OCALA, FL (https://352today.com) – She will carry no more than 10 items. She will not call the network of supporters who normally help her feed and clothe people living outside. And for four days beginning Tuesday, she plans to sleep among the very encampments she has served for years.
Raven White, founder of the all-volunteer A Mother’s Love Ministries, will camp from sunup Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026, through sundown Aug. 7, 2026, across different homeless sites in Ocala. The self-imposed limits are deliberate.
“There are stipulations, so it’s ten items or less, no ministerial contacts,” White said. “If I have someone that I know who could send me five dollars for food through the ministry, [I] don’t call them. You have to do it very organically. I would have the upper hand if I’m just using all the people I know in Marion County. There’s not really a point in that.”
The rules, she explained, are meant to mirror the reality she has witnessed for years.
“As someone who’s been on the street, there is almost no scenario where you get to go, ‘Okay, what’s everything I’m gonna need for an emergency situation without shelter?’ We grab what we can, and sometimes it’s just a toothbrush, sometimes it’s just clothes, sometimes it’s nothing,” she said.
White will livestream portions of the four days and accept donations to Mother’s Love Ministry, which she said is entirely volunteer-run.
“Everyone is a complete volunteer, and no one is paid. The only time anyone has any type of income into their home is if they’re like fostering a child, where they’re bringing in a family that’s homeless and they need it for like electricity or food for that family,” White said. “That would be an exception, and that’s about it. Gas to pick up and drop off donations, things that are ministerial-related, sometimes can be compensated for because we do 90 percent of the work. So I have the brunt of, like, the electricity bill and the gas and everything else because we do sometimes travel out of state. So things like that, but there’s no paycheck involved. There’s no one getting an actual like stipend or anything like that.”
The immediate fundraising target is about $4,000 toward land for a transitional tent city she envisions as a structured overflow option when every shelter bed is full.
She describes the proposed site as temporary and rule-bound rather than permanent open camping.
“It would be more of a transition for the over-encumbered shelters. When there are no shelter placements, and there is nowhere else to go, when you have a vulnerable group, they can go to the tent city. There would be drug tests, there would be searches, there would be rules, there would be boundaries,” White said.
White said the idea is imperfect but necessary.
“Something is better than nothing, because I meet families every day that are living in the woods. They have children in tents, they have children in cars. There’s over 1,500 homeless children in Marion County. There has to be somewhere for them to go,” she said.
According to Florida Department of Education data published in the 2026 Council on Homelessness Annual Report, Marion County Public Schools identified 1,494 homeless students during the 2024-25 school year.
She points to recent local and state policy changes as part of the urgency.
“Currently in the United States, in all 50 states, it is illegal to be homeless as per the executive order,” White said. “And on top of that, Florida has passed their own legislation that are anti-homelessness laws. The city of Ocala is taking out park benches. They’re welding electrical outlets shut. They’re cutting water lines. They’re telling preachers downtown that they’re not allowed to serve the homeless in front of their church. They’re running people off. They’re slashing tents.”
One incident still sticks with her.
“One time we handed out three tents, and within 24 hours, OPD had slashed two out of three of them,” she said.
Sitting across from White at the Starbucks in downtown Ocala, she pointed toward a space across the street from the coffee shop.
“It’s here. It’s very, very bad here,” she said. “It’s literally this exact spot right here. Within a mile from this spot, I can think of almost 50 unhoused individuals who leave their lives straight onto the concrete street, where they live in some type of tent encampment or some type of thing that they have built for themselves. So, I’ve known most of these people for like five years, and I know birthdays, names, we celebrate, baby showers, all kinds of stuff.”
White believes that Marion County’s homelessness problem is not exclusively due to housing costs.
“Part of it, it’s a mental health and addiction crisis, and part of it is because, believe it or not, two years ago when Hurricane Helene happened, what happened was the people who lost housing along the coast and in the south, they were given FEMA vouchers and they were put in the hotels right outside of Silver Springs Boulevard,” she said.
White said her greatest public safety concern throughout the four days is not the people she serves.
“My biggest fear isn’t the people that I serve; it’s not anyone who’s on drugs, it’s that I’m gonna get arrested and detained,” she said. “It’s illegal to camp on public property, and you can be arrested and detained.”
She said she has a clean criminal record and that she is not afraid.
“I’m what some may call a model citizen. If I were to be arrested, it would 100 percent make the news in a very big way,” White said.
Throughout the campout, she intends to keep the focus on people rather than politics.
“It’s not political in the sense of a party issue; it’s political in the sense as in human rights. The center [of the message] is supposed to be about compassion. It’s supposed to be talking to the people that we serve, sitting with them, and actually staying with them and eating with them,” she said.
White also wants to challenge common assumptions about the unhoused population and drug use.
“Most people who are currently unhoused have full-time employment. Most of them aged out of foster care. The youngest person we have helped through the ministry that was facing homelessness was one day old. The oldest person we’ve had facing homelessness was about 89. Neither one of those people were on drugs,” she stated
She will not announce exact overnight locations in advance. She plans to stay with the people already living outside, sign them up for available services when possible, and continue the work she has done for years from the homes of ministry volunteers.
White said she is not looking for confrontation. She simply wants people to see what she sees every day.
“The fact is that this cannot be ignored when we have thousands of people on the street. This is an epidemic. This is a crisis, and it’s affecting businesses. It’s affecting public safety. It’s affecting our medical resources, which are strained. Our mental health resources are strained. Our police force system is strained. It affects every single part of not only the city but the county. Everyone is feeling the repercussions of the homelessness epidemic,” she said.
White will begin her livestream from her Facebook page at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, August 4, 2026.