Full Circle: Stephanie’s Journey with ECHO

When Stephanie Davey arrived in the U.S. on religious asylum in 1993, she didn’t know where to turn. Living in the Lee Valley Apartments next door to ECHO, she decided to walk in one day—and found compassion she will never forget.

“The care, love and respect I was shown… I just knew I had come into the right place for help,” she recalls. For three years, ECHO provided groceries, clothing and a Christmas gift that became one of her family’s most treasured memories: her young son’s very first train set. “He cried when he opened his Christmas gift that year as he had never seen anything so beautiful.”

That support meant everything. “It was our whole world,” Stephanie says. “It was the only place we could depend on when we arrived in the United States.”

Today, decades later, Stephanie is back at ECHO—not as a client, but as a volunteer, sorting food donations from her church to help other families in need. “Now that I volunteer at ECHO, I see the clients coming into the facility, and I feel their needs are even greater these days,” she says. “Helping here is my way of supporting the organization my family wholly depended on.”

Stephanie’s journey embodies the heart of ECHO’s mission: neighbors helping neighbors, kindness coming full circle.