About a year ago, Brandy Greenwood’s job had just ended and her husband’s heart trouble had worsened to the point where he couldn’t support their four children.

Where she found help is a pleasant surprise in slow motion even today.

“It was my very, very last resort coming here,” Greenwood said through a smile Thursday as Faith House transitional facility for the homeless opened on Walnut Street.

The shelter, operated by Vicksburg-based nonprofit Mountain of Faith Ministries, will function as a place where women and children will live, get help finding jobs and be counseled through financial and emotional challenges faced by the recovering homeless, said executive director Tina Hayward.

Greenwood, 33, a Shreveport, La., native had lived in Jackson for 13 years as a “jack of all trades” in customer service.

“I worked in restaurants, clubs, grocery stores. I’ve done it all,” she said.

She and her four children, ages 7 to 15, had lived in the nonprofit’s Women’s Restoration Shelter in Vicksburg, to avoid the streets. She’s spent time volunteering on behalf of the group in nonstop efforts to raise funds, but sees herself as prime material to re-enter the working world.

“Miss Tina says I talk a lot, so I can see myself as a counselor,” Greenwood said. “I know what women have gone through and what their story is.”

Faith House, 1529 Walnut St., houses nine people and is in the same building where Piggly-Wiggly Super Market operated from the 1940s to mid-1970s and The Office Supply Store Inc. for a time afterward.

The new shelter has a clerical office-feel — work stations up front give way to eight freshly carpeted efficiency apartment units in back, each outfitted with either one or two beds, a microwave, a sink, a small refrigerator and a TV. An activity center and a computer room round out the furnishings.

Upkeep will be handled by residents of the ministry’s emergency shelter, said case manager Tiffany Bells.

“They’ll come in here, pull trash, clean floors,” Bells said.

The transitional shelter is more than a year in the making, as Mountain of Faith had to drop an earlier bid to ask the city to rezone the old ParkView Regional Medical Center on McAuley Drive after neighbors opposed it. Permission to convert the Walnut Street site, already home to the ministry’s Finders Keepers thrift store on the Veto Street side of the building, was secured in May 2011.

Funding the center’s conversion has come from a mix of public and private sources, notably a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Trustmark Bank and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas.

Hayward envisions enough space for 30 beds in the transitional home and to link resources with the WIN Job Center and volunteer groups such as AmeriCorps.

“We’re going to provide them with good clothes out of the thrift store for job interviews,” Hayward said.

The HUD grant lasts two years and funds up to $2,500 to sponsor a room are being sought from corporate donors, Hayward said.

The 2012 Point in Time Count, a semiannual census of the nation’s homeless population, showed 204 people in Vicksburg and Warren County without a place to stay. The tallies determine eligibility for federal grants awarded to Continuums of Care entities such as Mountain of Faith, which has conducted the census locally.