter can hold: a former Habitat applicant returning as the organization’s leader. Other later chapters may be quieter, and every bit as worth working toward. A parent keeps a job. A child stays in the same school. A household handles an unexpected bill without losing its home.
Those are substantial outcomes even when no ceremony marks them. At an office among the apartments in Holly Hill, the work stays close to the people who are trying to reach them.
What I admire in Elliott is the willingness to keep showing up for those possibilities. A long career has given her reasons to believe in people. The new work keeps giving her reasons to listen.
About Lindsay Elliott’s work
What does Lindsay Elliott lead?
Lindsay Elliott is executive director of Family Renew Community, which supports families with children experiencing homelessness in Volusia County.
What does Family Renew Community provide?
Family Renew provides temporary furnished apartments and case management to eligible families. Its work includes support with employment, budgeting, savings, child care and preparing for independent housing.
Does support continue after a family moves out?
Family Renew describes continued or renewed access to after-care case management through its Beyond Homelessness initiative, alongside efforts to track longer-term housing stability.
Sources: Family Renew Community’s program, campus, thrift store and after-care pages; Clayton Park’s November 2024 Daytona Beach News-Journal report, republished by Family Renew; Sierra Williams’ January 2026 Observer profile; and Brent Woronoff’s September 2026 profile of Devrie Paradowski. Current leadership and campus information checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about people whose work deserves a closer look. For more of my writing, or a conversation about your organization, meet Rob.