Local Woman Escapes Abuse to Help Others Survive

Battle wounds cannot always be seen. Sometimes the only evidence of what someone has survived is a smile that brightens others’ day, unwavering commitment and unparalleled compassion­– like that of Heather King-Green.

King-Green escaped a household of domestic and sexual abuse and survived to be a success story and champion for others who are fighting to survive.

She created her own nonprofit organization, Survivors Outreach, to help serve women in need, who are referred to the organization through a hotline provided by United Way. Now the organization expanded to serve a wide variety of community members and communities as well.

The organization, which will celebrate its second anniversary on March 17, now serves Cobb, Clayton, Douglas and Paulding counties. King-Green is hoping to expand into DeKalb and Fulton counties as well, along with areas of New York City, where she grew up. King-Green operates the organization primarily from South Cobb facilities, specifically the South Cobb Government Service Center’s community meeting room. There, about three times a week, she conducts intake assessments of the women referred to her.

"Thank God we can help because help is needed," King-Green said.

Survivors Outreach collaborates with Angels Thrift Store on Austell Road, which is operated by Royce Niger. The women referred to the organization are assessed and those needing clothing can shop in the thrift store, free of charge.

Additionally, volunteers of the organization raise funds at Food Depot on East-West Connector.

Three attorneys help by providing legal assistance with immigration, bankruptcy, online applications for food stamps, Medicaid, child support, housing and help for resumes. They also provide information and steps for those in the community who wish to start their own nonprofit organizations or businesses.

“It’s a work in progress,” King-Green said. “It’s awesome.”

King-Green, a Bronx native, is a survivor herself. When she was 8 years old, she witnessed her stepfather rape her sister.

Her stepfather was abusive and controlling, making life hell for King-Green, her mother and her sister.

Even after King-Green and her then-9-year-old sister explained the rape by their stepfather to their mother, King-Green’s mother stayed with him another 16 years.

“She’d go to sleep with layers of clothes on. We’d take turns sleeping growing up. It was traumatic,” King-Green said.

When she assesses the mothers who walk in for help, she pays close attention to them and how they treat their children, she explained.

"They think they're getting free food and rent, and they're really getting assessed to learn with what's keeping them that way," King-Green said.

She wants members of the community to speak out if they need help.

"I love people, and I love for them to do well," she said. "Private is not an avenue when you need to get help."

Although she is helping the women, she is devoted to helping the children first and foremost. She assesses whether the women have boyfriends in the home, whether the child is being abused or neglected and whether the mother is attempting to fix the problems that caused her to come before King-Green in the first place.

“I try to be the voice of the children,” she said.

“Seventy percent of these homes don’t have men, but they have boyfriends who come and go,” King-Green explained. She watches for this as well to learn if the women are in abusive relationships.

King-Green’s mother grew up very poor in a household of abuse and had been raped herself when she was younger. Her mother spent her childhood on the island of St. Kitts and Nevis, picking cotton and sugar cane.

She met King-Green’s father, George Connor, while he was still married to another woman. He passed away four years ago, and King-Green never had a chance to meet him.

It’s why she stresses to young women the importance of allowing fathers to be parts of their children’s lives in some way, despite their own relationship with the man.

“It’s just crazy growing up and not knowing who was your dad,” she said. “These children need to know their dads.”

King-Green helps the women get counseling and even offers them wisdom from her own life experiences.

For many women (and men), she is an inspiration, a motivating force they never had before. Many of them become attached to her and call her Mom.

For her husband of nearly six years, Leon, King-Green is "very passionate."

He said, "It's so inspiring when your wife has that kind of passion because it becomes your passion."

Before meeting her, he was not much for giving people second chances. However, his wife has inspired him to look past people's flaws and learn to help them.

"She helped people. That will be her legacy," he said.

She helps young women even in their relationships, telling them “To have self-respect is the most important thing.”

“As a young woman, I had to fight for men to respect me,” she said.

Although she was in a five-year relationship with the father of her first son and in a seven-year relationship with the father of her second and third children, she never married them and never lived with them.

“I was so scared of being controlled like my mother was.”

She also tells the young women to hold off on having sex in their relatioinships so that they can evaluate the character of the men they’re dating, and she said it never hurts to even have background checks done on them.

“Once you let them in, it’s hard to let them out,” she said. “If you hold back and they leave, they weren’t meant to stay.”

She also emphasizes the importance of sticking with one career or industry and becoming the best in that industry, which is what she did. She said the steadiness helps struggling women find more balance.

She started working in insurance at the age of 19, when she had her first son, Wesley. By her 30s, three kids later, she had become one of the top 10 insurance agents in the Metro Atlanta area.

However, her “biggest” and “most complicated” job was being an involved and engaged parent for her children, helping protect them the way she never was.

“I demand people to take care of their children.”

King-Green has a deep, unwavering commitment to helping people. It shows in how hard she works to help someone in need get a bill paid or find temporary shelter.

Despite the abuse she endured during her childhood and the effects she suffered through her adulthood as well, King-Green succeeded in business, as a parent and now as a director for a nonprofit organization.

She learned that she did not have to repeat her family’s mistakes. She was vigilant and never once was in an abusive relationship of her own and her children never suffered abuse.

She teaches these life lessons to the women and men that she helps each week.

“Whatever negative they saw growing up in their mothers, grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers, do the opposite…Take the positive and leave the negative alone,” she says to them.

“They seem to think, they need to be like them…No, use those experiences as a push to do positive,” she said.