Aaron Reddin’s guided tour comes to a brief halt when a tornado materializes inside the chicken pen.
It is sunny but cold; the icy wind has a serrated edge. It’s the kind of weather, in fact, that adds urgency to Reddin’s work with the homeless — but today he happily stops to watch as the gusts gather in a compact whirlwind that sends leaves swirling and the chickens into a tizzy.
“A tornado in the chicken pen,” Reddin says, watching the birds scatter. “Holy cow. That’s wild.”
Anything Reddin finds interesting or remarkable often gets labeled “wild” or “weird,” “mind blowing” or “crazy.”
Reddin, after all, has experienced much worse than “weird” or “crazy,” man. Crazy isn’t so bad. In Reddin’s world, crazy is a compliment.
Given the way Reddin’s help-the-homeless projects “The Van” and his nonprofit “The One” have taken off in three years — he uses the word a lot.
The explosion of donations and growth shortly after the first van went into service?
“That’s just when it really went stupid-crazy,” Reddin says.
Worldwide donations ranging from the Netherlands to South Korea that helped The One make a down payment on a home for women and children?
“That’s just weird, crazy,” he says.
The primary requirement for someone to get into Reddin’s line of work, maybe take over operation of The Van Reddin has planned for Memphis?
That person just needs to be “crazy enough” to do it.
Beginning with that first, hand-me-down van — and a lot of help from friends — Reddin, 32, has built an operation that features a 15,000-SF warehouse complex and small farm in Rose City.
As directly as it can The One, under Reddin’s direction, simply uses The Van to get what is needed — food, warm clothes, firewood — to the people who need it.
“I’m just a screwed up dude trying to help screwed up people,” Reddin says.
Semper Fi
A shaggy 5-11, 240-pound ex-Marine, Reddin, would never look at home at a black-tie fundraiser, unless he was the guy called in to wire the sound system. Reddin prefers to do his good works the blue-collar way, calling on a few friends for help and rolling up his sleeves to do the job.
“We go wherever they are,” Reddin says. “Camps. Under bridges. Wherever folks are, man.”
He doesn’t dwell on it, but under those freeway overpasses, in those alleys and behind those restaurants, he sees in each face the Aaron Reddin that might have been.
Despite a loving family and small-town upbringing in Danville, Reddin wound up, at 20, living in his car and addicted to methamphetamine.
“I guess I just got bored and made a lot of bad decisions,” he says.
Seeking the stability and discipline he needed to avoid a bad end, Reddin enlisted in the Marines, training at San Diego then getting stationed as an administrative specialist with an artillery unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Reddin served from 2002-2005 until a medical discharge for a bad knee returned him to the civilian world, clean and sober but still seeking meaning in his life. He should have been set with a job managing construction in Nashville, followed by a promotion and move to Richmond, Va., but he felt a deep dissatisfaction with his life and returned to Arkansas, where he tried to set up a chemical-free house in Conway that failed.
But, like the Marines say, “Semper Fidelis” — always faithful — and Reddin stayed true to his primary ideal.
“I just knew that I had a burning desire to help folks who are where I was, if that makes sense,” Reddin says. “So I just started trying to figure out how to build that.”
Reddin went to work running the shelter and long-term drug and alcohol program at Union Rescue Mission in Little Rock but was fired — he says — for being “too liberal,” a criticism not always leveled at Marines.
Reddin moved on to St. Francis House, working largely with homeless veterans, where something he’d first noticed at Union Rescue continued to nag at him.
“I kept seeing folks coming into the shelter when I was there in the Rescue Mission that didn’t have a coat,” Reddin says. “I was like ‘Man, that’s ridiculous people don’t have a coat.’”
Reddin turned to friends via social media and began collecting coats and other useful items, which soon led him to rent a storage unit in Little Rock and put out his plea for a van to help deliver the goods.
The first vehicle, a 1992 Chevy Astro, was donated through a friend of a friend in February 2011. In short order came other vans — one for Atlanta donated by a Twitter follower in Richmond, one in Searcy/White Co. and now one in Russellville — and the continued flow of donated goods.
The operation became too big for the rental space, and Reddin moved to some buildings in Rose City and then took over additional buildings when the auction house located there closed.
Then came The Farm, with 50 chickens and other materials donated by gardening expert and television personality P. Allen Smith.
At every stop, Reddin has been overwhelmed by people’s readiness to donate money, goods or time.
“I love this state. I love our community,” he says. “And we have some of the most awesome people here that care and we’re just grateful to be in the middle of people who care and people who need people to care. It’s not that we’re doing some kind of great awesome thing; we’re just lucky enough to be in the middle of those two things.”
Does he think The One is here to stay? Does it now have the momentum and resources to keep going?
“It better, man,” Reddin says.
Heartache and Victory
On this chilly day Reddin is dressed in a hoodie that covers his ornately tatted arms. But under the left sleeve, amid the other ink, is a tattoo version of a yellow, police-line tape.
He has seen his share of unpleasantness so Reddin doesn’t duck a question about the tattoo’s meaning. Instead he gets up from the chair in his cramped and dingy office to retrieve a small box off a shelf.
Inside is an actual piece of police tape, and as he pulls it out of the box Reddin tells the story of a man he met while doing homeless counts for Housing and Urban Development in downtown Little Rock. It was cold then too, and Reddin didn’t want to spend the 15 minutes it would take to swing by and check on the guy at the end of the day.
Instead, Reddin went home to a hot meal and warm bed, vowing to check on the man the next day, which he did.
He had frozen to death during the night. The tape marked the spot where his body was found.
Reddin carried the piece of tape with him for a time, pre-tattoo, but he didn’t carry guilt — “The Marine Corps definitely taught me how to detach from my emotions to be sure,” he says. Reddin simply wanted to always remember the urgency of his work.
“To remind me that 15 more minutes of sleep is not worth someone freezing to death,” he says.
Finding a home for the homeless would seem like the ideal objective, but for various reasons many homeless are distrustful of others. Reddin points out that once people enter shelters they submit to rules and regulations that can be unnerving and disorienting if they have become used to the freedom of leading their own lives, rough as they are.
One complication is that often shelters are free only the first handful of nights, after which visitors must scrape up $6 or $7 to pay for each additional night. That can lead to a new set of desperate acts for already desperate people — Reddin mentions a woman he met who admitted to performing sexual favors for $7 to get in out of the cold.
So Reddin’s first order of business is to get people what they need. His warehouse now houses racks of clothing, including kids’ clothes, as well as toiletries, blankets and footwear. The farm provides firewood, produce and eggs, which are ideal because they can be easily prepared as long as there is a fire.
But when he can Reddin tries to get people into a place they can call home.
One of his successes is a long-time acquaintance known as “Little Eddie” who lived with his brother under a highway overpass. The brother slept at the bottom of the embankment while Eddie, who struggled with alcohol, made his bed at the top.
Frequently Reddin would stop by and find Eddie passed out and would have to drag him by the seat of his pants up to his bed.
Little Eddie, who lived outside for 26 years, is now about to complete his first year in his own apartment, along with his brother, Reddin says.
“Just like there is no cookie cutter solution to homelessness there is no cookie cutter cause,” Reddin says. “I think the only way to have success like that — I mean I worked with him for five or six years and, I mean, it would have been so easy to say ‘Eddie is never coming out from under this bridge. Quit wasting my time,’ you know — but it’s a matter of believing in him and being his friend and showing him the opportunities that are available to get off the street.”
Reddin pauses for a minute. The yellow police tape is back in its box on the shelf but it still encircles his arm and wraps around his memory.
“It balances out, I guess, the heartache and the victory,” he says.
The One
Reddin didn’t set out to start a nonprofit, but The Van expanded so quickly he felt he had no choice and followed a friend’s advice and submitted the papers.
The One won’t pay what his $60,000-a-year construction job did, but it beats throwing newspapers or working part-time at a bakery, both of which Reddin did to make money while operating The Van.
“Rose City rich,” Reddin says.
Clearly, Reddin likes to keep things simple, and that extends to his process of naming components of his operation — The Van is a van, The Farm is a farm. But the naming of The One was more deeply sourced, Bible verse Matthew 18:12:
“How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?”
“A lot of what I do is driven by my personal faith, though I am a raging heretic,” Reddin says. “I kind of felt like that is kind of what we were doing. Get your ass out from behind the computer and go find people where they are that need some help. So that’s where The One thing came from.”
On the back of The One’s T-shirts is the phrase “No rules,” and Reddin is still trying to keep the red tape to a minimum when it comes to the new home for women and children.
Still, there are restrictions — legally he can only house up to five unrelated people a night and of course there can be no smoking inside.
“We’re not broadcasting at all where it is,” Reddin says. “We’re keeping the foot traffic to a minimum so that we can operate like that and we’re not being a nuisance to the community.”
Reddin has touched base with the Clinton School of Public Service and UALR’s social work programs trying to find a house person to stay on the premises.
And beyond that? In addition to his plans for Memphis, Reddin has been approached about putting a Van in Houston and doesn’t want to stop there.
“Before I die I want at least one Van in every state,” he says. “And I wouldn’t have a problem crossing the water. The numbers of homeless kids in, like, London, on the streets and unsheltered, is just mind blowing.”
But, Reddin says, the future plans are no more remarkable than what has already happened. It’s always been just a matter of finding the right kind of people.
You know — crazy.
“Whatever we’re able to pull off, you know, it’s just a matter of finding folks that are willing to take it on, that are crazy enough to go out in the woods and under bridges in all of that, in the middle of the night, because that’s what it takes most of the time.”