Darrian Kaye sees the need, hears the calling

Darrian Kaye has seen up close the profound privations suffered by her fellow citizens.

She’s aware that that desperation is likely only going to grow with the Trump administration threatening drastic cuts to the social safety net.

But if she ever feels despair over economic injustice and suffering and the fact that society often seems unmoved by it all, it never overwhelms her. 

Instead, Kaye, a member of the Mohican Tribe, calls upon the Medicine Wheel and its four stages for making the world a better place to provide a foundation.

“So it’s first, recognizing there’s a problem,” she says. “Recognizing it’s your responsibility to fix it, having the intelligence to know how to fix it and then finally executing it.”

Kaye, who owns and operates a musical collaboration business in Appleton called Inner City Sound, fully embraced the precepts of the Medicine Wheel, when, three years ago, she launched Mission: We Hear You. The charity provides warm clothing for people in need in the Fox Cities as well as in Minneapolis. It is a lean operation with no paperwork required, no proof of need and almost no overhead.

If there is a need, Mission: We Hear You will address it, often immediately. 

The impetus for her work came when Kaye attended college in Minneapolis about a decade ago. She witnessed people frozen to death on the library steps, their faces encrusted with ice. She wasn’t particularly impressed with how the mayor addressed the crisis of the unhoused, including when he would surreptitiously bulldoze their encampments. 

“It was like, you’ve got to keep walking, keep walking,” she says. “And it reminds me in a messed up kind of way of a modern-day Trail of Tears almost. The good thing about Appleton is it is a safe haven city because it’s one of the last cities in the Fox Valley that doesn’t have those no-loitering ordinances. That means people are being pushed out of those other locations to our city and now we have to ramp up our efforts to provide for that.”

The Mission is Growing

So how does it work? 

It’s pretty simple, really. 

Mission: We Hear You finds needs and then provides for those needs. That includes canvassing neighborhoods to seek out unhoused people and provide them warm clothing and it also includes working with other charities to warehouse clothing, be it coats, hats, socks, gloves and so on. 

Fittingly, the charity’s very first donor was Kaye’s own grandmother, who knits quilts and other things.

“So we went out to an encampment with that very first pack of seventy items,” she remembers. “And we really thought we were hot shots. It was like, look at how much stuff we got. And now we’re filling up whole cars with stuff.”

Mission: We Hear You is a limited liability company that seeks to soon establish itself as a 501(3)(c) so that it can apply for grants and sponsorships.

Right now, Kaye is relying on revenue through Inner City Sound as well as donations from the community to keep it sustainable. Some of the funding comes directly out of pocket, such as when she has to purchase XL coats. Extra-large coats are among the most requested items but also one of the hardest to come by.

Through social media and through some mainstream local media coverage, Mission: We Hear You has gained a pretty solid following in a short amount of time. Inner City Sound garnered some early brand recognition and Kaye parlayed that into a following for Mission: We Hear You.

“We weren’t really expecting it to become what it became,” Kaye says, noting that her various social media platforms, including Facebook received 150,000 hits over a recent one-week span.  “I was very pleasantly surprised by the response.”

Mission: We Hear You accepts donations year-round but winter is when things kick into gear. Kaye sends out press releases letting the community know of specific needs. They can drop off items at Mountains of Hope, a new transitional center at 116 E. Wisconsin, or sometimes Kaye will set up dropoff boxes at various businesses in the area. Mission also has relationships with many shelters around the area and coordinates with their staff to determine specific needs. For a barebones operation – Mission: We Hear You never has more than five volunteers at any time, Kaye says – the procurement strategies are fairly fine-tuned. 

“So we’ll ask them, ‘do you need coats right now or do you have people that need x, y, or z or food or blankets and whatnot?’ That way we’re able to pinpoint what they need, instead of dropping off a load of stuff and saying, ‘Okay, bye. I hope that helps.’”

‘Freezing is a now thing’

Mission also works with Harbor House to provide pajamas and hygiene products. 

What the organization doesn’t do that other charities often do is require proof of need. Mission: We Hear You recognizes the difficult straits these folks face when it comes to unemployment paperwork or ID or any number of other barriers standing in the way of desperate folks getting their immediate needs met.

“Proof of this or proof of that,” Kaye says. “Say you don’t have an ID and you just recently lost your job or your car, how are you going to get to the DMV? How are you going to save up that money to get an ID, you know? And people need to understand that these things take time. Freezing is a now thing. So it’s not like we have until tomorrow to wait when someone is out in the cold right now.

“How do we meet people where they are?”

And then there is canvassing neighborhoods, seeking out individuals or groups of individuals with no place to go and with insufficient clothing to get them through often brutal Wisconsin winter nights. Kaye says with Wisconsin being more of a “closed-off sort of culture,” it’s not as easy to find where these folks are.

“But we also know some common gathering points,” she says. “So we roam from one point to the next and say, okay, are there people here? And we get information from other charities and other non-profit groups who will call us and say, ‘Hey, I was just walking here and we saw a huge population.’”

Kaye says she always emphasizes safety during these canvasses. There haven’t been many instances where a volunteer felt threatened but Kaye insists that the canvassers always stick together. She recalls one incident when someone broke away from the MWHY canvassing cabal and wandered across the street and a person tried to hold them up.

“We went over and I kind of laughed and I was like, ‘How you gonna rob my friend when we came here to give you stuff?’ And he’s like, oh, can I have some pants and I said, sure, what else do you need?”

‘It only takes a handful of people’

The name Mission: We Hear You is striking in that it sounds at first like a Yoda-like pronouncement. But to see it in writing with the colon setting apart the word mission really brings it home. Kaye says the name just came to mind.

“We want people to know their voices are heard,” she explains. “Because we feel we’re in this unhoused situation and people are walking past and they don’t care and nobody sees you. But we do hear you. You’re not alone.”

Kaye has little doubt that the demands are going to increase if the Trump administration follows through on its threats to gut programs for the neediest people, which it seems almost certain it will. 

“There are going to be real problems that are going to be created that we’re going to have to somehow rise up and solve,” she says. “I recognize the seriousness of all this and how it affects my own human rights. But I know what my ancestors went through here in Wisconsin. We walked five Trails of Tears (from the Northeastern US) just to get here. I’m not scared because I have confidence in the backbone of people to rise above this. 

“I believe it’s going to take us sticking together and forming a united front. Organization is very important. Knowing your community is vitally important.”

Kaye is also anticipating being able to take the blueprint for her program and expand it into other communities of need. She envisions brand ambassadors for Mission: We Hear You in major surrounding cities.

As much as Kaye remains hopeful she also remains remarkably humble. There is no sense that she is doing any of this for recognition. It seems clear she is driven by the purest of motives: to help others in need.

“It helps put me at ease, knowing that when we think about how none of us individually can fix the huge, complex issues in the world, we can begin to make a difference  in our own community. It only takes a handful of people.”