When Robert Gillespie was 19, his father and stepmother learned he is gay and told him he could no longer stay in their home.
Gillespie, now 51: “I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks sleeping on a friend’s couch while trying to pretend that I was not a hollowed out shell of my former self. Even to this day, there is still a hollowness inside of me. Losing that connection changed how I think about home—not just as a house, but as a feeling of belonging and safety. Once that feeling is lost, it never fully returns.”
Fast forward several decades. Patti Crouch, who is president of the Helping Hands of Springfield board, said that life experience with housing insecurity is one of the reasons Gillespie stood out as a candidate for the executive director of Helping Hands, Springfield’s largest homeless shelter. The former Atlanta native joined the staff to replace Laura Davis, who resigned last year.
“We did a pretty extensive search, and we had several really good candidates, but Robert, in addition to checking all the regular boxes of having leadership experience and financial management and program experience, he had a couple of other things that we liked. The first being that he started out his career as a social worker, so he had that direct interaction with clients in the social work area that we thought would be very helpful,” she said. “He also had told us that as a young man, he had experienced housing insecurity, and so he felt empathy for those who were going through the same thing. So those two things sort of gave him an advantage over some of the other candidates, that he would have more of a personal perspective when it came to dealing with our clients.”
Gillespie, who became homeless for a time again in his 30s after leaving an abusive relationship, wrote in an email: “Being homeless isn’t just about not having a roof over your head. It’s about losing dignity, safety, and the feeling of being supported. These experiences influence how I try to be understanding and help people who often feel invisible and ignored. Homelessness isn’t a personal failure. It’s due to broken relationships, systems, and support networks that fail over time. I know this well because I have lived through it.”
Crouch said, “We also recognized in him that he was a good …problem solver. He was very engaged in his previous work with a large nonprofit (Hemophilia of Georgia, Inc.), so he had a lot of exposure to the community, building relationships in the community, and wearing many hats, and when we checked his references, they supported our impression of that. And so he thought that he would be good for the role at Helping Hands. It had gone through a significant amount of change and growth in the last 18 months, and we really needed somebody who could help our staff and our program sort of adjust and adapt to that growth. And Robert’s personality and his energy and experience all seems to lend to somebody that we thought could do that well. And I'm happy to say that so far, he's only been in the role about three months, we see good progress in that direction.”
Last January, the shelter moved into a $9 million facility converted out of a share of Sangamon County’s juvenile detention center. In 2023, 515 people were served by the shelter at a Washington Street location. So far this fiscal year, which ends June 30, almost 1,100 have been served. The agency’s budget has doubled since 2023 to $3.2 million.
Crouch said, “The decisions that he's making in terms of organization and changes to processes and procedures seem to be going over well with the staff and helping things run smoother. So I think, and I hope that we are on the right track.”
“The fast growth at the agency took its toll on our programs, and so Robert’s fresh eyes looking at the way we do things,I think has and will continue to help him build a good leadership team and staff that can help as the program sort of grow into this expanded client base that we now have.”
Gillespie said he spent much of his career in medical social work and led the medical nonprofit. But he said the medical social work was not quite what he wanted to do professionally.
“Yes, you are helping people and you're helping people who access medical care, but what I was really interested in is working with people who are experiencing issues with homelessness and being unhoused. So when I decided to leave the medical nonprofit, I decided that I was going to change my focus, and decided that I wanted to go someplace where I was able to make, hopefully, hopefully, knock on wood, make an impact. And so I interviewed a couple of places, and chose this in particular Helping Hands of Springfield.”
He said he wants to increase fundraising and messaging and is hopeful about the shelter’s up and coming program for clients who are experiencing medical issues. “We are basically creating this space in the shelter where people who have medical conditions that need extra care are able to go, now we do not. We're not a nursing facility or a skilled care facility. We're basically a place that people can come if they're discharged from the hospital and need other services like home health or oxygen or things of that nature, where you have not built ourselves up to the point that we can actually do any kind of nursing care right now, so we're slowly getting to that point.”
“We also cannot take anyone who is not able to do their own activities of daily living. But hopefully that'll change, if we can get more funding. So we do have some things that we have to work on. Space is one of the things, but right now, we're at a constant five around five individuals, I will say it's kind of turning out a little bit different than I thought it would. It's really designed to be an acute kind of a setting, but it's really turning into a little bit more of a chronic setting where people have chronic medical illnesses and we have to help them with our case management services, look for housing and establish housing with their medical condition as well,” he said.
Of the people using the respite rooms, he said, “They are required to follow a lot of the rules, but they have access to their beds all the time. It's kind of more so that they don't have to be out and sitting up because they have medical conditions where they might need to sleep, or medications that they take that might cause some glimpse and they need some rest and they're also have their medical stuff there for them. We do not dispense medications. They have to be responsible for their own medications right now.”
Josh Sabo, who is the executive director of Heartland Housed, the umbrella agency over the entities that deal with homelessness in Sangamon County, said Gillespie is an asset to the community.
“We’re really excited about having Mr. Gillespie in place over there at Helping Hands, and excited for the chance to continue working with them. I think he is three months in at this point. Helping Hands is such a crucial part of our crisis response system as a community. You know, our largest shelter provider, our largest supportive housing provider, and so, you know, continuing to ensure that that they continue, not only to just offer quality services, but also to be able to grow those services, is a really important element for our community. So we're excited to, you know, to get to work with him. Excited to do anything we can to support as he gets oriented to the organization and takes the next steps. “
