The organization is named for a person. Before Laura’s House was a shelter, a 24-hour hotline, three resale stores, and a resource center in Aliso Viejo, there was a woman named Laura, who died at thirty-eight after years of domestic violence. Her mother reached out to a small group of women in South Orange County who had been trying, since 1991, to build a refuge for people in exactly that kind of danger. They named what they built in her memory. Laura’s House opened its doors in 1994.
A portion of every stillnus purchase goes to Laura’s House. This is the longer answer to why.
What they actually do
Laura’s House describes itself as the only state-approved comprehensive domestic violence agency in South Orange County, and the word that matters there is comprehensive. The work does not stop at a safe bed. It starts there and keeps going.
That means a 24-hour crisis hotline for anyone who needs to plan a way out. It means an emergency shelter, and then transitional housing for six months to a year, so leaving does not simply mean trading one crisis for another. It means individual, family, and group therapy, including a Personal Empowerment Program for survivors rebuilding a sense of self. It means legal advocates who help with restraining orders and stand beside people in court. It means counseling and therapeutic play for the children who lived inside the violence too. And it means prevention work in schools, through programs like H.E.A.R.T. for teen dating violence and Man.Kind OC for young men, on the theory that the cheapest abuse to survive is the one that never starts.
Their mission statement puts the prevention first, which tells you something about how they think: “Changing social beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate domestic violence while creating a safe space in which to empower individuals and families affected by abuse.”
If you need them right now
This part belongs near the top of any honest profile. If you or someone you love is in danger, the Laura’s House confidential crisis line runs around the clock: 866-498-1511. If it is safer not to have the call show up on a shared phone, you can dial 211 and ask to be connected. The national resource, available everywhere in the US, is the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. None of these will appear in this article’s metrics, and all of them are the most important sentences in it.
The scale of it
This is not a token operation. In 2024, according to the organization, Laura’s House provided more than 15,000 services to survivors, educated 30,667 people through its prevention programs, and assisted 4,725 hotline callers. It has been doing this for more than thirty years, led today by chief executive Margaret Bayston, and it holds a four-star rating from Charity Navigator, the highest the evaluator gives.
How to help
The most useful things are the least glamorous. You can donate directly. You can volunteer at the warehouse, the events, or the offices. And you can shop or drop off goods at the Laura’s House resale stores in Lake Forest, San Juan Capistrano, and Costa Mesa, where the proceeds fund the programs above. A donated coat becomes a counseling hour. That is the whole machine in one sentence.
Why a comfort brand gives to a shelter
On its face it is an odd pairing. We make weighted eye pillows for rest, and rest can feel like a small thing next to the work of getting someone out of a violent home. But the connection is the entire reason we chose this cause. You cannot calm a nervous system that is bracing for the next bad night. Safety is not the opposite of rest. It is the precondition for it. Everything we make assumes the person using it is safe enough to close their eyes, and we are aware that for a lot of people, that assumption is not yet true.
We are a small company, and our giving is not a heroic number. We do not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that it is fixed rather than seasonal, that it stays local to the Orange County community we are part of, and that it goes somewhere specific enough to name, visit, and verify. If you want the rest of our reasoning, it lives here, and you can see the shape of our giving on our impact page.
The point of naming an organization after a person is to keep the work from drifting into abstraction. Laura was real. So is everyone the place she is named for has held since. That is a good thing to remember at a checkout, ours or anyone’s.
Stillnus was founded by Denise Troy, a TV and film choreographer turned wellness founder.
