Urban Compassion Project CEO/Founder Vincent Ray Williams III (S4E39P1)

Trigger warning: We're extremely grateful to Vincent for sharing his life story. But it's a difficult, painful, and traumatic story that involves several tales of violence and abuse against women and children. Please be warned that these episodes with Vincent contain potentially triggering content.

Vincent Ray Williams's ancestors on both sides moved to the Bay Area for a better life.

In this podcast, we get to know Vincent, the founder and CEO of Urban Compassion Project, a nonprofit "committed to the health, welfare, and empowerment of the unhoused." His dad was Black and from the South; Vincent's mom is Puerto Rican. His dad was a Marine vet who brought trauma home with him and succumbed to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Vincent never knew him.

Vincent's mother also suffered from drug addiction. The couple met in Oakland and had Vincent's older brother. Eleven months later, in 1987, they had their second son: Vincent. His parents weren't only addicted; they also sold drugs. Big time.

An Oakland poet named Hershey Hill joined us by coincidence the day we recorded with Vincent. During the recording, Hershey asks Vincent if he speaks Spanish. He shares that, in fact, it's his first language, but, as he explains in the podcast, there's some trauma that comes along with that. His father had physically abused his mom so badly that she asked CPS to come and take Vincent and his brother. Now in a foster home, the two boys would be beaten and locked in a closet for speaking their native tongue. The situation was bad enough that Vincent ran away at age 8.

The police handed him over to CPS and CPS put him in a group home. He thought he had escaped the nightmarishness, but it turned out to be a facade. More physical abuse ensued, and so Vincent ran away from the group home. He'd do his best to alert teachers or even the police to what was happening, but to no avail. Because he was so often in trouble at school, Vincent didn't have many friends.

Despite all this, he graduated from high school in Oakland.

At this point in the conversation, Vincent takes us back to when he was 9 years old and started doing and selling drugs. Between the streets of San Francisco and the streets of his hometown of Oakland, he was also selling himself. He also started committing crimes.

Eventually, Vincent reconnected with brother, Willie. Around 2010, Willie inspired him to try Narcotics Anonymous and it worked. After a relapse, Vincent has been sober for more than nine years.

We end Part 1 with Vincent sharing what it was like living and walking around the streets of Oakland and San Francisco before he got clean.

Photography by Michelle Kilfeather