Citizen Spotlight: Stacey Yarbrough

A SECOND CHANCE CAN BE LIFE-CHANGING. IT’S A FACT STACEY YARBROUGH HAS TAKEN TO HEART, AND SHE MAKES IT HER MISSION TO MAKE SURE OTHERS GET THE SAME.

By Berlin Green

When she emerged from prison in 2016, Stacey didn’t have much of a resume. The weight of 11 felonies heavily hindered her ability to get employment or find a place to live. She happened upon the soft opening of the downtown Sunnyside Diner where a meeting with co-owner Aly Cunningham would change her life.

“No one would hire me,” Yarbrough said. “My charges range from theft and larceny and embezzlement. In short, I was a thief and a liar. My family didn’t trust me and I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I was homeless. No one would give me a chance. I went everywhere and anywhere, but with that many felonies, it’s a lot. I walked into Sunnyside and all the news cameras were there covering the opening. I sat down and ate with Aly while they were filming and she said, ‘If you’re really serious, come back.’ So I went back after they closed, as she asked and she hired me as a dishwasher.”

Yarbrough worked her way up the ranks at Sunnyside Diner, moving from washing dishes to the front of the house and eventually leadership. But the trials of her journey shaped her, leaving her heart open and her purpose clear — to extend second chances and uplift those who no one else will.

“Being homeless gave me a different view on what it’s really like to be out there and not know what tomorrow holds. Just living in their footsteps for a bit, I haven’t lived as long as some of them, just a bit, but it was enough. When I’d get my paycheck, I would go get a bag and fill it with necessities like hygiene items, socks and stuff, and go find people to give them to, pick them up and go eat at McDonald’s or something and just talk to them. It’s amazing. The stories you hear of how they ended up where they ended up. The first person I ever met was an attorney out of Tulsa. His wife and child were killed in a horrible car accident. He turned into an alcoholic and lost everything, lost his ability to practice law and was on the street. You hear a lot of different kinds of stories. A lot of people don’t realize how close they are to becoming one of them,” she said.

When Aly and Sunnyside co-owner Shannon Roper learned about what Stacey was doing in her free time, they offered more help so she could reach more people. They developed a street team comprised of Happy Plate Concepts employees and community volunteers. Throughout the month, the group prepares meals and hands out bags of food, water and necessities to those in need. At the beginning of the school year, they fill backpacks with school supplies for children in low-income areas, sponsor field trips and host fundraisers for local charitable organizations such as Positive Tomorrows, Pivot, Special Care and Hope Alive. During winter, they team up with Pine Pantry and Project Winter Watch to host coat and food donation drives.

“Before COVID we would do bag drops twice a month, around 400 bags and that was just one diner. We’d make peanut butter sandwiches, chips, anything with protein. They get hand wipes and hygiene items so they can clean themselves up. We’re making a big push to get back out there. Just last night, we met up at the diner and loaded up 50 cases of water and just hit the streets. We went to the Day Center, the Jesus House, any place we could find people,” Yarbrough said.

Stacey’s practice of paying it forward doesn’t end with the street team. Her exemplary leadership earned her a store management position when Happy Plate Concepts opened a fourth Sunnyside Diner location in Edmond, allowing her to extend to others the same opportunities

Stacey Yarbrough. | Photo by Berlin Green offered to her. “I do a lot in drug and alcohol recovery and I’m really big on second chances. They’ve allowed me to hire felons, people who have been in lockdown for 25 years. Some of them make it, some of them don’t, but we’re that shot that we can really see if they’ve got it, and they’re going to do well. I hope to tap into their resources and have one to two sober living homes going next year. So I’ve got big plans and big goals. I think it would be amazing if we could buy a restaurant, fix it up and it be a workplace to those in sober living and transition homes coming out of prison. Because we’ve got to do better on justice reform, we just have to. We have to teach these people skills and how to reenter society and deal with their problems,” Yarbrough said. Stacey offers a unique perspective on the realities people in homelessness face and the limited resources available to those coming out of prison. She hopes to help change the stigma, create awareness and get more people on board with changing policies surrounding mental health and increase focus on justice reform. “When I was in prison, I learned that mental illness is a truly real thing. About 80 percent of our incarcerated, including myself, have some form of mental illness. Without the proper medications — and a lot of people can’t get medication — it only gets worse. Hearing the stories, seeing the stories and then personally experiencing the stories in prison, you learn different things about people. It’s like cooking. If they would have just had the right ingredients, they might have a completely different life … Let’s give people the right ingredients and help them succeed,” Yarbrough said.

“Not every felon that walks out of those prison gates is going to be like me, that’s blessed enough to run into someone like Aly. And of those that do, not all of them are going to make it, just like not all the homeless are going to get that opportunity and follow through with that opportunity. But if we can capture some of them, that’s just that many more lives that we’ve changed to where we have more resources to help the ones that can’t. And there’s some that just can’t, but they deserve help too.”

Learn more about the Sunnyside Diner Street Team and Stacey’s community projects at happyplateconcepts.com/community.

WHEN HUMANS CEASE TO SEE HUMANITY IN OTHERS, IT’S EASY TO TREAT THEIR LIVES — AND DEATHS — AS PAWNS IN POLITICAL GAMES.

By Robin Meyers

Four years ago, Adam Serwer wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled, “The Cruelty Is the Point.” It made the disturbing claim that Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. In the fall of 2018, the administration began what Serwer called the ethnic cleansing of more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked, while the administration lied about creating a database that would make it possible to reunite children ripped away from their parents and stored in cages. Some of those children will never find their parents again. This from the socalled “family values” crowd.

There was an outcry about how cruel and un-American it was, but as Serwer made clear, cruelty was and still is the point. Trump even said it aloud, “You’ve got to separate the children . . . If they feel there will be separation, they don’t come.” He even claimed that the children were being used by immigrants who “grabbed them” to try to make it easier to cross the border into America—a nation of immigrants. Except for Native Americans, we’re all from someplace else.

Throughout his presidency, Trump reveled in mocking his enemies, calling them names and provoking violence against them at rallies. Shocked at his behavior, many tried to explain it as the channeling of deep frustrations, especially on behalf of white working-class men who were falling behind, and resented the attention given to LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter and feminist movements that left them feeling emasculated. Trump understood this rage and threw gasoline on it by saying what so many aggrieved people had always wanted to say.

What we could not imagine, however, was that cruelty had become a deliberate political strategy. It can turn disparate rage into a unified mob. Look at photographs of lynchings in the American south, Serwer noted. The burned and mutilated bodies were horrible enough, but it was the images of white men grinning at the camera while holding the hand of a wife or girlfriend that speaks to something dark and demonic about human nature. When we truly and deeply hate and fear other human beings, we rejoice in their suffering. We will also pledge fanatical allegiance to any strongman who objectifies and humiliates them. There is intimacy in contempt.

Witness the cruelty of the recent immigrant dump at Martha’s Vineyard. Fifty immigrants in San Antonio — frightened, exhausted, and desperate — were offered fast food vouchers and promises of non-existent jobs in Boston, only to be taken to the land of Cape Cod houses and wine-sipping liberals. If this makes those liberals furious then the stunt is a success. Gov. Ron DeSantis must have assumed that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas wouldn’t mind offering up a few Texas immigrants so long as it made Democrats look like hypocrites. Apparently, however, the two have now had a falling out— trying to see who can out-cruel the other. Is there hypocrisy in sanctuary cities who don’t have to face an onslaught of immigrants? Yes. Are liberals prone to making pronouncements but often unwilling to make sacrifices? Yes. Are Democrats in favor of open borders? No. Would white people have ever been used as pawns in this way? No. This was an overtly racist stunt to dump brown and Black people into the backyards of rich white people.

But they did not call the police. They called churches together to welcome the immigrants feed them, provide legal counsel, and find places for them to stay. This would be, dare I say it, something like real Christianity, not a photo op with a Bible. Given how much Republicans love Jesus, they