Jeff Powell, better known as Jay Pee, came from the hellish side of Chicago, broken. In his first 30 years, he did it all – drug dealing, gangs, crime, jail.
“It was pretty much like a war zone out there,” he says. Yet the streets were the only place where Jay Pee felt he could belong.
At age 30, he headed to Minneapolis searching for “new horizons” and found the same kind of street action. He dove into hard drugs and collected arrests. “50, maybe 100,” he says.
Today, Jay Pee still feels he belongs on the streets, but with a whole different purpose. The website for the nonprofit organization he started, Minnesota Hope Dealerz, says, “He has dedicated his life to helping people feel less broken and has become a beacon of light to people that are living in darkness.”
It took five years of being homeless before Jay Pee first saw the light for himself.
“I would walk the streets for days,” he says, even while his money from drug dealing bought him fancy cars and the appearances of a high lifestyle. What owned him though was his addiction, and it kept getting worse, “to the point where I lost everything, including myself.”
Then things changed.
“I was in the trap house [drug house] one day, and that’s when I felt like, you know, God called me,” Jay Pee says. “I was doing the same thing that I used to do, as far as being the dealer. And then it’s like, you know, my whole life was like flashing in front of my eyes, so to speak. It was a kind of moment where things get clear for you suddenly.”
From there, he checked himself into a shelter and before long came across his probation officer.
“I was just coming down off the high when I seen him. When he dropped me, I was honest with him. I was like, ‘Hey man, I’m using. I need some help.’ I didn’t know the consequences. I thought he might have locked me up or something, but he told me, ‘We’ll get you some help.’”
Jay Pee believes a prompting from God is what allowed him to be honest with the probation officer. From there, it took two weeks to get him admitted to a treatment program. What happened during that time, Jay Pee describes simply as:
“I was having spiritual stuff going on,” he says. “And God was preparing me for what was next.” Jay Pee started examining his life through a new lens, and his sense of guidance from God led him to go beyond just getting clean and sober.
“I was pretty much, you know, just seeing instances of God,” he says. “I started following what he was telling me to do. It turned into working on myself — me becoming a better version of myself. I found out that I was addicted to the lifestyle – the cars and the money, and I had a lot of interior work to do.” He actively examined his past as he worked a program of addiction recovery, reflecting on his character defects. “I was able to pinpoint what was wrong with me and start working on that.”
Jay Pee compares his recovery process to learning to ride a bicycle. It usually takes more than one try.
“I kept falling off the bike and, like, trying to get back on it and ride it, you know,” he says. “I needed some training wheels, you know. I needed somebody to hold the seat just right.”
Several rounds of treatment were required. Each time he worked hard to learn his lessons and tried again, until he final got the hang of it.
Ultimately, he concluded that his barrier to staying clean was his primary addiction to a lifestyle of cars and money. So, he made a decision.
“I started doing volunteer work,” says Jay Pee. “I was trying to learn how to be broke because that was one of the character defects that I had, because every time when I didn’t have any money, I went back out there. That’s how I ended up using.”
In order to stop using, he decided, “I had to learn how to be broke. I had to figure out things that I can do that didn’t cost me no money, which helped me build my [new] identity for myself, because my identity was in money, the streets and lifestyle.”
Jay Pee volunteered at food shelves and soup kitchens, among other places. Once, while working at the Salvation Army, he was serving spaghetti and a man in line thanked him for giving his time to be there to serve the spaghetti. Jay Pee was stunned that this man who was down and out could “muster up gratitude.” It dawned on him at that moment that “I always felt like I had a void in me,” he said. “I was always trying to fill the void.” In the midst of giving out a spoonful of spaghetti and experiencing a little appreciation coming his way, Jay Pee found at last something that felt fulfilling for him.
“I didn’t know it at that time, but I pretty much had just tripped over my purpose,” he says.
I started following what he was telling me to do. It turned into working on myself — me becoming a better version of myself.Jay Pee has been pursuing that purpose ever since, lightening the burden for the broken and shining a guiding light out of the darkness of addiction through the example of his own turnaround. To get himself better prepared, he went to school to become a drugs and alcohol counselor, and he also attends a religious college for pastoral training. Even while in school, he started his work centered on the streets, where his calm manner and obvious sincerity, plus his street experience, readily gained the trust of people whose lives were similar to what he left behind.
He created a Facebook page, where, he says, he wanted to encourage and empower people.
“I started off by taking people to detox and setting them up with treatment,” he says, “taking them to the crisis mental health crisis centers if they needed to go, building connections with them, you know, and just trying to be there with them.” While in school and during his volunteer work, he actively worked on making personal connections with a network of professionals in the addiction services field. These connections have helped him link people from the streets to the services they need. He started Minnesota Hope Dealerz, which quickly became one of the nine Recovery Community Organizations in the state that provide outreach and support to people affected by addiction.
During the time of COVID shutdowns, Jay Pee continued building an online community of support for the down and out. He also made it his mission to get toiletries and other essentials to people living in sober houses when they couldn’t go out to shop. His work has grown by word of mouth, and he now intersects with a community of about 5000 people as he works to support those on the streets in getting out of addiction and building better lives.
“We do sober events. We train peer recovery specialists through our Recovery Coach Academy. We have peer services. We’re distributing NARCAN,” says Jay Pee. Working in collaboration with other groups, Minnesota Hope Dealerz sponsors sober parties, dances, resource fairs, speaker jams, and more. Sometimes they host raffles, giving away donated items such as a TV, cash, and other prizes. What he wants, he says, is for people whose lives are hard to be able to be sober and safe, enjoy life, have hope, have a caring community of people around them, express themselves, and have fun. He has trained other people to be “Minnesota Hope Dealerz” like himself. A host of volunteers support his work.
“We just pretty much let people know we care, give them somewhere to go, you know, instead of out in the street. Not only can they network and have fellowship, but they also see there’s hope and sobriety and recovery, and that it can be fun too.”
Jay Pee also does ministry and outreach work with the ICCM Life Center, a Christian urban ministry program in Minneapolis that provides a wide range of services to support people in moving out of homelessness, addiction, and abuse into successful lives. While in school, he started up a small business selling hoodies and rings carrying messages of hope, which helps to support the street work of his non-profit, and he serves as an addiction counselor at Evergreen Recovery.
What he wants to pass on to others is what he learned for himself through connecting with God, going through treatment, and a lot of soul-searching and trial-and-error.
“I learned how to accept my flaws. I learned how to accept my imperfections,” he says. This process made him a better person, he says, “because at that point, I didn’t really care too much about what other people have to say about me. Or, you know, what other people thought about me.” He learned to cry, to be clean, and to follow direction from God as he heard it.
“I pretty much fell in love myself” is the way Jay Pee sums it up. “No additives or no preservatives. Like, I was OK with being who I am in my own skin, you know, and that’s a blessing in itself because that pretty much changed everything for me.
“And I went from just having a little glimmer of hope to being able to look in the mirror and have positive self-talk and, you know, vibrate at a higher frequency and be a positive individual from the inside out. You know, walk the walk.
“It makes anybody feel better when they’re comfortable in their own skin and they can have the freedom to express themselves fully. You know, I thought doing drugs was freedom, but it’s freaking freedom to express yourself and to be you without nothing else involved. It’s the best freedom in the world.”
One thing that feeds him and keeps him going, he says, is “my ability to channel my pain. I had a lot of pain. So, I use that as a fuel, you know, especially since I see a lot of people dying from the opioid epidemic. It just fuels me for what I do.”
Jay Pee’s message, he says, is, “Never lose hope.” Even during the worst of his street life action, he says, “It was glimmers of hope that I had that, you know, just one day I want to be able to get out of this lifestyle.” Now he works day and night to help other people in similar situations to keep that glimmer of hope alive, to keep remembering that there is “a slim possibility that some things can change,” as he puts it.
“Don’t let go of that,” he advises, “because a lot of us let go of our dreams and a lot of us let go of who we are. Sometimes all we have left is that little glimmer of hope that things are going to get better.” Jay Pee keeps walking the streets, ready to fuel that glimmer of hope in others and make it brighter.
To learn more about Jay Pee and Minnesota Hope Dealerz:
- Minnesota Hope Dealerz
- “From Selling Dope to Dealing HOPE” YouTube Video
Pat Samples, is a Twin Cities freelance writer, writing coach, and somatic coach. Her website is patsamples.com.
Last Updated on May 30, 2024