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Jan Matthews sat on the front porch outside her childhood home on Mayberry Drive and remembered her parents’ giving nature.

It’s a bit different from the home she slept in as a child with no indoor plumbing or air conditioning.

The original house had damage to the roof after a tornado but her parents didn’t know about it until later, after it had rained more and mold began to grow. They were in their 70s when they found out the house was too far gone.

“We had to tear down the house that my dad built with his hands,” she said. “They never had a mortgage in their entire life … but thank God for Habitat for Humanity.”

She said Habitat helped them build their home which left them with only a small house payment. Even though they didn’t have a lot, she said her parents always gave what they had. She said her father would help people who would get stranded on Hwy. 72 before it was the highway that it is today.

“Never looked for nothing in return,” she said. “That’s why he wanted this land cause he said as long as he’s on this earth that nobody would be homeless. He had a thing about that. And we had hospital beds in the middle of my floor where daddy and momma would go get family, friends, whomever and love on them, patch ’em up.”

Now, she keeps that same spirit and allows the home to be open to those in need.

“I think that big tender heart really did come from my dad,” she said.

She puts that heart to work in so many ways with her nonprofit MTM Educational Enrichment. While she blesses others today, it was people who blessed her along the way that she said made this dream possible.

She said her mother only had a seventh grade education and her father just third grade.

“Their biggest desire was for me to graduate from high school and then go get a job,” she said.

But at first, she didn’t graduate high school.

“I went to graduation, even though I didn’t graduate. I went and I hugged and loved all my classmates,” she said.

A teacher, Dennis Black, saw her and went and got a diploma cover and brought it over to her.

“He looked me in my face and he said, ‘Don’t you stop. You go get what’s supposed to be in this cover.’ And that did something to me. You just need people to believe in you,” she said.

That summer she went to summer school and graduated. After that, one day one of Matthews’ classmates stopped by and picked her up on her way to Calhoun Community College. A woman there, Rosemary Robinson, recognized her in the office.

“I was so disappointed because the lady at admissions didn’t give me one of them good, warm, fuzzy feelings and pretty much discouraged me. … I turned around feeling defeated and was walking out,” she said.

But that was when Rosemary recognized her and called out to her.

Rosemary connected Matthews to Izora Harrison, who introduced her to a work-study program which helped pay for her to go to school. And, she received a $300 endowment from the school. To this day she doesn’t know who it was from. But, Izora told her it was someone with a story similar to her own who had wanted to help someone.

“There is always somebody out there,” Matthews said.

Matthews said she learned about a good work ethic from an early age. Her father worked on the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant for TVA.

“He was doing the early stage building the cooling towers. He fell off the cooling towers and really hurt himself,” she said. “That started my journey to work at the age of 14 to help supplement income cause my mom had to really take care of him.”

Little did she know that years down the road she’d end up at TVA herself. While she was at Calhoun, TVA sent a communication out about hiring. She didn’t think anything of it herself but she said her next door neighbor did and he needed a ride to his orientation so she agreed to be his transporter.

She was waiting in the lobby when someone walked by and told her they were sorry they hadn’t gotten to her yet but they had a lot of people to process. Originally, she told her she wasn’t there for a job.

“She said, ‘You’ve been waiting a long time and been very patient. I’m gonna process you in,’” Jan remembered. “I said, ‘OK, all right.’”

She said when the woman asked for her name, Matthews knew she wasn’t going to have any paperwork for her. But, somehow it all seemed to fall into place anyway.

“And she said, ‘That’s nothing. This happens all the time and I’m the head of HR. All right, I’ll start from scratch,’” Matthews said, and that was how she got hired as a personnel clerk.

From there she made connections in that job that lasted her through her entire career, Matthews always had someone there along the way.

She met a man there who she later worked with again when she moved to Huntsville with her husband, and got a job at NASA.

One day while she was driving to her job with NASA something reminded her that she had promised herself to help kids who had been like her growing up.

She said the first thing she did was go to the Athens mayor, which was Dan Williams, at the time.

“I told him my story and I said I want to help kids like me in the community who didn’t graduate with their peers, but yet still have a dream and hope, want to succeed, want a little something beyond high school in terms of education,” she said. “He said, ‘You know what? I’m going to champion behind you.”

That’s when she decided to partner with the schools to keep her work community-based. She said she wanted the students to write an essay about things they had to overcome and the steps they used to do that.

“A lot of times those steps can be recycled. We just don’t think about it,” she said. “That’s why I want them to apply the steps behind what they did to overcome that situation.”

She said that year she and her husband gave out the first three $500 Unsung Heroes scholarships using their vacation money that they had saved up. They brought them together to give them senior portraits and read their teacher recommendations.

“Its been 20 years now, but we’ve gone from three, to this year we gave away over $10,000,” she said.

The best part about it she said is that they’ve never had to get any kind of corporate sponsorship. All the money just comes from people who have offered to give her money for the scholarships here and there. That’s one of the reasons she said she keeps her scholarship banquet open to the public so that anyone can come.

“God has allowed our organization to take two fish and five loaves and just feed a multitude,” she said.

She said a few years ago, a man told her to look around the room at one of her scholarship banquets because she had every race there.

“I said it wasn’t strategic. I can’t take credit for none of that,” she said. “I have started looking around and it’s just amazing to me how, I mean, it is a representation of our entire community.”

She said she feels like the community is growing in a new direction.

“You got to celebrate the baby steps in order to understand where you come from and where you’re going,” she said.

In the early 2000s, she started a Unity in the Community event after working to win a video contest to bring gospel singer Canton Jones to Athens. At that event, she said 60 kids gave their life to Christ. She said she still holds the event every other year.

She’s still coming up with new ideas, too. She said that they have a core board but MTM is volunteer based for all of their community work.

“When God gave me the vision, he told me, never worry about that,” she said. “He said your motto will be pencil in where you fit in for when your season is up take that eraser, erase your name and move on with no condemnation.”

She said that’s what she does for the community. She said she’ll be there where she needs to be.

“I was always a dreamer,” she said it was her grandmother who helped her to dream from a young age. She even once asked her how much money she wanted to make one day. She told her she wanted to make the amount in thousands that equaled her age.

“I remember when I was 19 … I’ll never forget this. I made $19,000 that year with overtime,” she said amazed at how things have continually come together in life like this.

For all everyone out there, she said her best advice comes exactly from what her grandmother taught her.

“Dream but protect,” she said. “Carefully share your vision.”

And her long term vision right now, she was kind enough to share. She wants to help build affordable housing. It’s kind of full circle in that way since Habitat helped her parents. She said she doesn’t want to get in their way but to be more of a bridge to market to those they aren’t able to help.

“I want to do a younger clientele — especially those who are aging out of foster care and they don’t have nowhere to go,” she said. “Because there is a true gap in homelessness.”

Just like the house on Mayberry Drive that she grew up in, open to all.