An Orange nonprofit that assists homeless children with education, Project Hope Alliance, has a new executive director – one who knows the field well.

Like some of the students she works with, Jennifer Friend moved from motel to motel with her family during junior high and high school. Now the Costa Mesa local helps secure permanent housing and extracurricular activities for homeless kids.

“The thing that’s unique about education, particularly for homeless children, is that it’s the one opportunity to gain something that no one can ever take away from them,” Friend said. “They can’t be evicted from their education.”

Project Hope Alliance works with the roughly 70 students of Skyview Elementary and Middle School, who don’t have addresses that would zone them into other schools. Friend said it means many are homeless.

The Orange County Department of Education reported more than 28,000 of its students as homeless in 2010-2011.

Project Hope Alliance transports its students to Skyview for its 51-week year – classes go from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. – and then to and from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Tustin, where the kids stay until 5 p.m. The group also made over Skyview, hired a teacher and full-time counselor, helps parents find and keep housing, and more.

“If everything you grow up with is garbage, you think that’s what you deserve,” said Friend, who was able to overcome her own circumstances to become a partner at law firm Selman Breitman, a position she gave up to become Project Hope Alliance’s executive director. She lived in motels in Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, and attended high school in Huntington Beach.

Motels are expensive compared to rent but just affordable for the working poor who might fall behind on rent and can no longer save money, Friend said. “People expect the kids to look a certain way. And then you see, no, they look like your next door neighbor’s kids.”

Friend previously served as president of Project Hope Alliance. She plans to expand the supplemental education programming through art-based programs in order to close what Friend said can be a two-year education gap for homeless students.