Curtis’ Story

My name is Curtis Rutherford, and I was approached to join the Lived Experience Advisory Group (LEAG) in 2024 and it really touched my heart. I want to be a part of it and see what I can do to help people. I’m all about helping people.

I came to California with no purpose, no drive in my life. It took Hurricane Katrina to wake me up, to really open my eyes and look and see all the poverty, all the forgotten people, all the have nots. These are still human beings. For the last 20 years, I’ve been on this mission. I have a lot of support, I have people encouraging me. I am unstoppable. I don’t ever plan to stop until they throw me six feet under and dirt in my face.

My role model was Martin Luther King. I talked to his daughter, I met his daughter and sat down and asked her, how did he make up his mind to do what he did. She told me he sat down and meditated on what’s going on and what’s most important in the United States, and he focused on that until he moved to the next level. That’s part of what motivates me.

I traveled all over the United States. When I leave Santa Cruz, I go 3000 miles there, 3000 miles back. Then I come back here and look at this community, and I said, man, the number of folks out here is growing. Their homeless situation is growing. What can little old me do? I just said to myself, keep doing what I’m doing, promoting peace and love as a fundraiser, taking food and clothes and building materials and just giving it to the people. I ain’t asking for you to sign no papers. I’m not asking you to report to me. I’m just saying, just help the people. This is a crisis and we have to help each other.

The folks on the streets have been traumatized. I just try to be there to help them. Several people have gone to AA with me. Several people have come back to me and they have a year clean and sober. Gang bangers I’ve befriended have gone to this junior college, Cabrillo, and came back to me, said, “hey, Curt man, I’m in school from that talk we had, and that went from what you helped me do. I’m in school now, and I’m getting a degree.” I was in tears of joy from something I did.

Being a part of LEAG is a calling for me. I didn’t ask for this opportunity, but somebody noticed the goodness in my soul and allowed me to be a part of the program, and I accepted.

I was here in Santa Cruz doing my landscape when Hurricane Katrina hit. It was my family in Louisiana, I’m from Louisiana. I’m delivering food, clothes, building materials down there. I thought it was just going to be me, and it was five trucks. People volunteered to go with me, 10 people. We went down there. We distributed it. We went through New Orleans asking people, you need help over there? Do you need help? Everybody stepped up to the plate, and we worked hard.

I came back to Santa Cruz and there was eight tons of food, clothes, and building material in my driveway. 35 foot RV backed in there. They said, No Curt, take it. We know you’re going to do the right thing. Call New Orleans and bring it all to them. I had everything they needed. We packed the RV and headed back the next week. That next week turned into three years before it dawned on me how important this was and how such a passion I had for helping people.

I love driving, I love painting on this truck, putting all these positive affirmations, and I love how people accept me. It’s the first time I’ve been so well accepted in the United States. It just built me up. It took me three years to really see that, and when it opened my eyes up, that’s how I got started. I’ve been doing this work ever since. I don’t want to do anything else.

I wrote a book. It took us eight years to get to this point. From Madness to Surrender,that’s the name of it. 

I wrote this book because I want my daughter to know who I am. I want to help the people in the program and my family to know exactly who I am and what that was like being raised on a plantation, and how I was treated and what I saw.

I saw the clans across the levee rallying. I saw the different trees that my 90 year old Auntie was driving us to church and telling us that tree there, such and such, she got hung on it. This tree over here, such and such, she got hung on it. These are stories I got from my childhood. The blacks over here, the whites over here, all them signs. I see those signs the same way these people being treated. We were living on a plantation. We rented the house. We picked the man’s cotton. We rented the man’s house. We went shopping at the man’s store. I was asking a lot of questions growing up, but I get slapped up at the head and said “shut up and don’t talk about that”.

There’s a lot of [negative] people out there. When I’m doing my fundraising on the street, they calling me names. “Go back to Africa with that.” they say. That’s the baggage I have to drop, because I know how to defend myself. I know how to fight, and that baggage, I be picking it up. But I know the consequences already. I relax, breathe. I look at the people who like me. Stay with that. I go through all of that, and that’s a process. In that process, people are nice, people are talking to me, and I’m trying to release that anger and release that defending myself. It takes a minute. I learned to just walk away and not talk to nobody until I release all that.

My biggest thing, I talk from passion. I don’t act like I know it all. I want to show humbleness, kindness, compassion, love, peace, empathy. That’s what I’m developing. I set my intentions to be that big love. Treat my neighbor like I want to be treated.

I sit in my truck before I get out, close my eyes, and I just go into it real passionately. God, you got me here, and I’m just gonna go out here like an eagle and I’m gonna soar all over this place. And when I land, I roar like a lion with what I witness in life. And I’m gonna be on fire like a dragon with joy, enthusiasm, and motivation.

These animals came up for me in a vision quest. Seven days I sat in a circle in the woods with these rocks and nothing but trail mix and water. By the time I got to starving and going crazy, this is what showed up. Those three animals and the praying hands. And then I just shut up, and I started seeing that. It was real, purpose driven.

That was 15, 16 years ago. I went to a seminar. People paid for me to go to the next level, and the next, and the next. I didn’t have the confidence, but I went in anyway. I don’t have an education, but I’m smart, and I make the right decisions for myself. I mess up, I get up. I mess up, I get up.

Because I used to be out there on the streets, just like them people. I know what that feel like to go to bed hungry, and I know what that feel like to be traumatized and have no help.

Living in the world and the world throws something at you, them negative people that come at me and curse me out, the world got me reacting back. But if you do it the other way, then you will say, I bless you, brother, and walk away. That’s hard to do. That’s the hardest thing to do. My insides are like this, and I have to process it.

I notice all of this stuff. My antennas are up. You can tell when somebody wants to talk to you and don’t want to talk to you. That’s the kind of stuff that I speak on, what I see. Some people can take it, and some people don’t.

That’s part of my story.

This story was collected in 2025 by Andrea Feltz, Lived Experience Advisory Group Manager