EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Beth Kapla
  “If I bitch enough, I can make a difference,” says Beth Kapla between drags on her cigarette. And Beth Kapla does make a difference. After a boyfriend held a knife to her neck, she successfully lobbied the Denver Police Department to provide free self-defense courses. After experiencing homelessness, she joined the housing board of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to fight for adequate and affordable housing for others who became homeless.
Beth and her husband had arrived in Denver with their_18 month-old son and no place to stay.
They went to the Colorado Coalition and received help with a motel voucher. After that, they stayed for a time at a shelter in town. Things were not working out, so she took her son and headed for Amarillo.
Beth had long suffered from Bipolar Disorder, and had long used drugs and alcohol to cope with the ravages of her illness. By the time she got to Amarillo, she was unable to take care of her young son. He was taken into custody by the state.
Devastated, Beth returned to Denver to be with her husband, but before long, they broke up for good.
She stayed on the streets after that. She was in and out of shelters, but nothing ever seemed to last for very long. In the summer of 2001, Beth couldn’t get into any of the shelters and found herself sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the Denver Rescue Mission.
Around that time, in an attempt to get a physician’s letter so she could qualify for disability, Beth went to the Stout Street Clinic, a program of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. By that fall, the Coalition had helped Beth move into Goebel House, a group home for mentally ill women, run by the Coalition. After 10 months, she moved into her own apartment for the first time in years. It was a subsidized, supportive housing complex also operated by the Coalition. She’s been housed ever since.
“The Coalition gave me life,” Beth says. “My mental illness is under control. I still wrestle with my addiction, but rather than use again these days, I reach out. When you can get me to go to the doctor, I go to Stout Street.”
The Coalition also led Beth into her role as an activist. “Mike Misgen at the Coalition helped me start on this path. He told me I could do amazing things if I lobbied for change…I call my tangents ‘crusades.’”
When she speaks of mental illness and addiction, Beth is reflective: “Mental disorders and addiction are an enormous part of my life. With mental illness, you can’t just medicate the problem. You have to have therapy. And addiction makes absolutely no sense. I analyze everything, and I’ve tried analyzing addiction, and I can’t come up with anything.”
Then she turns her attention back to how we have allowed people who are mentally ill and addicted to live without homes. “People are dying out there on the streets,” Beth says, “and we need to do something about it. We can’t just sit back and say it’ll take care of itself, because it won’t.”
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