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For two years, Jeremiah Russell and his younger sister and his mother and father coped with a predicament – the predicament of homelessness.
They had been living in a perfectly stable situation in south Sacramento. Both parents worked, and they made plenty enough money to pay the rent. Then, the bad news – the value of their home increased to the point where the owner decided to sell it out from underneath them. Finding another place to live raised more complications for the family and forced them into a swirl of moves through short stays in various motels around the Sacramento area – 55 of them in all, by Jeremiah’s count – before his mother found an apartment through her job that they could share with another family.
“It was more stable, but we always had to keep our guard up a little bit,” Jeremiah said.
Last November, Jeremiah’s family was accepted for a move into Mutual Housing at Sky Park. With stability returned to the family’s living situation, Jeremiah has proceeded into his freshman year at Valley High School, where he now takes honors classes and is pulling a 4.43 grade-point average. He plays football, is involved in the campus chapter of the Black Students Unions, and he has established himself as a model cadet in the Junior ROTC program.
With Jeremiah flourishing, with his family’s basic needs of safe and affordable housing resolved, the 14-year-old’s early biographical story could have concluded right there with a happy ending. And while it sure looks like Jeremiah will live happily ever after, his story is only beginning to get underway.
Not satisfied with mere stability, Jeremiah is pushing ahead toward greatness. His sights are set on college, law school, and a career in the military. As he works towards accomplishing those goals, Jeremiah has taken a leap unheard of for somebody his age – he is creating his own nonprofit corporation, with the goal of building 20 “tiny home” communities in the region, each of them working off a five-step script that he has designed to give the formerly homeless residents the tools to become functioning and productive human beings.
He has support, from his parents, banks, private industry and officials at his school. More importantly, he has an optimistic vision that has sprung from a determination that swelled within him during the two years that he and his family were homeless.
It is a spirit that has steeled Jeremiah’s life.
“I can say that homelessness is the best thing that ever happened to me,” Jeremiah said, in an interview in the Mutual Housing community room at Sky Park. “I think if I wasn’t homeless, I wouldn’t have started a nonprofit. I wouldn’t have known what it’s like to go through homelessness, and I think that’s really good. It shows that even though I’m a kid and I’ve been through homelessness, you are only homeless right now, and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and if you work hard every day, you’ll get out of it.”
He has a long way to go before he can turn his dream into a concrete reality, before his vision can fold into the creation of a 501(c) (3) nonprofit corporation.
As a young man with big ideas, he knows he can’t do it alone, and he’s already established a board of directors that includes his parents, his JROTC instructor, and the vice principal of his high school.
“Jeremiah is a very motivated, very focused young man,” said Bridgette Kemp-Bell, a vice principal at Valley High School. “I’ve had the pleasure of knowing him through school, and he asked me to be on his board, and I agreed to do it. We’ll begin to meet and to share from him more of his vision. He’s already started doing his research, and he has other volunteers, and he’s created a web page, and he’s doing a lot of the leg work already. He seems to be very passionate and compassionate about the homeless population. I support him 100 percent.”
Mrs. Kemp-Bell also provided a wider view of the personality that is Jeremiah Russell. She said he is “friendly, with all students.” Other words she used to describe him: “helpful,” “respectful,” “disciplined,” “well-behaved,” “well-rounded,” “laughs a lot,” “very serious,” and “a great guy.”
It was the sense of his own personal instability generated by the dozens of motel stays that gave rise to Jeremiah’s wanting to do something for the people who were even less fortunate than himself.
“I learned how to be grateful during the time that we were homeless,” he said. “We’d go to Loaves and Fishes, and we would feed the homeless and talk to them, even though we were homeless, and it taught me a lot of things about life, to be grateful for what I had. I was grateful that I still had a roof over my head, even though I didn’t have my own home. I was grateful that I had a place to lay my head, and that drove me to the idea to start the nonprofit, and that’s what I did.”
While the vision was born amid the predicament, it was the circumstance of the family’s move to Mutual Housing at Sky Park that gave him a practical foundation to come up with a plan. It helped, for instance, for Jeremiah to have his own bedroom, which he has turned into something of an office, with a desk and a computer and places to store documents and data that he studies to help him along his path.
“I’m able to work on it now,” Jeremiah said. “I just had less time to do it before. Now, I’m in a stable place. I have more time to focus on work. I know when I’m going to be going to school. I have more time to manage my day.”
Jeremiah’s mother, Shalita Ellis, summed up the family’s move into Mutual Housing like this: “It was a blessing. We can put it together now that we have our own place. We’re going to go far with this. We’re going to stop homelessness. We’re going to get it under control in the city of Sacramento. That’s our vision.”
Ahead of the official incorporation of the nonprofit, Jeremiah and his family have created what they call the JRussell Foundation and a web site that lays out its objectives, the projects that are already underway, and the underlying principles of an organization that “is working each and every day to make a positive impact.”
Jeremiah Russell, 14, works on plan to create nonprofit corporation to benefit homeless in Sacramento.
At the core of his plan, and its most ambitious component, is the construction of the tiny homes through an established but not yet commercially widespread technology that enables a contractor to build a single small but functional living space virtually overnight. The ICON Design Build Co. of Austin, Texas, has developed a machine its officials call the Vulcan II 3D “printer” that essentially spews out concrete and reputedly can build a tiny home with a bare minimum of labor at the $4,000 cost cited by Jeremiah.
According to media reports on ICON technology, the cost does not accommodate aspects of construction such as the installation of indoor plumbing. The price tag also does not include land acquisition, and Jeremiah knows he’s going to need some help – financial, political and otherwise – when it comes to finding places to build these tiny-home communities. He said he is getting some expressions of support from those quarters.
“We’re looking at like mayors and governors and companies to help us, to donate land, and considering doing that, and we’re talking about outright purchasing the land,” Jeremiah said. “Or companies donating money for us to buy the land. That was an option, to see if we can get lenders and vendors to help us out.”
Jeremiah is just as animated about the rehabilitation program as he is about the construction of the housing for the homeless. His web site lays out the five-step approach as a gamut of job training and placement, mixed with psychological and social rehabilitation programs, therapy, and medication management.
“We’ll see what they need, see if they’re committed to doing this, and after that they’ll come into our homes and they’ll go through a one-year program with us,” Jeremiah said. “They’ll be taught life skills, job skills, how to fill out an application, resumes, and how to apply for homeless stuff. They’ll get all that information in a period of time. We’ll do partnerships with companies that will send out people to help us to teach job skills to pick a profession they can go through, and when they leave our program they can get jobs with those companies.”
Whether he can solidify these partnerships remains to be seen, but that isn’t stopping Jeremiah from doing the most he can do now with what he’s got, which at this point, is mainly energy.
Already, his JRussell Foundation has sponsored a couple of feeding programs for the homeless on a plot of vacant land on Stockton Boulevard just south of Fruitridge Road. His website has listed a schedule of feeding programs at the same spot for every other Saturday between now and October 12. He’s also doing clothing drives, planning symposiums, mediating on-campus disputes, keeping his grades up, volunteering at an elementary school and volunteering at local food banks – all while learning how to apply for grants and learning the ins and outs of the world of the nonprofits.
Jeremiah has refused to allow negative thinking to throw him off course, to cloud his vision.
“Optimism is a necessary thing, the most crucial thing you can have that makes for greatness,” said Mutual Housing community organizer Chinua Rhodes. “You cannot have realism or pessimism in the space of being great. And he knows he’s going to need people to collaborate with to make these big ideas happen. He’s young enough that even if he fails, he can pick himself back up and do it again and learn from what he fails. There is only an upside to this young man.”
For Jeremiah, it all comes back to those two years where it was never clear where or whether he’d have a stable place to live during his teen-aged years. Now he’s got one with Mutual Housing. Still, he’s not going to forget the 24 months of motel hopping and shared housing. Instead, he’s using it to drive his future.
“I have a passion for helping people,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to help people. Even though we were going through what we were going through, I was thinking about people who were living in tents, the people who didn’t have roofs over their heads. It always drove me to be a better person and motivated me to take on this issue.”
Listen to Jeremiah Russell talk about his plan to built tiny-home communities in Sacramento.