On a recent Tuesday in San Antonio, a well-dressed, confident and charismatic man handed out high-fives, fist bumps and encouragement as he walked through Haven for Hope, the city’s largest shelter and service hub for people experiencing homelessness.
As the CEO of Pay It Forward SA, the supportive sober living program located inside Haven’s campus, Ben Brooks Jr. knew the name of nearly every person he walked by — especially inside the nonprofit’s 88-bed dormitory.
“He rescued me off the streets,” a man said, pointing at Brooks as he approaches the dormitory.
“I heard you’re going back to Philly,” Brooks, 43, tells another man inside the dorm’s kitchen as the room fills with morning light. “Let me know what you need before you go, come talk to me.”
“A Mercedes,” the man replied, as the room erupted in laughter.
While Brooks has an easy laugh, he is often serious, too — and is never far from imparting wisdom grounded in his own journey to recovery.
He’s got “the chin up, the chest out” demeanor, said Chris Perry, the men’s dorm manager at Pay It Forward. “He’s not asking for [residents] to do something that he … hasn’t done. So it’s really comforting to know that if anyone could empathize or offer compassion, it’s going to be this brother right here.”
Less than eight years ago, Brooks would have been unrecognizable from the man he is today.
Before taking the steps to get sober, Brooks spent a large chunk of his adult life behind bars and has eight felonies on his record.
“I was locked up [in jail or prison] off and on for 11 years,” he said. “And the rest of that was either homelessness or treatment centers or institutions.”
Isolation and the pursuit of calm
Brooks remembers first tasting alcohol at a wedding when he was about 5 or 6 years old.
“I remember it was, like, literally the nastiest tasting drink I had ever had,” he said. “But I felt a sense of calm as a result, and I never forgot that feeling. … So growing up, any opportunity that I could take a drink, I did.”
His parents split up for a brief period, moving him from San Antonio to Kerrville and then back to San Antonio when they got back together. They were middle class and churchgoing, a weekly ritual that Brooks wasn’t interested in at all.
Brooks said he experienced “depression at a very young age … I didn’t feel part of my family” at that time.
“My parents always did their best to support me and to encourage me. I just think that I internalized things a lot differently,” he said. “It led to isolating myself from everyone else. So those formative years, where communication is built, I was by myself.”
An older friend introduced Brooks to smoking marijuana in middle school. Then he met more “wild” friends and found more opportunities to drink at Madison High School. He often skipped class to smoke or drink and eventually was kicked out to attend an alternative school. He was able to graduate on time, but Brooks didn’t have college plans.
“I idolized a lot of the older kids,” he said, whose behavior led him down fraught paths. When he was caught robbing a house, “I thought I was getting a badge of honor.”
The first night Brooks slept outside, he was 19 and had missed the last bus home to his parents’ house after a night of partying.
So he found a couch behind a vacant building and fell asleep.
“When I woke up, the sun was shining, it was nice and warm, there was a cool breeze,” he said. “I had this really crazy thought. I was like: ‘Oh, this is what homelessness is. It’s not that bad.’ And that’s a crazy rationalization.”
That same year, Brooks stopped coming home to his parents’ altogether, staying instead with friends. He worked at construction sites and grocery stores on and off throughout the next few years. But he started getting too hungover to work and lived on the street, regularly stealing from liquor stores to sell expensive bottles to buy drugs and liquor for himself.
In June 2016, Brooks, then 35, robbed a liquor store not far from where he grew up on the Northeast Side. As he was running away from the store — with vodka, cognac and tequila bottles in his hands and under his arms — “the owner of the store shot at me, and I could hear the bullets go right past my head.”
He got away that night, but he pictured a version of reality in which his mom had to drive to the liquor store parking lot to identify his dead body.
“That scared me enough to say: ‘No, I’m good. I don’t want to do this no more.'”
Weeks later, while in a treatment program, he saw himself on TV. It was a Crime Stoppers call for information about the people who robbed the liquor store. Brooks turned himself in, spent eight months in jail and faced 25 years in prison for the robbery and a separate drug charge. Ultimately, his attorney and the district attorney’s office worked out a deal and he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served.
Though his mother offered to take him home, he knew he wasn’t ready. Instead, he applied for the Pay It Forward residential program and was accepted to live in the specialized dormitory at Haven.
‘Exactly where I need to be’
Pay It Forward was founded in 2010 to help people on a path to recovery from addiction. Originally, it operated as a scholarship or subsidy program to help people pay for a spot at a sober living facility after they received addiction treatment. Haven for Hope opened the same year, and Pay It Forward eventually expanded into that campus to offer its own sober living.
Pay It Forward has 46 beds for men and 35 for women, which are typically at 90% capacity, Brooks said.
The one-year program requires residents who have experienced homelessness or are at risk of homelessness to have completed substance abuse treatment, participate in a 12-step recovery program, have a sponsor and find a job. It’s the only residential program at Haven, which serves an average of 1,600 individuals annually, that charges rent: $165 per month for a bed in the large rooms with multiple bunks.
That cost increases to $240 for a bed in the second phase of the program, during which residents have just one roommate.
The Pay It Forward system gradually ramps up independence and responsibility until “they’re on their way out the door,” Brooks said. “Our ultimate goal for all of our residents here on the Haven campus is self-sufficiency. We want to guide them into seeing that if you take these steps, you’re gonna get your life back.”
A panel of current residents reviews and approves applications from people who want to live in the dorms. There is a zero-tolerance policy for threats, violence and drug or alcohol use. In disciplinary cases, residents can apply to come back into the program, but they have to start at the beginning.
“We won’t deny them access to come back, you just have to start all over,” Brooks said, explaining that both accountability and compassion are key pieces of the recovery process.
Sometimes, the program offers jobs to its graduates. Perry completed the Pay It Forward program in early 2022 and was hired as a dorm manager in March this year.
“It was challenging, for sure,” Perry said of his time in the program. “You have access to a bunch of resources — a psychiatrist, a case manager, a recovery coach … a sponsor,” all aiming to hold him accountable.
“I got all these people asking questions,” he said.
At first, as a “people-pleaser,” Perry struggled with coming up with excuses and “having to manufacture things you think they want to hear.”
But eventually, Perry realized that honesty and vulnerability were simpler and more productive.
“Something switched in my head, and I actually started feeling like a VIP because I’m like, I have people that are going to lean in and ask the questions,” he explained. “That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s simple.”
The requirements of the program can make someone with a resentment for authority cringe, but accountability was actually a game-changer for Perry, he said. At first, he went through the motions with “gritted teeth … but it dawned on me: This is exactly where I need to be. I don’t belong anywhere else.”
The structure of Pay It Forward was developed by people with lived experience being in the same situation.
In 2023, Pay It Forward spent $155,000 helping people transition to other sober living facilities and housed 231 people in its dorms.
Before the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, about 85% of its graduates remained sober after one year, Brooks said. The nonprofit is still collecting data post-pandemic, but so far 73% of clients have remained sober.
“It’s not as great as it was, but it’s still good,” he said.
A leader, not a boss
Since it was founded, Pay It Forward has been led by someone with lived experience with homelessness or drug addiction.
That includes Hamilton Barton, who handed over the reins of Pay It Forward to Brooks in April. Barton was 40 years old when he became addicted to methamphetamine, which replaced prescription Xanax after his second marriage fell apart.
“I wasn’t trying to be a criminal … I just wanted to be high,” said Barton, who was homeless for 15 months before he realized he needed a change.
A “stroke of luck and being in the right place at the right time” led him to the nonprofit Lifetime Recovery rehabilitation center, then a job as a paralegal with his father, a paralegal certificate from UTSA and then, in 2018, becoming the CEO of Pay It Forward.
Hamilton, who is now vice president of engagement and philanthropy at Lifetime Recovery, first met his future protégé when Brooks was living in the men’s dorm in 2018.
Hamilton would routinely give donors and other members of the community tours of the Pay It Forward facilities.
“Part of the tour would be to introduce them to Ben at the dorm and let Ben walk everybody through,” he said. “I would see somebody that I had toured maybe a year down the road. … Once they remembered who I was, they weren’t concerned with me — they wanted to know: How’s Ben?”
Brooks, who was hired as a Pay It Forward dorm manager right after he completed the program in 2018, always connects with people, Hamilton said.
Brooks has “the level of natural charisma, with the willingness to learn … and the willingness to [set aside] fear … to take Pay It Forward into the next into the next phase,” Hamilton said.
What that next phase looks like under his leadership is still unclear, Brooks said.
“I have ideas,” he said, but he’s still learning the ropes eight months into his leadership position. “Some of the ideas that I’m having [have to do with] wanting to maybe have a standalone facility.”
Fundraising is always near the top of his mind.
“We’re a small nonprofit, so fundraising is always a thing,” he said. “A lot of times when I meet new donors and I start talking about the work we’re doing on the Haven campus, the first thing that I always hear is: ‘Well, I already donated to Haven.'”
Haven has been a big part of Pay It Forward’s success, but it needs to distinguish itself as the standalone nonprofit that it is, Brooks explained.
Whatever the future of Pay It Forward looks like, Perry is glad to have Brooks at the helm.
“He’s not a boss, he’s a leader,” Perry said. “I’ve settled for status quo basically my entire life. And that’s not what Ben is about — in fact, no one on our team is about any of that. It’s about growth. It’s about healing. It’s about finding resolve and it’s about coming together.”
Brooks, who received an associate degree in human services with a specialization in addiction counseling from San Antonio College in 2021, is now working on finishing a bachelor’s degree in social psychology at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
“I am so grateful for who I am and where I’m at today,” he said. “I am who I am because of what I went through. … I hope that [people don’t] see what they’ve done or experienced as a deterrent to change. … Every day that they’re still breathing is an opportunity that they can do something different.”
