Difference Maker: Kitara Johnson-Jones, founder of Gabriel’s Challenge, leads ‘from the heart’ to help others fight addiction

Growing up as one of 13 siblings in Chicago’s South Side, Kitara Johnson-Jones remembers walking over coagulated pools of blood on her way to school in the morning.

“They would move the bodies, but it just wasn’t enough time to clear up anything else because kids started going to school,” she said. “And so you often wonder, is this a friend? Is this a family member? You just don’t know.”

Though the family’s resources were stretched thin, what they did have was love, Johnson-Jones’ mother praying daily for her children’s safety in the gang-ridden neighborhood of Englewood.

In a bid to stay safe, Johnson-Jones herself joined the Black Disciples street gang.

It was her mother who encouraged her to study as a child. And it was her mother who took her to the hospital after she was stabbed in the neck during a gang fight. When Johnson-Jones became a mother at 17 following a rape, it was her own love for her son that pushed her in search of a better life.

She tried college in Iowa for a year.

“It was a hard transition, because I’m coming from the street to an all-white college,” Johnson-Jones remembered. “Let’s just say I was rough around the edges.”

She fought, learned and grew during that year and came back to Chicago speaking and dressing differently. The Black Disciples didn’t like the change, and Johnson-Jones left the school.

Next up: the Army. Johnson-Jones was a nuclear, chemical and biological specialist for five and a half years, ending as a sergeant.

“I mean, they couldn’t beat me. They couldn’t hit me,” she said. “I was like, this is great.”

She met her husband, from Davenport, Washington, while she was stationed in Germany and left the army to care for their kids in Davenport when he was deployed to Iraq. The work she did with toxic chemicals qualifies her as a 90% disabled veteran today. Her husband warned her that the demographics of Davenport were different from the military’s.

“Well, at the time, I didn’t know what demographics meant, but figured if I survived the inner city, I could make it anywhere,” she said. “And then I got to Davenport.”

“I’ve never seen anything – I was the only Black person in town,” Johnson-Jones said. “There was one Black woman, but I never saw her … and that was hard.”

She drove to Spokane Community College from Davenport to go to classes and get her associate degree. Around the same time, she began the nonprofit P.O.N.Y.T.A.L.E.S Youth Services in 2008, a teen center offering resources including tutoring, formal wear for school dances and community spaces.

The idea came after Johnson-Jones was asked to speak at Havermale High School about her life, and kids began showing up at her hair-braiding business.

“It just changed me. I cried a little bit because it was my life story, but it was teaching them how to make good decisions and not to give up,” she said. “And then the kids would come down to the salon that was on Northwest Boulevard, across from Rancho Chico, and after a while, there just wasn’t enough room to hold all these teenagers.”

But she still “didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.” She went on to get her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the latter of which was in organizational leadership and management, and “kind of stumbled” into working at Excelsior Wellness. She was there for just under a decade, ending as the Chief Human Resource Officer.

She was nearing her 10th year with the health care system when one of her five children died.

Gabriel Fensler suffered a fentanyl overdose in March, a day after his 24th birthday. He was found dead on the street.

“He – one moment of weakness and his life was gone,” Johnson-Jones said.

There have been 168 opioid-overdose related deaths in Spokane County between January and October, according to the most recent data from the Spokane Regional Health District. This is down from 2024’s all time high of 264 opioid deaths in the county. Johnson-Jones is determined to address the Spokane drug problem, especially in youth.

She founded Gabriel’s Challenge, an organization dedicated to addressing addiction in Spokane. After months of community outreach, it opened a kiosk Dec. 3 on the second floor of the NorthTown Mall.

Shoppers walking past Pink Cadillac and the old Sears storefront will see the jewelry-store-turned-community-care-kiosk, videos and images of Gabriel looping on a large screen to the side. Shelves are stocked with free addiction resource pamphlets, suicide crisis number cards, locking medication boxes and the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone for anyone to take.

The NorthTown kiosk features tablets routed to AddictionHelpFinder.org, which gathers local resources based on a four-question user survey, along with tables for events. Though it is not open yet, Gabriel’s Challenge also owns what was once a nail salon across the aisle, which will function as a “third space” for community activities.

“I didn’t know where to start when I found out my son was using and he wanted to get clean,” she said. “And I’ve met so many people; they didn’t know where to start. This kiosk hopes to change that.”

The “challenge” piece of Gabriel’s Challenge refers to a 36-day “family centered community response to the fentanyl crisis,” which was based on a 66-page document Fensler wrote while in treatment. It began Mother’s Day of this year and ended on Father’s Day.

“Over 36 days of listening, learning and mapping the system through Gabriel’s Challenge, one truth became clear: families in Spokane are navigating a fragmented system that lacks coordination, real time access, and follow through,” a review pamphlet of the challenge says. “When a person is ready for help – especially a young person in crisis – delays in care can cost lives.”

Johnson-Jones said that community members who had followed along in the challenge asked her to do a summit meeting, gathering local officials to discuss gaps in Spokane’s drug abuse response. There, Johnson-Jones and the other participants planned a trip to Benton County to learn about the Columbia Valley Center for Recovery’s “No Wrong Door” model to treatment, which they executed in September. No Wrong Door aims to connect people in active addiction to resources quickly, regardless of personal or financial circumstance.

“Gabriel, when he was living – there were so many barriers, so many systems, so many places all throughout the county where he had to go to get treatment, and we want to be able to change that,” she said. “These are the broken areas of the system that we really need to address, and that’s why I knew I couldn’t stop doing Gabriel’s Challenge … We’re exhausted with task forces, so we want to see some action take place.”

The summit was a “great opportunity to really focus in on the challenges facing our entire community,” County Commissioner Amber Waldref said. Waldref was one of seven who helped to plan the event. It was “a chance to get into the weeds of what the real policy challenges are and where the gaps in services are in the county.”

The community needs someone like Johnson-Jones, who understands the roadblocks that youth face while trying to seek help, in order to help develop policy changes that facilitate the “No Wrong Doors” model,” Waldref said. Johnson-Jones is the “relentless leader” that Spokane needs, making space for everybody else at the table.

“She’s brought disparate groups together, who are all doing great things,” she said. “That’s what I love about Kitara’s vision. We need to make it as easy as possible. There’s way too many barriers.”

After the Summit, Johnson-Jones said that “more and more things were coming.”

“I was like, ‘OK, we need to build a coalition because I’m noticing that a lot of organizations are not focused on youth and young adults,’ ” she said.

There are currently two withdrawal management facilities where youth aged 13 to 17 can go in Washington: one in Yakima, the other in Brush Prairie. People 18 to 24 are often too old to use youth services but are unprepared to navigate adult services, Johnson-Jones said, forming a gap in local treatment.

Municipal Court Judge Gloria Ochoa-Bruck said that she has “a special place in my heart for specifically young men the ages of 18 to 24, because their executive function has not yet been fully developed.”

“And specifically around the fentanyl crisis that we find ourselves in, that specific population, there’s a lot of cliffs in our system and there’s a lot of gaps where things like what happened to Gabriel, when a very young person that has a whole future ahead of them, their life is cut short,” Ochoa-Bruck said.

Ochoa-Bruck has volunteered extensively with Gabriel’s Challenge and was a core member of the summit planning. The organization is helping address gaps in the current addiction treatment system by mapping resources and identifying areas where collaboration can occur between organizations.

“If we can save anyone else from that happening, help a family member,” she said. “We can only do so much in the court system, it’s really the community that has a bigger role in being able to close those gaps and make sure that people have access to the services that they need.”

While she wishes Gabriel were still here, Ochoa-Bruck said that Johnson-Jones is “uniquely positioned” for leading Gabriel’s Challenge thanks to her background working at Excelsior. She leads “from the heart.”

“I wish it hadn’t happened the way that it did,” she said. “But she is phenomenal at how she’s just taking this on and making it into an opportunity to do all that she can for other moms out there to not lose their child in this way.”

Johnson-Jones plans to host educational panels, skill workshops and general connection events run by other organizations in the new space.

The NorthTown Mall, too, was the perfect spot to set up shop.

“It’s just people migrating. So when you see downtown clear, they had to go somewhere. A lot of them just moved north,” she said. “And when you think about NorthTown Mall, it’s the place you can go. Free parking and it’s warm and it’s open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.”

Further, a number of people simply lounge at the Mall, or walk to stay active, meaning there are more eyes on the resources. The Pokémon Go player base remains strong in the area, and trainers have stopped in to learn about Spokane’s resources.

Figures from all around political and social spheres have contributed to Gabriel’s Challenge in one way or another. Former state Rep. Jaquelyn Maycumber paid the entire first year’s rent for the space in the mall, while Northwest Granite donated 90 boxes of flooring, the project manager an old friend of Fensler’s.

Gabriel’s Challenge is in the process of becoming nonprofit, Johnson-Jones said. In the meantime, the Innovia Foundation is accepting donations on its behalf.

“We’re convening, building relationships, we’re listening to where the gaps are,” she said. “But we’re centering the voice of community members, those who have lived it, who move and breathe and experience this every single day, where our family members aren’t the numbers. So when we call a place to get help and no one answers the phone at 3:45 on a Friday – we want to address that.”