Our Mission
Our mission of the Women's Refuge of Vero Beach is threefold: to provide a live-in Christian program where hurting women can find sanctuary in a healing environment, to offer biblical counseling and support for the healing and wholeness of emotionally, mentally and spiritually wounded women, men, and families in our community, and to make available training for people to disciple others.
Our Founders Donna & Ted Robart
In 1970, Donna Robart and her first husband were running a facility for homeless teenagers in Clover, South Carolina. They had four children of their own ranging from 15 to 5 years of age. During that time she and her husband, Wayne, opened their hearts and lives to homeless children and ministered to over 70 teens.
Donna had become a Christian in 1970, when she accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. It was during prayer two years later that the Lord laid on her heart that she would one day open a Women’s Refuge. “Here I was in the midst of all these rebellious teenagers and I thought, well, maybe this was my way of getting out of this,” Donna chuckles. She really loved what she was doing at the time, and purposefully stored away that vision, that inner need and cry from the heart to do something she felt very strongly about.
“I was brought up by a mother that tried to abort me. I never really connected with her. My father abandoned us when I was little and my mother remarried three times. I was a needy person. I ran away and got married to my first husband when I was 17 years of age. So, when I got this vision in 1972, it was more for myself, more for people that I saw in the psych wards who really didn’t need to be there, or needed a place to go after they left. I stored it away and we raised our children.”
Continuing their work with homeless teens until they moved to Atlanta, Donna then finished her schooling and got her RN, specializing in psychiatry. They moved to North Carolina, her daughters married, her son joined the Coast Guard and in 1991, her first husband died of a heart attack. Four years after his death, Donna’s desire to follow her heart strengthened and that vision of the Refuge started to become a reality. She decided it was time to open the women’s home - in Romania. She had been there seven times on mission trips, and it seemed like the right thing to do.
Preparing for the new journey, she packed up her life in 1995, left her job, her home, her retirement, her grown children who at that time had started families of their own, and came to Vero Beach to visit her dear friends, Barbara and Roy Gardner. The Gardners, working with Life Exchange in Vero, asked Donna to do some counseling and she temporarily agreed to join their efforts. Thinking that she had to come to Vero Beach on a short term assignment, or layover en route to Romania, Donna’s plans would change again when her second husband, Ted, walked into her life.
"I had said to the Lord, 'if you ever want me to get married again you are going to have to have him just knock on my door.' I am not going to go chasing after anyone. This guy moved in right next door to me in 1996. He wasn't my 'type' - and I wasn't his, but he was nice to go to church with, or jogging or rollerblading - just a really kind, nice man...we were married on June 8, 1996.
In 1997, Donna and Ted began what would become their ministry of the Women’s Refuge of Vero Beach. The non-profit organization opened first in the old two-story house on the corner of 9th and 20th. The Bible study group that met in their apartment became the Refuge’s first Board of Directors. Jim and Laura Davis assisted while Ted took care of the property and Donna acted as the house manager, counselor and director. “Because God ordained this, it started to grow immediately. We soon needed a place we could build on. One of our board members mowed the grass on the lot we are now situated on.”
Asking the current lot owner if he would give them the lot (as a tax write off), he conceded to giving them half and they mortgaged the other half. The vision and heart’s desire that God gave Donna back in 1972 and that she came to share with her new husband, Ted, started to take form and the Women’s Refuge of Vero Beach went from the initial stage of crawling to taking its first big steps.
Ted found an old cracker house and moved it on location. It was two years and $70k later when they finally occupied it, after which they built two resident homes which are on the campus today. “The women that God brought through the program became our staff. We started out with a three month program. It turned into a two week, three month, six month, nine month, and two year program, depending on the woman’s need. Additionally, we started community counseling and support groups, such as co-dependency, sexual abuse, anger management and Bible studies. Everything we do today sprang from that. All of this comes together, to present day as I am now a mentor for all the staff.” - Donna Robart