Changing the face of homelessness

  My name is Tracy Jay Gillespie. I live in St Joseph, Missouri. I am a mental health and homeless advocate. I've been working with individuals who are struggling for the past 6 years. I myself have struggled with mental health and homelessness. There are many resources available in my community to assist individuals in need. The mental health crisis hotline 988 is a great resource to utilize if you are experiencing a mental health crisis. With my lived experience, I have seen first hand a mental Health crisis turn into an emergency. I recently reached out to utilize this resource for myself. I was not having a mental Health crisis. However, I was quickly approaching one. I knew I needed someone to talk to about what I was experiencing. My phone had been deactivated due to late payment. I live a little over a mile away from my mental health treatment center. With no service plan on my phone I had no way to reach out to anyone. It was my understanding that the 988 clinician would...

 Today in America, we're facing a mental health crisis. The need for mental health professionals has never been higher. Nationally, there are only 31,000 psychiatrists available to treat over 200 different mental health disorders. The state of Missouri has a population of 6.2 million, and 925,000 of those people are diagnosed with some sort of mental health disorder. A staggering 225,000 of the population suffers from a serious mental illness that affects their everyday quality of life. Over 50% of Missouri residents live with some form of untreated trauma in their lives. Even though there are 181 clinics and facilities in the state of Missouri that treat mental illness and provide trauma-informed care, unfortunately, there were 1,125 suicides recorded last year. I'm here as one of the 225,000 who has lived most of my life with an untreated serious mental illness and severe trauma. In 2024 there were 1,219 Missouri residents who took their own lives. That's one person for e...

"I was taken from the hospital as a baby to the basement of my grandparents' house on South 3rd Street. Whether it was a home or not, I will never know. My grandparents took me under their wings from day one. I am positive that my grandma introduced me to my first and only home here on earth, which was church, at a very early age. The Church began to teach me a lot about the Lord and who I am to Him. Now that I am 48 years old and I look back, this is also where I began my training. Love, fellowship, and basically family could be found at church. Learning of great leaders, learning of disciples, learning how to walk the way of the Lord impressed me. I wanted to become one of His angels. I had learned of great mansions built in heaven for those that God chooses to call home. God knows our plans even before we are born. I believe that God put me on a path of homelessness so that I would have the opportunity to be where I'm at today. Jesus said, 'Let the little children c...

I apologize for not being very active the last few days and for not keeping up with the event schedule. However, I am ready to plug away again. I've already been on vacation from work for a week, and I have another week of vacation to go. I have been employed at NMPRC for one year, and I absolutely love it there. In the past year, I have been educating myself about mental illness, behaviors associated with certain diagnoses, and, of course, treatment plans, goals, objectives, and so forth. I have even been able to work on my own mental illness using some of the knowledge that I was gaining. I know that my new understanding will benefit everyone whenever I do street outreach. I started there as a technician and am now a rehabilitation associate and work therapy specialist. I am very well-liked by many at the hospital. When I went to work on my first day, I was homeless and staying in a cold weather shelter. For years, I've been able to hide my homelessness with my personality, m...

  I  received my second COVID-19 vaccine shot, and I'd like to share my experience. The clinic was held at the Civic Arena here in St. Joseph. I went with my boss, the Executive Director of Community Missions Corporation. The clinic was designated for frontline healthcare workers, and honestly, I wasn't sure I truly belonged in that group. There were members of the Saint Joseph Fire Department, the St. Joseph Police Department, Buchanan County EMS, nurses, and many others. Over the past two years of working with the homeless, I've met quite a few people. The director of the health department was there, and I said hello after receiving my shot. I also greeted a couple of other people I recognized. Despite these connections, I still felt a bit out of place. After all, I'm just a former homeless veteran who does a lot of volunteer outreach work. However, that feeling was about to change. After getting your vaccine, you proceed to have your card scanned into the system. I t...

On Saturday, October 30th, 2021, I was evicted from my apartment. I had fallen two months behind on rent due to a layoff from work. Although I applied for unemployment, the funds were taking an excessively long time to be deposited into my account. Ironically, the only agency that could have potentially prevented my homelessness was my employer, but a conflict of interest prevented them from offering assistance. Having experienced homelessness for a significant portion of my life, I instinctively headed to the river. However, this time was different. I began to journal my experiences, partly as a coping mechanism and partly with the intention of sharing my reality with others, hoping to foster a better understanding of what homelessness truly entails. Would this prove too challenging even for someone as seemingly resilient and experienced as me? It is now Saturday morning, October 30th, and I sit by the river with my car packed with all my belongings. I struggle to comprehend how this ...

A few years ago, around 2015, I was homeless and walking down a street lined with older buildings. It was a fairly busy area. I noticed a man pulling grass from the foundation of one of these buildings, a building I happened to know something about. I struck up a conversation with him, asking if it was indeed the old gymnasium for Benton High School, the very school I had attended. He confirmed it was, mentioning that writings still remained on the locker room walls on the third floor. Curious, he asked how I knew this. I explained that learning the history of Saint Joseph was a hobby of mine and that I was a member of the National Museum Historical Society—which was true. I even mentioned having my own display at the Robidoux Row Museum. I also shared that I had found numerous artifacts along the Missouri River and enjoyed donating them to the museum. The man seemed quite impressed. He expressed interest in learning more about the building. I offered to use my connections to see if I ...