From shelter resident to staff member, Union Gospel Mission client services director shares inspiring story

Roechelle Williams can feel compassion for the woman she once was but has little sympathy.

“Sympathy? Not so much,” the 36-year-old Sioux Falls woman said. “A lot of it was my own doing, to be honest.”

The decisions she made led her to intermittent employment, homelessness, loss of custody of her son and a meth habit that led her to shoot up several times a day.

Williams would turn to the Union Gospel Mission when she needed shelter, food and clothing. She eventually turned her life around when she realized that she never wanted her son, now a teenager, to think drugs mattered more to her than he did.

Now, she works full time at Union Gospel Mission as client services director. In that role, she has helped the nonprofit expand the services it offers, moving it beyond a “bed-and-breakfast” to a full-service agency working to solve problems, not patch them over.

“It used to be ‘come in, drop your bags and don’t cause trouble,’ then you could stay here, but you were on your own,” Williams said. “Now, we have interorganizational collaboration, a discipleship program, case management — you name it, we’re trying to do it.”

Eric “Pineapple” Weber, the Mission’s CEO since December 2019, first met Williams at 4:30 one morning when she was banging away at her recalcitrant car, parked in the organization’s thrift shop lot.

“What in the world is this girl doing?” he thought to himself. The answer soon became obvious: making her life better.

“I saw her as a person that needed some guidance and a step up and a hand up,” Weber said. “Having her now with her lived life experience is unbelievable. She’s been through it. She’s worked the system, lived the system, been there, done that.”

Weber knew when he joined UGM that the programming needed to expand, making sure clients have the stability they need so the likelihood of a return is dramatically reduced. He and his staff don’t need to play Superman, he said. Their clients can take that role on for themselves.

“Roechelle’s just one of many that’s been through the mission,” he said. “We have so many great stories. To go through all that and now to do what she does, whew, it’s mind-blowing. It’s so great. She gets it that if you want it, you have the capacity to do it, and you’ll get it done.”

For years, though, Williams doubted herself. Raised in southwest Michigan, her life started a downward spiral when she was in college. As an addict, her weaknesses were “meth, men, alcohol and pills.” She was living with her young son in Atlanta and dreaming of using her degrees in a business setting when domestic violence derailed her plans. Williams joined family members in South Dakota almost 10 years ago.

She took a job in insurance dictation, but substance abuse took over her life. Williams remembers the first time she tried meth.

“I fell into the wrong crowd when I was finding friends and different outlets,” she said. “Nobody wants to move back in with their parents. I was feeling vulnerable. The first time it was ever presented to me I had never seen it before.”

With experience in nursing, the thought of being injected with a needle didn’t frighten her.

“’What does it feel like?’ I said, and that was the stupidest question I ever asked. It set me on a whirlwind. I was instantly hooked, so to speak. I went from about 250 pounds down to 98 within a six-month time frame. I was a significantly heavy user.”

From 2017 to 2020, Williams went in and out of the Union Gospel Mission shelter. Her parents took temporary custody of her son. Even when Williams reached the point of “either I do what I’m supposed to do to get him back or lose him forever,” she still found obstacles.

“It was very difficult. I still had obstacles,” Williams said. “I had a lot of service providers — a probation officer, an addiction treatment counselor, a judge, parents, employer — and everybody was telling you, you need to do this, but nobody was communicating among each other to make the path easy to identify what I was supposed to be doing in that order.”

Williams had stints in fast food and housekeeping but was working in construction while she began maintaining sobriety. After an ectopic pregnancy, she decided to find a safer career path. She had worked as overnight staff at UGM and decided to focus on that job.

“I was used to this environment, and I had been through the ropes and thought I can help people going through similar things,” Williams said. While working overnights, there was not a lot of direct client care she could do. However, as she thought about her own journey, she began developing a case-management plan.

In 2021, Union Gospel Mission began offering case management to its clients. Since then, the program has expanded from offering services to the women clients to the men.

Aubrey Kilbourn first met Williams at a community meeting. The woman she was with told her: “You have to meet Roechelle. She is basically like an encyclopedia. She has all the information.”

Kilbourn, now a full-time staff case manager at the Mission while pursuing a master’s degree in social work at the University of Kentucky, thought Williams’ knowledge and experience would intimidate her. Instead, she felt welcomed into the field.

“She made me feel welcome, so much so that after I graduated with a degree in social work, I applied here because I knew that’s what Roechelle did,” Kilbourn said. “Knowing what I did about her, I knew that’s the kind of person I want to be.”

Kilbourn describes Williams as compassionate, hardworking, determined, enthusiastic and passionate. In the six months they’ve worked together, and Williams has been Kilbourn’s mentor for the graduate degree program, Kilbourn’s admiration has grown.

“If there’s an idea, and I’m like maybe let’s do this, she’s really awesome about having our voices heard and trying to pursue the things we’re interested in and making sure it’s applicable to UGM,” she said.

At Union Gospel Mission, Williams is the person staff members turn to for statistics. In the first 11 months of 2024, a little more than 1,200 guests have stayed 1,705 times. Case management and community health worker services have been provided to 879 individuals. Fifty-three unique families have been served throughout this year.

“Out of the 879 clients we have provided case management and community health care worker services to, through those meetings we have served 2,365 hours of case management or community health management,” Williams said. “We have housed 329 unduplicated individuals, moving them into housing.”

Williams has seen a shift in who is receiving UGM services. She has recorded 102 people between the age of 18 and 24 seeking shelter. The cause is unknown; it could be just that more attention is being paid to the issue through programs such as the Volunteers of America Dakota’s Axis 180, which serves homeless youths.

The changes in Williams’ own life continue. The holiday season reminds her that when she began her recovery, her family warily gave her no cash, just prepaid items such as a phone card. Now, her grandparents ask her about her financial dreams and goals, and a sibling plans to study social work and trauma counseling in school.

“I think whether due to bad past experiences or watching me navigate different systems, I think she has grown to have a heart to understand people and their needs and how to be a big advocate in the younger-generation populations,” Williams said.

When Williams looks at her own past, she acknowledges that she wouldn’t be here — with her son in their comfortable apartment, a full-time job and goals for her life — if she hadn’t been there. She will always identify as an addict and knows how easy it can be for a person to lose himself or herself.

But there is always hope.

“Homelessness does not equal hopelessness,” Williams said. “Everybody that comes through our door has a dream. It can be very miniscule. But that doesn’t need to be minimized. You don’t ever know what somebody has been through.”