Two-time Iraq war veteran and Sigma Nu Epsilon sponsor Seth Simmons said he expected to see poverty during his time in the US Army. Even so, Simmons said he was shocked by the extent of it and even found it infuriating. In the midst of bullets and car bombs, Simmons said the deep poverty around him was the one thing that truly bothered him. When he arrived home, Simmons expected to return to find a nation of wealth and plenty. But his eyes had been opened, he said, and even at home he could no longer stand idly by as others suffered in homelessness and poverty. Simmons eventually went on to help found The One Inc. and Mission Machine, two poverty-fighting non-profits in Little Rock and White County, respectively.
Simmons said that although poverty was probably all around him when he was a child, he nevertheless grew up blind to poverty. It was while serving in Iraq that he said his eyes were truly opened to it.
“I had never seen poverty,” Simmons said. “It was probably everywhere around me [when I was] growing up — I might have been right in the middle of it, I don’t even know. But I was just blind to it. In Iraq, I spent a lot of time screaming at God, wondering how I ended up there. In the middle of bullets flying and car bombs and everything else, you know, the one thing I just couldn’t get over was the level of poverty.”
Simmons said it was not uncommon pull up to a village and have 50-60 naked children run alongside their vehicles, begging for food. He said he knew he had to do something about it, and became convicted to try to see things as God sees them.
“I heard this amazing message from a former Harding student, Jonathan Storment … about how Jesus came [to open] the eyes of mankind again. When Jesus opened our eyes back up, he made it to where we didn’t just see what we wanted to see, but we started to see what God saw. That message really struck me. I had been seeing things one way for so many years, but now, all of a sudden I was seeing poverty everywhere. In the midst of me yelling and cursing at God, he opened my eyes and this is what he showed me. When I came back to the United States, I just couldn’t stand to see it anymore.”
Simmons said he and a formerly homeless friend held a coat drive in Conway, Ark. in 2006. Unknown to him at the time, fraternities and sororities at the University of Central Arkansas started having a competition to see who could donate the most coats, and the drive was ultimately a huge success. He said that he and his friend decided to try to continue and grow their efforts, and eventually his friend, Aaron Reddin, moved to Little Rock and founded The One Inc.
Simmons said The One Inc. is based out of vans, and exists to seek out, support, and enable people living on the streets and crashing on couches to live better lives. A few years later, Reddin asked Simmons to take a 1983 green Chevrolet van that had been donated by a motorcycle racer, and expand their efforts to White County. Simmons named the van the “Mission Machine,” and has been working alongside community members and Harding students, like junior Stern Harris, to battle homelessness in the area ever since.
“The first time I went out with Seth, there was a man and his daughter sitting at the police station because they were kicked out of a friends apartment by the landlord,” Harris said. “They had nowhere to go, and the police station was the only place that was warm that night … We went and got them pizza, a new set of clothes, and we put them in a hotel — the guy running the desk there also used to be homeless, and Seth had helped him get on his feet. That guy has a heart for it too now. In fact, every single person I’ve gone out and helped with Seth have all said that when they get off the streets, they want to give back somehow. So many of them want to look us up in the future and find a way to help out. The cool thing is, a lot of them do.”
