Life After DHS: A College Student’s Homeless Adventure

Not many college students would ditch their dorm room beds to spend sleepless nights on a church’s doorstep instead, but that’s what Deerfield native Jonathan Ingram thinks it takes to get the story.

“I wanted to do something just a little bit different,” said the Missouri University junior, who has a double major of broadcast journalism and clinical psychology. So he asked the radio station where he worked to let him head into the field, literally.

“They hooked me up with a voice recorder and said Godspeed,” he recalled about initiating his three-day sojourn of roaming the streets.

On a Thursday night in October, Ingram packed a backpack with nothing more than an apple, bagel and his student identification. “I had no money, just the clothes I was wearing,” he said, recalling how he headed into the streets of Columbia to do an expose on the city’s homeless.

According to the Columbia Daily Tribune, there are about 196 homeless people in the area, which is the highest number since 2008 for the Missouri city of nearly 100,000 people. Ingram started his journey downtown near Broadway Street, which has a "prevalent panhandling" population.

“I would kind of just sit down next to them,” Ingram said about his strategy to befriend Columbia’s homeless.

“They were surprisingly open about it," he added about his conversations with an array of individuals who included drug dealers, religious fanatics and blind people.

But there was one piece of information the homeless people who he encountered seemed to keep to themselves.

“They have little huts and little homes in areas, but they’re very secretive about where they sleep,” said Ingram, who was left to fend for himself.

“The first night was pouring rain” and he was forced to curl up under a church’s pillar, the fledgling journalist recalled. That’s where he was confronted by police who notified him he was loitering, he said.

That encounter with local law enforcement gave Ingram another concern. "I was worried they would pull the plug on the whole thing and make me go home," he said. 

Passing the time during the daylight hours was much easier Ingram remembered. "I talked a lot, listened a lot, and spent a surprising amount of time begging for money. I was able to accumulate around $6 a day and that was enough to survive on," he said.

"It's surprising, though, how quickly one jumps into survival mode when homeless. My priorities became food and shelter, whereas never before had those been an issue for me," the 21-year-old noted about his experience.

The second night Ingram slept on top of a stack of sandwich boxes. "They were stacked up behind the store. I organized the pile to make a wall of sorts and slept behind that right in front of a wall, so I was sort of barricaded inside," he said. “It was some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever done."

The student’s homeless stint landed him a 20-minute segment on KOPN, a FM radio station that features National Public Radio (NPR) content. The piece is currently airing on the community radio station at least twice a week. 

Those are the types of adventures Ingram swore to embark on after leaving the North Shore.

"I felt like The Truman Show, like I was in that bubble,” he said in comparing his final years in Deerfield to the 1998 movie. “If anything, it kind of inspired me to make a vow to myself that until I figured out what I was really going to do, I was going to try and do as many things as possible.”

The  graduate said he was inspired by such writers as Jack Kerouac, whose 1950s book, On The Road, is based on his spontaneous road trips across the U.S. 

“I don’t like average at all,” Ingram said. "It makes me nervous.”

Ingram will head back to the Chicago area this summer for an internship at WGN Radio, working on the Greg Jarrett show with a clock-in time of 3:30 a.m.

“I'm using this production experience as an opportunity to advance my skills on the air,” the Mizzou student said.