The Salvation Army is famous for making music with metallic instruments. Now for most people that means brass; trumpets, coronets, tubas etc…But this August, The Salvation Army’s Compton Community Center played a variation of this theme via a very public performance of the National Anthem on steel drums.

Slogans like “The American Dream” and “It Takes a Village” are easy to come by but more difficult to find tangible flesh and blood examples. That is, unless you’ve met Jeanine Horowitz who puts a face and a story to those two slogans and makes them come alive in a way only a woman who has persevered the way she has can. Many years ago, Jeanine Horowitz was a single mother, jobless, homeless, lacking in education, and the last person in the world one would see as an American success story. But then Jeanine found her way to The Salvation Army’s Westwood Transitional Village.