BELONGING
Homelessness is a subject that is often discussed but rarely acted upon. However, here in the Central Valley, Adrianne Hillman is making a significant and unique impact on our “neighbors experiencing homelessness”. As the founder of Salt + Light, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Tulare County, Adrianne is dedicated to helping those who feel marginalized in our community realize that they do, indeed, belong. “The mission of Salt + Light is to cultivate belonging and community wherever we go, focusing on our neighbors experiencing homelessness and those at risk of homelessness.” The rapid, expansive growth her non-profit has seen since its inception in 2019 speaks volumes to the effectiveness of Adrianne’s groundbreaking approach to a subject that isn’t well addressed in the United States of America.
While she never anticipated working in this realm, her dedication and work ethic are inherent. Adrianne is from a long line of hard-working, community-oriented people. She and her three sisters were born into a dairy family in Tipton, California, with their father’s family having immigrated there from the Azores to establish a new life for themselves over a century before. “I grew up in a family, though, where women weren’t really part of the farming aspect of things. So, I didn’t feel totally connected to the ag piece of it, other than living rurally,” Adrianne admits. “But my mom raised some really strong women who were really independent and so I’m grateful for that piece.”
Instead of joining Future Farmers of America, Adrianne pursued leadership opportunities in high school, such as cheerleading. “It was actually a leadership thing,” she elaborates. “We led spirit at school, and I led my team and I was a really young member of ASB,” Adrianne shares of being one of the youngest members of the Associated Student Body—yet another early example of her take-charge tendencies. “Those early years of leadership, looking back, I think I was a natural leader.” Even in elementary school, she would run for student office. “My two grandmothers were really community-minded—both of them were Women of the Year in Tulare,” Adrianne is proud to say. “I really think those pieces shaped who I am.”
“The women in my life are pretty influential,” she goes on. Adrianne’s maternal great-grandmother moved to California from Oklahoma when her husband passed away during the Dust Bowl, leaving her with 11 children. “Some of them were already grown, but most of them came here and landed in Visalia and were homeless,” she recounts. They ended up in a tent encampment and picked peaches before eventually moving into a home and shanty garage behind the College of the Sequoias. “So, I mean, these are hard-working people and the salt of the earth.” One of her daughter’s, Adrianne’s maternal grandmother, had a beloved dress shop in Tulare during the late ‘60s and ‘70s. “Even my mother-in-law shopped there!” Adrianne exclaims, referring to her husband, Scot Hillman. “In fact, that’s how my parents met—my grandmothers were friends.”
Adrianne’s paternal grandmother took care of all her grandfather’s farm workers and the children. “She made sure the kids that didn’t have enough didn’t feel like they didn’t,” Adrianne shares. “She was really charitable, really giving. My grandparents were both really benevolent, giving, really generous people,” all traits that came down to Adrianne in spades. “I just saw them being community leaders.” She thought, “this is how you’re supposed to do it, and my grandparents were pretty successful.” A big swath of land that her grandfather had purchased in the early days is now the site of the World Ag Expo. “My grandmother noticed a gap that it was really very farmer- and male-focused, but … there was nothing for the women to do. So she created her own booth, called the Women in Ag,” which is still a major attraction to this day.
Both of Adrianne’s parents were ardent supporters of her childhood pursuits and were heavily involved in fundraising endeavors through school. “My family is just hard-working people. That’s the stock I came from … all the men, all the women … that’s how I was raised. And then I had my own aspirations,” she divulges. “I’m a singer and I love theater and I really thought that was the direction I was going,” leading Adrianne to run for Miss Tulare, which she won in 1996. “That got me a little scholarship and got me going on my college career because I actually paid for my own college.” The following year, she ran for and won the title of Miss Tulare County, which is part of the Miss America program and leads into the Miss California contest.
“It helped me to polish my speaking skills and think about being in the public eye in that way, and that’s kind of the direction I was going.” Adrianne’s major in college was broadcast journalism. “I’m a journalist by nature just because I like to know things and I love to write. I just love to know about people’s lives. I like people.” But even the best-laid plans can change course at the drop of a hat. Adrianne wound up marrying young and had three boys, Carson, Bennett, and Easton. Despite being a stay-at-home mom, “I really could not stop with the volunteering and the doing,” she chuckles. This led her to be actively engaged outside the home, joining Rotary, volunteering at her sons’ school, and serving on the Kaweah Health Foundation board.
Our mission is around homelessness, but this is my way to help people realize we belong to each other and help people love each other better.
But her divorce in 2012 set Adrianne on a new path to rebuild her life. “When you get divorced, a lot of things split. A lot of things change and you’re no longer allowed in this group or you are allowed in this group, and there’s just a lot of division and a lot of lines, and I will tell you that being extricated from certain groups and certain spaces was the biggest heartbreak of my life,” concedes Adrianne. “I’m not sure I had ever realized what ‘not belonging’ felt like.” In high school, she was popular—a cheerleader and runner-up for homecoming queen. “None of that stuff saves you from disdain from people or judgment. In fact, sometimes that stuff makes it worse. And so to experience the lack of belonging that I felt post-divorce was striking, and I didn’t realize how much it was actually going to play into what I do now.”
On the recommendation of her therapist, Adrianne started training to become a professional life coach. “I had a private practice,” she says. “I started a brand called ‘Do It Afraid’ because I realized that fear was driving a lot of my decisions, a lot of my life, and it had been for a really, really long time. It was an empowerment brand and a curriculum that I built to teach women to use fear as the raw material for courage because that’s what it is: fear is the raw material from which we create courage. You can’t have courage without fear. You’ve got to have some fear first, but you can use the fear. You can do two things with it: you can let it drive you, or you can let it cripple you. You can utilize it to catapult yourself into something great.”
And everything seemed to be going great, until she received an unexpected call. “I was in church one day and I heard this: ‘You’re going to serve the homeless.’ And I’m like, ‘No I’m not, because I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I had never served the homeless in any way, shape, form, or capacity at all. It never crossed my plate.” Homelessness was uninteresting to her, and she had no context for that, or so she thought. Nevertheless, Adrianne told her husband about the divine message on the way home. “And he’s like, ‘Well, maybe you should. There’s probably a need,’ and this was in 2016. I’m like, ‘No, no. I’m a life coach, and I’m speaking, drawing up curriculum, and hosting retreats, and I’m loving it.’ Then, not long after, I was asked to sit on the board of a non-profit that was serving people experiencing homelessness.”
Until this point, Adrianne saw board work as more of a slightly distanced position than hands-on participation. However, while hearing about their work, “I was just thinking, ‘This isn’t working. Whatever is happening here isn’t working.’ It’s not a slam on the non-profit itself; it’s just a matter of the system not feeling like it’s working in the way we’re talking about people experiencing homelessness and the way we’re building systems. And then the people that are helping, I don’t think they really understand the community they’re serving.” The disconnect was clear. While she wasn’t officially working for that agency, this issue frustrated her. “It got a hold of me and I could tell it was really bugging me, and it just wouldn’t let me go.” Shortly thereafter, in 2017, the work of Alan Graham, founder of Mobile Loaves & Fishes and lead visionary behind the first community village in Austin, Texas, came on her radar, and she felt exceedingly aligned with him after reading his book.
Though she had reached out to Graham and had been invited to visit the building site, something just kept preventing Adrianne from booking the trip. But a series of fateful happenings eventually slowed Adrianne down long enough to lead her to finally go to that tiny home village in Austin after months of contemplation, and the rest is history. “It felt like the closest thing to heaven I’d really ever experienced, and I’m like, ‘How can I bring this back to my community?’ And, ‘Someone can do this’ because I’ve never run a non-profit,” as self-doubt beclouded her rationality. She was sure she could convey the idea back home, and then maybe someone else, like the agency on whose board she sat, could pick it up. That is until Mobile Loaves & Fishes called to say that Adrianne had been identified as someone they believed had the potential to pull something like this off in her own community. “They don’t sponsor anything. They just encourage it and try to give you the tools to do it yourself.”
The name “Salt + Light” comes from the Sermon on the Mount, which emphasizes Jesus’ message on how to treat others. Amidst Adrianne’s internal struggle over her pursuit of this service to the homeless, one particular daily devotional finally sealed her destiny. “I opened my Bible and the title of the chapter was Salt and Light.” Daunting as it was, there were just too many signs from God and too great a pull on Adrianne’s heart to deny this project any longer. Yet, she still wanted to be sure she was doing it for the right reasons. “I did a lot of work and what I discovered was that my heartbreak is around belonging,” she reveals. “My divorce, it was a life-changer. I was asked to leave a church community and it was humiliating. It does something to you when people, humans, tell you that you’re not okay in the eyes of God. It does something to your soul.”
In actuality, Adrianne knew she wasn’t truly or entirely alone. “But it dawned on me then that for every one of me, there were lots and lots of people in the world who didn’t feel loved or didn’t feel like they were created equally to somebody else or like they were part of humanity because someone told them they weren’t. I realized once I traced things back, that that’s what’s been bugging me. That’s where my passion lies. Our mission is around homelessness, but this is my way to help people realize we belong to each other and help people love each other better.” Adrianne clearly understands that being extricated from friends, family, and church groups is not the same as being extricated from society, but the heart of the matter is the same. Salt + Light seeks to bring those on the margins of society back into the community through radical hospitality and humility, which means being an organization that says “There you are” rather than “Here I am.”
It’s a distinctly different and clearly infectious approach to homelessness. To begin with, instead of calling people “homeless”, using the phrase “neighbors experiencing homelessness” removes housing status as an indicator of humanity and self-worth. Much like how you wouldn’t hurry a friend or family member’s recovery time, Salt + Light doesn’t believe treatment should have a timer. Far too often, people facing homelessness are accustomed to simply accepting whatever is given to them rather than having a choice, a right that is so often taken for granted. Salt + Light seeks to empower this ability to choose, and choice leads to belonging to something bigger and cultivating community. Chiefly among Salt + Light’s demonstration of belongingness is the Neighborhood Village that’s currently underway in Tulare County. It is California’s first-ever master-planned permanent supportive community for those experiencing chronic homelessness. They also have a mobile relief outreach for neighbors still living unhoused.
Adrianne’s approach, work, and results have caught the eye of numerous organizations, earning her a slew of recognitions, including the 2022 Humanitarian of the Year by Lions Clubs of Central California, 2022 Ruby Award from Soroptimist International of Visalia, 2023 Remarkable Woman of the Central Valley by Nexstar Television, 2024 Anthem Award for the non-profit leader of the year in the humanitarian and action category, and 2024 Outstanding Woman of the Year by the City Council of Tulare. These distinctions speak volumes as to the effectiveness of her mission and accomplishment. This is especially impressive given that Salt + Light was established just months before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, teaching our world as a whole a lesson on the value of belongingness.
Adrianne is the embodiment of what it means to be the change you wish to see. “I feel really strongly about how we belong to each other. I believe in kinship.” The old model is transactional, checks boxes, and is system-oriented; this model is human-centered and meets people where they are. “Knowing people is the important part and I feel like we’ve been missing that,” states Adrianne. “We also believe that people heal people.” Sharing these beliefs and living by them plants the seeds for change, and the Central Valley gets a front-row seat to witness something groundbreaking. Salt + Light made its debut as a food vendor at the 2024 World Ag Expo, bringing Adrianne’s agricultural roots and community-centered destiny full circle. There are multiple ways to engage with Salt + Light. From volunteering to donating, every effort is an act of loving our neighbors in a radical way. Check out www.saltandlightworks.org or the VOMO app to see how you can be a part of the solution to end homelessness.
Editorial Director Lauren Barisic
Photographer Ellie Koleen
Stylist Paloma Hodges
Hair Ashley Beckenhauer
Makeup Kristen Flores
Wardrobe provided by LOMIE’S
