Tisha Janigian

Founder and Executive Director, She Is Hope LA

 

Conducted by Mirage Thrams, Public Relations Strategist, Just Like a Mirage PR

 

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INTRODUCTION

In this exclusive conversation, Mirage Thrams, Public Relations Strategist, Cultural Architect, and Founder of Just Like a Mirage PR, sits down with Tisha Janigian, founder and executive director of She Is Hope LA. Based in Los Angeles, She Is Hope LA has supported more than 2,000 single-mother families through housing access, career development, food security, and community infrastructure. Janigian built the organization from her own experience navigating homelessness, systemic gaps, and economic precarity as a single mother with two sons.

Together, Thrams and Janigian examine what it takes to build a system of care from the inside of a crisis, and why survival, when transformed into structure, becomes the most radical form of advocacy.

 

 

TRANSCRIPT
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
Tisha, She Is Hope LA has served over 2,000 families. But before it became an organization, it was a personal reckoning. Where did the impulse to build something begin?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
It began in a storage unit in another state. My boys and I left with three suitcases and no clear plan. I wasn’t thinking about an organization then. I was thinking about how to keep the lights on and get my sons to school without a car. The impulse to build came later, when I realized that every obstacle I hit had already knocked down thousands of women before me, and nobody had connected the gaps.

 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
SHE IS HOPE LA is an acronym right? 
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
Absolutely! it stands for Single Moms, Housing and Empowerment, Inspiring Self-Confidence through Hope, Opportunity, Perseverance, and Education.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
You’ve described the social support system as designed to keep people dependent. That’s a sharp critique. What did you witness that shaped that view?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
The math never mathed in your favor. You’d earn a few dollars more per month and lose hundreds in benefits. You’d get a part-time job and your food stamps would drop as if you were suddenly thriving. The system punishes momentum. I wasn’t radicalized in a classroom. I was radicalized at a benefits office with two sick kids trying to understand why getting better made things harder.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
She Is Hope LA covers housing, food, career development, hygiene, wildfire relief, vehicle support. How do you think about scope without losing depth?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
We follow the woman instead of the category. When a mother is in crisis, her needs don’t organize themselves neatly into program silos. She needs a car to get to the job that would pay for the childcare that would let her take the class that leads to the promotion. Remove one link, the whole chain breaks. Our scope exists because her life arrives all at once.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
You’ve distributed over 17,000 pounds of food and 1,200 personal hygiene kits. Those are material resources. But you also talk about dignity. How do those two things live together in the work?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
A hygiene kit is soap and a toothbrush and a message: you are worth preparing for the world. We thought about what you need before you had to ask. Dignity lives in how you deliver resources, built into the delivery itself. No one should feel like a charity case for needing what any human being needs to function.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
You’ve partnered with over 20 nonprofits and received 2.5 acres of donated land. What has collaboration taught you about power and trust in community work?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
It taught me that scarcity thinking is lethal to mission work. Organizations that guard their territory, their donors, their credit, end up serving their brand over their community. The land donation happened because we built trust over years, not because we asked for it. Real partnership is slow. It’s earned. You can’t shortcut it with a memorandum of understanding.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
What do you want people to understand about single motherhood that the public conversation consistently gets wrong?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
Single motherhood is a circumstance, and circumstances change with the right support. The public narrative around single mothers is still saturated with pity or blame, and both are useless. These are women already doing the work of two people, often under financial and emotional pressure that would break most. They do not need sympathy. They need access.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
What’s the next chapter for She Is Hope LA?
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
We’re focused on converting land and partnerships into permanent infrastructure. Housing stability is still the central wound, and we intend to treat it structurally, not seasonally. The goal is to build something that outlasts any one donor cycle or crisis moment. She Is Hope LA should be as permanent as the problem it exists to solve.
 

MIRAGE THRAMS:
That’s the kind of clarity this work demands. Thank you, Tisha, for building in public and refusing to make survival look smaller than it is.
 

TISHA JANIGIAN:
Thank you, Mirage. Survival is not the end of the story. It’s just where the real work starts.