Center for Transforming Lives Wins National Award for Riverside Campus Design

Center for Transforming Lives, a Fort Worth nonprofit serving mothers and children in crisis, has received Program of the Year from the National Women's Shelter Network. The honor recognizes its Riverside Campus as a model for trauma-informed design and was presented at the network's annual conference.

The campus occupies a former Montgomery Ward department store, a 1950s concrete building that sat vacant from the 1990s until renovation. Bennett Partners designed the project, which has already won an American Institute of Architects Fort Worth Community Impact Award. The nonprofit moved in during May 2025 after a $40 million capital campaign and reports a 30 percent increase in service delivery.

The site includes a child development center with a healing playground, a coworking and economic mobility space, mobile health rooms for partner agencies, a drop-in child care center, a clinical counseling wing, housing services, and a donation center. Design choices such as natural light, acoustic treatment, biophilic elements and a meditation garden are intended to reduce anxiety. The roughly 14-acre grounds will later become an urban park.

For developers and designers, the project shows how a dated commercial building can be repurposed for a trauma-sensitive social service use, with design decisions tied to occupant outcomes.