Kayla Sample knows what it’s like to feel invisible. A 35-year-old woman born and raised in Vancouver, Sample has not had a stable place to call home since she entered the state’s foster care system as a little girl.
After becoming houseless once again in late July, she decided to start her own grassroots organization called Operation Can You See Us, organized through Facebook, to bring attention to the challenges faced by people like her.
“My mission and vision is to end the mental health stigma that creates instability, homelessness and addiction in Vancouver, Washington,” Sample said.
Her idea for the organization took root this summer while living in a pop-up camping trailer with her son at Vancouver’s Evergreen Transit Center Safe Parking Zone, a free and legal space where people living in their vehicles can stay. She has since left the Safe Park and is back on the road, seeking a community that can provide the help she needs.
While at the Safe Park, Sample and her neighbors all needed resources — food, water, toiletries, storage containers, phone chargers, tents. So Sample began to mobilize, finding free or cheap necessities through local networks like community Facebook pages.
When friends at the Safe Park approached her looking for water in the blazing summer heat, she handed them cold water bottles from a cooler she kept outside her camper. When a friend ran up to her in desperate need of a tampon, Sample searched through her plastic tub filled with belongings until she found one.
Some Safe Park residents would hang out in lawn chairs by her parking space, sharing cigarettes and nonalcoholic drinks while discussing possible ways to better address the city’s homelessness issue. “We’re working together. We’re trying to be the change,” Sample said. “We have ideas, too, you know. Great ideas.”
Overcoming the stigma
Even as Sample does what she can to provide for others, she has not been able to find resources to meet her own needs. She has spent much of her adult life trying to provide for her three kids, all of whom struggle with mental health and behavioral issues.
Mental illness and homelessness make “life in the community we live in almost impossible,” Sample said, reading aloud from her organization’s mission statement that she’d written out by hand. “Even in outreach programs, many are treated less than, not given the correct individualized resources and are often forgotten when misunderstood. This creates an even bigger problem, or shall I say revolving door, of mental health crisis and homeless individuals.”
Sample lives with several diagnosed anxiety disorders, depression and PTSD. She has struggled with substance use since she fell into drugs at 18 after graduating from high school.
At the Safe Park, she did not have a means of refilling her prescription medications for anxiety, so she self-medicated with Adderall, ecstasy pills and other drugs. “I’m not an addict. I was self-medicating. There’s a difference,” she said.
Her behavior while self-medicating can be erratic and volatile. Sometimes she can’t control her anger and starts yelling at those around her, including police officers. “I’m unmedicated. I’m sorry, I get so upset,” she said after an outburst.
She said most of her current struggles with substance use and mental health stems from the domestic violence, sexual abuse and housing instability she experienced as a child. She entered the foster care system at age 7.
She’s not alone when it comes to homelessness among people who were in the foster system. Seventeen percent of youth leaving Washington’s foster care system are homeless within a year of exiting, according to a 2022 study by Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services. Nationwide, 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care, the National Foster Youth Institute reported.
A 2005 Northwest Foster Care Alumni study on kids who were in Washington and Oregon’s foster systems in the 1990s — when Sample was in the system — found nearly one-third of foster care alumni had experienced maltreatment while in the foster system.
Now as an adult, she feels triggered when people monitor her, an outcome of her past experiences with domestic violence. “That’s why I can’t do the shelters, that’s why I need my own space,” she said. “I’ve had control issues. People controlled me my whole life.”
This need for freedom, however, did not bode well for her at the Safe Park, which has many rules for residents. Her disregard for the regulations, such as a rule prohibiting residents from using illegal substances on the premises, led to the city kicking her out of her assigned spot in mid-September.
After leaving the Safe Park, Sample once again had nowhere to call home.
Out of control
Ever since her eldest daughter was born 15 years ago, Sample has feared Child Protective Services would take her kids from her, just as she was taken from her mother. CPS is a service within the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families that investigates reports of child abuse and neglect.
That fear was realized in January 2020 after her eldest daughter, then 12, experienced a severe mental health crisis. CPS removed both daughters from her care shortly afterward.
Then, the day after the city kicked Sample out of the Safe Park, the state took her son, too. The Department of Children, Youth and Families cited her homeless living conditions as one of the reasons to request out-of-home placement for her son.
Sample quickly spiraled, threatening suicide. The La Center Police Department responded, and she was taken to a psychiatric hospital that committed her overnight. Only after experiencing this crisis was she able to get a 30-day supply of Prozac to help with her mental health issues, she said.
Ongoing battles
After being released from the hospital, Sample found refuge for a few days at a freeway rest area. As she tried to figure out where to go next, she worried for her son, who has behavioral issues and wasn’t adapting well to the foster care system.
In early October, things seemed to calm a bit. Sample went to La Pine, Ore., where she was able to get psychiatric help at the Deschutes County Stabilization Center while living at a campground.
“I’m no longer self-medicating and I can pee clean,” Sample said while in La Pine. She added that her son, after being moved around a few times under the state’s care, is “finally in a place he feels slightly safe.”
Without her children, she feels beaten down — but her dedication to helping others who are homeless has not faded.
“I’m not done,” she said. “This just fueled my fire.”
She continues speaking out against the challenges of the foster care system and homelessness while trying to break stigmas around mental illness. The task is not easy. Ongoing battles with her own mental health and substance use make it difficult to maintain a stable life.
But in her years of moving in and out of homelessness, she’s learned a few things along the way.
“I learned self-love. I learned there is hope. I learned there is freedom,” she said. “I learned that everything that you see in fairy tales is out there, when someone gets to know you for you, and not what people think you are.”
