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Inspired by the story of a newly sober young man who tried to help feed a few of his still-homeless friends, Tracie Byers has taken caring for the addicted, homeless or less fortunate to a new level. Byers, a Jackson Energy member, is the 1st place winner of the 2025 Who Powers You contest sponsored by Kentucky’s Touchstone Energy Cooperatives. She received $2,000 for her ongoing efforts to feed and help the homeless in the local area.
“Southeastern Kentucky has been ravaged by the opioid epidemic, which has led to a growing homeless population. While most of the community is asking our government to step in, Tracie is staying busy, making a difference one person at a time,” said Tracy Smith, who nominated Byers.
“There’s hot coffee, and if you’re hungry, there’s chili on the stove,” Byers calls to two people she knows on a first-name basis, as they enter the safe haven she runs in downtown London, while being interviewed.
What started as taking roughly 80 meals a month to the homeless encampments in the London area has become Isaiah 58:10 Ministries and Outreach. Now serving people in five counties all the way to Tennessee, Byers and a team of volunteers served more than 4,000 sack lunches and more than 100 meals at the soup kitchen (not counting the people she helps shelter) in November2025.
“We offer food boxes if someone is hungry. We take out cold weather supplies to help them survive the winter months,” Byers said.
The beginning of the project was humble. “Soup beans!” Byers said, in crockpots with cornbread on the back of a trailer, powered by generators, trying to give the homeless warm meals. That eventually morphed into sack lunches, which could be scaled up to feed many more people. Word of mouth grew quickly about the outreach, as did the volunteer numbers.
“As people found out, you know the community was like, ‘that’s amazing, can I help?’ And it’s just grown from there. People just want to help,” Byers said.
Partnered with Corbin White Flag ministries, when temps go below 27 degrees, Byers and her team pay for motel rooms for the homeless population and provide food Monday to Friday. “We offer resource management, so if they need help getting out of a situation, getting their paperwork, birth certificates, if they want to get into a recovery, to reach out to a food pantry, we help them find resources so they can live a little more comfortably,” Byers said.
Every sack lunch bag has a QR code with links to resources for any kind of help a homeless or person in need might use to make their situation a little better. “There’s a whole list of resources available to them,” Byers said.
Byers is retired, after serving in the United States Navy for a decade as a young woman. “I work harder now than I did when I was getting a paycheck,” she said. But every day she’s led to this work by God. Her mother and grandmother performed some of the same kinds of helping gestures, but not on the scale that Byers is now.
“God is doing this. He keeps putting resources in our path to be able to help these people,” Byers said.
The job of helping the less fortunate doesn’t come without its toll. Byers said a family this past summer lost a brother and son to a drug overdose, but didn’t have enough food to feed the gathered mourners. Byers, passing out sack lunches at a gas station at the time, gave the family everything. The sister of the deceased tapped her on the shoulder at the gas station. “She said my mom is driving and we don’t have food to feed everybody. She asked me if I would come pray with them, and I did. I had never prayed a prayer like that before. I couldn’t imagine losing one of my kids, much less like that.”
“We have to help them,” she said. “It’s rewarding and humbling. People need to know they’re cared about. And if we can earn their trust and let them know we care, then we can help them.”
And helping is Byers’ job now. Helping those who are addicted, homeless or otherwise in need, Byers is there for them, organizing an outreach one sack lunch, one resource, one coat or hat at a time.
If you want to help, go to https://is5810.com/
