A Civilian's Mission: Getting Homeless Veterans Off the Streets in Fayetteville

On the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina, not far from Fort Liberty—one of the largest military installations in the world—veterans are living in camps tucked beneath bridges and along roadsides. Some have gone weeks without a hot meal. Others haven't had a shower in longer than that.

Stacey Buckner knows where they are. Most days, she's already on her way.

In 2015, Buckner founded Off Road Outreach, a nonprofit dedicated to serving homeless veterans in and around Fayetteville. She is not a veteran herself, but she grew up in a military town, watched her father serve, and later saw her son enlist. She also works at the VA, where she witnesses firsthand the long-term costs of military service—Vietnam and Korean War veterans arriving for oncology appointments, smiling through treatments for Agent Orange exposure. That daily exposure to sacrifice shaped something in her that eventually became a calling.

It started simply. Buckner began offering homeless veterans access to showers—something most people never think twice about. The response was immediate. Within a week, a dozen people had shown up for the same service. She realized the need was far larger than one person acting alone.

Today, Off Road Outreach operates as a coordinated daily effort. Buckner moves camp to camp in a specially outfitted Jeep, distributing supplies, conducting intake assessments, serving breakfast alongside community partners, and connecting veterans with critical services at local resource centers. When she learned that people who had been living near Bragg Boulevard were displaced—and that bodies had been found in the area—she went to check on them personally, arriving with sleeping bags, waterproof pillows, and whatever else they needed.

The longer-term goal is permanent stability: bridge housing, employment placement, and a clear path off the streets. Housing shortages in Fayetteville have made that difficult, but Buckner has helped place veterans in jobs at Fort Liberty and worked to connect them with programs that teach independent living before transitioning to permanent housing.

The results show up in her phone contacts. Numbers that once belonged to people sleeping under bridges now belong to people with jobs and apartments—some of whom call to tell her they've just become grandparents. She describes watching that progression, knowing where someone was less than a year before, as the clearest measure of what the work is for.

What drives her, she says, goes beyond the logistics of food and clothing and shelter. It's the human connection—the recognition that the distance between stability and crisis is shorter than most people assume. At the end of a long day moving between camps and resource centers, what she holds onto is the possibility that she may have saved someone's life before she got home.