[Jazz music begins playing] [Donnie Missouri] Hello. I'm Donnie Missouri. Once again, I'm out here helping, helping people. That's my passion. Very few people find their passion and I am very, very blessed to find mine. Thank you very much, and have a wonderful day on purpose. [Music fades] Donnie Missouri is my name, like the state. [laughs] We are at Patterson Park in East Baltimore. It is one of my favorite parks, especially when I want to get some alone time. This is where I like to come and process, think things through, and make some major decisions if I get stuck. I go to my friends, and they help me out. Usually, I come here by myself and take my little walks. This is really one of my favorite places and that why it's important to have my portrait taken here. I'm a recovering addict. I'm coming up on 27 years of sobriety. I stumbled into this profession. This wasn't my dream. I think my higher power knew I was coming here, but I had to go through my process to get here. Let me start by saying that I decided to go to Johns Hopkins and start working there. I started working at the lowest level in the linen department. I knew I was better than that, so I pursued transferring out of that department. I had a friend that worked in research department, and she got me working on a three-month study. That's when I met Dr. Hunter, who was starting a pilot program on community healthcare workers. They were calling them care coordinators at the time. That's when Veda Moore got involved. Dr. Hunter is a great guy. He developed a grant, the grant to start CHWs at Johns Hopkins. We did focus groups and talked about what the Johns Hopkins healthcare work is needed. What was the importance of a CHW? Are we going to be out in the community? What are we going to be doing? We put all this information together for the government, and we got the grant. The grant enabled us to go into the community and start working hand-in-hand with the patients. Instead of the patients coming to us, we will go to them. We will find out what their needs are. I remember Veda and I went to a trailer park in a low-income community. There was a sign that said, "Beware of dogs." I'm looking for these dogs and saying to Veda, "I'm going to knock on the door but keep the car door open in case I have to run out of there." As I'm knocking on the door, identifying myself to the client, people start looking and whispering to each other. "Who are they?" Fortunately, in this case, the lady said that she knew who I was and that she needed some help. She was a white, older woman and she was comfortable with us being Black CHWs. She was on drugs really bad and had other physical illnesses that she had to deal with at the same time. I got her into a detox treatment. She went and got better. She addressed her physical health, and she's doing much better now. Those are the kind of things that we had to encounter being out there as CHWs. You got to have a passion for this. The passion have to be there. If you're here for a paycheck... Mmm, no. My passion comes from the fact that somebody helped me. I was living in abandoned house for two years, eating out of garbage cans, sleeping with rats and roaches. I didn't care about myself. I didn't have a clue about nothing. All I wanted to do was put dope and coke in me. That's all I wanted to do. Because somebody looked at me, saw something in me that I didn't see in myself, and helped me, I remember my last day using. It was on a Sunday night, around about ten 0'clock at night. I got finished using in the abandoned house. I saw this rat come out, go outside, come back with food in his mouth. It did it twice. It dawned on me, "Damn, this rat, feeding his babies, and I couldn't feed mine." That triggered a light in my head. So I went down to the treatment center and a friend of mine was working there. He said, "Donnie, are you ready to get help?" I said, "Man, I am so ready," so he got me a grant to go to treatment. I started using at a very early age, the age of 13. So when I got clean at 37, that 13-year-old kid jumped out. I had to allow that kid to grow up. I see that in a lot of my clients. My loyalties run deep with my clients. I let them know that I care about them, which I really do. I really do. I care about this community that I'm part of, the drug treatment community, the sober living community.