When Michelle Wright Rhame was asked to be a foster mother, she saw it as a divine calling. She had always wanted to be a mom, but she couldn’t have children of her own—a heartbreak that contributed to the demise of her marriage.
She got her opportunity through Hope Rising, a Brenham-based child placement agency and Christian ministry that worked with young victims of sex trafficking. “My prayer request at that time was for the Lord to use me for a greater purpose,” Rhame recalled. “I immediately said, ‘I’m all in. What do I have to do?’”
Rhame began working with Hope Rising as a volunteer with the organization’s therapy horses. “Horses are magical healers,” Rhame likes to say. She was 8 when her family moved to the United States from Panama, and her own horse, Duchess, taught her confidence as she adjusted to a foreign world.
Rhame loved volunteering so much that she began showing up to two or three times a week. When Hope Rising expanded into foster care two years later, the nonprofit began recruiting and training people like her as foster parents and matching them with children in the state system who’d survived sex trafficking. Supported by state tax dollars and private donations, it also developed a specialty school, weekly equine-therapy sessions, and caregivers to help foster parents.
Rhame moved into a 1950s-era guesthouse at a ranch near Brenham—one of several properties the organization used. The owners had offered the space to the nonprofit. The home, at the end of a 3-mile driveway, was isolated, which made it feel safe for young women seeking refuge from exploitation.
As the children came and went, her new home felt like a summer camp, Rhame said. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto a large lake, where the children could fish, and open land with riding trails. Horses roamed acreage called “the Pasture of Dreams” by the girls.
“God didn’t give me babies, but he gave me teenage girls,” Rhame said. She recalled her early days there as “so, so sweet and so good.”
Which is not to say her role was easy. To make ends meet, Rhame worked as a server at a family-owned restaurant in nearby Round Top, where her foster daughters did homework. As the girls grew older, most of them worked there themselves. Whenever money got tight, they’d make pumpkin loaves and sell them to the organization’s supporters. Creating a sense of normalcy was important for Rhame. She wanted her girls to be able to buy trendy clothes—Air Jordans, Victoria’s Secret Pink, Adidas sweat suits. All of her girls had a “glow up,” she said.
From 2018 to 2022, she helped raise 13 foster children and adopted her first foster daughter, Faith, in 2019. Faith had ended up at Hope Rising after her biological mom sold her to a Mexican cartel in exchange for drugs, Rhame said. Child protective services found her on the run.
“She was phenomenal. She would wake up and go to school, go to softball practice, and then go [wait tables with me],” Rhame said. And she “got straight As.”
Hope Rising received about $2 million in state grants from 2018 to 2021 and even more from private donors. At its peak, the organization had a staff of 25 and oversaw eight foster homes.
But the nonprofit proved to be an unsteady partner for Rhame. She still has faith of her own, but she’s begun to question whether faith-based nonprofits are the right answer for Texas foster children.
It was around the time COVID-19 hit that Rhame said she first experienced friction with Hope Rising’s management.
In June 2020, the organization’s founder, Sherri Clement, asked Faith to speak about her equine-therapy sessions at a fundraiser in exchange for $200 and a Chick-fil-A gift card. Rhame didn’t attend, but she was told later about its success: “Tears were falling and checks were flying,” Rhame said she was told.
Afterward, Faith, then only 19, seemed troubled, and Rhame became angry when she learned her child had been pressed to rehash her trauma onstage. Faith also admitted that she consumed alcohol there, Rhame said: The teen implied that staff told her it would calm her nerves.
Rhame was furious—she felt the organization had exploited her daughter for the sake of fundraising.
Like many stories that would later emerge about Hope Rising, the details of what happened depend on who is telling the story. Clement said a server didn’t question Faith’s age when she requested the fundraiser’s specialty drink, which had sherbet, club soda, and sparkling wine. When another staff member saw Faith with the drink, it was confiscated and she was accompanied home, Clement said. Clement later changed the organization’s policy to prohibit serving alcohol at events where minors were present.
Rhame didn’t buy Clement’s excuses. She filed a police report. Shortly thereafter, according to Rhame, Clement retaliated by attempting, unsuccessfully, to end Rhame’s role with the organization. (Clement disputed that account, saying that there were problems with Rhame’s care.)
The incident was one in a cascading series of accusations that would end with Clement’s ouster, followed by the dissolution of Hope Rising in 2022. And Hope Rising’s fall is not unique.
In 2017, Texas began outsourcing its child welfare system to third-party contractors, which the state regulates and only partially funds. While this initiative was designed to keep children closer to friends and families in their hometowns, critics say the approach has created a mixed bag of models and quality of care.
Three nonprofit programs set up to assist trafficking victims in the Texas foster care system closed in 2022, all after failing to meet the state’s minimum standards, experiencing management issues, or losing funding. At least 50 child placement agencies have shuttered, according to an agency website used to help foster children track changes.
As Texas continues to overhaul its child welfare system, state officials are proposing ways to avoid failures like this one. One of the strategies has been to put more private contractors, rather than state agencies and officials, in charge of vetting and managing nonprofit providers in different regions—a transition that is ongoing.
Child welfare experts are hoping that additional reforms will improve oversight and vetting, even as privatization of Texas foster care expands.
“In some ways, I don’t think it can be worse,” said Tara Grigg Green, the executive director of the Foster Care Advocacy Center.
Clement was a marketing specialist at several firms before founding Hope Rising in 2012. She said she’d felt called by God to fight against sex trafficking—an evil scourge she’d witnessed growing up in Southern California. Friends of hers had been sucked into trafficking, and she saw its violence up close. But somehow, she had been spared.
“I felt like God was protecting me,” Clement said. “Men just don’t … I can’t explain it, but they don’t care about using women or children. I have never given up in my heart the fact that there are women out there that don’t have a voice.”
Clement founded Hope Rising in her home state. But after hearing that Houston is one of the nation’s trafficking hubs, she and her husband moved to Texas in 2014 and turned their organization into a ministry.
Texas seems to suit Clement, whose cascading blond hair matches the mane of one of her horses. She lives in a house on a hill in Washington County. Dogs, donkeys, and horses roam in the pastures that surround it. Like Rhame, she believes wholeheartedly that the correct combination of faith and farm animals can help humans bounce back from the unthinkable.
Hope Rising began with a simple mission of raising awareness of sex trafficking. Over time, Clement developed an ambitious plan to support young victims with a combination of residential foster care and equine therapy, a treatment that uses horses as a catalyst to work through anxiety, depression, and trauma.
While “sex trafficking” has become a buzzword and a political talking point, its actual definition varies. When dealing with adult victims, sex trafficking occurs when someone compels others by force or fraud to sell sex acts. But anyone who buys some form of sex from a minor is considered a trafficker, and every such minor is a victim. While this includes rare and horrific experiences of young people being prostituted against their will, it also describes people buying photos of underage girls online or employing them to dance at strip clubs. A 2016 study from the University of Texas estimated the state had about 79,000 underage victims.
In 2018, Clement’s organization became a fully licensed child placement agency—a type of foster care program that finds, vets, and trains foster families. Typically, children in the foster care system have been removed from their homes by the court, usually because of abuse or neglect.
The same year that Hope Rising received its license, Tim Webb, a local pastor in Brenham, joined its board of directors. Webb wears a suit jacket and jeans to church, where he’s an energetic preacher. In an interview, he said he joined Hope Rising because he believed in its cause.
Three nonprofit programs set up to assist trafficking victims in the Texas foster care system closed in 2022.
Jennifer Hohman, a charismatic and feisty Houstonian, joined the board in 2018 to help with fundraising. A longtime energy corporation executive, she’d served on other boards and had a network of wealthy Texans passionate about anti-trafficking efforts.
Hohman’s history on nonprofit boards included a track record of cleaning house. Hohman also sat on the board of Elijah Rising, an established anti-trafficking organization that houses adult survivors. For nearly 10 years, Elijah Rising had been run by its founder, Cat French. After Hohman got involved, first as an activist and later as a board member, she challenged French’s leadership.
At one point, Hohman hired an attorney and rallied the board, French said, and “the next thing I know,” the board chair “came with some paperwork and had me terminated.” An interim director was installed.
Hohman played a similar role as a reformer on the board of another organization, YWCA Houston. Hohman would do it again at Hope Rising, using the same attorney and interim director.
She’s not shy about her track record. “I got three in my back pocket where I literally had to be a part of an ethical changeover,” Hohman said in an interview. She takes issue with “founder’s syndrome,” a phenomenon where founders retain a disproportionate amount of power and influence.
“Nonprofits are not owned by an individual,” she said. “They are public organizations with public money going through them.”
Clement said she first met Hohman at an event for a different advocacy organization, and their relationship began as friendly.
That changed in 2019 after Hohman leveraged her connections to raise $100,000 to renovate a property that Hope Rising used for its services. Hohman was under the impression that the organization owned the property, which was listed as an asset on its 990 tax forms. When she found out that Clement and her husband were its owners, she felt they were using nonprofit funds to renovate their own house.
Eventually, disagreements between Clement and board members would escalate into litigation over her ouster and the organization’s use of property.
Clement would later testify in Washington County District Court that the property’s ownership was no secret: Other board members knew she owned the house and the land. The Clements were essentially doing the organization a favor, she argued, by leasing their property to Hope Rising for $1 per year, since the nonprofit couldn’t afford to buy it. She said the renovations were legitimate improvements to a long-term leased space; she called the false categorization of ownership on the tax form an accounting error.
Hohman said she made other discoveries that put her on edge, including the fact that only a fraction of the children in Hope Rising’s care had been victims of sex trafficking. That alarmed her, given that the organization’s purpose was to “provide emergency and long-term wrap-around therapeutic care to the minor survivors of sex trafficking and exploitation,” according to its tax form.
As Hohman’s accusations mounted, Clement protested. In an interview, she said she believed that Hohman was out to discredit her. Clement said Hohman insisted on installing one of her Houston allies to collect enough board votes to oust Clement.
But as the pressure increased, Clement became “defensive, distant” and attacked others, accusing four people of stealing from the organization, according to a letter Webb wrote to other board members.
Webb was recovering from heart surgery when Clement pushed to change the bylaws, specifying that Clement could be removed as director for only three reasons: if she committed a felony, if a judge declared she had an unsound mind, or if a judge ruled that she committed fraud or abuse against the organization. (The changes were approved in Webb’s absence.)
In another allegation raised in court, Webb blamed Clement for going to a bar in 2019 with a 21-year-old trafficking victim who, according to court records, had just gotten out of rehab for a drinking problem. The girl apparently got so drunk that she took off her shirt in public.
Clement offered another explanation. The girl had not been to rehab, she said in an email, but simply participated in a sobriety program as part of an internship.The night began with watching the World Series at Dave and Buster’s, Clement said, but it got out of hand when a staff member persuaded everyone to go to another bar.
In 2019, as clashes between Clement and the board were heating up, the organization reported more than $3 million in revenues. While fundraising, Clement told supporters that Hope Rising was providing young women a chance at a new beginning. Expansion plans were on the horizon.
In July 2020, Clement tried to urge other board members to vote to remove Hohman. But by then, it was too late, Clement said in an email. “The other (Board of Directors) members had drunk” the Kool-Aid.
On August 21, 2020, Clement arrived at the Hope Rising headquarters, then inside an old church building in Brenham. The space, which the nonprofit didn’t own, housed its school and its offices. Clement was expecting a one-on-one meeting. She would later describe what took place as a “hostile takeover” and a “military-style coup.”
Clement waited in the empty boardroom. She was surprised when Webb arrived with “an army” of people: three board members and Tracey Conwell, an attorney Hohman had previously worked with to remove the leaders of other organizations. (Webb also brought two police officers, who entered after the meeting got heated.)
When Clement asked if this was actually a board meeting, Conwell responded, “No, this is you getting fired,” according to testimony Clement gave as part of a lawsuit she filed in August 2020. In the lawsuit, Clement challenged her ouster as illegal, and questioned other board actions.
In the lawsuit, Clement also alleged that Hohman had proceeded to remove professional and personal files from her computer and Dropbox account. “I was just sitting in my office watching my whole life’s work just disappear,” Clement said in an interview.
Around her, she said, several employees were crying, confused and concerned for their jobs.
But Webb said that Clement became “emotionally unhinged” and “hysterical” when she was given notice of her termination, according to an unsworn declaration included in the board’s response to the lawsuit. “She could have left peaceably and without incident, maintaining her dignity and respect,” he wrote. “Instead, she responded with an incredible storm of yelling.”
Clement destroyed files, Webb said in an interview. She locked herself in her old office and spent hours sabotaging the organization by changing passwords and shredding documents, according to Webb and allegations in court records. He said he ultimately had to turn off the building’s wifi and utilities to get her to leave.
Sherri Clement at her home in Brenham on June 15 (Mark Felix/Texas Observer)
All the while, Hope Rising was being dinged by state regulators. According to records obtained from the state Health and Human Services (HHS), Hope Rising was written up 60 times for failing to comply with state standards between January 2018 and May 2022.
The state files contain disturbing details: A caregiver, an employee hired to help foster parents, was cited for letting the kids “tire themselves” before intervening in a fight. One citation noted that “a caregiver provided and smoked marijuana with children in care and another caregiver provided children in care with alcohol.” Foster parents were cited for pulling a child’s hair, cussing and yelling at children, and threatening them with physical harm. A foster parent was also cited for keeping toilet paper outside the bathroom, meaning children had to request it every time they used the restroom. (Because no names are listed, it’s unclear how many citations involve the same caregivers or foster parents.)
After Clement’s removal, Webb said in an interview that he discovered 30 citations and $7,000 in fines that the board had previously been unaware of. Public records the Observer obtained from HHS, which may be incomplete, show only $400 in penalties—mostly for violations related to required background checks for caregivers.
Outside of the legal battle, the drama played out in other ways. Webb sent a letter to Hope Rising’s donor base in December 2020, explaining that he’d become aware of the “improper, inappropriate, and noncompliant behaviors of Sherri Clement.” In 2021, he worked the conflict into a sermon, and from his pulpit, he called Clement “a bad character” who, by suing him, was “coming against me, against the board, against our church.”
In the small town of Brenham, Clement said, the pastor’s word holds significant weight. “I can’t even go to the grocery store without getting stink eye from somebody,” Clement said.
Clement made efforts to move on with her equine-therapy side business. Meanwhile Hope Rising’s therapy horses were still living on the property she rented to the organization. She claimed that the board had abandoned them and that if she stopped caring for them, they would die.
In contrast, the board secretary reported that Clement had locked them out of a leased property where the donated horses were kept, and accused her of being a horse thief, court records show.
In June 2021, the Clements were awarded the contested land in a related eviction case, and a justice of the peace ordered Hope Rising to pay related court costs. The separate civil lawsuit ended in 2025 when a judge signed an order, approving a motion submitted by the Clements. In an email, Clement said she spent $100,000 on the case and ran out of resources.
Clement sees the situation as one where powerful and well-connected people banded against her. Her fatal mistake, she said, was letting Hohman on the board. “It was a successful, viable organization … and these people just wanted it,” Clement said in an interview. “They took it and ruined it.”
After Clement was removed, Hope Rising was cited again for physically unsafe and unsanitary conditions in foster homes. One home was described as dirty and in “disrepair,” with unfastened cabinets that could fall on a child; an inspector noted that a frog hopped through a house during the state’s visit. One child in the nonprofit’s care “had their rights to be free from abuse violated,” according to HHS records. The organization was repeatedly dinged for failing to have a licensed, full-time child care administrator on staff.
In July 2021, almost a year after Clement’s ouster, HHS put the organization on “Heightened Monitoring” for excessive citations. Audits increased, and so did corresponding paperwork, which made it difficult to operate, Webb and Hohman said.
In May 2022, the new Hope Rising leadership relinquished the nonprofit’s operating permit.
In 2026, Clement said she continues to help children as an equine specialist. “I am still providing mental health services to at-risk youth both boys and girls, including some that are human trafficking victims,” she said via email. “The fact that I am still doing this work in spite of the efforts to snuff me out by Hohman and Webb should demonstrate my character and motivation.”
In Rhame’s assessment, some problems were specific to the dysfunction at Hope Rising. Whenever Rhame would request a caregiver for help with the foster children, for example, some conflict would emerge. They were not “trustworthy or reliable,” she said. One was spread thin trying to support two foster homes that were a two-hour drive apart, she said.
Perhaps commingling traumatized teenagers wasn’t necessarily the best idea in the first place, she realized. Drama and conflict at the school Hope Rising provided were made worse by a teacher who did not appear to be trauma-informed and had a tendency to “push a lot of buttons,” Rhame said.
But she suspects those quality-control issues were directly related to the state’s overburdened foster care system, which provided too little oversight. The state’s latest overhaul, called Texas Child-Centered Care, will require more vetting. But the number of organizations offering placements for young victims of sex trafficking is slim, and some fear raising the bar could worsen the shortage of appropriate foster homes.
“There is a deep desire to try to help them, and also a dearth of resources and qualified individuals,” said Green, of the Foster Care Advocacy Center. She fears the state will continue to take providers at their word when they claim to be equipped to provide care.
Monica Faulkner, the director of the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing, a research institute within the University of Texas’ Steve Hicks School of Social Work, said that since the state relies on nonprofit providers, state agencies need to provide adequate resources so management can focus more on quality of care and less on fundraising to cover payroll and overhead.
“I don’t think we necessarily set people up for success in terms of how to run a nonprofit effectively,” Faulkner said. “People assume that nonprofits are just like this kumbaya-type place, but the reality is that nonprofits are constantly competing with each other for donors, for state funds, for federal funds.”
Hohman said that the foster children being served by Hope Rising were shielded from internal conflict between the board and the founder. She claimed the children were not affected, even when the nonprofit closed, because they could remain with the same foster families and just be transferred to a different child placement agency.
But Rhame said she and her foster children were affected. Her two teenage foster children relied on wifi for homeschooling at the place where she’d been living as a foster parent for the nonprofit. Two weeks before the program was scheduled to close, that service was disconnected without notice.
(Illustration by Guillermo Ortego)
Ultimately, Rhame decided not to continue as a foster mother with another agency. She stays in touch with her adopted daughter Faith and, intermittently, with her former foster daughters.
When the organization shuttered, one foster daughter was rehomed to a family in San Antonio and ran away only one month later. Another, who was 19 at the time, stayed with Rhame on the ranch as she finished out her school year.
Rhame still doesn’t completely understand what caused the unraveling of something that began like a dream come true. “It could have been ego. It could have been, as some people say, a demonic takeover, or it could have just been good old-fashioned greed.”
After more than five years on the ranch dedicated to helping her girls, Rhame moved to Cypress to start anew. She’d walked away from Hope Rising with “a lot of loss,” “a lot of heartbreak,” and “a much lower credit score,” she told the Observer.
“But at the same time, I would do it all over again.”
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