Nikki Gane wasn’t trying to start a nonprofit that winter day in 2011. She was just trying to buy a pair of shoes. But when she saw a woman standing alone outside the store, she recognized someone in need—and she knew just how to help.

Gane went into a drugstore, bought some essentials, and handed them to the woman, who promptly disappeared into a nearby McDonald’s. When she came back out, it took Gane a minute to realize that it was the same person. “I had no idea she’d been standing next to me all cleaned up,” she recalls. “And she was like, ‘Oh my God, thank you. That’s what I needed.’”

The encounter happened right around Gane’s 40th birthday. “I was sitting on the edge of my bed and I said, ‘Okay, God, I had the first 40, you get the next,’” she says. And Dignity for Divas, Gane’s nonprofit, was born.

Gane was able to recognize what the woman needed because she had once experienced homelessness herself, after leaving an abusive relationship, returning to Seattle from Atlanta, and working three jobs to get back on her feet. Gane describes that period in her life as “going uphill with skates on”—exhausting. But she emerged on the other end unbroken, and she believes fiercely in the power and value of other women who’ve experienced the same thing.

“I think that we have to stop viewing someone based on what they’ve been through,” Gane says. “There’s this idea of like, ‘Oh, someone’s homeless, well, they can’t do that.’ Why not? If you can be homeless, you could be anything.”

Gane started Dignity for Divas in 2012 by assembling and distributing her Diva Survival Kits, which include “pretty much everything you would need if you didn’t have anything you needed,” she explains. Gane makes sure the kits are stocked with high-quality personal care items, including soap, toothpaste, and shampoo. “That’s where the dignity comes in,” she says. “Because who are we to decide the value of someone?”

These days, Dignity for Divas has expanded its scope beyond handing out bags of daily necessities.

A core component of the organization is the Keep the Key Initiative, a year-long program at the Diva Dream Academy in South Lake Union that supports newly housed women with “Welcome Home” kits of brand-new home goods, and offers wellness workshops and classes for adult women and women with minor children. Each diva is offered weekly food pantry access and a graduation ceremony at the end of their year of maintaining housing. The idea is that getting a woman housed is just one part of the puzzle—and that these wrap-around, supportive services are meant to keep her there.

In 2025, the nonprofit announced two major developments: a new headquarters and an expanded internship program. Opened in November, the organization’s 10,000-square-foot home base—adjacent to the Diva Dream Academy—features space for 30 interns, a private area for distributing Welcome Home kits, a brightly lit podcast and media studio, meeting spaces, and a calming “dream room,” festooned with lights and plants, where women can finally exhale.

The internship program, meanwhile, will include two paid weeks of skill assessment and leadership development followed by 90 days of training in areas such as nonprofit administration, communications, and client services. (The new headquarters includes a bright-purple call center, where women will be trained to handle the phones.) The goal at the end of the program is to connect women to one of the companies “that have been showing up for us all these years,” Gane says—local heavies such as Microsoft, Puget Sound Energy, Key Bank, and Comcast.

Gane credits the program’s success to her “lens-first” approach. (Around 72% of the women who complete the Keep the Key Initiative remain housed after two years.) The perspective she brings as someone who has experienced homelessness—and the awareness that each person’s journey is different—helps inform her interactions with the women who come through Dignity for Divas’ doors.

“If you want to help a woman experiencing homelessness, sit down and listen to what she needs,” Gane says, noting that the answer will likely be vary from person to person. “Stop trying to fill in the gap with what you think she needs. The majority of women that I know—we want to be heard.”