Part II - Investigating the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission

Alison's Story

This is part 2 of 3 in my series investigating the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission, a faith-based homeless shelter that is the only service provider in Grants Pass, OR—the city at the center of the recent Johnson v Grants Pass Supreme Court case, where it was adjudicated that cities like GP (and all around the country) can criminalize homelessness with fines and arrests with the full support of the Constitution.

My primary source in this series is a woman I’m referring to as Alison, who agreed to share her story and documents with me if I kept her identity secure. She provided the documents from Part I, and today’s post comes from her testimony of her experience staying at the Mission.

SUPPORT: Alison did a really brave and vulnerable thing sharing this all with me–not simply because it presents risks of identification and retaliation, but also because this process unearthed a lot of trauma for her. Telling me her story and finding/sharing the documents was work in a number of different ways. For this physical and emotional labor, I did compensate her–but she deserves more than I could offer. If you are moved at all by Alison’s story and participation on this, to consider donating directly to her. For anonymity’s sake, I will collect those and pass them along. 

You can contribute via Venmo (@ kevin-nye-3), Cash App ($Revkev), Paypal or Zelle (kevin.m.nye@gmail.com).

Disclaimer: Because of the closed-off nature of the Gospel Rescue Mission and their services, there’s no way to fully verify the authenticity of everything I will present in this series. Wherever possible, I achieved confirmation of the accuracy of the documents, and compared the stories of some others who have experience with Grants Pass GRM to Alison’s. In every way, Alison’s experiences resonated with what I heard from others, and I have no reason not to believe them. Nonetheless, I cannot present them as if they are facts, and you as the reader will ultimately have to make your own decision.

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image source: https://gospelrescuemissiongp.org/services/

Alison’s Story

I don’t know a lot about Alison’s early life. She alludes to a childhood full of trauma, which set her in a sort of prolonged state of precariousness in early adulthood. What I do know is that between the winter of 2015 and the summer of 2016, everything went wrong really fast.

After discovering that her boyfriend was in the deep throes of a heroin addiction, she realized she could no longer live with him and feel safe. Even though she was only working part time and had been feeling progressively more ill with a mysterious ailment, she set out on her own. The next few months found her living in increasingly untenable apartments and rooms, while being dismissed by doctors again and again for her symptoms.

When she was finally taken seriously, 32 gallstones were discovered and she was scheduled for immediate gallbladder removal. This surgery and its recovery caused her to lose her job, and then her housing. In the pain of recovery and increasing stress, she developed an addiction of her own to the pain medication she was prescribed. Everything was getting worse, and she felt powerless to stop it. 

With truly no other option, she turned to the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission. She knew about the Mission; its rules and reputation. It was the absolute last thing she wanted to do: 

When I was faced with the best option being the only shelter in my entire county, my initial feeling was a deep fear. Fear of losing most of my rights to be the person I currently was, even if I was quite unhealthy. Knowing that I would have to change the way I talked to others, I would have to change the way I dressed and remove my piercings, I would have to start being extremely secretive about my relationship with my kind and loving [new] partner. I would no longer have comfortable access to spending time with my pet cat, who I loved very much and was incredibly attached to. I felt like I would be losing my identity.

After signing all the paperwork and agreeing to the Mission’s rules, Alison remembers being placed into the room for “new arrivals”, a small room with about five bunk beds for 10 women, many of whom were detoxing along with Alison. For Alison, this was the most terrifying time as they all were managing the incredibly dangerous and acute symptoms of drug detox without support or compassion. Instead they had to manage all of these things while keeping the Missions hard schedule of chores, chapel, meals, and work. 

I want to pause here and emphasize how extremely unsafe this is. Dependence on opioids, methamphetamines, and even alcohol can make going “cold turkey” an excruciating process, sometimes even deadly. The World Health Organization has published clinical guidelines for how Withdrawal Management should take place that insists:

Healthcare workers should be available 24 hours a day. Workers should include:

• A doctor who sees patients on admission and is on call to attend to the patient in case of complications;

• Nurses, who are responsible for monitoring patients in withdrawal, dispensing medications as directed by the doctor and providing the patient with information about withdrawal.

The WM area should be quiet and calm. Patients should be allowed to sleep or rest in bed if they wish, or to do moderate activities such as walking. Offer patients opportunities to engage in meditation or other calming practices.

In contrast to these experiences, Alison received no medical care, and barely slept due to close proximity with other women in physical and mental distress. 

After her agonizing first few weeks, Alison sort of “locked in” to her new reality as her physical and substance recovery eked on. She learned quickly that the way to be successful and remain safe at the Mission was to garner the favor of the Staff, who she heard and observed as showing favoritism among the residents. She would try to exceed at all the tasks that were given to her, to have the cleanest room, and to not complain–these were techniques of survival more than betterment, as she often saw women get exited from the shelter for minor infractions. She recalls at least two women–friends–who lost their bed at the Mission over minor things like this and died on the streets shortly after.

Some of these minor infractions didn’t even take place at the Mission. Remember the Rule against relationships, smoking, drinking, or drugs “either on or off mission property”? If you’re wondering how that was enforced, Alison learned the hard way. She had heard from other residents that “the city has eyes.” She remembers several women get kicked out for sneaking a cigarette across town. One time, when she went to visit her boyfriend (who had agreed to keep her cat so that she didn’t have it give her up,) she hadn’t told anyone where she was going, but the staff had somehow found out. She was reprimanded and threatened with an exit if it ever happened again. 

The other time she recalls coming close to losing her bed was when she discovered something was terribly wrong with her bed; she had been waking up sick again and again no matter how much she cleaned her room, until she flipped over her mattress and discovered that it was covered in what appeared to be black mold. She was nervous to tell the staff so she told her friends about it. When word got out that she was talking about this problem, she was threatened by staff with being exited, saying it “Made the mission look bad.” She was eventually given a new mattress–on condition that she “would not be discussing this issue or any other like it with anyone, ever again.”

As a non-Christian, the constancy of chapel, Bible study and church was frustrating at first–between twice a day chapel on weekdays, once on weekends and mandatory Church attendance on Sunday, that meant residents were forced into Christian worship 13 times per week. Alison reflected:

I feel as though I am an educated and open minded person, and I felt we were being forced to sit through a sort of brain-washing sometimes. I was curious about religion, I wanted to hear what could have been shared, but so little of it was feeling truthful or helpful. I had a lot of questions, and was labeled a troublemaker for asking too many. Eventually I learned to just shut up and journal/draw during chapel to cope with the emotional distress.

When she mentions emotional distress, she is specifically recalling the abusive nature of the teaching in chapel. Some of the frequent topics she remembers?

• One frequent chapel teacher was a flat-earther and taught on this regularly

• Invectives against LGBTQ+ people, claiming they were dangerous abominations

• Telling the women that their “aborted babies are burning in hell”

Alison also remembers a particular local pastor who spoke at their chapel frequently–that is, until he was arrested for the sexual abuse of a minor in his former church. Even after this, this pastor’s wife continued to speak at chapel, and many of the staff publicly shared their sympathy for the arrested pastor. Alison understandably wondered, alongside other residents, if any abuse had occurred at the Mission itself, with how much access this pastor had. 

If the goal of these constant barrages was to help Alison, they had the opposite effect: “I would often leave Chapel feeling ashamed for being LGBTQ and having relationships with partners when I was not married. We were told that we were there because we were bad women, and because nobody wanted us. I felt bad to my core and would leave Chapel angry, ashamed and hurt most days.”

After her 30 day probation period (when you’re not allowed to look for work outside of the Mission), Alison looked for work as soon as possible… to get out of going to Chapel! “I would work overtime and come in early whenever possible in order to spend as little time as possible at the Mission.” While going to work meant way less humiliation than Chapel, the Mission’s policies still found a way to make it a degrading experience. 

In order for Alison to be “approved” to leave the Mission for work, she had to justify every hour she was away by having her boss or manager sign a time-sheet provided by the Mission. This meant that even away from the Mission, its influence followed her:

Having to get my work hours signed by my boss made it clear to my workplace community that I was homeless and living at the mission, which was really embarrassing. Eventually I stopped hiding it, and people would ask me about it all the time; [things like] “Why doesn’t your family help?”, [or] “Don’t you have any friends you could stay with?” These constant reminders that, no, I did not, hurt my heart regularly. I struggled with depression and feelings of abandonment every single day.

After about a year of staying at the Mission, Alison was informed that her time had ended–there had never been conversations about a term length, until she was given two weeks to find new accommodations. Alison was devastated and distressed. On leaving the Mission she moved into yet another unsafe, convenient living situation and relapsed. On reflecting on her year stay, she could remember hardly any resources related to her long term housing or recovery. 

A few other things she remembers from her stay: residents medications frequently coming up “missing”, when only the staff had access to them; the CEO and senior staff driving expensive cars and being quite immodest about their financial status/superiority; donations that were brought to the women’s shelter were diverted to the thrift store to be sold rather than given to the women living there; the food used to cook the daily meals was often expired or even moldy. There’s so much more. 

But not every memory is negative. By performing the necessary persona to become a favorite, Alison secured a job as the kitchen lead at the Mission, which she enjoyed and gave her usable experience. Despite everything, she remained focused on her gratitude for having a place to sleep that was safer for her than the streets. In a town like Grants Pass that truly has no other option for someone like Alison, she chose to be grateful. 

I don’t know that I could have remained grateful, positive, or anything but resentful in this situation. But, I’m under no delusion that I’m anywhere near as strong and resilient as Alison. 

Finding herself back in desperation, things finally turned around when she started working with “Options of Southern Oregon”,  a mental health support network. They offered her psychiatric support, medication support, employment support and guidance, and case management. Her case manager helped her apply for Social Security Disability, which was initially denied and then granted after appeal. Her case manager also helped her apply for a HUD housing voucher, which finally came through after a long period of waiting and subsidized the rent in the good housing situation she had found. She was finally stable, and independent–and with that came all of the feelings that the Mission would never let her feel about herself:

All of these supports led to me feeling strong, worthy and capable. Therapy, advocacy, addiction support, medication support, employment guidance, stable housing. Wraparound care. Healing truly does begin when a person feels they have a safe home to sleep in. I tried to heal for years, but the true healing did not begin until I had a safe home to call my own.

In Part III, I’m going to really unpack what it means for the Church to continually peddle this kind of “service” in the name of Jesus; I’m going to reckon with what it means for the United States of America that those who are responsible for upholding justice at our highest level took a close look at homelessness–at Grants Pass specifically–and said it is perfectly fair and just to criminalize people for sleeping outside. 

For today, I want us to stay right here, with Alison.

Homelessness is a vast, multi-faceted problem,and I always encourage us to be vigilant and broad in our scope to tackle it from its many angles and battlefronts. 

But homelessness is also small. We can’t merely engage it as a national crisis in a platform or on a ballot. Ending homelessness is about the experiences, the bodies, the very lives of the people nearest to us. Homelessness is their names, their stories, and how we stand with them (or don’t.) For today, before we fly back to 10,000 feet and draw broad conclusions, let’s consider that homelessness is just Alison; how she was treated, how her life was altered, and what it took of her and of us to find her in this present moment, reflecting back to us her experience.

An insidious reality is that the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission would likely consider Alison’s story a success, taking credit and celebrating their model. They would say that their insistence on detox got her off of her pain pill addiction. They would say that their rigorous structure led to her finding work and applying herself to the point of getting overtime. They would say their extreme rules brought about good behavior and made her a “better woman.” 

They won’t tell you that their detox could’ve killed her–that it’s possibly killed others. They won’t tell you that she took that job to flee their unholy brainwashing. They won’t tell you that she only “behaved” because she was afraid that any slip could send her to death or worse on the streets, like the friends she lost after their exits. They won’t tell you that the positive outcomes they celebrate are done at a metaphorical gunpoint. And they certainly won’t tell you about how the cut her off and sent her back to essentially where she started before she ever entered the Mission. 

They’ll never tell you that because they don’t know, or they don’t care. I’m not sure which it is, or which is worse. But either way, it’s a damn shame. Because it meant they never really knew Alison, and they’ll never know how easy it could have been to help her. 

When I asked her how it felt to get what she finally needed after spending all that time in the Mission, Alison wrote this:

I feel like adding these types of support to the staff and direct environment there would have changed so many lives, not just my own. So I have had to take some time to process those feelings. That still hurts today, knowing the mission is still the only option for adults and families in Grants Pass. I find myself hoping maybe something has changed by now...while at the same time feeling as though this is unlikely.

Alison isn’t that far removed from this experience. While she celebrates her independence,  stability, and sobriety, finances are tight. She deals with chronic illness still, and works two jobs to get by. In all this, she has become a passionate advocate for ending homelessness in her community. In fact, her and I were first connected because she saw me post a statistic on Instagram about homelessness and median rents, and she messaged me to ask for the source so that she could reference it in her advocacy. Only in conversing did I learn about her stay at the Mission, and ask her to share her story.

It took a lot of time and trust for her to agree to share it. It was the same day the Court announced its verdict that she messaged me: “Just saw this update this am. I'm ready to start moving forward.” I can’t imagine what that decision felt like for her, but I’m in awe of the courage it took to share all this–and not for her sake, but so that it might happen less to others. 

I’ll let Alison bring us to a close:

I wish that more people could open their minds to becoming more educated and less afraid of their homeless neighbors. 

I wish that they could grasp how endlessly complicated it can be to get out of that situation once you find yourself in it. I wish there was more advocacy and more supportive transitional housing, bringing people out of a life outside with the right support, care and forgiveness.

I am scared for what might be next for a community of people who are already being kicked while they are down.

Reminder: Let’s support Alison financially for the risk and labor of bringing us these documents and her story. Every penny you send to me will go directly to her in addition to the amount I am committing to and have already given. You can contribute via Venmo (@ kevin-nye-3), Cash App ($Revkev), Paypal or Zelle (kevin.m.nye@gmail.com).

Part III - Investigating the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission