GLOUCESTER — Wellspring House has grown under the leadership of President and Executive Director Melissa Dimond as it focuses on providing pathways for families and adults when it comes to shelter, homelessness prevention, and career and educational opportunities.

The 45-year-old nonprofit is different from others in that it not only offers the first rung in the ladder of shelter and crisis intervention, it also offers the next rungs of housing and community resources expertise with job training and career advising, to help people get ahead.

A 25-year resident of Gloucester, Dimond is a member of Temple Ahavat Achim and the Community Hevra Kadisha North Shore Boston, a sacred burial society that prepares individuals for burial in accordance with Jewish tradition.

Her career spans 30 years in the nonprofit world in the spirit of tikkun olam.

Under her leadership, Wellspring has grown into a $4 million nonprofit serving 2,000 young adults and families across 20 cities and towns with an emphasis on Gloucester, Salem, Lynn, Peabody and Beverly. Wellspring is made up of 47 full- and part-time staff across five locations in Gloucester and Salem.

“We do crisis work, and it is a critical part of what we do. It is not predominately what we do, because we are the next step to the long road of getting ultimately secure,” Dimond said.

Dimond says her upbringing led her to nonprofit work. She was born at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where her father worked as a primary care physician. Her mother was trained in social work and worked as an early childhood educator. Her Orthodox great-grandfather was an immigrant from Poland who became a member of the New Jersey bar.

Growing up, her family was not involved in synagogue life, and she only got bat mitzvahed as an adult when Temple Ahavat Achim celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2004. She felt it was important at the time because she wanted to raise her and her wife Gretchen’s son, Ari, Jewishly.

Dimond attended Washington University in St. Louis, where she majored in English. She described the university as “into community service on steroids.” Dimond spent much of her time working on service projects in St. Louis and in leadership roles on campus.

She had a great experience at WashU, but she also experienced antisemitism on campus, despite its strong Jewish community. It was a reckoning, and a reason she became more involved in Jewish life after college.

Knowing she wanted to become a leader in the nonprofit sector, she headed to Massachusetts and began working nights as a crisis counselor at a domestic violence program. Later, she worked at Beth Israel Hospital as a discharge planner on three floors and two intensive care units. 

After earning a Master of Science in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, she did policy work at Project Bread and later founded the North Shore branch of the Food Project in Lynn.

From 2009 to 2015, Dimond worked as manager of community initiatives at the Massachusetts General Hospital Chelsea HealthCare Center. She launched a Community Health Coalition. One of its major accomplishments was to overhaul the Chelsea Public Schools food system.

In 2015, with a desire to work in the community where she lived, she applied for the job at Wellspring, becoming only its third executive director. She went from a health care organization with a lot of infrastructure “to a pretty scrappy nonprofit” that was well established in the community.

Its programs were “amazing,” she said, but the organization lacked infrastructure. Dimond spent her first five years building out Wellspring’s systems. 

A self-described “data nerd,” she wanted to know if Wellspring was delivering on the promises it was making to its clients when it came to housing stability or helping them find better careers. “And we cannot deliver on that promise unless we know what we do works,” Dimond said.

Dimond said more than 50% of people in Wellspring’s programs each year achieve at least one major milestone in furthering their employment, education or wages.

Last year, Ruth Rowe joined Wellspring’s board of directors, but earlier in life, she benefited from the One Family Scholars Program, of which Wellspring was a founding member. (The program is now a separate nonprofit in Boston.) She is now president of a Gloucester-based nonprofit, Needy Meds, which provides information on medication and health care costs.

Rowe said Dimond “has an amazing leadership style,” and never gets frazzled. She has a vision of long-term impacts while also being able to focus on the day-to-day, Rowe said.

“I can see what needs to be,” Dimond said. “I can see … here are the problems, here are the opportunities, this is what we should be doing. But you can’t get there if you don’t have the resources and structures to support that.”

To learn more, visit wellspringhouse.org.