Ryan W. Gates’ work in marketing led him to produce his first feature-length documentary, about homelessness in Wichita and those who are working towards solutions to it.
“Hope in the Heartland: Wichita’s Quest to End Homelessness” will debut at 4 p.m. on Thursday at the Mary Jane Teall Theatre in Century II, with an encore showing at 11 a.m. Sunday, as part of the Tallgrass Film Festival.
Gates is president of PANO Marketing, which works with a variety of organizations, including Project HOPE, a five-year project through the city of Wichita looking at crime rates and homelessness, especially in the downtown corridor.
Project HOPE grant coordinator Angeline Johnson sparked the idea with Gates of telling the story on a larger level, he said.
“She told me about how Project HOPE board wanted to do something to educate the general public about homelessness, some of the misconceptions. And they were really intrigued by video,” he said.
After holding town hall meetings near the end of 2023 as well as talking to people who are homelessness and to people who live or work downtown, Gates created a proposal to tell the story documentary style. Filming began earlier this year.
Gates interviewed leaders of groups working with the homeless in Wichita, which led him to several of the unhoused persons in the area.
“Hope in the Heartland” puts much of its focus on 22-year-old Caitlin, who aged out of the foster care system and wanted to have a better life.
“It’s Caitlin going through her plight to try and escape homelessness, paired with the city going through the process of trying to identify a location and develop what a multi-agency center could and should be,” Gates said. “And then all of the people that are part of the process now . . . trying to find a way to collaborate for this new approach that the city is working towards.”
From Gates’ research and the people he spoke with for the documentary, he found mixed messages about the current state of homelessness in Wichita, with a reported decrease in homelessness but an increase in the number of people utilizing shelters and services.
“I had this image in my head of what homelessness looked like, and as I met a number of our unhoused neighbors, and seeing how fluid that is, how many people are staying on a friend’s couch,” he said. “Many people are sleeping in cars. I think that our homeless population is growing and definitely condensing more and more downtown.”
Gates credited public officials such as Wichita Mayor Lily Wu and Sedgwick County Commissioner Ryan Baty with making a turnaround in the homeless population a priority.
Before beginning the documentary, Gates said he had a stereotype of those who are homeless as older, white men, but found more women and families than he expected.
“I was not prepared for seeing families experiencing homelessness, and it really blew my mind,” the Wichita native said. “I think the other misconception is that homeless people are lazy, that they’re there because they’ve chosen this lifestyle.
“It’s kind of crazy to talk to some of these people I’ve had a chance to meet and just hear how similar their life experiences are to my past life experiences and where my life went this way, their life went that way, and it very easily could be flipped the other way around,” he added.
Although there is a large amount of substance abuse among the homeless, he said, the misconception is that all of them are in their situation because of a drug problem.
“I think we often see one image or one person, and we then blank and apply it to everybody else,” he said.
Gates said he hopes audiences not only walk away from the documentary with more education about homelessness but also appreciation for groups working with them.
“There’s all these organizations that are working together toward something, but they’re in these little silos, and they come together and they talk about doing stuff,” he said. “If we can be better about collaborating this is going to be really helpful.”
Gates, who had more than 100 hours of interviews recorded for the documentary, said his work on the subject is not over.
“This film is honestly just the first piece of a lot of things,” he said. “We started this project wanting to make a multi-part video series, and then decided to narratively bring it all together into this format for Tallgrass to present it in this condensed way.
“We are looking at a number of different channels for how we could do this in the future. It may be through television, it may be through streaming. It may be that we release them on social media, but breaking this into smaller pieces, retooling it, re-editing it and releasing multi-part series.”
This article was produced as part of the Wichita Journalism Collaborative (WJC). The WJC is a partnership of 11 media and community partners, including KMUW.