Meant as a way to spread information about the homelessness situation, regional Emmy winner “Hope in the Heartland” serves as a testimony to what can be accomplished by a group of people taking pride in the work they do.

The documentary was produced by Ryan Gates, a business practices in digital media arts instructor at Wichita State. Gates collaborated with the Wichita Homeless Outreach Proactive Engagement project, a grant-funded initiative to confront homelessness in the city.

Beginning in 2023, Gates and members of his team met up with the director of the housing department for Wichita, Sally Stang, and the HOPE grant facilitator Angeline F. Johnson, where they decided to document the homelessness situation after being hired by the city to help educate people about homelessness.

“In those discussions (we) came to the (conclusion) ‘Let’s do more long form style videography, let’s not make talking head commercials,’” said Gates. “Let’s go out and document.”

With that decision comes more realism, he said, but also the risk of negatively portraying the people who hired his team to make the documentary.

“We’re not going to control the narrative, we’re going to go and document,” Gates said.

The team set out in early 2024. It took around eight months of filming and editing close to a thousand hours of footage down to one hour and forty minutes, but the final documentary was released in January 2025.

According to Gates, this was a short window to make a documentary.

“We knew that we had a tight timeline for it, so the stories that we focused on were things that were happening right then and there,” said Gates.

However, Gates said that they did luck out on the timing of production, since Second Light opened right at the end of their filming period.

Second Light is a multi-agency shelter and services center that is designed to give resources to actively or at-risk homeless people through a one-stop resource hub. 

‘An eye-opening realization’

Where many people say Wichita has a homeless problem, Gates does not.

“I don’t call it a homeless problem, I call it a homeless situation,” said Gates. “We worked on misconceptions and nomenclature and whatnot throughout this (documentary).”

One such example is that homelessness is not just something that happens in the background, homeless people have complex stories that often get overlooked.

“Through this project, I learned a lot about (how) homeless people are very much our neighbors,” said Gates. “I have homeless neighbors, and they are human beings, they have families, they have things going on in their life.

“Meeting so many people and seeing how many families were homeless, how many single moms, how many kids are sleeping in cars or sofa surfing.”

Gates and his team found the experience was a rough realization of a grimmer reality, which is happening nearby, constantly.

“It’s one thing to see, maybe some people sleeping on the streets, it’s another thing when you go kind of in the encampments and see just how many people there are,” said Calvin Shadle, who worked on the documentary as an associate producer and camera operator. “(It) was kind of eye-opening just to see, this is their day-to-day life is — no walls, no door, no lock, you’re just out there with all these other people.”

However, these were not the only realizations that the crew had in the process.

“Those that are drinking or using drugs are going through one of the worst periods of their life, and they’re in an impossible situation that, unless you’ve experienced it, you can’t understand,” Gates said. “If you are going through something and you are going through trauma, and if you’re having anxiety, you’re having depression, I go to my doctor, and my doctor’s gonna be like ‘let’s get you some Lexapro, let’s get you some counselling.’ 

“If you’re on the street and you’re hustling and you don’t have these things and alcohol is there or drugs are there, I mean, it’s self-medication.”

Situations like homelessness are hard to solve, even as a team, but resources such as Second Light and Project HOPE can help alleviate some of the pain. It isn’t easy to solve this issue however, especially when some have just lived one way for so long.

“Getting somebody rehoused who’s been chronically homeless isn’t a ‘here’s the keys, off you go’, you just keep trying until it sticks,” said Gates.

Caitlin, the person who was chosen to be the main focus of the documentary, is an example of this.

“In the documentary – not to give away the ending – she does get housed,” said Gates. “She was there for a couple of weeks, and she lost her housing.”

“We continued to follow her, she dropped off the map for a while and then she re-engaged, we started seeing her again.

That’s kind of Caitlin’s thing … She’ll pop up again and we’ll go through the process again.”

Opportunities for growth

This project wouldn’t have happened if not for Justin Rorobaugh, the director of the school of digital arts at Wichita State.

The documentary team was able to use the podcast studio and the sound stage in Shocker Studios as secondary filming and interview locations. 

“Justin …  is the one who gave me a lot of opportunities seven or eight years ago and has become a fierce friend and got me teaching again,” said Gates. “So working through Justin and having Shocker Studios as a resource – we film everything, all of our interviews that you see that aren’t on location were shot either on the Sound stage or the podcast studio.”

The team recorded a shorter five-episode docuseries along with the documentary to focus on stories they weren’t able to include in the full length documentary. The City of Wichita has released the documentary and all five episodes on its YouTube page.

The utilization of Shocker Studios was just part of the partnership that went into creating this documentary. Every part of the team was related to the university in some way. 

“I’m the only non-student, but every single crew member that worked on this was either faculty, alum, or student at Wichita State, and I think that is pretty cool,” said Gates.

Submitting the documentary for awards

At some point of creating this documentary, Gates, associate producer and camera operator Calvin Shadle and director of the film program at Shocker Studios Robert Thomas took a good look at it.

“We were like ‘this is really good and potentially award winning,’” Gates said. “So we had a meeting with Sally Stang, the director of housing, and (said) one of the things we should probably shoot for, is we should apply for a regional Emmy.”

The ceremony for the regional Emmys takes place in Oklahoma, and the group attended, despite not knowing if they would win or not. 

“There was a shocked/not-shocked thing where we were in Oklahoma for this thing and going into it, we were like ‘hey, if it wins, it wins — if it doesn’t, it’s fine,” said Gates. “In my head, I’m sitting there going ‘it’s not going to win’ and they call our name first and Cal and I looked at each other in this ‘what is happening, like did we just…’ 

“The award ceremony is on July 19th, which is my birthday, so it’s a pretty darn good birthday present.”