Human Up Season 1 Ep 14: Kathleen Kaye Turpin on Policy, Housing First, and Mandatory Treatment

This is a transcript of Human Up Podcast Season 1, Episode 14 with Kathleen Kaye, which you can watch and listen to here:

Dave: Welcome to the Human Up Podcast. I'm honored to have Kathleen Turpin as our guest today. Welcome, Kathleen.

Kathleen Kaye: Thank you, Dave. It's good to be here.

Dave: Yeah, it's great, and I'm very excited. Thank you for making time to visit with me today. I want to start off right away that you are one of our board members. You are an advocate, you are in recovery, you are very active with nonprofits. How did this happen?

Kathleen Kaye: The recovery, the board position, or the nonprofit activists? Well, I, I'm proud to say that I have celebrated over 10 years of recovery, and for our viewers and our listeners, I want you to know that Dr. Dave Marlon himself actually did an intervention on me, and I credit a lot of my sobriety to your heart and your diligence, Dave, and am very grateful for all that you've done for me and everybody within the community. And so with that, with my sobriety, I went back to school, I went to USD, university of San Diego, and I got a master's degree in nonprofit leadership, which had been my background. And I just made a very deliberate decision. And with the help of God decided that if I was ever in a position to give back, either paid or unpaid, I would do everything I could to help recovering nonprofits, which is how I ended up on your board of directors.

Dave: I'm super grateful for that. I want to mention that I recently celebrated 20 years of recovery, and I'm so grateful for the guys who came before me who were here to reach their handout, and I love the fact that we all help each other. Speaking of which recovery is, it's communal, it's not just individual, and your work has shown to be deeply communal. Could you say, how is your connection, how important is human connection and healing from homelessness and from substance use disorders?

Kathleen Kaye: I would say it's critical and it's even more important to have the right connections. I mean, as recovery advocates, I'll just put it on the table. We'll call a spade a spade here. I don't know one person in the recovery community that supports rapid rehousing or housing first

Dave: Right to it.

Kathleen Kaye: Fortunately, and I do, I say that publicly in public meetings in a public forum. I do have a background, an extended background in working with homeless youth and homeless adults and have been around long enough to see that those types of programs are just not effective. They're very effective for people that are in a domestic violence situation, they need to be removed immediately from their circumstances. And rehoused, as you know Dave, they're not effective for individuals like you and I for the members of our family. And so having that connection is critical, but it's also really important that the right connections are in place.

Dave: Thank you so much for being brave and saying that, and I'm sure I could speak for Kathleen as well. We are not saying this out of lack of compassion. We want everyone to get well, and we recognize that every human should sleep in a bed, although giving them the keys to their own home before they have a support system and recovery in place ends up being enabling. So here at Vegas Strong, we take people through a structured, often congregate living and then sober living, moving towards transitional and then independent living. And too many times I've seen people doing well in treatment, all of a sudden they get handed a key and the second they get handed the key, they're well and we don't see them again. I think some of our hesitation about housing first is just because we've seen how detrimental to the recovery process it could be. We still believe everyone should be housed, and it's still our goal to get everybody housed. Do we agree?

Kathleen Kaye: We agree. And Dave, I'll even go back and say several years ago when this concept, especially during COVID was introduced and well-funded, you and I had conversations about let's try this and see if this is going to work. It wasn't that we immediately said, oh, this is going to be a bad thing. I mean, we were linked arms and right alongside everybody else saying, look, we're going to do everything we can to get these folks off the street and get them. Well, we have now learned through experience because we both sponsor people personally, and that's not our job, but we both know now through experience that this is not an effective program for people who are suffering with addiction that are living on the streets.

Dave: Yeah, agreed. Now you're kind of underselling yourself saying you've helped, you've been around, you were the CEO of Nevada, what is it, homes for Nevada youth?

Kathleen Kaye: Yeah. I worked at the public health department in 1997. I was actually hired in a training position. I worked for the director of nursing, and we had identified at that time, Dave, that there were a large percentage of unaccompanied minors. Some people throw around the term homeless youth, but they're talking about 19, 20, 21 year olds. We are actually looking at people under the age of 18 who can't rent hotel rooms, who can't lease apartments, and we saw high teenage pregnancy rates within this population, specifically living in Las Vegas, and we saw low birth weight rates and infant mortality rates with this population and just kind of stumbled across the need for services in the state of Nevada. Believe it or not, there was a very old law in the books that wouldn't allow providers to give kids the right to consent to shelter. So if you were 17 years old and you went down to Salvation Army or Vegas stronger, you couldn't get food or shelter without a note from your parent. It was ridiculous. And that kind of began, the movement at the time was called the Coalition for Homeless Youth. It's now known as the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, but that begun the moment of formalizing a service delivery system for minors so that they would be privy to the same services that their adult counterparts would receive.

Dave: Wow. Okay.

Kathleen Kaye: In the year 2000, the Nevada legislature passed a law called the Right to Shelter law, which allowed providers like Vegas stronger or Catholic charities to serve minors without parental consent, and they wouldn't have to be worried. They were actually granted. In Nevada, you're granted civil liability immunity and criminal immunity if you choose to serve a minor without parental consent.

Dave: Wow. You seem pretty adept at the political landscape and how to champion a bill through. Could you tell us about your political acumen?

Kathleen Kaye: Well, as you know Dave, I served on the Henderson City Council for two years when I was knee deep in my addiction,

Dave: But still, you learned how to pass bills, how to work through government, and that's an amazing skillset that you have today.

Kathleen Kaye: Yes. The irony of that, and I can laugh at it, of course, I was drinking and using at the time, but when you're stuck on that dais for five hours, you still have to hear the material and listen to the presentations no matter what I mean. So I think inevitably you do end up learning a thing or two. But yeah, I served two years on the Henderson City Council. I still to this day, am an all out political junkie. I just love politics. I love having a two party system. I love being involved in the local politics, and I love thinking about policies that are going to help individuals have better lives that'll ultimately save taxpayer money. I'm just, yeah, I'm a junkie. I'm a political junkie. I'll admit it.

Dave: I'm not surprised. And then to me, it comes from your political acumen that you've shown that you could effectuate change, that you could get things done. So to me, you doing those things to allow homeless youth to access services, you saw that you could move the change, and by doing that, I'm sure that's what has kind of lit the fire that a person, especially with all your experience and your heart, that again, you could effectuate positive social change.

Kathleen Kaye: Thank you, Dave. Thank you for that. One thing I would like to see done in Nevada and California and Arizona, I would love to see mandated treatment implemented, actually implemented, and I'm going to give you an example. I celebrated my third wedding anniversary yesterday to my husband. Thank you. He's got 37 years of sobriety, and he's a doctor chiropractor. Wow. Yeah. And so he actually was mandated to treatment. He got caught by the California Medical Board using drugs and drinking alcohol, and they said to him like They do all the doctors. If you don't get clean and sober, we're going to take your license away. And he was mandated treatment. And so I feel like the hypocrisy, I've actually met with social workers recently who say, well, we don't believe in mandated treatment. And I'm like, unless it's your dentist or it's your gynecologist, I mean, where are we going to draw the line on mandated treatment? And so I think the double standard that we see in Nevada is also limiting our ability as advocates to make sure that the people, just because somebody doesn't want treatment doesn't mean that they shouldn't get it. Now today, my husband would tell you it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was really bad at the time, but today he would stand there and tell you that it saved his life, and I think we need to get a little more aggressive in our policy decisions as it relates to requiring treatment as well.

Dave: It's amazing you said that, and I loved your example, comparing it to other diseases and other modalities and ways to treat diseases, like why wouldn't it be treated the same? But what's also fascinating is that people who are mandated to treatment have the same outcomes as the people who go to your treatment voluntarily. People think, oh, you have to be willing. No, you just have to do the treatment. If you do the treatment at work, regardless of how committed you were or not on day one, treatment is about just doing it.

Kathleen Kaye: Amen.

Dave: Now, I also read that you're a peer support specialist.

Kathleen Kaye: I am. I went through the California state training to do interventions and peer support specialist certification. For the people listening that don't know, that means that you have some type of lived experience and you go through a series of, it was a 60 hour core training where you're given communication methods and reaching people directly as you do Dave directly and trying to mobilize them from their addiction into treatment In California, there is also an additional layer where you become Medi-Cal certified, and it wasn't an easy credential to get, but it was something I just really wanted to do because as you know, this is personal to me and I like doing it.

Dave: I just went through the peer support specialist supervisor certification, so I'm about to join you. I'm waiting for my licensure any day now.

Kathleen Kaye: Congratulations.

Dave: Yeah, thanks. And it's all just another tool in our toolbox, and I've been always a big fan of the effective peers in treatment, so somebody who's been through it and isn't maybe talking potentially down as a clinician or a doctor, but a peer could be really instrumental in helping keep people engaged in treatment so they complete it because again, treatment only works if you do it. It only works if you finish it. Let's talk about your current professional capacity because you help nonprofits and their mission and their organizational development right now. Can I ask what's your secret sauce or your direction or your advice to nonprofits that you're trying to help right now?

Kathleen Kaye: Let's see. Well, let me back up and say I have a full-time position where I work for a very large homeless provider who specializes in mental health and substance use disorder treatment, and I love the work that I do. I work in capacity as a professional fundraiser, and I just love it on the side. I have a small consulting business where I do nonprofit consulting work sometimes for a fee, sometimes often times not, where I come in and put together strategy for fundraising and strategic planning. Most frequently what I see with my nonprofits, whether they're large or small, is a lack of knowledge in online reputation management and overall fundraising capacity, and so I do a lot of coaching and planning centered around individual needs and organizational needs of nonprofits that are looking to bolster their bottom lines basically.

Dave: That's awesome. Now, how do you balance as a development director, how do you balance the financial fundraising part with the heart, with your heart and with your mission?

Kathleen Kaye: That's a good question, Dave, and a lot of people probably wonder the same thing because I think oftentimes fundraisers are looked as the people that just have their hands out, but the truth is, and you know this, you do some fundraising when you can take somebody that has the means and they want to do good things and they want the community to be better and you can match them with somebody who's in need, it is such a gift. It is such a gift to be part of that and to be able to witness that and even more so to be able to see the results of that and taking the haves and pairing them with the have nots and watching what happens when somebody who's well intended and financially secure, it is just as beautiful to see the growth in that individual as it is the person who's on the recipient end.

Dave: Wow, that's such a great way to look at it. That's such a good strategy, and you're right. I know lots of wealthy people who are good hearted and want to help, and it often takes a special person like yourself to help connect them with an organization who's really doing the work.

Kathleen Kaye: I've had so many people tell me, Dave, that they believe that God gave them their success or gave them their wealth because he wanted them to help people. I actually know self-made millionaires or people who have won large settlements say this was a gift from God, and I know that he wants me to do good things with it, and oftentimes I just don't know how. I consider it a privilege to be able to do this, especially with my own lived experience, and I thank God every day for it, for the talent and the time and the means to be able to work on these causes.

Dave: That's amazing. I love your perspective on this. That changed me. Thank you. You mentioned you serve on the San Diego County Behavioral Health Board. What do you do there and how does that shape policy?

Kathleen Kaye: The Behavioral Health Board in San Diego County is responsible for $1 billion. All of the county money that goes towards mental health services and substance use treatment, it is required by state mandate that each county in the state of California have an oversight committee that ultimately oversees the checks and balances of these funds. Sometimes it's quite frustrating. I find myself in the minority, there are two other people on the board who are in recovery. It goes back to those discussions of I don't think we should be giving people hotel rooms. At best, we can influence policy and have healthier discussions that are more transparent, but at the end of the day, the county staff and the electeds there really make the policy decisions.

Dave: That's interesting.

Kathleen Kaye: Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Kathleen, thank you so much for sharing all your experience, your strength, and your hope with our listeners. You're an amazing person. Congratulations again on your three year anniversary. That's awesome. I'm so happy for the two of you. I want to close by asking you about Human Up, the name of the podcast. What do you think Human Up means to you?

Kathleen Kaye: Human Up means that we have community and personal responsibility to care for one another in ways that we would want to be cared for, and it's one step above Stepping Up... It's Human Up.

Dave: Human up. Oh, that's good. You were absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for your time and being on the Human Up Podcast. Thank you again for serving on our board of directors. Your council is invaluable, continues to be. Have a good day.

Kathleen Kaye: Thank you for having me, Dave, and God bless you for all you do.

Dave: God bless you, Kathleen. Take care. Bye-bye.