Kathleen Miller, the founding director of Living Grace Homes, has been named Nevada’s 2026 Mother of Achievement, a recognition that comes as crews finish a new campus in Las Vegas that will add 14 emergency beds for pregnant young women facing homelessness.
Miller said she was “very humbled and surprised” when she got the call telling her that she had been nominated and that the committee had chosen her. But she said the honor really belongs to the nonprofit she started after seeing pregnant teens sleeping on the street and realizing there was no housing in Clark County for young women in that situation.
“But if it weren’t for Living Grace, there would not be a Mother of Achievement for me, because this has been my life for the last almost 25 years now,” Miller said. She said she spent years preparing, researching and figuring out what needed to be done before the nonprofit opened 19 years ago.
Since then, Living Grace Homes has provided a safe place for nearly 900 mothers and babies to begin again. The program helps young moms with medical care, legal issues, school and jobs, and Miller said most of the women who come through the doors have not graduated from high school. “We can help get them re-enrolled in school and back on their feet and back on track,” she said. “We make sure that they get the medical care that they need so that we can have healthy moms and healthy babies, which leads to a healthier community.”
The support does not stop when the mothers leave. The nonprofit also stays with them after the program ends, functioning as a support system as they try to stabilize their lives and care for their children. That long arc is why the new campus matters now: Living Grace Homes hopes to open the 14 new emergency beds by July, expanding a service that has grown out of a gap Miller saw more than two decades ago.
For now, the work depends in part on donations. Through the month of May, gifts from new donors are being matched dollar for dollar by a Helms Family Grant, up to $20,000, as the organization pushes to finish the campus and prepare for the next group of mothers who need a place to land.
The recognition arrives with the expansion, and that timing gives Miller’s award its meaning: Living Grace Homes is being honored not for a past chapter, but for a mission that is still growing. The question now is how quickly the new beds can open and how many more mothers and babies the program can reach once they do.
