The NFL Rookie Who Helped 252 Families Come Home
When Miranda pulled into the driveway of her new home in Lealman, Florida, Warrick Dunn was there. She and her three children had been sharing a one-bedroom apartment. Now the children would have rooms of their own.
“I know you want to provide your kids with a stable environment,” Dunn told her at the October 2024 celebration.
He had been the child in that sentence.
His mother, Betty Smothers, was raising six children in Baton Rouge. She worked as a police officer and took a second job in private security, trying to save enough to buy a house. Dunn, the oldest, helped keep the household running: dinner, homework, baths for the younger children. Even with her work schedule, his mother found ways to attend her children’s games and events.
In January 1993, Smothers was killed during a robbery while working her security job. Dunn was 18 and became responsible for his five younger siblings. He used his mother’s life-insurance benefit to buy the family’s first home, reaching the goal she had worked toward.
The family also received help from their community. Baton Rouge established a fund that helped them pay bills after her death. Dunn would remember both sides of that experience: needing support, and seeing people step forward to provide it.
“I grew up in a situation where we needed a lot of support,” he later told Sports Illustrated.
Four years later, Tampa Bay selected him 12th in the NFL draft. He finished 1997 as the Offensive Rookie of the Year. During that same rookie season, coach Tony Dungy challenged his players to take part in the community where they lived. Dunn thought about his mother and started Homes for the Holidays. The program helped its first three families that year.
His mother’s example went beyond wanting a house. Dunn remembered how she treated people when their own family had little to spare.
“I saw the way that she treated people,” he recalled. “She would give her last to people.”
Homes for the Holidays brings that help to single parents purchasing their first homes through affordable-housing partners. Organizations such as Habitat for Humanity help families prepare for ownership and buy the house. Dunn’s charity helps with the down payment, furnishes and decorates the rooms, and stocks the pantry. The surprise reaches into the small necessities, too: toothbrushes, beds, and even lawnmowers.
For Shaneeka Grant, the path to that front door had started years earlier. She grew up moving among Atlanta apartments and wanted a home for her own family. In 2017, a high down payment and other setbacks put it out of reach.
“At this point, I thought I could never get a house,” she told Southern Crescent Habitat for Humanity.
She was living in a two-bedroom townhouse with ten people, including her children, mother, sister, nieces, and nephews. An accountant at a Georgia university, she heard about Habitat through people at work, her sister, and families who had completed the program. She began her own homeownership journey in 2019.
By her 2022 home dedication, Grant had gained more than an address. Financial classes gave her tools for building wealth; construction work taught her skills she could use to maintain the house. She saw her children learning from volunteering, too. Dunn’s charity and its partners fully furnished the home, helping the family begin with the rooms equipped.
Dunn’s organization also created a separate financial-education program in 2014. Count on Your Future offers free workshops for teens and adults on budgeting, saving, investing, credit, and debt. Participants who complete the workshops can qualify for investment-account contributions and matching funds, debt-planning help, and up to two years of individual financial guidance. The support gives families practical tools to use well after moving day.
Some of the relationships outlast the move. In that 2018 Sports Illustrated interview, Dunn described a Tampa mother who sold her first home and bought another. He also recalled an Atlanta mother asking him to talk with her son. Years later, he saw that young man again, now a father supporting his own family. Dunn had stayed close enough to see what happened after the celebration.
Today, Warrick Dunn Charities reports 252 families served across 16 states. That includes families in Coolidge and Glendale, Arizona. Dunn’s football career lasted 12 seasons. The housing program he began as a rookie is approaching thirty years.
At Miranda’s celebration in Florida, Dunn’s charity and its partner Aaron’s provided $5,000 in down-payment assistance and $10,000 in furnishings. There was grocery help, too. Her family could move from that one-bedroom apartment into a furnished home with space for the children.
“We will cherish this home and the community that helped build it,” Miranda said.
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