3E Restoration, Inc

The need: 3e Restoration, Inc. began partnering with the Pineapple Inn and Housing Center in 2016 to provide two full-time emergency shelter rooms, known as Restoration Place. Since then, the Pineapple Inn has been a hub for 3e and its community partners. For well over a decade, local churches and nonprofits have provided short-term hotel assistance, hot meals, holiday parties and other social support and outreach to individuals and families who have nowhere else to go. Nevertheless, the need continued to grow with the most vulnerable populations being very low-income seniors, single parents with minor children and those most in need of medical and mental health care services.

The idea: Fast forward to 2024, when the owner of the hotel asked us to help. He said that he wanted a project that would offer more than a hotel room and a few hot meals; he wanted each guest to have access to stabilization and support services to help them find solutions and a plan to successfully move out of desperate situations.

Be the Change Hospitality: In January 2025, the project, spear-headed by 3e Restoration, was partially funded by the Sentara Cares Foundation to serve as a bridge, connecting those in need with a web of local agencies, nonprofits, and community programs. From emergency shelter to employment support, from mental health care to transportation assistance, we provide on-site intake, assessment and stabilization to help guide people through the maze of services with kindness and clarity.

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Please consider supporting this initiative as every dollar matters.

Who We Are

Homelessness not only occurs when someone loses a dwelling place, but also when abandonment, despair and feeling out of place all come together in a loss of social and cultural identity. Homelessness is a state of being without any sense of place or effective means of orientation. Homelessness understood in this way is more than houselessness. Homelessness is an all-consuming displacement and a deeply traumatic experience. This is why we prefer the term social displacement.

Social displacement results in broader concrete realities that move beyond traditional categories of homelessness. Our understanding of these concrete realities come from Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25:31-46. There he says, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; 36 I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.” We believe the six descriptions of neighbors Jesus mentions—the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned—translates into twelve concrete realities of social displacement experienced by our neighbors in our U.S. context. We call this the Twelve Descriptions of Social Displacement.

Houseless
Insecurely housed
Subsidized housing
Addicted
Intellectually, developmentally, physically, and medically disabled
Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated
Marginalized minority groups
Elderly widowed neighbors
Domestically abused
Immigrant
Refugee
Asylum seeker
We believe everyone deserves a home.

By home we mean something more than a house. A house is a building; a home is a dwelling place. A house is made of wood or brick or mud or thatch; a home is made of stories and relationships and memories. Houses can be bought and sold but home is never up for sale. Home is a bounded place that provides both definition and openness, structure and flexibility. It is a place and space, a web of stories and symbols and rituals and relationships where a common life is cultivated and human flourishing happens. To us, home is a place of inhabitation where life is oriented toward a life-giving narrative where restoration is made possible in every human dimension—socially, emotionally, cognitively, spiritually and physically.

Therefore when it comes to housing we can not continue to do it in a traditional way with a traditional understanding. We help others find a house but we also introduce them to a web of hospitable relationships that can restore them socially, physically, cognitively, emotionally and spiritually.