If Wil Harris ever gets discouraged, he can always watch his own TEDx talk on YouTube on how to set aside negative thoughts.
Just months after speaking at the Youngstown, OH, event, (TEDx are local versions of the international TED lecture series), the one-time aide to Congressman Tim Ryan finds himself a resident at Camp Haven, Vero Beach’s transitional support program for homeless men.
It was as if the poverty and abuse of his childhood in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood suddenly assaulted him again. In all the work he had done as a community leader and motivational speaker, he was left to wonder how his own life had suddenly turned inside out on him, the pain and confusion bubbling up to the surface after years of achievement and success.
And now he found himself in precisely the place he advised others how to avoid.
“I hit a breaking point,” he says. “I was just going through the motions to give the impression that everything was right. I never took the time to figure out what is it that I’m lacking.”
In a long career helping young people, Harris, 44, is getting counseling himself now – for the first time in his life.
Until now, he has coped with stress and anger through his artwork, concentrating on his intricate pencil sketches as a way to calm his mind. His portfolio goes with him wherever he goes: from Overtown to Youngstown and now to Vero, where he spreads the sketches on a table in the Camp Haven office. A lion deigning to let a lioness nuzzle him; Christ on the crucifix sharing a cone of light with a figure crossed-legged in meditation; three men – all representations of himself, he says – in disparate manners, the center figure bound and hooded.
Next week, Harris’s often startlingly emotional drawings will be on display at Lighthouse Art and Framing, in a benefit for Camp Haven. The idea rose from a chance meeting at a wellness fair at Unity Church, where Camp Haven’s board president, Lalita Janke, had paid for a table for Harris to sell his work.
“From my own past, I have seen how but for the flick of a switch, all of us could have been losing everything of value to us,” says Janke. “Some lose their reputation; some lose their wives or family. I have paid big bucks to go places to get respite. And that’s what I want to bring here.”
Camp Haven arose out of Vero’s need to shelter Vero’s sizeable homeless population that surges to upwards of 700 in winter. Originally envisioned as a tent city, the Camp Haven that opened in January was built from the old Citrus Motel on U.S. 1. Considered a transitional facility, its program serves 15 homeless men screened to show potential for moving toward independent living. Once they are able, they pay a weekly rent and volunteer their services. Harris is the night watchman.
“We knew we could trust him to look out for everyone else including himself,” says Janke.
Disdained by the grandfather who raised him when his mother fell into drug dependency, Harris showed the spark of artistic and intellectual ability, if only teachers could settle him down with pencil and paper, particularly when the family moved to Youngstown.
“I was always respectful of my teachers,” he says. “But with my peers, I was constantly in fights.”
That came to an end just as he reached adulthood at 18. He pulls up one sleeve of his grey T-shirt to reveal the scar of a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Another bullet tore into his pelvis and through several organs, lodging in his hip, where it remains today.
It was a defining moment in his life. What he experienced just before he came to was the classic out-of-body experience. He viewed himself from above, looking down on his flailing arms as the surgeon repaired his shredded organs. “I was relieved, and I wasn’t afraid at all, but I had this awareness. I was cognizant of the fact that I was so weak and vulnerable,” he recalls. “Then, in the blink of an eye, I woke up in intensive care, with a tube in my throat down to my stomach and another coming out of my belly button.”
Opening his eyes, the surgeon stood next to him, stroking his arm. “You died for seven minutes,” he told Harris.
From the fight that precipitated the shooting, to the vision that followed, Harris felt his life change. “I just didn’t see living life the way I had been,” he says. “That was it.”
A visitor heard about his experience and asked him to speak at her church.
“I was nervous about speaking and I was rough around the edges,” he said. “But she saw something about me.” The head of the local chapter of an urban anti-drug agency, she asked him to volunteer; a month later, she hired him.
It was there that he honed his speaking skills.
“They sent me to all these training sessions. I was out of town three times a month – New Jersey, Detroit, California. I was like a sponge.”
He stayed in the post for ten years, then worked for the local YouthBuild chapter. By 2002 he was director of the Young Black Men Association, a program funded by a block grant to help kids deal with self-esteem issues, conflict resolution and peer pressure.
One day, he was speaking at an event, when “this young clean-cut white guy” – Congressman Ryan – approached him. “He said, ‘My name is Tim Ryan. I love what you’re doing out there. I would really like you to come and work for me.’ I told him my reputation isn’t like your reputation. But he didn’t care. I worked for him for three years.”
That position further opened his eyes. “The influence and the power was incredible,” he recalls. “To go somewhere and say you’re an aide to a congressman? The way people treat you is intoxicating.”
At one point, he wrote his own column in a bi-weekly Youngstown newspaper, the Inner City Voice.
“Wil is an entrepreneur. He is a disciplined person. Not everybody is,” says Janke. “He knows the impact he has on people.”
In addition to Camp Haven’s daily personal development program, tailored to each client’s needs, Janke says, Harris is taking business classes for college credit through Indian River State College’s new program at the Homeless Family Center on 4th Street. Through a grant, the college can waive tuition fees. Harris is enrolled in his second class; he got an “A” in the first.
Camp Haven is a far cry from the suburban home he rented on a rent-to-own basis outside Cleveland. He drove a Lincoln Navigator and had a 401(k) retirement fund, he says.
He and his girlfriend, his high school sweetheart, were raising a four-year-old boy, who last winter was diagnosed with leukemia. It was during discussions of his radiation and chemotherapy that Harris found out he is not the boy’s biological father. The news tore him apart, he says. The couple split up. With no legal claim to custody, Harris did as his lawyer urged and left.
Vero seemed as likely a sanctuary as any; he had visited a few years earlier trying to renew a relationship with his own father in Fort Pierce. That effort proved futile, but he always remembered how kind people were to him in Vero Beach.
Today, when he meets people, it can be challenging to explain his circumstances. “People are genuinely curious, but you don’t want to reveal too much, because then you’re vulnerable,” he says. “It’s difficult, considering what I’ve overcome already, to explain why I am here. Sometimes you don’t have an answer for that. I’m a human being. Life happens.”
Yet getting his public speaking career back on track is his dream. “I have to get centered again. I know that if I do work, life works itself out.
“I was in a tailspin. I had everybody pulling me in a different direction. I was depressed and I wanted to just take a time out, but there’s no way on earth that you can do this. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. This place gave me a time out. I needed to have a place to go where nobody knows I’m Wil Harris.”
The Camp Haven benefit is Saturday, Oct. 18 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Lighthouse Frames and Art, 1875 14th Ave. There is no admission charge. Examples of Harris’s art, as well as the craft jewelry of Barbara Petrillo, will be available for sale with a portion of the proceeds going to Camp Haven.