‍

Kristen Bowen on Communication, Loss, and Building Hearts + Homes

‍

I’ve known Kristen Bowen for a long time, but mostly from one chapter of her life. She was the Communications Director at Princeton Alliance Church when I joined the staff right out of college, and she brought a level of professionalism and care to the work that was obvious from the start. Kristen thought deeply about writing, clarity, brand consistency, design, and how all the pieces of a message fit together. We worked closely for several years, and that team remains one of the better examples I’ve experienced of what can happen when talented people trust each other enough to do good work together.

What I didn’t know nearly as well was everything that came before that season, or just how much the years after Princeton Alliance Church would reshape her life. That was part of what I wanted to explore when Kristen joined me for an episode of The Power of Human Stories. I knew the communications leader. I knew the colleague. I knew pieces of the story that came later. What I had never really heard was how those chapters connected.

Kristen has always been a planner. She likes to know where things are headed, and if Plan A falls apart, there is usually a Plan B nearby. Probably a C, D, and E too. One of the more interesting things about her story, though, is that many of the biggest turns in her life were things she could never have planned for.

Long before she worked in ministry or led a nonprofit, Kristen was a shy kid who loved to write. Her father’s work moved the family around, and she spent her high school years in the Chicago area before eventually attending John Brown University in Arkansas. Writing became the place where she felt most comfortable expressing herself. She read constantly, journaled, and wrote stories that most people never saw.

That instinct eventually became a career. Kristen studied journalism and moved into communications work that spanned publishing, graphic design, consulting, pharmaceutical and life-sciences communications, medical publishing, convention marketing, and client relations. She spent years learning how to communicate complicated ideas clearly, manage projects, work with clients, and keep a lot of moving pieces aligned.

By the time Princeton Alliance Church entered the picture, she had already built a substantial career. She just wasn’t looking for a church job.

One Sunday, while sitting in a service, someone announced that the church’s communications position was opening up. Kristen’s husband, Bob, elbowed her and said, “That’s for you.” She dismissed him at first. The idea didn’t fit the plan, she wasn’t looking for a change, and she didn’t see herself as someone who belonged professionally in ministry. But the thought stayed with her long enough that she eventually reached out, and one conversation led to another.

That decision became one of the more formative chapters of her career. At PAC, Kristen found a place where her communications experience mattered, but where relationships mattered just as much. She was still writing, editing, thinking about audiences, building campaigns, and overseeing creative work, but now all of it was happening inside an environment where mission, trust, and people were deeply intertwined.

Kristen had spent much of her career working independently, and at PAC she discovered how much she loved being part of a team. We talked in the episode about what made that particular team work. There was collaboration, but there was also autonomy. People were allowed to own their lanes, ideas could be challenged and improved without every person needing control over every decision, and there was a level of trust that made the work better.

Kristen put it simply: you can teach skills, but you can’t manufacture chemistry.

That experience would later influence how she thought about volunteers, leadership, and culture at Hearts + Homes. But before any of that happened, life interrupted the plan in a much more painful way.

In 2017, Kristen began feeling that she needed to step away from her role at Princeton Alliance Church. She didn’t have another job lined up, she wasn’t unhappy, and she wasn’t chasing some obvious next opportunity. Through prayer, she felt that she needed to “prepare for what’s coming next.” She didn’t know what that meant, but she shared it honestly with church leadership and began preparing to leave.

About two weeks later, her sister called.

Kristen’s father had been in a serious car accident. He survived the initial accident but died about a month later. Her mother had already died the year before after a long illness, which meant that in a relatively short span of time, both of her parents were gone.

When I asked Kristen why the loss of her father was especially difficult, her answer was immediate: “My dad was my hero.” He had been one of the central voices of encouragement in her life. When Kristen was younger and quieter, he protected her. As she grew into herself, he became the person who told her to go for it, to travel, to take risks, to try things, and to trust that she could figure them out.

Losing that voice changed something.

Kristen didn’t immediately throw herself into the next career move. She needed time, and in the middle of an already difficult season, she suffered a concussion that made reading and writing difficult for months. For someone who had identified as a writer since childhood, that became another kind of loss. There are seasons where highly motivated people can power through, and then there are seasons where time and rest are part of the work. Kristen had to learn how to be still.

Somewhere in that stillness, another idea started forming.

After her father’s death, Kristen and her siblings had to clear out their parents’ home in Alabama. Anyone who has ever done this after losing someone knows that the process is strangely practical and deeply emotional at the same time. You are sorting through furniture, paperwork, clothes, kitchen utensils, boxes, and drawers, making decisions about objects that might seem ordinary to anyone else but are loaded with memories for you.

Kristen remembers standing in the kitchen with her brother and pulling an old can opener out of a drawer. Immediately, there was a memory attached to it. That happened again and again as they moved through the house, and the question became more than, “What do we do with all this stuff?”

They wanted the things that had mattered to their parents to still be useful. They wanted to know that another person or family might actually be excited to receive them. Simply putting everything into a generic donation stream without knowing where it would end up felt incomplete.

They kept returning to the same thought: there has to be a better way.

That was the beginning of Hearts + Homes.

The basic idea is easy to understand. Some families have beautiful, useful furniture they no longer need, while other families are rebuilding their lives and have almost nothing. But what Kristen eventually built is much more than a furniture redistribution program.

Hearts + Homes serves families emerging from circumstances such as homelessness, domestic violence, job loss, illness, and other forms of crisis. The organization works through advocacy partners who are already supporting those families, then steps in to help create something that often gets overlooked during a transition: a real sense of home.

That distinction became one of the most interesting parts of our conversation. Housing is not always the same thing as home. A family can finally receive keys to a new apartment and still walk into an empty space that doesn’t yet feel like theirs.

Hearts + Homes tries to change that by getting to know the family before the installation happens. Kristen and her team ask how they live, what colors they like, what their kids are into, what would make a bedroom feel personal, and what they imagine when they think about home. Volunteers then select furniture, restore pieces that need work, hang curtains and artwork, stock kitchens and bathrooms, make beds, and sometimes even print and frame photographs from the family’s phone.

The goal is not simply to fill a room. The goal is to create belonging.

Kristen has recently been exploring the idea of a “sense of place” and the concept of agency: the feeling that a space belongs to you and reflects who you are. She realized that Hearts + Homes had been trying to create that feeling all along, even before she had language for it.

The culmination of that process is what the organization calls the reveal. The family leaves while a team of volunteers transforms the space, then returns later to see it completed. Kristen described families walking through the door and sometimes stopping almost immediately. Kids run toward bedrooms, parents notice framed family photographs, and more often than not, there are tears.

Hearts + Homes likes to say that they are in the business of happy tears.

One story Kristen shared captured the heart of the work. A mother they served had grown up in poverty and had never had a bedroom of her own. During the installation, Hearts + Homes created a room specifically for her daughter. When the mother saw it, she cried, and one of Kristen’s longtime volunteers cried too.

For the volunteer, it was more emotional than she expected. For the mother, something bigger was happening. She was watching her daughter receive something she had never had herself. Kristen described the moment as a small release from generational poverty.

That is the kind of story that makes it difficult to reduce Hearts + Homes to furniture.

The beds matter. The lamps, curtains, dishes, and rugs matter. But the deeper work is dignity.

Kristen is very intentional about that. The organization does not operate on the assumption that people in difficult circumstances should simply be grateful for whatever everyone else no longer wants. Donations are carefully curated, furniture that needs restoration is repaired, and items such as mattresses, bedding, and towels are provided new.

Kristen’s standard is simple: they should not put something into another person’s home that they would not be comfortable putting into their own. For her, that principle is connected directly to faith. Generosity means giving your best, not simply giving what is left over.

The same mindset applies to how families are treated. They are not problems to be fixed. They are people to be cared for.

As I listened to Kristen talk about the organization, it became clear how much of her earlier career had quietly prepared her for this work. Her years in communications taught her how to tell stories. Her years managing projects taught her how to organize. Her experience at Princeton Alliance Church taught her about mission, team culture, trust, and leadership.

Now she uses all of it.

Hearts + Homes is still volunteer-led, which means Kristen has had to learn how to build an organization around people with very different skills and motivations. Some volunteers restore furniture, some sew, some handle finances, some go on home visits, and some simply tell her, “I like moving stuff.”

There is apparently a place for that too.

One of the lessons Kristen carried from earlier in her career is that leadership does not require her to be the smartest or most talented person in every room. In fact, she would rather surround herself with people who know things she doesn’t and create an environment where they can contribute meaningfully.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Kristen what she would tell the shy version of herself from years ago. The question hit her immediately. She said she would tell her to be brave, take risks, care deeply, build relationships, and not be afraid of failing.

She also said she would probably tell herself to study a little less in college.

There was something fitting about that answer. Kristen is still a planner. She still likes to think ahead and understand where things are going. But much of the life that shaped her arrived unexpectedly: a church role she wasn’t looking for, a season of loss she could never have prepared for, an injury that forced her to slow down, and an idea that emerged while sorting through her parents’ belongings.

None of that makes planning meaningless. Her preparation mattered. The years spent building skills mattered. The work ethic she learned from her parents mattered.

But preparation and control are not the same thing.

Sometimes the best you can do is prepare well, stay open, and be willing to pivot when life looks different than you expected. For someone who loves a good plan, Kristen has built a meaningful life around learning how to respond when the plan changes.

You can hear my full conversation with Kristen Bowen on The Power of Human Stories.

‍