‘A borrowed space.’ Charlotte foster father raises funds to provide path forward
It’s easy to see and feel Aaron Dais’ love of music through his room decor — there’s an orange couch with pillows that look like speakers, vinyl albums on the wall, a piano and a disco ball suspending from the ceiling.
This is the first time Dais has been able to express himself in his room. Growing up in foster care, he always had a place to live but has never truly felt at home.
Bouncing around from one group home to the next, the now 20-year-old has aged out of the system and must provide for himself. However, without a family to help him, it would be difficult.
Fortunately with assistance from the nonprofit Home Sweet Hope and the efforts of Peter Mutabazi, a Charlotte man dedicated to supporting foster children, Dais can make his new East Charlotte townhouse a real home.
“I come in and see all of the stuff on the wall and I’m like, someone else did that because they cared,” said Dais, who added that when kids are in foster and group homes, they must adapt to what is already there.
Mutabazi, also a foster father, wanted to change that for others. In June, he started a GoFundMe to raise $100,000 to help 20 foster children design their own rooms through his foundation Now I Am Known — rooms that are personalized to each youth.
He realized when taking in his first son in 2017 how important it is for foster children to have an opportunity to decorate their room. Since then, Mutabazi made sure to take each of his foster children shopping for their room decor and bedding when they first move in. Over the past nine years, Mutabazi has taken in as many as 34 foster kids.
“When kids come into foster care they always come to our homes, the beds are already there, everything is already there,” Mutabazi said. “So it’s almost like it’s a borrowed space. My teenagers had never had a choice to choose what goes into their room because they’re always brought from home to home.”
On June 11, after the fundraiser hit $40,000, Mutabazi, Home Sweet Hope and volunteers began remodeling a room for two siblings who are in the process of being adopted. This marked the beginning of the new project.
“We’re giving them an opportunity to have a good beginning where they get to choose what they would like in their room,” Mutabazi said.
Each room makeover costs around $5,000 and covers paint, custom bedding, furniture, other personal decorations and volunteer labor.
Why they want to help
Decades ago as a homeless kid in Uganda, Mutabazi wandered back and forth from under bridges to sewer canals, barely sleeping.
He did not feel seen until the couple that took him in gave him his own space.
The couple enrolled Mutabazi into boarding school when he was around 16 years old and gave him a bed in their home for when he was on school breaks.
“He (foster dad) didn’t put me in a room where nobody wanted,” Mutabazi said. “But he put me in the same room as his kids and they gave me an opportunity to make my own bed and put what I wanted. I think for the very first time, I felt, ‘I can belong somewhere.’ ”
As an adult, Mutabazi combined his understanding of rooms as safe spaces and his experience flipping houses to remodel rooms as a way to help more children.
Mutabazi’s partnership with Home Sweet Hope began in 2023 and since then he has helped remodel 24 rooms for 32 youth. The North Carolina nonprofit funds custom designed rooms for fostered and adopted children. Since beginning in 2019, it has completed 55 rooms.
Staci Stepp, executive director of the nonprofit, had a similar experience to that of Mutabazi’s. When setting up for her foster kid, she realized that she could use her background in interior design to help other kids.
Home Sweet Hope designs the rooms for the makeover and conducts the application and interview process. Candidates with youth who need their space to feel more like home apply through their website.
The organizations generally serve central North Carolina. Their focus is on kids in the foster care system — a little more than 10,000 around the state, according to the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina — but they also provide services for those who are recently adopted.
This initiative also targets teens and those about to age out of the system, Mutabazi said.
“We do more teenagers because we know they’re about to be on their own,” he said. “If you never belonged, you never had a space or things that you can call yours, I think it’s really hard to transition to the real world.”
They have even helped some first year college students furnish and decorate their dorm rooms.
“We encounter lots of different scenarios, lots of different circumstances,” Stepp said. “But in the end, we really want to empower youth and show them that they are loved and they’re cared for and they’re worthy of having a space to call their own with items that they love.”
There are 25 kids on the waiting list, according to Mutabazi, and the GoFundMe has raised over $79,000 so far.
Assisting foster parents
These makeovers also provide needed relief to foster parents, Mutabazi and Stepp said.
“I know a lot of the families that are foster parents, they would love to give their kids everything they could,” Stepp said. “But there’s a lot of other things that need to be taken care of, more immediate needs.”
Because Mutabazi and Stepp are foster parents they understand these families. Mutabazi shared that it is just as important that the parents feel seen in this process.
This story was originally published July 1, 2025 at 1:12 PM.
