Podcasts about ray it

The Music Box returns to Starpoint Radio. Join me alternate Sundays between 12-2pm GMT at www.starpointradio.com for some great soulful music across the styles and tempo's.......as we like to do on The Music Box!!BYAMM - Life Comes From The Sun (Dale's Radio Edit) (UK Barima Yaw Asante MP3 2024)Divine Who pres. Lady Lois Snead - I Found Out (Extended Club Mix) (US Divine Discs MP3 2024)Cornell CC Carter – Everyday (UK Expansion Records Promo MP3 2024)Crossroads feat. Cler - You're My Occupation (EU BeYourself Recordings 2024)Kameron Music - On The Floor (US Kameron Music MP3 2024)Jordan Lee - Love Ride (EU Garden Meyer Recordings MP3 2024)MS1 Project feat. J. Daphaney - Set It Off (2024 Remix) (UK MS1 Project Promo MP3 LP “Remedy 4 The Mind Part II” – forthcoming 2024)Kiko Navarro, DJ Pippi & Willie Graff starring Billie Brown - I Remember (Vocal Mix) (US Quantize Recordings MP3 2024)Masaki Morii & Earl W. Green - Memories (Main Mix) (Japan M2Soul Music MP3 2024)Melchyor A - So Over You (Melchyor A's Hmida Version) (EU RazanaProd Records MP3 2024)Lex & Locke - Caribbean Traffic Jam (Coflo Remix) (US Ocha Records MP3 2024)Louie Vega feat. Unlimited Touch - Music Is My Life (Dave Lee Extended Remix) (US Nervous Records MP3 2024)Gary Taylor - Just Gets Better With Time (US Gary Taylor MP3 LP “From The Vault Of The 80's” 2024)Punkpappa feat. Princess Freesia - Pour The Sun (UK Quadrosonic Promo MP3 2024)Fred Kingdom – Medicine (UK AWAL/Muco Music Ltd. Promo MP3 – forthcoming 2024)Soulpersona & Carl Hudson - Magic Bullet Theme (UK Soulpersona MP3 LP “Magic Bullet” 2024)MS1 Project feat. J. Ray - It's On (UK MS1 Project Promo MP3 LP “Remedy 4 The Mind Part II” – forthcoming 2024)Alex Nester - This Love Will Shine (US JEG Multimedia Group / SRG/ILS Group MP3 2024)Barbara Tucker pres. The David Bratton Company with Dawn Tallman & Lauren Byrd - Call Him (DJ Spen & Gary Hudgins Praise Party Mix) (US unquantize MP3 2024)Soulfreakah - A Cure For Heartache (SA Same Sun Records MP3 LP “Reflexions Of Soul” 2024)Wez Whynt & Hannah Khemoh - We Move (UK Househead London Promo MP3 2024)Rony Breaker feat. Sean Jones - Sunshine (Extended Mix) (UK Duffnote Recordings MP3 2024)Laroye & MissFly - Let Me Go (Main Mix) (UK Makin' Moves MP3 2024)Sean McCabe & Shamrock - Somewhere Out Here (Original Mix) (UK Boogie Cafe Records MP3 LP “Collective Sounds Vol. 3: 10 Years Of Boogie Cafe” 2024)Enjoy!Mark

Árás á spítala á Gaza fyrr í vikunni vakti upp gríðarlega reiði og hefur verið fordæmd sérstaklega. Ástæðan er ekki síst sú að það má ekki sprengja upp sjúkrahús - ekki heldur í stríði. Í stríði gilda nefnilega reglur. Hvað má og hvað má ekki? Og hvenær er stríð stríð? Við fórum yfir það með Kára Hólmari Ragnarssyni, lektor í lögfræði við Háskóla Íslands. Það getur verið erfitt fyrir sálina að fylgjast með hörmungum heimsins, hvort sem er vegna frétta hér heima eða úti í heimi. Hvernig er best fyrir okkur að takast á við þetta? Þóra Sigfríður Einarsdóttir sálfræðingur ræddi þetta við okkur. Við fórum yfir í allt önnur mál í síðasta hluta þáttarins. Þá töluðum við um bækur. Við rýndum í jólabækurnar og greinum jólabókaflóðið sem er á næsta leiti með þeim Önnu Leu Friðriksdóttur bókaútgefanda hjá Sölku og Kolbrúnu Ósk Skaftadóttur bókastjóra hjá Bókabeitunni. Umsjón: Eyrún Magnúsdóttir og Þórunn Elísabet Bogadóttir Tónlist: Miller, Glenn and his Orchestra, Eberle, Ray - It's a blue world. Sálgæslan Hljómsveit - Út í myrkrið. Tolentino, Ife - Distante Canção. Svavar Knútur Kristinsson, Kristjana Stefánsdóttir - Þín hvíta mynd. Haden, Charlie, Jarrett, Keith - Don't ever leave me.

Árás á spítala á Gaza fyrr í vikunni vakti upp gríðarlega reiði og hefur verið fordæmd sérstaklega. Ástæðan er ekki síst sú að það má ekki sprengja upp sjúkrahús - ekki heldur í stríði. Í stríði gilda nefnilega reglur. Hvað má og hvað má ekki? Og hvenær er stríð stríð? Við fórum yfir það með Kára Hólmari Ragnarssyni, lektor í lögfræði við Háskóla Íslands. Það getur verið erfitt fyrir sálina að fylgjast með hörmungum heimsins, hvort sem er vegna frétta hér heima eða úti í heimi. Hvernig er best fyrir okkur að takast á við þetta? Þóra Sigfríður Einarsdóttir sálfræðingur ræddi þetta við okkur. Við fórum yfir í allt önnur mál í síðasta hluta þáttarins. Þá töluðum við um bækur. Við rýndum í jólabækurnar og greinum jólabókaflóðið sem er á næsta leiti með þeim Önnu Leu Friðriksdóttur bókaútgefanda hjá Sölku og Kolbrúnu Ósk Skaftadóttur bókastjóra hjá Bókabeitunni. Umsjón: Eyrún Magnúsdóttir og Þórunn Elísabet Bogadóttir Tónlist: Miller, Glenn and his Orchestra, Eberle, Ray - It's a blue world. Sálgæslan Hljómsveit - Út í myrkrið. Tolentino, Ife - Distante Canção. Svavar Knútur Kristinsson, Kristjana Stefánsdóttir - Þín hvíta mynd. Haden, Charlie, Jarrett, Keith - Don't ever leave me.

“The more authentic you can be, then you're not having to try to do something or be someone that you're not,” says Ray LeCara, Jr., certified life coach and educational consultant, “And it really touches each part of our lives.” Indeed, answering the basic question of “Who are you, really?” (which is the title of Ray's book) helps align ourselves with our best career path, and the best education to help us reach our goals. It then leads to further important questions such as “Why am I doing this?” “Why is this important” and whether what we're doing is serving our current purpose and needs. The answers help us hone in on our true passions and purpose in life, leading to a life imbued with more meaning and improvement in all areas from leadership at work, to personal relationships, and even time management.  An advocate of lifelong learning, Ray has watched many people pursue all types of education at all stages of life. Still so many adults report struggling to complete their goals because they are not honest about who they really are and what they really want to do. Ray founded Authentic Embassy Consulting following a move to the West Coast which was part of his and his wife's shared mission to live with intent and included Ray supporting his wife while she studied to become a sous chef.  In addition to helping others see their own creative goals come to fruition, Ray writes fiction, including a torn timeline series in which the protagonist seeks to find his true purpose in life. By coming more in line with who you truly are and what you want, you, too, can learn to become the hero of your own story, and as Ray puts it,  “live, love, lead and learn profoundly.”  Quotes: “I believe that life is really about empowering others, especially if you can help them to access their most authentic selves. Because it's through that, that we're able to live, love, lead and even learn.” (4:21 | Ray) “The more authentic you can be, then you won't have to try to do something or be someone that you're not.” (13:03 | Ray)  “Being authentic is really about recognizing those things that mean something to you, and then passing them on to other people and recognizing that. It's the same thing with learning at all ages.” (13:49 | Ray) “That same thing with learning at all ages is, ‘Why am I doing this? What's the purpose of an education..and does it tap into that student's authentic self?” (13:58 | Ray) “It's really about articulating what it is that we do and finding meaning in that understanding that your life, your voice, everything is really important. We just don't own up to that.” (22:57 | Ray) Links: Mentioned in this episode: Learn more about Mike Horne on Linkedin Email Mike at mike@mike-horne.com Learn More About Executive and Organization Development with Mike Horne   Learn more about Ray LeCara Jr: Website: authenticembassy.com  Twitter/IG: @BAuthenticBU  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raylecarajr         Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm  

This week I'm speaking with the amazing Ruth Poundwhite! Ruth is a certified coach, NLP practitioner & feminist marketer who supports highly sensitive humans to run businesses they love without sacrificing who they are.   Ruth and I talk about the preparation and inspiration behind her upcoming Soulful Sales Summit, which brings 30+ experts together to talk about finding your sales strategy as a highly sensitive business owner. We chat through the risks and rewards behind being yourself in your business, and how showing up as the real you can not only open up parts of your business, but parts of yourself too.   Tune in for more on how to approach ethical selling in a way that genuinely responds to your audience, embracing your ambition, and how to really get connected with the value of what you do.   And if you're interested in attending Ruth's Soulful Sales Summit, you can find all the information here: https://soulfulsalessummit.com/ray   The summit runs from 11 – 14 of October, and tickets to attend are free (with the options to upgrade for replays)! Just an FYI, the link included is an affiliate link and I'll be one of the speakers, which I am so excited about as I know it's going to be an absolutely brilliant 4 days!   You can find out more about Ruth here: https://ruthpoundwhite.com/ https://www.instagram.com/ruthpoundwhite/   And if you've caught the info about Real You Real Money in the intro, follow this link for more: https://www.raydodd.co.uk/real-you-real-money.      QUOTES   RUTH   “Being myself and honouring my desires in my business… can be really confronting and sometimes you need to take breaks from stretching. But it is a privilege because this is the life I want to live, and I want to be myself in my life. And for me, my business has been the vehicle for that.”   “I think the hardest thing is trusting yourself to try things, because you don't know how they're gonna feel until you actually try them.”     “What I mean by Soulful Sales is selling in integrity with yourself. And obviously we've all had bad sales experiences and we've all had pushy people. We've all been ripped off - some of us have been scammed really badly. It's also true that selling as a whole does not have to be done one certain way. So Soulful Selling means selling in alignment with your own self, which includes your values, what you think is right or wrong, but also your energy levels – selling in a way that you can get behind.”     RAY “It's so important to just sit with who we are rather than constantly be striving. I think we are conditioned to do the striving to fit ourselves into the shape of other people we've seen as successful. Instead, let's give ourselves that space to sit with who we actually are and what actually works for us and where we feel resistance.”

Find Sharman at www.sharmannittoli.comTRANSCRIPTDiane Dayton  0:02  This is Changing the Rules, a podcast about designing the life you want to live, hosted by KC Dempster and Ray Loewe the luckiest guy in the world.KC Dempster  0:12  Good morning, everybody. This is KC Dempster. Welcome to Changing the rules. I am here with Ray Loewe. And we have an absolutely fascinating guest for you today. And I hope that a lot of our listeners are in my age group, because it's going to be even more meaningful to you. So we bring interesting people to our podcast, so that the luckiest people in the world, or those who want to be the luckiest people in the world can have their minds expanded as to what they see the vision of their life being.Ray Loewe  0:45  Yeah, and I think one of the things as we look at these luckiest people in the world, we kind of see a role model, we kind of see how they did things. And sometimes we find out the things that they did wrong. But the whole idea is there's a journey to becoming one of the luckiest people in the world. And the luckiest of the luckiest continue that journey with no limit.KC Dempster  1:07  And often they have to change rules to make their journey their own. But that's what we're all about.Ray Loewe  1:12  Oh, yeah, you have to change the rules. Otherwise, it's absolutely no fun. So today we have our special guest add. She's a teacher, she's a musician. She's an actor. She has created music she's performed. And she's just an outstanding person and and there's no end to what she's going to do. So Sharman Nittoli. Say hi to everybody.Sharman Nittoli  1:41  Hello, everybody.Ray Loewe  1:43  That was that was pretty. That was pretty good. Okay, so, so So tell us you're a young lady right now that's going strong. You're in which career of your life now? 1,2,3,4,8, 10,15. Where are you?Sharman Nittoli  2:00  Oh, gosh, it was, you know what, I almost bought some new cameras yesterday, because I had an idea to do another film. And then I stopped for a second and said, oh, let's just finish some of these other projects. So what career am I in? I don't know. I'm gonna say at least 12-13.Ray Loewe  2:21  Okay, so let's, let's go back and give people a little history because it's fascinating. I believe I'm correct. When I say Frank, so Frank Sinatra was part of your life once upon a time.Sharman Nittoli  2:34  Yeah, a big part of my life. big part of the journey. Yeah.KC Dempster  2:38  Well, let's, let's go back to your start. You said that you were a classically trained pianist, or pianist?Sharman Nittoli  2:45  Mm hmm. Yes, I was. That was my degree. Mm hmm.KC Dempster  2:49  And then and then what did you think that that was going to be your career? how did how did you move into the path that you followed?Sharman Nittoli  2:57  Um, I think that was the universe pushing me in different directions. But I did think I would be a teacher. And I did come out of college teaching. And I literally went to met somebody who had a band, and they said, Why don't you join the band? And I said, Okay, and I got on stage and realize, I did have classical training. But I needed a different kind of musicianship in order to function in a band. And I started listening and studying and studying and listening. And that that was a long time ago. And it's it's just been different bands, different styles, different genres, different doors to go through.KC Dempster  3:40  You mentioned a band that was very prominent in my growing up, The Duprees.Sharman Nittoli  3:48  Yeah. Yeah, I was the Duprees. My husband and I both for about 10 years working in the band. And I was working as the musical director on keyboards and doing arrangements. And yeah, it was a really terrific opportunity to work some major showrooms and to meet some of the classic groups that we grew up with. And just to see the enthusiasm of the people, my goodness, you could not contain them. As soon as they heard that song.  they jumped on and kept where they were, they jumped on their feet and said, Honey, remember that?KC Dempster  4:29  Yeah, that was the Rivieras and the Duprees were very large factors in my high school years. They were favorites at all the dances.Ray Loewe  4:38  Okay, yeah. We can get caught up in the past over here, but we got to go on to the future because, because Are you willing to share with everybody your age, Sharman?Sharman Nittoli  4:50  I'm going to be 71Ray Loewe  4:52  Okay,Sharman Nittoli  4:53  Seventy-one years youngRay Loewe  4:55  and you're just starting your next career because you will From all of this performing with the stars on stage, and you're still doing some interesting things didn't you did? Didn't you just go to San Francisco not too long ago to play? Tell us tell us about the experience real quickly.Sharman Nittoli  5:15  Well, I it was la that I work in LA for a while playing piano in a couple of the clubs, the restaurants, clubs, you know, Ray, it's really, it's just amazing that a door will close and then the phone will ring. You know, sometimes, you know what I mean? It's just the opportunity is there if you're willing to take the shot, and and I did you know, um, so yeah, that was terrific. That was a great thing.Ray Loewe  5:44  Okay, now, you also made a movie not too long ago. Yeah, give us the short version of the movie.Sharman Nittoli  5:52  Okay. We'll give you the short version. My husband is also a musician, and an actor who has worked as a stand in and an acting but he's working as a stan- up for Joe Pesci for many, many years. He wrote a screenplay years ago, that was about his life in the music business, which is some 60-70 years. And he just decided last year, he's, my husband is going to be 85 that he wanted to do it. So we tried to sell the script, we didn't have any luck. So he just said, Let's do this. And that's what we did. We did it. And we just, we just took it step by step. And I in my prayers every day, I always thank God for for YouTube, because YouTube saved my life! you know, I learned so much about sound and, and editing, editing was a huge job music editing, film, editing, just so many things. We finished it in a year, we decided after going the route with the festivals to put it up on Amazon Prime. And that's where it is now. Our cast. We're all mostly all friends. And a few of our friends are professional actors who happen to be in it. But the one of the main characters is Joey Long from the Four Seasons, who is was one of the characters because Alfred had worked with him before he joined the Seasons. So um, yeah, it we've bounced back and forth from the present to the past, flashbacks about how this business has changed. So so much. And, you know, there used to be music seven nights a week. There isn't anymore. God knows not right now. Right?KC Dempster  7:34  Right. Quickly, though, tell us the name of your movie so people can go look for it.Sharman Nittoli  7:39  It's Does The Band Eat, which is a phrase that musicians when someone is booking a band, for the weddings and such that used to be a big negotiating factor. Because if the band eats, I can give you a better price. And we would always find out that when we got there we were eating but we weren't eating what they were eating.KC Dempster  8:01  You had the bologna sandwich on white bread with no mayonnaise, right.Sharman Nittoli  8:06  Stale bread. Yeah. needed a toothpick to keep it all together.Ray Loewe  8:11  Okay, I think you know those few comments, and I'd love to spend more time talking about the past. Well,KC Dempster  8:19  I was gonna say you teach the listeners by mentioning Frank Sinatra, I think you need to ask Sharma to tell them about that.Sharman Nittoli  8:27  Quickly, I'll give you the cliff notes. So when I graduated college, I was a classically trained and went through the folk era of the protest era and all that stuff. But I was not into jazz, and I was not into standards. But then life put me in a particular position. And also with my husband, who had had had played in bands that did that he conceived of this idea to write a song called Here's to the Musicians. That would be people like Sinatra and Tony Bennett, thanking the musicians in the band, not just the arrangers, not just the writers, but the wonderful the top of the line musicians that made it all happen. We took it to a third person, Artie Shrek who was extremely talented, and he kind of refined it and changed it up a bit and it became Here's to the Band. And after hustling is all I could say in a variety of ways. One and a half years later, the song was recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1983. And then Liza Minnelli and then Sammy Davis, Jr. and then a miss runner up for Miss America. I don't fully get that, but but it didn't matter. I got the residuals. SoKC Dempster  9:47  that's awesome.Ray Loewe  9:47  Cool. Now Now I want to get into the future of where you're going in a minute. But But you mentioned something when we did our pre interview about you got one of these devices attached to Google. I don't Remember, it's not Alexa. And it's not Siri, I don't remember who it was. But you said something about play Sharman and what happened?Sharman Nittoli  10:09  Right. And it played Sharman. My dream is a dream, I had to become an independent artist. And I, you know, went through a variety of changes. But at some point, I finally sat down. And again, you know, my husband helped me and produce me, we got this song done. So someone gave me a little this CD done, called Unconditionally, which you can get on Amazon and iTunes, but unconditionally is this is a song that was dedicated to our beloved dog who runs this house. And, and so I was sitting there and I say, gave me a Google music a little, the little disc, a little round thing. And I said, Hey, Google, play Sharmin and lo and behold, I heard my song and I just teared up because it was a journey. And it probably something I should have would have could have, but I didn't. But I finally got it done. And it was a joy. It's just I can't even tell you is just to have my music out there. Wonderful.KC Dempster  11:16  No regrets, huh?Ray Loewe  11:18  Okay, no, no, no, no. Go ahead. No, you're running. It's good. Well, let me let me tell you why Sharman is one of the luckiest people in the world. You know, we've got all this past history over here. All these wonderful things that she did, you know, playing with these big name people, building her career writing, music, all of that. But now if you go to her website, and and Sharman, what is your website? Let's tell everybody that right now.Sharman Nittoli  11:46  Okay. So, during the last five years, I developed a project called LiveYour Bloom. I consider myself despite being an industrious hard worker for any job I ever did. But I never committed myself to my own projects, my own dreams, my own some of these songs I wrote 20 years ago, and I never recorded them. So I studied, I learned about procrastination, why we do it things that we put off all of that stuff, which makes total sense to me now. And I wrote a project off of it called Live your Bloom. Before the pandemic, I was performing it in a variety of churches. And it was such I hate to say senior groups, I, let's say, like blooming groups. And the whole point of the project is, is there something that you haven't done that you really want to do? And why aren't you doing it? Now, that that could be anything that could be dancing, it could be art, it could be reading, it could be acting, it could be anything? Is there something that is haunting you, I call it a dream seed that you planted a long time ago, and you just never watered and by this time, you built up such a wall of those limiting beliefs. It's too late. I'm too old, who cares, it's a waste of money. It's this, this and this, but if it's still in your head, it needs to be born. And and that's what my project is about. I have a group of on Facebook, I call them bloomers that we, we get together and support each other. I have a course that I just developed, I'm just going to be releasing it in a couple of weeks called It's Your Time to Bloom. Because people have a number of reasons why they don't address it. But I think as long as you're breathing, even if your health is limiting, but you're still moving and thinking, I think you can you can you can pay attention to your dream, develop it, and you're going to be a lot happier, a lot more fulfilled if you just reprioritize and put yourself at the top instead of the bottom, because the bottom never gets done.KC Dempster  14:09  Right. And I think you said excuse me, that when you retired, which people have in their own understanding of what that means that you were going to work as hard for yourself as you had worked for others.Sharman Nittoli  14:23  That's right. And, and I did. Although the beautiful thing about being retired is that when I'm I am truly tired, because maybe I've been working hard or I just feel like if I want to put my feet up for the day, and watch reruns. That's what I do. And I have I have learned not to feel guilty about it. But I will tell you when I did my CD the first one, 12 hours a day I was working, I was living in my pajamas second CD I did with my husband, same thing you know, it's just you just immerse yourself. In it, and it's joyful. It's frustrating. There's anxiety, but you're, you're, you're so close to that thing that you've been bottled up for so long. And you're living it. And there's just no feeling like it. And the movie, forget about that. That was just I can't even tell you I read, I literally was living in the same pair of pajamas at one point for two weeks. Just walking like a crazy person, you know? It I mean, joyful, but stressful, but good. And then you go back, and you can always think of 1000 things you should have would have could have. But there's just something to be said for getting it done getting it out there and moving on with all the new knowledge and experience you've gained from that, from that exposure from what you did?Ray Loewe  15:54  You know, it's a shame. You're not passionate about this. You know, you had you had five quotes on your website, and I pulled them off, because I want to talk about them briefly. Some of them we mentioned, but but I think they deserve some emphasis. You know, the first thing that you said is there's a lot of limiting beliefs about aging. And you hit that a little bit, but but there's no reason I, you know, no reason to stop, other than the fact that you think you're getting old, right?Sharman Nittoli  16:24  Yeah, I mean, chronologically, sure, you know, I'm definitely on the other side of the halfway mark, you know, but and I, and I, you know, I have aches and pains. I was a rock and roll musician, I was a keyboard player, I carried all that stuff, you know, right. And we, I have my aches and pains, I have my issues, I have my things. But, you know, you find how can I deal with this. As long as you can deal and keep moving, you keep moving. Because sometimes we have things thrust upon us that we cannot change and control and adapt to. But as long as we're breathing and moving, there's always something to be done that will expand our mind. And I'm a big believer that you expand your mind and become a happier person, you're going to effect that kind of happiness and joy in the world. We need more of that open mind, you know, those open minds, you know what I mean? Ray? It's just, we are so closed and polarized, we just, well, it's not something you can read about in a book to fix. I think it's just something that has to come from inside.Ray Loewe  17:32  Well, and it comes from people like you and having conversations with other people like you. And you know, the there's another comment you made that I want you to comment on. And it's the difference between living and just existing.Sharman Nittoli  17:46  Yeah, yeah.Ray Loewe  17:48  You're you're living now. But But look at all the friends that you have. And I know I have that are existing because they're not letting themselves. They're limited by their aging, put it that way.KC Dempster  17:59  Well, and I think that Sharman threw a word out in her last comments call, she said expand. And that's something that that we always talk about with the luckiest people in the world. They're constantly expanding their horizons, you know, whether it's places they want to go things that they want to do. You just you, you know, if you continue to expand, and and if you continue to be an open minded, interesting person, that's who you draw to you.Sharman Nittoli  18:28  Yeah, that's true. That's true. KC. Yeah. And you know, what I was thinking the other day is like, with our kids and our grandkids, and certainly with all of my students, didn't I spend a lot of time trying to guide them in that direction? What's your purpose? What are you interested in? What do you want to do? What can we do to back that up to give you the tools you're going to need? And we do that for our kids, So Why don't we do that for ourselves? So, yes, somewhere along the line, it becomes all about everybody else, and not about us.Ray Loewe  19:03  Well, here's the next comment that you made on your website. And I think we bring it out to everybody. What a joyful, amazing feeling to be living the best part of my life right now. It's you It's, that's your comment. That's your quote. And I want it is going to be my quote, too, because because it's so true. Why put a limit all this fits together, there's no limit. And you can you can, it's all what's happening in your mind and your passion. So I think this is absolutely wonderful. Sharman, I think you're doing a great a great job. Now you did a great job in the past, taking care of all those music people. Okay, and you're not done. Okay. Add your last comment on here is I want to share what I've learned with you. So how are you doing that? How can we help you do that?Sharman Nittoli  19:56  Well, two ways if people are interested Did they can go to my website, just Sharmannittoli.com, short and sweet, where I talk about the program, the Facebook site I have where I do live concerts and sometimes go live. And we talk about  things that are standing in people's ways. A lot of what stands in people's ways that we try to address is that other people don't approve of what up their choices they're making now. And so we talk about claiming your time and being able to say no, and these are real problems. And the other way is, I'm launching this course at some point, but I'm going to do a whole bunch of online talking about the course and about the the the tools that are needed in order to how can I say this, some people come up to me and say, like, I really want to dance. And if you say to them, what's stopping you, I, you know, you're not in a wheelchair, so what's stopping you? And they'll be oh my husband doesn't want me to waste the money. And I don't want that, that, that of that data. And I and I'm like, Well, what would happen if you just said, I'm doing this? Deal with it? And it's gonna make me happier and have I'm happier, you're happier? And isn't that a good thing? Aren't you happy that I want to expand myself, you know? So, but to start with, I would just ask if people would like to come on my site. And if they are happy with what they see, subscribe by communicate with. I'm always sending out communications about articles that I'm reading and things I'm, I'm coming across that can help us all, live, this part of our life with joy is not just living and living can't just be well, I got all my medications on the table I got I got this, I got that no that. There's more, there's more.Ray Loewe  21:57  Well, you know, everybody, I have to tell you, you have to go to Sharman's website, and we're gonna post the website, you know, with our with our podcast notes. But she's got snippets of music that she and her husband have done and are doing together some of the stuff that she she's done in the past. It's just, it's a joyful website, and Sharman, you know, the best of luck to you. You don't need the lock, you're good just going to be making happen. And this last quote, and I want to end with this, what a joyful, amazing feeling to be living the best part of my life now. And that's why you are one of the luckiest people in the world. And Sharman, thanks so much for being with us.Sharman Nittoli  22:43  Oh, my pleasure. And I just want to compliment you both on this program. This was just just was just a wonderful thing to discover. And I'm honored to be here. Thank you so much.Ray Loewe  22:54  Okay, well, we'll be in touch. And KC, tell us what's going to happen next week? Well, no, because I haven't told you.KC Dempster  23:00  That's right. But I'm sure we're gonna have another wonderful, interesting person to talk to. And so everybody keep coming back because we've got great stuff for you.Ray LoeweAll right, everybody. And thanks, Taylor, and thanks, everybody, for being here.Diane Dayton  23:15  Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules, a podcast designed to help you live your life the way you want, and give you what you need to make it happen. Join us in two weeks for our next exciting topic on changing the rules with KC Dempster and Ray Loewe, luckiest guy in the world.   

A discussion with Betty Ray on the three phases of a rite of passage & the tools they offer us for composting our grief. Music by Terry Hughes Links: Betty Ray Betty’s talk: We Must Initiate the Young People Arnold Van Gennep Lisa Miller of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute Menarche ritual Full transcript: Ray: And then there’s the whole midlife crisis and a porche and a girlfriend and whatever and all that, but we don’t really talk about what’s going on psychologically or spiritually. The transitions in our lives can bring up difficult feelings. It’s easy to see the lay of the land when we’re walking a straight path, but when the sidewalk ends, all kinds of confusion can come up. We may lose track of where we’re going and even start to question our values. How can ceremony help us through the transformations in our lives? Join me for a conversation with Betty Ray. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we’re going to slow it down and really look at rites of passage. Where did that term come from? What’s the anatomy of a rite of passage? And what can these ceremonies be used for? Our returning guest Betty Ray helps parents design customized ceremonies to help their youth go through a coming of age process, something that is deeply needed in American culture today. But she understands that all big transitions are worthy of the same process, whether it’s coming of age, approaching midlife, or even experiencing a significant loss. Betty and I had a conversation recently about using the rites of passage structure to design a healing ceremony. This could be any kind of healing ceremony, but I asked her how the rites of passage structure could be useful to design a ceremony for someone who had lost a child. Ray: I think the language rites of passage to me is more structural because rites of passage articulates a structure. There’s a three-part structure to rites of passage which is immutable and across all these different cultures. And that is really a benefit because that gives us a way in which we can design meaningful personalized rites of passage or healing rituals or however you want to describe it, there’s lots of ways. But I think the language around rites of passage for me has been to articulate this tripartate model which is so powerful. The first one, the first phase of totes of passage is called separation and this is from the work up in Arnold van Gennep and this was from 1909. So this guy a long time ago studied all these different cultures and found across cultures and across time and space that people were using the same three phases. And in fact, Joseph Campbell was really inspired by Van Gennep’s work and used his rites of passage work for the hero’s journey work which is amazing. Like I didn’t know that. Did you know that? My God, I was so excited about that, I was like “Oh, you’re kidding me!” That's so brilliant because it makes sense that rites of passage would make a good story. So the three steps are separation, where the initiate leaves the comforts of home. And whether that’s a young person going off to figure out who they are and discover their identity or a middle-age person who has to leave the sort of the structure that their life has become. So then the second phase is called liminality or I’ve also heard it referred to as metamorphosis and that’s the phase where once they’ve left there kind of betwixt and between as Victor Turner said. It’s this time when you don’t know what’s going to happen to you and that’s when this beautiful phase of ego death comes in. You don’t know. You die. Who you are, who you were, is no longer who you are or who you want to be. And then there’s design elements I can make liminality more or less... that’s a design challenge for those of us who want to do these. And then the reincorporation phase where the young person for the young middle/elder whoever comes back to wherever they were, to the original, you know, container and then takes what they’ve learned and bring it back to... so that they may be in their community once again. So there’s kind of a, you go off into the netherland, you go off to the wyrd world, the forest, you know, in our mythologies... all kinds of heroes journeys there. Yeah, so those three phases I feel like are really valuable as design elements. So that’s why I was talking about that. And we can talk about how to put this into someone who’s lost a child. How do we manage that, those feelings and the grief and the identity and all of the elements, the psychological elements, that go into holding that and how does one release that and reinvent themselves to be able to move forward and to not just be completely paralyzed by that loss? I think what I love about rites of passage, however you talk about them, is that they do offer tools for composting our grief, or our fear, or whatever - getting it out and turning it into something else. The transformative nature is really powerful. Thomas: What's the benefit in designing our own ceremonies? Ray: I think that our 21st century culture has become so individualized that certain kinds of rites of passage, the generic thing, just don't resonate. And so the benefit of a personalized sort of self designed DIY rite of passage or ceremony, transition ceremony, is that it can be something that is deeply meaningful to you. And I don't think these work if they're not deeply meaningful to you. So I would argue that there is no reason to do this if it isn't personalized. It's really important that it be meaningful, and that it come from a place that has such heart and meaning that it can that it does the sort of psychological lifting. When it is individualized, it's a creative process. It's really fun. It's really fun to think about what is the thing that nurtures me. It's really fun to think about what is the thing that I'm trying to heal. It's not fun - that's not fun. But it's healing. It's healthy to look at what is the thing that I want to let go of and how do I design something so that I can take back my power over this thing that has really hurt me or has humiliated me or that I want to leave behind. And that can be anything from a relationship to a mindset. You know? It's a lot different than talking about in therapy and I love therapy, I go to therapy. It's valuable. But again, getting into this psychic space of ego death, right? You’re kind of more open and vulnerable and you kind of like you, you're working with the programming language of the soul. And it's a lot deeper than just the cognitive stuff. We don't... cognitive is important. But this when you're working at the soul level, it's more potent. I love that way of describing it: that what we’re doing in ritual is working with the programming language of the soul. Does that make sense? We’re getting into an area where words don’t work, so it’s a little bit difficult for me to use words to describe it, but think of the rituals you’ve participated in in your life and remember what they felt like in your body. There’s a reason we do devotional ritualized practices in religious settings. Taking the bread, stepping into the Mikvah, casting a circle with the athame. These are physical things we do to connect, ritualistic soul-level actions we take. They are separate from our thoughts. When we hear the phrase “rites of passage” we may think of life stages such as coming of age, getting married, or having children. But life transitions are not always predictable or planned. A sudden illness or loss can knock us off our game and create a need to withdraw and heal. That’s where rites of passage or ritual can become invaluable. Ritual can provide a space of deep healing where our pain can be witnessed and honored. Ray: When I was about 25, I was involved in a bike accident. And I was not wearing a helmet and I was unconscious for a day or two. And I woke up in the hospital and I was all like, double vision, concussion - a real mess. And I got out of the hospital and I was like in bed, you know, I couldn't work, I was out. And I was just really just discombobulated. And I had this major double vision, and I was so like, I couldn't even, you know, literally couldn't see straight. And my mom called me, you know, and she said, "I would like to offer you a rite of passage at my house." And I was like, I don't know what that is but it has to be better than this wherever I am right now, this sucks. And I'm in bed and I would love to... sure whatever that is, do it up! And so she said, "Okay, I want you to invite somewhere between 6 and 10 women that are older that you look up to and that your respect," and I was like okay. And so I know she knows some cool people and I know a few cool people and I put together this list and they all came to her house at the winter solstice. And one of her friends had made me a paper machine a mask to wear for the ceremony. And it was like this beautiful thing that had a butterfly at the mouth and like flower up at the head and like these beautiful beads... and it was really... it was like, okay, so I put that on, we came to her house and there was a fire in the fireplace and all these women were sitting in a circle and I wore the mask. And they proceeded to each tell me a story, or read a poem, or kind of reflect me, or reflect the world so that I could kind of titrate it and understand it, some things about the world things that were, you know, through poetry and beautiful writings and pieces of art. And I just sat there and just absorbed this giant mirror of all these older women that were so wise and so loving and so interested in helping me heal. And I could just feel that energy and I'm wearing this mask. And then at the end of it, I had to, I had to write, based on everything I had heard, I had to write a series of commitments to myself, and like things I wanted to keep, things I wanted to nurture, things I wanted to deepen and explore. And then I had to write a series of things that I was ready to release. And she had a fire in the fireplace and at the time, I took the things I wanted to release and I put them in the fire. And we said a prayer. And then it was over and it was probably about 20 minutes. It was a short thing, maybe more - I don't remember maybe it must have been more - but anyway, it was really powerful to me. It was a really, to have all these older women hold me in that way taught me the power... and to and to experience the intentionality of that moment, the gravitas, the beauty, you know, she... the home was beautiful, it smelled nice, it was people you know, it was just a sensory experience of being in this kind of like other world. And the kind of the grace that I felt afterwards was just like, wow, I knew this was powerful! And I was really interested in doing more of it. I was in my mid 20s. And I remember kind of putting it out there and sort of doing a little bit of research after it was over, like kind of getting out of my depression hole and going down to the bookstore and researching a little bit. And I got this clear picture that this is too woo woo for the world. I can't do this now. It's not ready. It's too weird. And so I took a hard turn and I went into writing about popular culture, and, you know, teaching myself technology and HTML and like, I kind of went there. But it always stuck with me, it was always part of my soul. You know, it was like I was awakened. Wow, that's a cool thing! You can do this stuff and it really helps your soul! It helps you get out of, you know, self pity and suicidal ideation and you know, kind of loneliness and all this crap that I... and my physical thing didn't change. I still have the crazy double vision. But I was just, it was something that changed in my being. So, you know, but over the years, I sort of dabbled in it, you know, I kind of come back to it and I found it on the dance floor. And I really found like, dancing really helped me with the soul work and, you know, I would take an astrology thing here and they're like, kind of like closet woo woo, you know. And then I found this program at, you know, at Columbia, right, like, fancy-pants ivy league school has this weird little thing called the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. And it's actually not woo woo. It's a bunch of researchers who have found evidence for the benefits of spiritual exploration and spiritual experience. And I was like, okay, it's coming out. Now it's time. You're going in! So I took that program, I quit my job and I am now working on the rites of passage stuff. Lisa Miller, the woman who founded the SMBI, the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, has done all kinds of really interesting research on the power of intergenerational spirituality. So she's she says that when a young person has a container, a community, you know, who are holding them in a place where they can explore "lowercase s" spiritual practices they're so much healthier, they have a much, much higher rate of... a much lower rate of depression, anxiety, self harm suicide, and it's like 60-ish percent; it's ridiculously powerful. Yeah, yeah, it's a big deal and it's sort of free. So it's kind of, you know, it's not like you have to like build a new school or have a mountain that you know... going off to the mountaintop or anything, you can just change your practices. So it's important for families and communities to know about that. One of my favorite things about ritual is that it can transcend space and time. What I mean by that is if there is something that happened in our past - maybe a hard time we went through all alone or a significant personal accomplishment that got overlooked by our friends and family - we can actually do ceremony for it now and bring some healing to both the past and present versions of ourselves. That may sound strange if you are new to the concept of ceremony. But if you do this work regularly, you know what I’m talking about. My first experience with this was when I read a book called “Red Flower: Rethinking Menstruation” by Dena Taylor. It inspired me to create the menarche ceremony that I never had. Because ritual transcends space and time, it didn’t matter that the ceremony took place 15 years after my first period. My inner 12-year-old was fully present and felt fully welcomed into womanhood that day. I asked Betty to reflect on her past and think of any transition she wished she had had a rite of passage for. In answering my question, she spoke about a very personal subject. She spoke about healing from an abortion. I’m pausing to give you a heads up now in case this subject is close to home for you or in case you are listening with children. Thomas: Are there any experiences in your past that you wish you could have had it rite of passage for? Ray: There are several. I had an abortion and that was the biggest source of shame ever. And I had no way of... I mean, I had… it was very difficult to like make peace with that or understand, you know... nobody talked about it. So, having some sort of a, you know, there's an Amanda Palmer song about an abortion… it’s a ceremony and it's beautiful and I sobbed the first time I heard it. I think having that would have been a good idea. It would have been a way to heal that in a way that was good for me. Although what I did do is I ended up moving out to California from Minnesota to honor that. It was like, I'm not ready to be a mom here. I'm gonna to go do whatever it takes for me to know that I can be a parent. And that means going out to California and sort of following an instinct that there's work out there for me that will not only be meaningful and enrich me but it will help others. Like I wanted to be able to have to have an authentic sense of myself in the world and I just had no way of doing that where I was. So coming out here was sort of that for me, but it wasn't the same and it was certainly not witnessed. No one knew about it. You know, that was my own sort of thing. Yeah. Thomas: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. I've heard that in the blood mysteries for women, that that's one of the blood mysteris, you know, that that's got that same depth as, or is considered in some circles by some healers to be, in the same depth of you know, menarche, menstruation, menopause, birth, and abortion, miscarriage even, you know, just that it's that it's that really deep, really, really deep place. Ray: It is. Thomas: Yeah. Ray: Well, yeah very confrontative because it forces you to look at your life in a way of like you're at this giant fork, right? And like, what are the resources over here? What is my capacity? What does that what does that life look like? And what is the life look like on the other direction? And they’re… you can't go through it unchanged because it causes such reflection and it causes such anguish and it's so... it's very complicated. So it definitely, you know, I think it just transforms you and so for me moving out here was like, “Thank you, Little Spirit.” You know, it was all in the attempt to, well, to be able to welcome that little spirit back someday. And I don't know that I did. I don't know if my daughter is the same little spirit, but certainly there is a little spirit now too. Thomas: Wow, thank you. I’m so very grateful to Betty for giving us the low down on the anatomy of a rite of passage and for sharing with us so vulnerably. I encourage you to think back and notice if there’s anything in your past it might have been helpful to have a rite of passage for. It’s not too late! Together with a close group of friends and family, people who can take your healing seriously and honor your story, you can go back and have the transition witnessed. Betty Ray is a speaker, author, and consultant who uses design thinking to co-create meaningful rites of passage to help her clients navigate transitions. Learn more about her work at bettyray.net. If you’re a parent or work with youth, be sure to catch her talk “We Must Initiate the Young People” on YouTube. Check our show notes for links to that plus more information about Arnold Van Gennep and also Lisa Miller of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

Writer Ray Lipstein describes the melodrama of looking in the mirror.  ABOUT THE GUEST RL (Ray) Lipstein is a writer, editor, and performer who works for The New Yorker, and previously for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and the United Nations. They were elected president of Girls Nation in 2009, on a universal healthcare platform, before leaving mock politics and organized gender. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE’S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: I am so happy to have Ray Lipstein with me on a remote version of She's a Talker. Ray, thank you so much for being with me. RAY: It is my pleasure. More than my pleasure. NEIL: What is more than your pleasure? RAY: My pain, I guess. I don't know. NEIL: So you're saying it is painful to be here. RAY: Yeah. It fits somewhere between ennui and delight. It goes backwards. NEIL: There falls the shadow. So we're talking remotely, how are you doing? Whatever that means. We're talking, I think, probably two months into quarantine in New York. RAY: I am holding up well. I rearranged my bedroom last night in a feat of extreme 2:00 AM industriousness and it feels great. It's converted the bed psychologically into a day bed, the new orientation. So I'm excited for my roommate to get back who is with their partner. They're not a Gog. I'm going to send them away again. It's very big news. NEIL: Okay. When someone asks you what you do, how do you succinctly describe to them what it is? RAY: I work at The New Yorker. No further questions. NEIL: Okay. I'll accept that. RAY: No, no, no, don't accept it. Don't accept it. If someone asks me, what do I do, well, first of all, I would say, "Do you mean for a living? What do you mean? And why are you asking?" Those are all first line questions. And if push comes to shove, I say I'm a copy editor at The New Yorker. NEIL: All right. So first card is most photography is melodramatic. By definition, photography is melodramatic because it's the moment, right? It's always the moment. RAY: To preserve a moment is melodramatic. NEIL: Well, I don't know if to preserve it, to present it, to say, okay, here's this flux of life and I am going to take this one moment. Fuck preserving it. And I'm going to offer it. I'm offering you this one moment. Okay. That's the theoretical problem with it, but then I think pragmatically, photographs often look melodramatic just by virtue of something being stopped in the middle of something. So let's say you're looking at a picture from a photo album where your mother is looking into the camera and your father is looking off to the side and you're in the baby carriage holding a rattle. That is melodrama, because all that shit by virtue of being extracted from the flux of time is being given this outsized importance. RAY: It definitely seems like a bit arrogant or presumptuous. I mean, that seems like part of it, right? What you're saying that, to free. Yeah. And to present any moment, any given moment in time, it's something worthy of, as you say, isolating it out of that flux. I associate melodrama with overwrought emotionalism. NEIL: Which I think this has paradoxically by its restraint. RAY: Huh? Yeah. I mean, if you're going to say that, I mean, I have to say that all art is melodramatic then. I would say that card is melodramatic. NEIL: Oh, all the cards are melodramatic because it's by virtue of saying, look at this thought I had. It's worth your attention. It's sort of like at the beginning of the podcast, can I tell you this may be a slightly different thing, I've in the past introduced it by saying, "Hi, I'm Neil Goldberg, and this is She's A Talker. That to me seems like the height of presumption or melodrama or something, like who the fuck cares if you're Neil Goldberg and who cares if the podcast is called She's A Talker? RAY: Well, once you said that it's melodramatic in its restraint, I kind of start to feel like everything, including life, is melodramatic because then both the things that are literally melodramatic and the things that are restrained are melodramatic. And I absolutely feel that way. We're constantly looking to melodrama. NEIL: Everything. Everything is melodramatic basically. RAY: And you would only start it with most photography. How quickly were you realized? Yeah. I mean, I think for practical reasons I can offer a defense of you giving your name and the name of the podcast at the beginning, but I definitely see why it seems crazily hubristic and presumptuous and absurd, but it also feels crazily hubristic and presumptuous and absurd to look at myself in the mirror in the morning and try on multiple outfits and then go out the door thinking about how I look. I mean, it's presumptuous to have an identity. That's why you just got to strive for ego death. Everything short of ego death is melodrama. NEIL: Next card. Does the immune system ever get tired of all the conflict? RAY: This one made me giggle. I love to personify the immune system. NEIL: When you kind of personify it, does it have features? RAY: My immune system would be extremely neurotic. It would be anxious and avoidant and inefficient, over-reactive. Oh, all these sorts of things that you also might characterize me with. It would be true of him, my immune system. NEIL: Okay. Your immune system is gendered male. RAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Uses he pronouns for now, I guess. NEIL: You say that your immune system is avoidant. What does it avoid? RAY: I mean, I think of my immune system's avoidant in terms of hay fever. When allergies come, it just absolutely drops. The ball runs the opposite direction. It doesn't even put up or maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's an over, I forget exactly what is it. NEIL: If you have allergies, that means you have an overactive immune system, I believe. RAY: Yeah. I think we're going to have to scratch all this for my pride, but I mean, it may not be avoidant in a literal sense, but it's avoidant emotionally and it knows that and I know it. Just because you're tackling, you could be avoiding a real conflict by throwing yourself at the conflict in an inefficient way. There's all sorts of ways you can avoid. NEIL: Oh my God, that's the story somehow of my art career, but not about conflict, but about opportunities. NEIL: Once one has decided that the Zoom meeting is over the rush to end the call. I'm talking about pressing the button that actually ends the call, so as not to be in that zone between when the meeting is over and the call has been disconnected. RAY: Yeah. I'm so glad you named this. I relate to it strongly. And I embarrassed myself at work Slack bemoaning it happening to me with my therapist. Every time we Zoom, she beats me out of there. So I'm working on it. Because it feels, and that doesn't just feel like embarrassment. That feels like abandonment. I mean, it's therapy. Every time. NEIL: You don't want to be abandoned. RAY: You don't want to be abandoned. NEIL: That's it right? It's about abandonment. RAY: You don't want to be the schmuck alone in the room. Yeah. It feels like rejection, I suppose. But the Zoom, you have to click it and then it'll say, "Are you sure you want to leave the meeting?" So there's that second. That's where I always get held up. Everyone leaves while I'm waiting to confirm that I want to leave, but on FaceTime, they don't ask you anything. And I was talking to a good friend of mine yesterday or two days ago, and I wanted to beat her out of that call so that I didn't feel abandoned. And I tried to compensate for the popup and there was no popup. And instead I hung up on her in mid sentence and that's kind of like, that's the price you pay to make sure you're not the last one left. NEIL: That really reminds me. I was deep into magic as a kid in high school. No. Well, yes, in high school, but all the way in elementary school. And I remember I once did a magic show for the elementary school. Maybe I was in junior high and I came back to the elementary school to do a magic show. And the teacher was introducing me, but I had the feeling like, wait, she's actually not going to introduce me. She was doing kind of a roundabout introduction that I think was maybe speaking to magic broadly, and I had this profound fear that she's just going to forget to introduce me. So I just came out in the middle of her introduction and started doing my show. Let's sit with that, right? RAY: There's a lot there. NEIL: I think I do, and I suspect you do too, if someone is, well, an introduction is often praising and of course I desperately want to be praised, but I don't want to be seen needing the praise, so I try to preempt it. So if someone is saying something nice about my art, which of course I want to hear, but I'll often cut them off. This connects to a card actually that I have here, which is when people praise me, it makes me wonder what narcissistic thing they detect in me that is pulling for them to praise me. Whenever someone's praising me, I think, oh wait, they can tell I'm asking for the praise or my whole personality is structured around needing praise. RAY: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What makes you think that they can tell? NEIL: Because I feel like one is always 100% transparent. That I deeply believe. People can always tell, don't you think? RAY: I don't know. I don't know. I was in a dialectical behavioral therapy group for a bit and they have these versions of Zen koans, but they're kind of very banal phrases instead. And there's one that's like, never in the history of the universe has anyone ever read another person's mind. But I took issue with that one because I mean, it really just eliminates the idea of magic from the schema. I don't want to believe it, but also it does give me some comfort because then no one, you know. I remind myself that constantly that no one can read my mind and it helps. It might help you receive compliments, because you do. We really want them. NEIL: Okay. There's the magic version of reading minds, but reading a mind is also just picking up on cues that manifest themselves. I feel like I'm a terrible liar. I just know if I'm lying to someone, unless they're just really tuned out, they can tell it. So that's not them reading my mind that they know what I'm saying is a lie. They can read it on my face. Likewise, if I'm feeling greedy for a compliment, I just think that manifests itself. RAY: Maybe you have very expressive body language. NEIL: This card says, how animals hide their pain, but what about a hypochondriacal animal? RAY: Do you have an animal that is hypochondriacal? NEIL: No, I had known lots of people and people are animals, but no, the closest I could come up with are those birds that as a strategy to protect their nests, they fly away from the nest and pretend they have a broken wing to attract the predator to them and then they fly away. Is that hypochondria or is that, well, it's a strategy and maybe hypochondria is a strategy. And it draws attention, which hypochondria does. RAY: That's interesting. NEIL: That's the closest I can get to a hypochondriacal animal. RAY: There is a dog in this 19 whatever vet book about an English veterinarian who lives in the countryside. NEIL: All Creatures Great and Small? RAY: All Creatures Great and Small. NEIL: Oh my God. That was, I think, the first book I ever read. RAY: No shit. Yeah. Really? NEIL: Oh, I was obsessed with it. James Harriot. James Harriot, right? RAY: Yeah. Totally. So right. James Harriot goes, he's this country doctor and he has to earn the respect of his eccentric boss and join the practice. He's seeing a Pekingese, I think, who is owned, I forget what the Pekingese's name is. I'm trying to find the, oh, I opened to it. Amazing. Ms. Pumphrey. Oh, yeah. Tricky, the Pekingese and Tricky needs, I don't know whether it's Tricky who is the hypochondriac or Mrs. Pumphrey, but he needs to squeeze Tricky's anal glands every so often. NEIL: Oh, I remember this vaguely. RAY: Tricky gets uncomfortable. Yeah. Iconic. I mean, definitely an iconic one. And then the story is really about how Mrs. Pumphrey anthropomorphizes Tricky and how James Harriot has to make sure to thank Tricky and not Mrs. Pumphrey for the cigars and the sherry or whatever he gets at Christmas because the gift is from the dog, but the dog, he doesn't really even seem to need the anal glands being squeezed. So actually I think it's still the owner who's hypochondriacal unfortunately at the end of this whole story. NEIL: You're right. It's like Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy. God, lots of memories from that book. And I worked summers in high school at veterinarian's offices, because I wanted to be a veterinarian for a long time. An animal lover. RAY: Was it because of the books? NEIL: I think the books were because of that. I was just obsessed with animals from an early age, but one thing that will turn you off to being a veterinarian is working for veterinarians. I think for me, it was just seeing a lot of animals suffering. I just couldn't deal with it. But I saw a lot of anal glands being expressed. Did you say express? RAY: I didn't. NEIL: Because that's what it's called. You express the anal glands. RAY: I love that more than anything I've heard all day. That is. Tell me if this is true, because if so, it's tragic. Must anal glands always be expressed by another or can they express themselves? NEIL: I don't have the answer to that question. I got to believe that they can be expressed themselves, unless that was some real clever form of domestication that happened. It's like maybe that's why dogs domesticated themselves, to get their anal glands expressed. RAY: They lost the ability to express. Yeah. Well, let's just hope they don't take up photography. NEIL: People who go through a stage where they don't smile for photos should just skip that phase. I went through that phase, I should say. RAY: Let them just skip it. Let them skip it. They don't need it. NEIL: And there are some people who are stuck in that phase. But you're right. You don't need it, but is there any photograph that's better by virtue of the fact that the person's not smiling? RAY: Loads, millions, all of the ones. I think so. It introduces this kind of amazing mystery to all the photos before the convention of smiling in photographs. There's a photograph in my parents' basement of a great aunt of ours. And there're just all these incredibly pale looking Latvian girls in dark robes and they all look, they're so serious, but you know that they're school girls and someone's got gum in someone's hair and eight of them have crushes on each other. What's happening? And you can't tell. There's this sort of unaccountable distance that the imagination has to bridge between what these faces might look like if their personalities could have come through if they'd had more choice, I suppose, in how to form their expressions. RAY: I guess what I advocate for is choice ultimately. There shouldn't be a mandate to smile. If you think you have a crappy smile and it makes your face look funny, as I kind of feel about my face, then you shouldn't have to smile. You choose the expression most appropriate in the moment. NEIL: I like that. RAY: And that's the only way to really keep it from being a melodramatic photograph, I think. NEIL: I think smiling in a photograph is a way to acknowledge the melodrama. How's that? I think not smiling supports the melodrama. RAY: Yeah. Smiling fights it. I agree, because then it's a farce if you're smiling. NEIL: You're acknowledging. You're acknowledging it. RAY: Yeah. I'll just say if you take away the coy avoidant pout from me for a photograph, you'd be depriving me of one of my few remaining crutches, so I hope you come around. NEIL: I do know that pout. I know that pout. I like it. I love it. I also love your smile though, because I feel like your smile is a hard one smile. RAY: Interesting. It's about a great battle. That does recall, yeah, I was going to say something earlier when you were talking on the card, the card on people praising you because it makes you wonder what narcissistic thing you did they detect. I mean, please don't include this. But there was in high school, they called this face I made the a hundred face, which was when I got back an a hundred on a quiz or a test and it would be this evil, a rapid flicker between a smile and a frown and a frown that was exaggeratedly. It's a horrific, horrific bastardization of what a facial expression should be. Just a constantly moving war to prevent a smirk, a smirk for getting at a hundred on a quiz or a test, or just to hide the joy or to hide whatever the self satisfaction. And whenever it came, I was so conscious of what my face looked like to others, that they gave it a name. NEIL: The hundred face, but can we just completely put a button on this by saying, you say there's no such thing as mind reading, you were trying to kind of jam the signal of people's ability to read your mind as expressed by your facial expression. This speaks to the truth that people can read your mind, or at least you fear people read your mind. I have to include this. You prefaced by saying not include it. I just feel like I would violate, even though this isn't journalism, I would violate journalistic ethics to include that. RAY: Oh my God. Only if your credibility as a journalist is on the line. If those are the stakes, then I will see. NEIL: Oh my God. RAY: And maybe my friend, Lizzie, will hear her famous phrase. NEIL: Oh, I love Lizzie for naming that. You know what the hundred phase reminds me of by the way, although I think it's actually totally different, but it's this thing I do where I'm saying something and I'm about to use a fancy word. And by the way, I'm using that word not to show off, I think, but because it feels like the right word, but I don't want to be seen as trying to show off. So there's this little stumble or pause or something I do before I say the word that actually I think it then draws attention to the word or to me. I don't know. Do you have that situation? RAY: Yeah, I have that situation really bad. I don't know if I do the pause, but no matter what, the way I handle the self consciousness makes it more conspicuous. I think I just make a really shameful hand in the cookie jar kind of face and dark glances to see if anyone's noticed that I've used an unacceptable word. And I mean, I was made fun of this my whole life for using big words, I guess, was the common accusation. And like, "Why do you have to talk like that?" All sorts. And they're absolutely right. There was no reason to talk like that. I mean, it's just I was getting vocab words in my lunchbox every day from my mom from a book and there's only so much you can do with that much input and had to use it, use it or lose it. NEIL: Because your mom is a librarian, right? RAY: My mom, she works at the library. She is a library circulation. She's a clerk. NEIL: And she would slip a word into your lunchbox every day? RAY: She would casually slip a word of the day every day of the week. And then on Fridays, a vocab quiz, or maybe it was the end of the month after and I do 30 of them, I'd get quiz. NEIL: Wow. Now, would she ever slip in a vocabulary word, but forget your actual lunch? RAY: I think probably the words were what kept her remembering to make lunch. NEIL: Maybe your mom should be on She's A Talker since it's so centered around these index cards. RAY: Yeah. Well, in fairness, they were cards printed with the names of Lindt chocolates in different combinations, like milk chocolate shell with a hazelnut filling and a coconut shavings on top and numbered and then the backside was blank, and they were being reused from when my dad was a market researcher and Lindt Chocolate was his client at one point. And for our whole lives, our note cards were these focus group discarded Lindt Chocolate cards. NEIL: That's so beautiful. I hope you're saving that for whatever, for your novel, for your one person show. RAY: I think I was saving it for this. And this is where this memory will finally be discharged. NEIL: I love it a discharged memory, especially remotely. A remote discharged memory. RAY: I knew you wouldn't let me get away with saying discharge. NEIL: When this is all over, by this I mean our current who the fuck knows what over means, but what is it you're looking forward to? RAY: What am I looking forward to? One thing I miss is getting on the subway and moving through all the cars of the train in case my one true love is somewhere on the train, but not in the car that I got into and going from car to car to see if someone is there who I will meet, and none of that is possible now. NEIL: I love it. I'm sending you a huge virtual hug out to Bed Stuy from the Lower East Side. Thank you so much for being on She's A Talker. RAY: Neil, thank you so much for having me. It's been a total delight. NEIL: She's A Talker with Neil Goldberg. She's a talker with fabulous guests. She's a talker, it's better than it sounds. Yeah.  

Craig Ray, Keystone Oil Fabrication, gives a history his company's diversification in industry. From Sand Kings to Cranes to Silos, Ray discusses past pitfalls and successes in a volatile market. Ray explains the difference between “silo” and “box” in the frac sand market and what his professional opinion is. The [...]

Ray Crockett is a two-time super bowl champion and former All-Pro cornerback for the Denver Broncos. He played for over 14 years in the NFL, and since he retired in 2002, he’s been living in Dallas, working in television, and writing his first book, Bump and Run. He also happens to live across the street from Johnny Wimbrey, so when he swung by the studio a few weeks ago to crash Johnny’s livestream, he couldn’t resist sticking around to talk about the problem with getting stuck on the numbers, his lifelong struggles with depression, and how his faith and his friends always managed to pull him through. To find out more about Ray, follow him on Twitter at @SlickPickSix39 or check out his instagram at @crock39. To learn more about Johnny and to hear more episodes of Masters of Wealth, follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/JohnnyWimbrey and check out his website at johnnywimbrey.com.Show Notes & Show Quotes: ----5:20 (Johnny) - You can’t create wealth on a global scale without being able to say “hi” to the people!11:30 (Ray) - It’s okay to diminish your light, but don’t diminish your shine.29:30 (Ray) - I had business partners, I have friends, I have family members, I have people that have all looked up to me to be the “together” one, and here I am falling apart at the same time. 33:50 (Ray) - I feel that if you help enough people, money will come. 38:45 (Ray) - It is not brave to suffer in silence. 52:25 (Ray) - When you are sick, it puts you in a good place where you can serve. Ray Crockett: ---Facebook: facebook.com/ray.crockett.14Twitter: @SlickPickSix39Instagram: @crock39Johnny Wimbrey: ---Facebook: facebook.com/JohnnyWimbreyInstagram: @wimbreyTwitter: @wimbreyWebsite: johnnywimbrey.comBooks featured in this Episode:---Ray Crockett - Bump and RunJohnny Wimbrey - From The Hood To Doing Good

A history of a history of west OlympiaMusic in this episode:Frog In The Well by Lucas Gonze used with Creative Commons licensePaper Crowns by Ditrani Brothers used with permission.Sleep by Ronny Tana courtesy of 2060 recordsSwing Gitan by Ditrani Brothers used with permission.Feathersoft by Blue Dot sessions The following is a full transcript of this episode:Rob Smith: One thing I know about the last name Smith, is that it makes you hard to find. I've always seen this as a benefit, but now I'm trying to find a random Smith. Larry Smith. I've been thinking about this guy for several months now. Ever since I learned he helped write a book that's long been out of print. I found a copy of this book on eBay, bought it for $25. It's called How the West Was once a history of West Olympia.On phone: Hey, my name is Rob Smith, and I'm calling for a Larry Smith who used to be a English teacher in Olympia at Jefferson junior high school. And I have no idea if this is the right Larry Smith, but he wrote a book called With some students and I wanted to talk to him about that book that he wrote. So, if that's you, Larry, if you're the Larry Smith..Rob: Here's what I know. Larry Smith was an English teacher at Jefferson Middle School in West Olympia. In 1974, his last year teaching at that school, he assigned his eighth graders a collective writing project. How the West Was Once is the product of that assignment. On the phone: Hey, my name is Rob Smith. I'm calling for a Larry..Rob: The book is small. I'm holding it here it's about eight by five, and just under 100 pages, black and white. My copy has this blue binding material holding it together. The cover's yellowing and only slightly thicker than the books pages. It's clear it was made on a budget. And yet it's well done. Those hundred pages are full of accounts of life on Olympia's West Side, from the mid 19th to mid 20th century. It's not definitive by any means. Some of the stories read a little like legends, and there's a few cringy passages. But the book adds real personal color to the history of West Olympia, a place I learned, once known as Marshville. Ever since I got my hands on this book, I've been thinking about the people who wrote it. I wanted to talk to them. What sort of teacher takes on a project like this? A lot of what I like to do with my audio work is record stories of older people. I see it kind of like time traveling, or preservation at least, it struck me that that's exactly what this project was doing. 45 years ago, in book form.I pay for this service that I use to look people up. It's kind of amazing. You can get phone numbers, addresses, email addresses. The problem is there's a lot of false positives, old numbers, dormant email addresses. Most of the time, you're just reaching out to the wrong person all together. So I went to Jefferson Middle School, the place where this book was written over 45 years. ago, I talked to the principal. He'd never heard of the book. The one who worked there the longest, a woman at the front desk, said she must have just missed Larry Smith. She started in the late 70s. I was told to go see the librarian. She knew the book, had a personal copy herself, but didn't know what had happened to the teacher who orchestrated it. I called the district offices, talk to someone in archives. They had nothing. So I decided to go back to the book, knowing i'd have better luck finding one of the couple dozen students listed in the credits. The first page is a list of names. And at the top of the alphabetized list is Rick Aarts. AARTS. I looked him up, called him, left a message. He called me right back! Rick was great. We talked a while about the book. and what he remembered about his teacher. He said Smith left an impression Only had good things to say about him. I asked him if he knew what had happened to Mr. Smith. Rick remembered something about California. Maybe he moved there for health reasons. He couldn't remember. Rick didn't want to talk on tape, said he'd be a lousy interview. I disagreed. But he gave me another name. So I stopped bugging him.Ray Houser just turned 60 he was one of the eighth graders that put together How the West Was Once Ray Houser: I lived on Decatur Street, which was probably a block and a half from the elementary school, and maybe 8-10 blocks to the junior high. Walked to school pretty much my whole life - typically with my buddy Bruce and Rick and, you know, we built these and developed these relationships and it was back in an era where you could ride your bike anywhere you wanted and you coiuld stay out late at night and we'd go to the park and... It was a little Mayberry.Rob: Bella biagio was also a student of Larry Smith.Bella Biagio: I was considered basically, maybe the class clown. Just because I am who I am and I continued. (laughing) I just you know, I'm, you know constantly.. things make me laugh and everything's comedic to me. So sometimes that got me in trouble.Rob: Ray and Bella both remember Larry Smith as an exceptional teacher. Bella, who as an adult would be diagnosed with ADD found relief in his class.Bella: He was one of the people... if anybody, you know, you didn't think you were done. He... you know what I mean? I f you had that in your mind, that was completely eliminated when you were in his class.Ray: What was unique about Larry was, he was a younger teacher back then, and I was a younger student back then - and he really took a genuine interest in his students and knew something about his students and And genuinely cared about his his kids. Rob: I interviewed Ray and Bella separately on separate days,Bella: Even though I am who I am, and I have this personality and everything. I also am very insular and somewhat shy,Rob: But they both landed on the same word to sum up their eighth grade English teacher 45 years later.Bella: But he just, you know, he was able to like, just take you and just make you feel really safe. I think that's a very good word for him.Ray: It was safe, it was safe physically, it was safe intellectually, and it was safe emotionally.Rob: Obviously, many of their memories have faded. But this feeling of safety has stuck with them all these years. Other memories have stuck around as well.Bella: He had a very distinct smile, a very distinct nose. It's it's weird that I remember this. Like I remember some of the clothing he wore. Like he would wear shirts with the little tie maybe, sports jacket maybe, a sweater or something but he was just always so like... Look he's so cool! And just just like little, the twinkle in the eye and the smile and lanky, sort of tall guy and his wife was beautiful.Rob: Larry's beautiful wife was another clue I had. I knew her name was Nikki. I'd left about a dozen messages for people I thought might be Larry, but none of the contacts had a Nicki associated with them. Then finally, one night as I was making dinner, the phone rang. The caller ID said Smith, Larry. I answered. An old voice told me that he was indeed Larry Smith. And he really wished he was the Larry Smith I was looking for.That night in kind of a fit of desperation. I just googled something like Larry Smith, English professor, California. And as you'd expect, I got a lot of hits. But I found this one in LA, a teacher, an English professor at LA City College. I clicked on his rate my professor page - years and years of glowing reviews. I knew it was a long shot - I mean, Larry must be retired by now. But I emailed this professor and went to bed. The next morning I had a new email. I hit record on my cell phone just before opening it.Rob reading email: ...and just based on the subject line, I think I might have found him… Ha. Cool. "Rob, haha, you hit the jackpot since I’ve never had been on Facebook or MySpace. I'd assume I'd be hard to trace. After Olympia. My wife and I moved to San Jose for four years. On to Coos Bay, Oregon for 16 at a high school, with two in the middle to work in Papua New Guinea to give our three kids a true cultural experience. Paso Robles, California for six, California Youth authority prison, then down to LA area in 2000. Where I continued with high school and adjuncted at several colleges. Now I'm in my fiftieth year with no plan on retiring…. Phone message:Thank you for calling the Whittier Union High School District. Please listen closely to the following options as our menu has changed. Para Espanol oprima a nemero 8. If you are calling from a touch tone telephone and... # Wait while I transfer your call…Larry Smith:Hey, morning, Rob.Rob on phone: Hey, Larry. How you doing?Larry: Good. Great. Hey, let me go grab Patty. She had a she had an event and so she's around here somewhere. She's the one with a phone.Rob I got ahold of Larry Smith in his classroom. He recorded his end on a colleague's cell phone. Larry: Okay, we're on.Rob on phone: Okay, well, um, can you just start, Larry, by introducing yourself, and maybe where you are right now?Larry:Yeah, my name is Larry Smith. I'm a teacher. This is my 50th year. So I've been teaching starting in Olympia, Washington and now I am in Whittier, California teaching at an alternative high school, and Los Angeles City College and living in Pasadena.Rob: Larry grew up near Seattle. It's where he expected to start his teaching career after graduating from Seattle Pacific University. But he finished school during a big recession.Larry: Nobody was hiring. And so I just started going further and further south until I finally found a district that did have an opening and I found the first one in Olympia. And so I had literally never stopped in Olympia. I'd never been on the Capitol grounds. West Olympia, I had no idea what that was. So the first time I really saw where I was going to be living was for my job interview and ended up really enjoying the area, rented a house. It was on Plymouth Street, a two story house in West Olympia for $65 a month! That's how bad the house was and how the economy was in those days.Rob: Jefferson junior high, it was a junior high then not a middle school, wasn't in great shape either. Larry says./Rob: It was pretty rundown, actually, you know, there was like three trees on the whole property. In fact, I think my second year there, we did a big project where we got a bunch of trees donated and the kids planted them along the front of the school and on the side. And I believe if you drive by Jefferson today and see any fairly large trees along the front, they were planted by my eighth graders that year.Rob: I asked Larry what he did for fun. Like, did he go downtown?Larry: No, I didn't. Downtown, my goodness? No, that's where the Washington and Reeves kids hung out. And I wouldn't dare do that. No I was pretty much Westside. I mean, You know, I would eat probably three times a week at Bob's Burgers, which was right across the street from Egan's drive in, which had the worst worst ice cream in the history of humanity, which was so grainy that it would literally sand your teeth down and would go to Peterson's Food Town to buy my food. And then went to church at a little church actually was built during probably my second or third year there, Westwood Baptist Church.Rob: He still had friends and family up north. He'd visit them on the weekends.Larry: So I would jump in my Volkswagen bus, hippie mobile and drive into Seattle and then come back on Sunday for church and then, you know, kind of that was sort of the ritual but yeah it was pretty much West Olympia. Rob: Larry started teaching here in Olympia at 22. closer in age to his students than to their parents. Far from home for the first time, he just folded himself into the west side community. Larry: It was just pure fun. You know, and as a bachelor first year teacher I mean I lived right in the middle of where all my students lived and you know, my door didn't have a, my house didn't even have a lock and I would come home from school and five kids would just be hanging out in the living room and I would be invited to dinner all the time. And, I mean, it was just really a big family thing.Rob: The Bachelor days were short lived. In his third year teaching, Larry magically reconnected as he puts it, with a woman he was engaged to years before at SPU. Within three weeks, the two were married. over winter break, Nikki resigned from her teaching position in Santa Cruz.Larry: And then she moved up and shivered for a year and a half before she talked me into moving south.Rob: It was Larry Smith's last year teaching in Olympia that How the West Was once was written.Larry: I knew it was going to be my final year. I just wanted to try something really unique. And I just happened to be really blessed by an incredible group of kids and wanted to do more than just daily and weekly assignments. And so we just took on this virtually a year long project. Ray:He explained it to us and said that we're going to, we're going to write a book as a class and it's like, oh, okay, well, what does that mean?Rob: They had to decide what to write a book about.Larry: We listed all the possibilities, and I remember one of them was all the uses of ivy. But that didn't seem like a book that would really sell and might have been a parent came up with the idea that we should do a history of the local area because West Olympia is really a distinct geographical region from the rest of the city.Rob: Larry says the first topic was wild John Tourneau, a mass murdering man of the woods that one of his students had told him about. A story he'd passed off as legend. Larry: We looked it up. And sure enough, this guy was a real person who was killed in a gun battle. And so he became sort of our first story and then it just took off. Ray: Everybody in the class got assigned different, different jobs, editors, interviewers, researchers, etc. And we kinda launched into this giant project.Larry: Different kids got more involved. Some of them were involved in every single aspect. But nobody was uninvolved. It's like the entire class picked up the vibration and parents were actively involved. I would get phone calls from people just out of the blue suggesting somebody to go interview. You know, the kids didn't have cars. They were eighth graders. So, their parents would drive them out to the middle of nowhere up to the end of Cooper point or somewhere and sit in the car while the kids went in and did the interviews.Rob: This was all on top of the regular duties of eighth grade English - reading, writing vocabulary. A lot of the work on the book, like the interviews took place after school or on the weekends. Ray and Bella did some of those interviews. Ray: My role was to actually go out and meet with the elder community of West Olympia. They were so gracious and so interested and willing and eager to share their experiences and many who had lived there their entire lives. Rob: Ray remembers a couple of those interviews in particular. One was with an old man that lived near the water and mud Bay.Ray: He wasn't a curmudgeon by any means. But he talked about how the changes and the you know the bringing of new businesses had kind of altered the community feel. And then the other was just an elderly woman who like I say she had cookies and lemonade and it was just exuberant and excited and wanted to meet with us. It was a little intimidating. I was in eighth grade and I was with Larry and my buddy Rick. And we really enjoyed spending time with her and just very gracious and very interested in sharing her experiences.Bella: Oh, they just thought it was so great. I mean, they just thought it was so exciting that one, we we're writing a book and two, what it was about, because, you know, nobody was gonna ask them the history of West Olympia. And they were really excited about, I think, I think people really enjoy telling the history of where they've lived, probably all their entire life.Rob in conversation: Yeah. Some of my favorites are the personal ones like the guy that did the ark, built the ark.Bella:Yeah. Why did he built the Ark? I don't rememberRob in conversation: I think he was waiting for the second flood?Bella: Yeah, you know that really live in it up, didn't it? (laughing)Rob: Each chapter of the book is a different topic or story. There's a chapter on the different incarnations of the Fourth Avenue Bridge, The story of Harry Beechy, a hulk of a man who lost his arm working as a longshoreman. I love the story of the streetcar that used to run up Harrison Hill, and take a right on Rogers, how kids greased the tracks one year as a Halloween prank. Each account was recorded by the kids during the field interviews, some on tape, some handwritten notes. The stories were written up back in class, then edited. Larry says plenty of the work didn't make it into the book.Larry: Certain stories, we couldn't verify. And so they were eliminated. The stories that weren't as well written and we just wanted it to be a crisp, concise, only the very best. And so the story about Harry Beechy, the guy that built the ark, and the plane that crashed into St. Peter's hospital, you know, they made the cut and so we really focused on them. Bella: Here's the art guy! Here it is! Oh my god, (reading)“Bill started work on ark II in 1922 and worked on it for four or five years before he finished it” (laughing) "Bill was an average man except for one thing, he built an ark". Oh, that's great!Rob: When the writing was done, Larry's wife Nikki typed it all up. This project wasn't over yet though. Students helped collate the pages and learned how to bind the books. There was marketing. They built wooden display cases to put in shops around town.May 16 1974, the students finally had finished products to show for their work.Larry: We just sold it I think it was for $1.25, which probably today would be about $15. Of course, every kid in the class had family members who wanted to buy them and the Daily Olympian published a story about it. And that developed some interest.Rob: The book sold out in no time, 1500 copies before school was even out for summer. Summer was when Larry and Nikki packed up their house on Plymouth Street.Larry: I basically put a fairly large group of them in charge of whatever was going to happen with a book. And they authorized and supervised another printing, continued to sell, continued to meet and determine where the money would be distributed after I left the school. I mean, this group was so responsible and incredible. Rob: Larry didn't know it, but he wasn't done with this group just yet. The following year, they won an award.Larry: Yeah, it was, it was like a new author prize that was given every year for the entire state of Washington. And it was so exciting to them and I, of course didn't know about it, and this was way pre-internet and nobody had my phone number but I got a... somebody, I think I had a forwarding address probably in the personnel office. And so I got a letter from the kids confirming that it was me and once they knew it was they purchased and sent me down a round trip plane ticket from San Jose to SeaTac and back to attend the, it was a governor's reception at the Capitol, and all the kids, it was funny because there were just probably 10 other adult authors and then like 50 kids (laughing) at this thing, that were still actively involved in this book, and they all got some kind of a metal certificate. I can't even remember what. But it was great, you know, best reunion I've ever had, even though it’d only been a year to just see, see how these kids had grown and just continued to be an enthusiastic bright group.Rob: In the end, about 60 Kids helped in the production of the book. 2500 copies were printed and sold. And much of the money from the sales was donated to help local senior citizens. Bella and Ray, both tell me that they think often about this eighth grade project and their teacher, Larry Smith.Bella: He really just made this thing happen. Like we wrote a book.Rob: Bella - whose last name in the book is Sabella, by the way - Bella has made a career in the performing arts, both on stage and in the restaurant industry. She says that Larry's class, that feeling of safety, helped her out of her shell and gave her a feeling of accomplishment.Bella: You know, feeling so like important and proud that we did this, you know? And, you know, I think it's a really wonderful thing that we all had that opportunity. 'Cause I don't think a lot of people get to have that kind of opportunity. They just don't.Rob: Like Larry, Ray Houser went into public education. He's worn a lot of hats over the years. From teacher to assistant superintendent. One of his roles had him traveling the country researching effective teaching strategies. It gives him a unique perspective on Larry's approach to teaching.Rob: I gotta say, Larry was lightyears ahead of his time when it comes to effective teaching strategies. And I've, I've done a ton of research. The whole idea of relevance, real world experiences, collaboration opportunities, engagement strategies, it was, now that I look back on it, I didn't know then obviously, as an eighth grader, it was, it was pretty incredible that he had kind of discovered how to engage his students, how to ensure that their learning was, was relevant and required them to work collaboratively. That's, that's the stuff we've been focusing on for the last 10 years and we're still trying to get into most of public education, he was doing it 40 years ago.Rob: Larry was modest when I asked him if he had any secrets to great teaching.Larry: Yeah, the secret is when you teach Junior High they're, they're too clueless to really know how bad you are. And if you tell jokes and give fun assignments, they might like it. But, you know, I don't know. It's hard to tell. I mean, teaching in some ways is hardly, it's not like a job for me because, it's like the old saying that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And it's… I got a, received a card from a student in that class that I tucked away somewhere that said "Mr. Smith promise you'll never grow up". And, unfortunately, my wife says that's the case.Rob: After the self deprecation. Larry got a bit more real.Larry: But really what it boils down to, it's kind of a 50/50 thing. You have to love the material and you have to love the students. And if you love the students, you're going to make sure they learn the material and if you love the material, you're going to make sure the students you know, have access, learn to love it as much as you do. And you just can't take things too seriously. When kids are in bad moods, you can't think that they're doing it because they're angry with you, but there's probably something going on in their home and, and a lot of that whole philosophy came in my very first year teaching probably three or four months into the year, a student who was a foster girl, her name was Valerie Good, was shot and killed by her foster brother in their home. And it just shook me to the core realizing how fragile life is and how special these kids are. And that stuck in my mind forever that you know, every single kid is really valuable and full of potential. And to this day, I think, after 50 years and probably 50,000 students I don't think I've met one kid who didn't have vast potential and some of them never realized it. Some ended up in prison, some ended up dying of drug overdose, some ended up suicides. But the possibilities were always there and, and since you don't know who's going to just blossom and potentially be the next, Michael Jordan or Barack Obama or, you know, great author, you just treat all of them as if that's going to happen.Rob: These days Larry and Nicky Smith live near Los Angeles. They have three children and six grandchildren. One of the things that Larry loves about Southern California is all the different cultures. He tells me that LA City College where he works is the most culturally diverse college in the world. Another obvious difference between here and there is the weather. Larry can't seem to get enough of the warm, sunny climate after his early years in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe this is the origin of the rumor that Larry and Nikki moved to California for health reasons. Despite the weather, Olympia holds a high place in Larry's mind.Larry: Of all the schools I've taught in, the class of 1974. Jefferson Junior High is the most memorable. It was that group that, I mean, all my kids in Olympia were great, but for some reason, it's like a convergence of the planets or something. But I still can look over the names and picture every single kid in that group. Great, great memories, and I wish I had been a more experienced teacher and had done a better job academically, but I'm sure if I could find out what you're doing. I would be so proud and so impressed and so amazed, and just, you know, blessed that I got to be a part of your lives for nine months, and that was the best nine months of my life. So thank all of you for sure. From the bottom of my heart.CREDITS:Rob: Thanks to Rick Aarts for calling me back. Thank you, Larry for checking your email. And on that note, Larry says if you're a former student of his, he'd love to hear from you. His email address is Smithoverseas@hotmail.com. Thank you to Ray and Bella, for allowing a total stranger to come into your homes and talk with you. Even if it was against the better judgment of your friend, Bella.Bella: My friend's like "hey, do you know this man?" I'm like, "No". he's like, "you're letting him in the house?" I'm like, "Yeah." He goes "Do you have something that if you need to kill him..." (Laughing)Rob: You heard music today by, in order, Lucas Gonze, two pieces by Northwest band Ditrani Brothers. The psychedelic track was by local artists Ronnie Tana, courtesy of Olympia's own 2060 Records. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Ending theme music by skrill Meadow. More info and links on all these artists in the show notes and welcometoolympia.com.I first came across the out of print book How the West Was once in the bibliography of a book that's very much in print. Understanding Olympia is a really funny and (smiling) mostly accurate guide to Olympia by David Shearer Water. You can buy it at Browsers, Orca Books, or online at buyolympia.com. Ending Theme Music by Skrill Meadow. With permission I posted the chapter on the ark builder, Bill Greenwood at Welcometoolympia.com. It's under the show notes for this episode. Also, this book wasn't the only extracurricular activity that Larry Smith did with his class. They also made silent films. Ray still has one of these and he shared it with me. Honestly, it's just a bunch of teenagers goofing around on the Capitol campus, but it was 45 years ago. Check it out. Welcometoolympia.com. It'll also be in the show notes. Finally, I thought it only fair that I give Egan's a second chance on Larry's behalf. It has been 45 years. I took my five and seven year olds recently. Rob at Egan’s: Does it taste grainy at all to you?7 year old: No, it tastes like ice cream a tiny bit melted with chocolate and vanilla mixed up together good.Rob: There you have it. I'm Rob Smith.

Technology in Language Education Part I Future (with Ray Davila) - TranscriptRoss Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week we have our friend on again.Tracy: Ray.Ross: Davila.Tracy: Davila.dRay Davila: Hi, guys.Ross: Ray, you've switched jobs since last time. Do you want to tell us what you're doing now?Ray: Oh yeah! I'm currently a development editor working in product development. I look at the academic quality of lesson plans, educational books, songs, movies, and seeing how they can be implemented as materials in lesson plans.Ross: If I'm not incorrect the name of the department you work for is called Ed Tech. Is it?Ray: Yes, yes.Ross: I thought that was so interesting. An education company. That's the name for the team that makes the teaching materials.Ray: We're trying to focus a little bit more on how we can use technology in the learning process.Ross: This week we're going to try something that I don't think...I remember we've only did it once before which is to do like a two‑parter. The first half, we're going to talk about some of the advantages of technology in English language education. Then in the second part of the podcast, next episode, we'll talk about some of the disadvantages.Ray, you had a catchy name for this that you've thought of, right?Ray: Oh yeah. It's something like, technology in the classroom, fad or future in education?Ross: Well done. That's...Tracy: That's a great name.Ross: You make [inaudible: 1:46] .[laughter][music]Ross: I guess all of us use technology quite a bit. Tracy and I have worked, at least, for the last year in online teaching, mainly and used technology. What are some of the benefits you guys think of technology in education?Tracy: The first thing I would say is fascinating actually you have a lot of class recordings, and you can definitely go back and watch those lessons. Either you are doing material development, you are focusing on like a teacher training or even just the teacher themselves. They can go back and see which area really what tallies in my class and which one didn't.It's definitely big advantage for having the technology in the classroom because either really in the traditional offline classes, I think it's quite difficult for people to do that.Ross: I presume it's the same. Maybe it's also true for the students, that students might be able to use that technology. Not quite now, I'm not sure if we're on that stage yet. In future, presumably, soon have the ability to literally listen back to what you were saying in class three months ago or six months ago and compare that with what you are doing now.It seem to be very objective way of helping students visualize or see what their progress has been.Ray: Using or having those recordings are also a great opportunity for us to take a step back and look at things that we would never have realized it could be a potential issue in our teaching or in just the students learning and just having that as a tool to reflect on. Or even I think that for teachers of young learners, it's also something they can use when they're sitting down with the parents.Tracy: I also wanted to mention something, at least in China, I think a lot of public schools from what I heard, like my university classmates and they're teaching in public school how they assign homework. They don't really use the way that when we were in school anymore. I think they also having like an app.You can log in, then you can see the homework, you can do that, and you can submit it. The teacher can check your homework or provide you the answers or suggested answers to compare with. Everything will be tracked in the app or maybe some other programs.I think that's a massive change because when I was a teacher in public school, you really have to check every single student's homework book. I needed to take them back home sometimes, and it's really heavy, but now...[laughter]Tracy: ...it's really light, you just need a phone or you need a pad, and you can just do all of this work.Ross: I think here we're getting into the idea as well of personalizing things very easily that if you have technology you can personalize things a little more easily for your students. That you could give, for example, quite easily every student individual homework, individual exercises. You can have algorithms to make sure that you figure out where people are struggling, and what they're advantages and disadvantages are.I think really it has that opportunity to individualize learning and get everything just to the right level where you're helping everyone learn because I think ultimately that's one of the most important things in education, is figuring out where your students are, and then teaching them accordingly. I think technology can help with both sides of that equation.Tracy: Yeah.Ray: Personalization, is a huge thing. You were mentioning one of the main things with algorithms. How you can, example, giving a test or giving homework, and then that can for you, instead of the teacher doing it, it can assess what a student is having difficulty with.Then from there, it could suggest other alternatives, more activities for them to do in a particular grammar points or them being able to do this.I think that one of the things about how this benefits education is that, yes, we have personalization, but then at the same time we have a lack at the moment of educational professionals currently at the disposal of helping students to get to where they need to be.Maybe either because there's just a lack of resources, there are not as many instructors as there were before. Also, there are not as many instructors with as much experience or as much passion as there were before. I think that now, we're turning toward technology where it's picking up the slack. I think that we, on the human end, we've fallen a little bit short.Ross: Not just that. Also, it can help you get resources to places where those resources are lacking. For example, if you're in a highly developed western country it is easy to get access to probably a good education. If you're not, then it's more difficult. It really depends on where you are in the world.Technology, I think, at least, all online classes and things you can now have probably a class with just about a teacher anywhere in the world, that's one thing. The other thing that it does is there's so much access to...If we're talking about English, English now, like any students can go on to YouTube or to read newspapers or whatever.I remember even as a new teacher back in 2006, how difficult it was just to get a newspaper clipping or something and photocopy that for your students, but just think now there's so much English out there.[music]Tracy: Recent years we're talking about 21st century skills. I think technology is great platform to provide people these chances to explore the culture differences and that also the soft skills is not just about critical thinking, but also being more tolerant, to understand other people, beliefs, religion.That's a great way actually to make sure our students or people, they have the opportunity to have a chance to open their mind.Ross: I definitely feel that about online classes. It's amazing that you can pull a lot of people in America, Britain, wherever, they actually know people in China, right? When they see China in the news, whatever, they're not just immediately thinking something negative about it. They have some understanding and some relationship with some students here.It's the same for children here with teachers abroad and obviously, that cause across in a hundred different countries to probably hundreds of thousands of different people that there's all this extra understanding. In this current era that we're in of nationalism, it's developed maybe over the last decade or so but that's a really wonderful thing.Ray: I think that's just it. That language learning, big language learning classroom, is not just about communication. It's about also cultural awareness. We can have a platform where a student in one country, in South America being in the same classroom virtually with a student from Asia. It's part of that age of globalization.Tracy: We've been talking about this in this podcast for a film, and it's ready, but I still think not really many people, for example, like the parents, they are aware of this. It's not just a way for your kid to learn a language is just like...Yeah, changing their mindset, their beliefs and also how they view the world, view people.These are a lot of soft skills where it's quite difficult to evaluate from the parents who are maybe these teachers or schools. It's very difficult for them to evaluate, to see the result because that's the long‑term goal or long‑term results.I also think that technology for teaching lately, the massive topic is about AI or AR. Having an AI teacher, there are a lot of debate and discussion about it. Do you think that AI teachers is going to replace a real teacher? There's something really interesting about AI because they definitely can track or catch the student's behavior sometimes.I remember I went to a conference, and they were actually showing on the screen there were maybe 40 students, and each student, AI technology can catch everyone's facial expression, and it also gives a report about the student's talk time in this class. It probably can help you see the student interaction.Also, I don't know, based on the temperature or something, and see how much they are mentally evolving in this learning process. These things are so difficult to see from the surface level and just judging from how they look like. I think that AI, all this technology they can help us to analyze this.Ray: It's funny that you've mentioned AR. I recently came back from Macau where I participated in a little VR thing.[laughter]Ray: I don't even know what to call it. Pretty much we have these harnesses on with headphones, helmet with goggles and stuff. We were put into a room. That was not very big. It was very, very bare. There was nothing in it. It was just like a concrete floor, concert wall. There was nothing inside except for a handful of us. There were like eight of us.Then we were told to put on our goggles, put on our headphones, and then we have like this gun. Out of nowhere, we were in an entirely new world. We had to walk around in this world. We were walking around, we had to shoot robots, and things like that.I just remember my heart pounding when we were doing certain things like having to cross this crosswalk which obviously your brain knows that we know that we're in a concrete room. For some reason, my mind was playing tricks with me. Out of nowhere, I was refusing to go over this crosswalk because I was looking down, it was stories up and my actual legs were shaking.It's this amazing...It was the first time I ever realized that our minds can have such an impact on the way our body reacts, the way that we think in general. Most people know what VR is but AR, I don't know if many people are quite familiar with AR.Ross: Can we pause you there for a second?Ray: Oh sorry, yes.Ross: That's an amazing story. This is huge potential there, isn't there? In a class of like, "Yeah, you pretend to be the shopkeeper. You pretend to be this person." Stick on your goggles. No, let's pretend we're in a restaurant. It's like boom! You're in a restaurant or something much more interesting than being in a restaurant.Tracy: One of my favorite activity actually using the AR technology it's quite similar to the selfie app. The students, they can really try to be another character. Like if now I'm just having a conversation asking for directions in a foreign country, and then they probably can change how they look. Now, I try to be an old person, and that's how they look.Also, on the flight, I try to be the passenger, and the flight attendant having a conversation. It's just so interesting. You can see their face it's actually replacing on the screen. The student's face is actually there. They can feel they're in that context.Ross: You think about how much of language learning is role plays and pretending to be people in certain situations? Obviously, the more I think we do in general in class to help students understand those situation through setting context, moving the seats around, and bringing in props, the better. Obviously, what we're talking about just takes that to another level entirely.[music]Ross: Tune in again next time, and we will talk about the disadvantages of technology.Tracy: Thank you for listening.Ross: Thanks, Ray. We'll see you next week.[laughter]Tracy: See you soon.Ray: See you, guys.Tracy: Bye.

Debbi Mack interviews crime fiction author Ray Flynt. The transcript is below, if you'd like to read it. Or download the PDF copy and read it later. Debbi: Hi everyone. This is the Crime Cafe. Your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I'm your host, Debbi Mack. Before I introduce my guest, a quick reminder that the Crime Cafe Nine Book Set and Crime Cafe Short Story Anthology, are available for sale at all major online retailers and some minor ones too. In any event, just go to my website, debbimack.com and click on Crime Cafe, where you'll find the buy links as well as ways to subscribe to the podcast. And with that said, I'm thrilled to have on my program today, one of my old writers' group buddies, and a great mystery author as well as a master thespian, Ray Flynt. Hi Ray, I'm very glad to have you on today. It's awesome and thanks for being here. Ray: Well it's great to be with you and we do have a history, even though you're barely out of college and I'm 39 again. We do go back a few years. Debbi: Oh, please! Ray: I have fond memories of that writers group in Maryland for many, many years. Debbi: We miss you. Ray: It really kind of crystalized my writing, that group. Debbi: It's a great group and I'm glad to be a part of it and we miss you and think of you often (at least I do). Your first mystery, I remember reading parts of that I believe. Ray: Absolutely. Debbi: Unforgiving Shadows Ray: Unforgiving Shadows Debbi: Yes. It kind of seems to set up Brad Frame's backstory for kind of like the whole series that carries him through the whole series in a sense. Was that intentional? Ray: Yes, although it was not the first Brad Frame story that I wrote. Debbi: Ah, Okay. Ray: The first one that I wrote was entitled, Grateful Husband Loving Wife and it was not good, plain and simple. However, I thought when I finished it, it was a masterpiece you know. First of all, it was only about 40,000 words. It was not…I mean some might debate whether I'm a good writer now, but I was not a good writer back then and I rediscovered my manuscript for that book about 10 years after I'd written it and I started to read it and I thought, oh my god, this is just absolutely awful! Debbi: [laughs] Ray: So I know I've improved from then. So that was the first book and it really was I think unconnected character that I wanted to make Brad. One of the issues that (in my life) I wanted to infuse Brad Frame with was to create an investigator whose life had been informed by tragedy and that kind of shot him off into a different trajectory then he had been. In my own life, when I was in my mid 30's, I had a younger brother (age 22) that died. And it was certainly a tragic event for our family. It was something that we were all dealing with; trying to come to grips with, did a lot of reading, etc. The second book that I wrote with Brad Frame as the lead character, was a book that later got published called, Lady on the Edge, and in that book it features a South Carolina ceramic artist whose son's death had been ruled a suicide four years earlier. Brad Frame was in town and she reached out to him saying she didn't believe that her son would commit suicide. As a mystery writer, it has to be a murder mystery and, in fact, that's the case. But that book gave me the opportunity to explore suicide on families. Debbi: [agrees] Ray: So that was basically the second manuscript that I wrote…a book which was originally titled Death Scenes, and that is what became Unforgiving Shadows. …for me a little of the story…I think this is informative for writers. Some of my favorite authors growing up were like Reck Stout. So he had the Watson character that basically told his stories, you know. Debbi: [agrees] Ray: So originally I started off with the idea that Brad Frame, this wealthy member of the mainline in Philadelphia had hired a publicist to tell his stories and that cha...

Ray Buchanan: A vision to end world hunger  In 1998, envisioning a world without hunger, Ray Buchanan — a United Methodist minister — founded Rise Against Hunger (formerly Stop Hunger Now). After enlisting as a U.S. Marine during the Vietnam War, Ray Buchanan quickly recognized that accomplishing a mission required “commitment to something larger than yourself.” Over the past three decades, that principle has driven Ray's mission to eradicate world hunger. As a divinity graduate student at Duke University, Ray began working with the poor and hungry. He continued that work at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he received his master's degree in divinity, and as a pastor at ve rural United Methodist churches in Virginia. As a pastor, Ray joined the effort to save the lives of starving Ethiopians during the 1973-75 famine in Ethiopia. Driving Ray's hunger work is the recognition that “ending hunger is more than just feeding people.” So Rise Against Hunger “focuses its feeding programs in areas where we can see transformational development,” he says. Ray embodies the ideal of a servant leader. And he understands that volunteers and organizations working together can build a global movement that will stimulate the political will to marshal the resources that are essential — and available — to eradicate hunger. Rise Against Hunger has realized positive, annual growth mainly through expansion of the meal packaging program into new communities. Rise Against Hunger continues to further Ray's legacy of commitment both to domestic and international crisis response including relief from famine, natural and manmade disasters and health epidemics. More information at www.riseagainsthunger.org The Interview Transcript Hugh Ballou: Greetings, this is Hugh Ballou. This episode of The Nonprofit Exchange is great, like every one of them, but this one is a new friend who is right here in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has an extensive history of founding charities and taking them not just to the next level, but taking them to the top. In some cases, over the top. Ray Buchanan: Over the top would be a good way to put it. Hugh: Ray Buchanan. We are going to talk principally about a charity you formed that you originally called Stop Hunger Now. Now it's Rise Against Hunger. I want to let you tell a little bit about yourself. You had an idea about something. How did you put it together and start this, get people on board, and get it funded? There is a lot of people with ideas, and they don't really understand the sequence and how to put it together. Tell us about Ray. Thank you for being on The Nonprofit Exchange today. Ray: Good to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. I was in the Marine Corps during Vietnam. Came out of the Marine Corps. Did all my undergraduate work in about two and a half years. I then had a mentor who saw more in me than I thought was there. He said, “Where are you going to go to get your divinity degree?” I said, “I hadn't thought about it.” He said, “You need to go to Duke.” I said, “Riiight.” I literally thought he was kidding, but he knew people who knew people and I found myself at Duke. I immediately felt like I was way out of my league. I looked at all these young people coming in the first day of class, and I said, “I don't belong here.” What happened was very interesting. I stood in the corner of the student center of the divinity school, and I saw somebody come in the door who looked as miserable as I felt. He was about my age, older than the normal incoming divinity school student. We hooked up, and he had military experience, been to Vietnam as well. We started talking, and pretty soon another older student came in. The three of us gravitated together. What happened was that first semester at Duke, we became a support group. We didn't know that's what it was, but we were all married and had at least one child. In the course of that semester, we became best friends, closer than friends, and a support group like I said. We started in January. During the summer, of course we all wanted to pastor churches. According to the Methodist church, they had no churches available in North Carolina around Duke. I had the choice, and I chose doing beach ministry in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. That sounds like a real cool gig, but we did most of our work with runaways and drug culture between one and two o'clock in the morning. I had a safe house for folks. One of our other friends served a small church in Raleigh. Ken, the first person I saw, came from Virginia. His superintendent needed pastors badly. He already had a church promised to him. He talked to his superintendent, and he said, “You have friends that might serve churches?” The process was so far along that we didn't get to visit, but he called. I learned my first lesson of humility. He asked me who I was and what I wanted, so I told him I'd been a youth minister in a larger church in North Carolina when I was in college. I had experiences as a chaplain's assistant. I really pumped myself up the way you would to a boss. He said, “I haven't been able to get up with your other friend. What kind of experience does he have?” I said, “He's a really nice guy. He doesn't really have as much experience as me, but he is really committed. He has a heart for the Lord, but he just hasn't had the experience.” The superintendent without missing a beat said, “Well, that is his subtlety. You obviously have much more experience. I'll give you the five churches, and I'll give him the four churches.” I learned real quick you don't need to do that. I started there because that is really the start of the journey we are talking about. The three of us were appointed to churches in rural Virginia, the south side of Virginia. We were right outside of South Hill. Between us we had 13 rural churches. Hugh: Oh, wow. Ray: And we were going to school fulltime, commuting an hour and a half one way. We learned really quickly about supporting one another. We learned that each one of us had gifts and graces that matched with the others. Where I was weak, my friend was strong. Where he was weak, our other friend was strong. Rather than compete, we decided we would work as a team. With those 13 churches, they were all small, struggling, had that feeling that many small Methodist churches have, that they weren't ministering. They were surviving. We decided to change that. For the four years that we were there, we made sure we worked as a cooperative parish. We weren't ever legally called that, but we had our churches go together. I remember the first thing we did is we gathered clothes for Appalachia. They had never been able to do anything as one or two churches, but as 13 churches, we filled a huge U-Haul truck. The men took it to Appalachia, and it made them feel so empowered to be able to do something. Hugh: As you're talking about that, that is a group of churches. The same thing could apply to a group of small charities. Ray: Absolutely. One of the key philosophies that I have always worked with is everything is built on partnerships. The more partners you could have involved, the stronger the program is. I'm not saying it's easier, but it really impacts more people, not only from the relief side, but also from the folks doing it. A key principle in what helps grow the organizations I have been a part of is we always seek partnerships. One example is with Rise Against Hunger, when I started, I knew nothing about international relief work. I had been doing domestic relief work for 20 years, and I've done a few things internationally. But how you work internationally is something I had to learn on the job. One thing I committed to was I was not going to start offices internationally because internationally, every place I wanted to work, there were already relief organizations on the ground. I didn't need to reinvent the wheel. I just needed to partner with the folks already there who had a better idea of what was necessary. Hugh: I won't let that one slip by. You're really understanding the synergy of collaboration. Let's do more stuff than we can do by ourselves. What year was that? Ray: I started Rise Against Hunger in January of 1998. What had happened was earlier than that, Society had a program called The Potato Project. That is the story of God's grace. Basically, Society of St. Andrew was an intentional community devoted to covenant living. What that means is in response to world hunger, we said we wanted to come together and demonstrate a lifestyle that the entire world could adopt, a just lifestyle, a fair lifestyle. We had two families that moved together onto a farm. We formed a covenant to live under the poverty level. When we started in 1979, that was about $2,000 a person. Hugh: Oh my goodness. Ray: If you put all the stuff in the world in a pile and everybody took a fair share, in 1979, it would come to about $2,000 a person. We made a covenant that we would live under that. We had nine people in our community: four adults and five kids. We said we would live under $18,000 a year. We never made it up to $18,000 a year. Basically, we lived under the poverty level out of choice, and we wanted to do that not only to identify with the poor, but also to demonstrate to the church especially that if we wanted to, we could live in a way that the entire world would be able to have a fair share. Hugh: The year you founded this organization was 1979. It was founded as Stop Hunger Now. Ray: The first organization was founded as Society of St. Andrew. I was the co-director of that from 1979-1998. In 1998, the reason I left Society of St. Andrew is because after 15 years or so, both my co-director and I were getting burned out. You start out with your hands working with the poor, shoulder to shoulder, but as the organization gets bigger and bigger, you get further away from the poor. We worked with the poor. Then we had staff that worked with the poor. Then we had managers. Then we had directors of the managers. All of a sudden, you look around and you have 70-80 employees in five or six states. You are so far you can't even see the poor. I started using my vacation time to go internationally to work in Africa and what have you so I could still get my hands dirty. Hugh: That's interesting. You get so far away from the work that is your passion. You get sucked in to the organization. There is a lesson in that, too. Ray: Absolutely. Hugh: When did you found this organization that is now Rise Against Hunger? Ray: 1998. Hugh: And it was founded as Stop Hunger Now. Ray: Yes, it was founded as Stop Hunger Now. The reason the name is important, the reason I founded it is because I did my work internationally, it hit me that although hunger in the United States is real and it's horrible and it's immoral, the richest country in the history of the world, that we have hunger doesn't make sense. The Christian church has to understand its responsibility there. As I worked internationally, there were opportunities that started to rise in doing stuff internationally. My passions fairly quickly turned to doing international work because although hunger is real in the United States, it's qualitatively different than hunger around the world. In the United States, no one dies of hunger. I challenge you to find a newspaper article that talks about the last time anyone died of hunger. They might have died of exposure or something, but it is such a rarity that it is not measurable. You go international, and after all these years, we have hunger down to 20,000 people a day. Hugh: A day. Ray: But when I started, it was like 30,000 people a day dying of hunger. There is no way to explain that. I have always wanted to have the biggest impact. So I started focusing internationally, and my partner, after you work together with somebody for 20 years, you know each other. He looked at me and said, “If you need money for that, you raise it. We don't have money for that.” At that time, Society of St. Andrew was doing $15 or 20 million worth of in-can work, and our cash budget was $1 or $1.5 million a year. We never had enough money. That is how Stop Hunger got started because I needed to raise $25,000 for a special project. I didn't have it. After my partner said, “Well, if you want it, you raise it,” which was the way we worked, I remembered that five years earlier, a donor had come to us, he and his wife. We had an office in a sheep shed. They came and sat around the table and said they wanted to help feed the hungry. His vision of hunger was a starving child with a bowl held up. At that point, my partner and I said, “We don't do that.” We didn't. We worked in the United States, using tractor trailers to haul produce to food banks on Native American reservations. We told him we really appreciate the offer, but that is not what we do. It's not a good match. But we have a friend who is chairman of the board of Food for the Hungry. We will give you his name, and you can connect. We broke the cardinal rule of you never give a donor away. We gave this donor away before we ever started working with him. Strange thing though. Every year, he would call us and say, “Do you have any special projects?” We'd say yes. He'd say, “Send me the bill.” For about $8-10,000. He would never give us a grant. He would never write us a check. But he would always give us a gift of about $10,000 by paying a certain bill. I remembered his vision. After five years, I went to our Director of Development and called him and said, “Give me this guy's name and number.” He said, “Let's meet.” I went to Virginia Beach, and we had lunch. I'll never forget. The timing was amazing. I drove from the big island, and he drove a couple of blocks and we got there at the same time. We met in the parking lot and walked into the restaurant. He said, “How are things going?” making small talk. I said, “Great. My daughter is having her first child.” He said, “Oh, you're going to be a grandfather for the first time?” The proper answer would be, “Of course I am. Yes, that's great.” I said, “No. When my son turned 21, he got a girl pregnant, so I have a grandson.” I said, Shut up, shut up, this is not the way you speak, shut up. It was like I had verbal diarrhea. We get in, and the maître d' seats us. He comes back and starts to speak. John waves his hands, saying, “No.” He leans across the table and he says, “Ray, last year was the worst year of my life. I went from being a millionaire to not being a millionaire. I got kicked out of my own organization that I started. My wife divorced me. My son had to get staggering drunk to tell me that he had gotten a young lady pregnant.” Hugh: Oh my goodness. Ray: This is before the menus get there. All that is simply to say we were on a level that you normally don't get to with a donor until you've cultivated them for years. That is how Stop Hunger Now got started to be honest. Hugh: We are recording live on Facebook. If you come by and wonder what this is, this is the Nonprofit Exchange. Every Tuesday at 2 EST, we talk with a thought leader about how they have made things happen. We are talking to Ray Buchanan about multiple charities he has founded. Ray, I have moved from using the word “nonprofit” a lot even though this is the Nonprofit Exchange. When I am in conversation, I use the word charity because we have tax-exempt charities. It's a business and a framework that has got a lot of rules and regulations for the IRS. My co-host, Russell, used to work for the IRS. He is very much up to date with how we need to comply with those. We need to have strong business principles. If you are listening to the podcast sometime in history, you can ask questions on the podcast page. We learn from other people's stories. Ray, when you are looking back and talking about starting these, Russell was just meeting with a gentleman that has got a hunger project. This is quite an amazing story, Russell, about Ray starting what was called Stop Hunger Now. Now it's called Rise Against Hunger. You had an idea. How hard was it to get it off the ground? How hard was it to get people to support it? How hard was it to get some funding? Ray: I want to say one of the first things that was my first organization, Society of St. Andrew, what made that successful is that when we started our first big project after three years, we fell into the Potato Project, which has taken unused produce otherwise thrown away, wasted. We were going to get that to the hungry across Virginia. The farmers agreed to give us the produce, but they had to get their money recouped on the extra labor, the bags, and the transportation. I could tell you a lot of funny stories about that. Long story short, they could get us potatoes that would normally be thrown away for three cents a pound, a phenomenal price. They said they could get us a million pounds of potatoes. A million pounds of potatoes at three cents a pound is $30,000. At that point, our two families were living on between $12-15,000 a year. That was all the money in the world. That first $30,000 came from the United Methodist Church seeing the vision and buying into the vision. I could talk for hours about the faithfulness in that because at that point, we were seen as a couple of hippies living on a farm. We weren't the bare-faced young guys. But they had enough faith to put the money into it. Once that project started, we had never realized that we were just scratching the surface. Farmers wanted to give us more and more produce, which required more money and more distribution areas, which required more transportation. Literally within two months, we were spending $30,000 to last us this summer, and after about a month and a half, we were out of money. It hadn't been misused, but the need was so great. We started having to raise money. The first thing we did was my partner's brother who had a business degree came to us and said, “You all need somebody to fund this.” Both of us understood that numbers are not my friends. I will be honest with you. I like letters. You can make words with letters, and words make sentences. Numbers are just numbers. We asked his brother to help us, and he graciously helped us. From day one, we ran the organization as a business. Hugh: From day one. Ray: From day one. That is one of the biggest benchmarks that I can point to as to why it worked. We didn't operate as a church. That sounds very horrible, but it's true. We operated as a business, not only in that the finances were handled to the penny. I can literally remember Friday evening at 6:00 realizing that David was still in the office. We operated in a sheep shed that previously held sheep in it. I would see the light on and say, “David, what are you doing?” “I can't get the books to balance.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “It's 27 cents. I cannot find it.” I said, “Here is a quarter.” He said, “Noooo, you don't understand.” That is the way we operated financially from day one, but we also realized that when we made a promise, it was a commitment. Unlike a lot of charities, church organizations, nonprofits, it was like, We will not get to it if we can when we can. If we said we were going to do something, we did it. The operating as a business is a key principle that every nonprofit ought to operate by. Hugh: Hey Russell, we teach this stuff. It works. How about that? Russell: The sweet spot is where fun and compliance and compassion come together. That's what I call the sweet spot. 27 cents by the way is not material if you have more than five dollars. Ray: I understand that. But the principle is the same. Russell: The principle is the same. It's like operating a business without losing who you are. If you have a mission and the mission is spiritual, you don't have to lose that. There is a point in there where money and spirituality mix. It's just understanding both the critical components to what you're doing so that you don't leave either out to the exclusion. They are not mutually exclusive in other words. Ray: Absolutely. To jump forward, when I started Stop Hunger Now, basically I met with this donor. I was asking him for $25,000. He had been giving us $10,000 a year for five years. When I got to the point where he said, “What do you really want?” and I told him I needed $25,000 to move three containers of food to North Korea and Africa, he said, “Fine, I'll write you a check Monday.” Any time you can take a donor from $10,000 to $25,0000, you know that is a home run. I was just going internally like Yes! I couldn't wait to go home and work out the logistics. He lookrd across the table and said, “Tell me, you said you were burned out and were thinking about leaving the organization a couple years earlier. What is it that you really want?” Not trying to be flip, but I said, “I want to feed more hungry people.” He is not the kind of man who accepts an answer like that. He said, “I asked you a serious question. Give me a serious answer.” I had to take a deep breath. I answered him, “What I'd really like to do is go to crisis areas around the world, find out what the real need is, come home, and cut through all the red tape and BS and get that need met as fast as possible.” He leaned across the table and said, “That's exactly my dream, with one exception.” I said, “What is that?” He said, “I'd want you to take the checkbook with you.” We finished the meeting. As we are getting in our cars, he looked at me and said, “Let's see if we can't make our dreams come true.” Two days later, he called and said, “How soon can the head of my foundation and I meet with you and your partner in Big Island?” Two days after that, four days after our original meeting, they were in our office. Both my partner and I knew what he wanted: to set up an international relief hunger organization. My partner and our wives and I have nonstop been figuring out how to make it work. At that point, Society of St. Andrew had an 18-year track record. We were known throughout the United Methodist Church, working in all 48 contiguous states, constantly went up to the Hill to give testimony on hunger and gleaning. I was on the House Select committee and a bunch of stuff like that. We said, “Oh, good, we are going to have a domestic arm and an international arm.” We presented that to him as what we were going to do. He looked at us and crossed his arms and said, “Nope, I'm not interested.” We were crushed. We thought we had this perfect plan. He said, “Look, you are a domestic hunger organization. Your board is always going to fight over who gets the money. Here is what I'll do. I'll give you a quarter of a million dollars a year for two years. Three conditions. 1) You set up a new organization. 2) You set up a completely separate board of directors. 3) You are the director,” pointing at me. Hugh: Oh. Ray: Now, what do you do when you're 50 years old and somebody looks at you and says, “I will make your dreams come true?” Hugh: Oh my. Ray: That is so exciting. But if you look at the flip side of it, we had an organization that we had started as two families living under the poverty level and was now at the pinnacle of our ministry. Like I said, we are at Capitol Hill every month. Our senator's wife was on our board. It was a horse you could ride until you wanted to get off. It was only going to get bigger and better. You leave that to start over basically. You leave that. The four adults that founded this society prayed together and cried together and discussed for two to three days. We came to the conclusion that if we didn't take his offer, that money was not going to be there. To get to a place where we could do the international ministry that we wanted would take us a couple of years to raise another quarter of a million dollars because we had maxed out our fundraising capacity at that point. We knew that it would take us a year or two to ramp up if we could. We thought we would take his offer because we could do more good faster by doing that than any other way we could. I left Society of St. Andrew at that point to take over and start a new organization. That is how Stop Hunger Now got started. I started January 1, 1998 with a guaranteed $2,500. Show you how simple I am. I had two goals for 1998 for Stop Hunger Now. I wanted to do at least a half a million dollars' worth of ministry. I wanted to double his gift of $250,000. Secondly, I wanted to be in five or six countries. I didn't want to be a single country nonprofit. At the end of the first year, we were audited, and the audit showed that we had done $2.9 million worth of aid in 18 countries. That was the start of Stop Hunger Now. The name is very significant because Society of St. Andrew, my first organization, was named for the disciple Andrew. He was always introducing others to Jesus one at a time, “Here is my friend.” We like that kind of evangelism. More importantly, he was the disciple that knew about the boy with the loaves and fishes when Jesus fed the 5,000. Very significant spiritually. As we grew, we had focus groups and consultants come in. The first thing every group said, “That is the most horrible name you could have picked. There is no worse name.” Society of St. Andrew: Is that a Presbyterian program? Is it a Catholic program? Is it an Episcopal program? Is it a golfing group? It says nothing about what you do. I learned that. When I started my own organization, Stop Hunger Now, our mission and our ministry were identical. Nobody ever asked what do you do. Hugh: Why the change from Stop Hunger Now to Rise Against Hunger? Ray: We rebranded this year because as we grew, we realized that Sodexo has their foundation called Stop Hunger. Dozens of times, we tried to work with them to get the trademark Stop Hunger Now, and their lawyer said it's too close. For 12 years or 15 years, we worked side by side, no problems, but as our program expanded internationally and we started doing more programs outside the U.S., we bumped up against Sodexo in England, where they didn't want our brand in England for some reason. Our board looked at it and realized we had to get a trademark name. As we started looking at marks, we couldn't even get the mark that we had. We had to start from scratch to rebrand. Hugh: It's really good to have that clarity. Your brand tells people what you do. If there is confusion, people don't want to help you. Russell, I know your brain is going with this funding thing. Russell teaches charities how to attract funding. He is one of our WayFinders in SynerVision. We are talking about Ray joining the WayFinder team. I didn't tell him about the initiation process. Ray: I don't have a lot of hair to shave. Russell: There is full heads of hair, and there is perfect ones like this. Ray: That's right. Russell: You don't need to dress this up. Ray: I hear ya. I hear ya. Hugh: Russell, did you come from- You got this striped shirt on. Did you come from a ball game where you are refereeing, or were you on the work cam for the prison? Russell: Rocks from Little Rocks all morning long. Hugh: Russell, you are listening to this story like I am. I am thinking like this is a fairytale story. How do these people come along? This is one of our colleagues in Denver. You are real popular. Russell: I am just a party waiting to happen here. Hugh: I know. As you are listening to his story, how many charities have we worked with over the years that really struggled to get somebody to believe in them to help them get some funding? There must be something that worked with your tenacity, your language, or something. Russell, what are you hearing? What question do you have for Ray about this early stage and the funding piece together and then getting the right team? Russell: That is a perfect illustration of what we talk about when we talk about why you are doing what it is that you're doing. Or do you want to get out of it? That is a perfect illustration of how important that is because that is exactly what happened to Ray. When somebody brings that horse to you and says, “Here is the gift horse. You don't quibble over what you call it. You just say thank you and move on.” There is a lot of fear involved with that. But you took the bull by the horns and went on and did what it was that you thought you needed to do. Focus on the fact that the mission is important. This is big. This is something that is bigger than me. I have to go here and do this. Here it is. Face that fear and go ahead and do it anyway. Talk with people and find out what is important to them. You were able to speak their language, and that is why they partnered with you. When you talk to people, it's important to use language that is important to them and that they value and move from that standpoint. Let's talk about that a little bit, Ray. I'm sure there were some doubts or some voices come up. We have our critics. We have our itty bitty committee, and I throw something a little extra in. This is PG-13. I will not throw the extra word in there. Itty bitty committee that comes calling when you go to brass that dream and you go to take it a step further. Talk about how you handle some of those conversations that were going on in your head and push through them to reach for the bigger goal. Ray: It's interesting that you say that because I tell friends that Stop Hunger Now started in January 1998. We knew about it from the end of August. That was when the donor made the decision to move forward. September through March, that six-month period, was probably the period where I was most frightened in my whole life because I had always worked with a partner, worked as a team ministry. We had gotten very successful with what we were doing. We fulfilled all our commitments and were just growing. I was getting ready to leap out into an area I basically knew nothing about with no support network behind me. I was so frightened, but I realized after I did it, I was thinking it was like leaping across the Grand Canyon. Actually, it was just like stepping off a curb. It was just a change. It was nothing great. What helped me was what I'd learned with my first organization: People honor results. The people allowed us to do the Potato Project because they had seen us living for three years according to a basic lifestyle of justice. Being just and living that out gave us a platform to do the domestic hunger. Doing the domestic hunger piece for 18 years said that yes, we can fulfill what we promised. When I started Stop Hunger Now, that first year, we were able to make some huge accomplishments again through the grace of God. But for example, my first trip in January of 1998, I went to Nicaragua, Honduras, and Haiti because those are the three poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. During those trips, I made partnerships and started putting the protocols in place to help some organizations. All of a sudden, in August of that year, we had Hurricane Mitch, one of the biggest hurricanes that hit Central America. Because I had worked with these folks and I had the protocols in place, I was able to get them funds that allowed them to be the first organizations in Honduras for example to actually make a difference for the hungry. When people see that you're actually making a difference, they want to be a part of that. People are hungry to help. The biggest difficulty that I've seen is they don't know how. If you can demonstrate that your organization really makes a difference, you will not have difficulty finding funding most of the time. Hugh: If you go out there and knock on doors. Ray: If you go out there and knock on doors to start with. It's always the case that when you need money the most, it's the hardest to get. When you get to a place where you have grown the organization where money is not that difficult to come by, it flows in. That has always been my understanding. I will say that in the early days, my first organization, Society of St. Andrew, when we started the Potato Project and started spending money, it was $1,000 a month, then it was $1,000 a week. We literally had the capacity to spend ourselves out of existence in any two-day period that we decided to move enough produce. Went to D.C. and talked with a lady at a project where we were helping. We were getting potatoes for her. She said, “I know a man that might want to help you. Let me give you his phone number. He likes organizations like yours, so he will probably give you $1,000.” And $1,000 was wonderful for us. I called the number. It was a business number. He never had come in by 11:00, and he always left by 1:00. Literally for over a week, I couldn't get up with him. I finally asked the administrative person, “I'm sorry, but I really need to talk to this gentleman. Is there any way I can get ahold of him?” She said, “Let me give you his home phone.” I called his home phone for a week and never got up with him. We were panicked, and the need for money was so great we were at a loss. I called the secretary back and she said, “Oh, I gave you his bedroom number. Let me give you his den number.” The first time I called this young man, and he was a young man, he answered. I told him who I was and what we were doing. He said, “Oh man, that is so cool. I like that. Could you use $10,000?” I was hoping for $1,000. I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Let me talk to my dad, and we will put it through the foundation. We will give you $10,000.” With just a letter, I sent him a letter request. He gave us $10,000. Then they gave us another $10,000, and another $10,000. That was $30,000 over the course of two months with never meeting him, just a letter. I kept trying to meet him to take him to lunch and get to know him and cultivate him. He said, “Man, I don't do the lunch thing.” I said, “Fine.” One time I knew I was going to be in D.C, and I told him, “I would love to come see you.” He said, “Come up to the house, and we'll talk.” I came up to the house, and this was a young guy who had been involved in the drug culture. It had affected him quite a bit. He had a huge mudbog truck taller than I was. We spent about four hours together just getting to know each other. He fixed us ham sandwiches in the kitchen. Just a really nice young man who is really trying to find himself. I mean, he had a good heart and never talked about money the whole time. As I was getting ready to leave, he reached into his back pocket and gave me an envelope. “We have been giving you money from the foundation. This is from my personal account. I am sorry it isn't more than it is, but I've been burning through the money a lot faster than I thought. My accountant said he was surprised I had any left in the account at all. This is all I can do. I believe in what you're doing.” Well, I thanked him profusely of course and put the money in the car. I got in the car and drove out to the edge of the driveway. It is a long driveway outside of D.C. I couldn't stand it. I wasn't going to go on the road home until I looked in the envelope and saw a check for $43,500 from his personal account. The reason that is significant is that $43,000 got us through the next three weeks at which time the United Methodist Committee on Relief gave us a grant for $100,000. You just never know how you cultivate donors. I want to say if you're faithful in doing what your passion calls you to do and you communicate that openly to your donors, they will respond. Hugh: That is a big “and.” A lot of people don't connect those dotted lines, do they, Russ? Russell: That's that fourth piece of the four steps to building a high-performance nonprofit is communicating that value that you bring. The language is a little different for different people, but it's about relationships. You communicate that. That is very important. It's critical. It's actually being able to go out there, understanding what your core is, and communicating those values. They may not be for everybody, but you go out there and you do it and you make those critical connections. That's what it's all about. It's about relationships. I was just thinking because that is an example of one donor, but you have different people who volunteer, different people come to work. What are some of the things when people say, “Why do you work with Rise Against Hunger?” What are some of the reasons that people will give? When you understand that, you can communicate that. I am going to put that question to you, Ray, because you have all these relationships you have built, whether it's a staff member or a volunteer. What are some of the things people are saying when the question, “Why do you work with Rise Against Hunger?” comes up? Ray: We get the same answer all the time. We engage about a quarter of a million to 350,000 volunteers a year now. We engage them to a meal packaging program that allows- It's an inter-generational program that lasts two hours where volunteers package high-protein dehydrated meals for school feeding programs internationally. It is a beautiful entrance into making a difference on hunger. We get the same responses every time we ask people. We don't usually have to ask them. First of all, they say it's so much fun. We can make a difference. We are having an impact. They can see the connection between their hands and their heart. It's one thing to write a check and for some people that's exactly what they need. More and more people in the millennial generation want to be physically involved in what they are committing themselves to. Giving volunteers a chance to be involved makes all the difference in the world. The same thing is true for boards. I am passionate about growing boards because a high-powered, high-impact board really empowers an organization to reach the next level. It's the same for every level of volunteering. Giving people a chance to make a difference where they can see it and feel it makes all the difference in the world. People come back time and time again to our events because not only are they interacting with other people and having a good time, but they also know when they put those meals in the box, the next time that box is opened, it will be at a school somewhere where the kids would not be able to come to school without those meals. They know they are transforming lives. That is so important. Hugh: You sort of understanding the fun part of that. My church in Blacksburg did this. In two hours, how many pounds of food do we package? Ray: You probably package 10,000 meals. Hugh: 10,000 meals we packaged in two hours. They have an area director that comes in and tells people all the resources there, the boxes, the gloves. It is a very sanitary process. It's like an energy field where we are doing stuff, and it's like a church social event. It's like games. Like games for families at church. This is far better. We are doing something worthwhile. It is really an energized process where people package. They tell us exactly what is going to happen to it. We put it in those boxes. We take it out, it goes into a truck. Whoosh. It's gone. I was very impressed with the organization. It's like turnkey, boom. Ray: That is part of the secret. The turnkey part of it. The thing is, the more people you have involved in this process, the more fun it becomes. We have done events. One of my favorite events was done in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We had one university with four campuses. They packaged a million meals in seven hours using 4,000 students in four locations. It was just awesome. It was electric. We do million meal events all the time. One of the most exciting events I have done recently was February a year ago when Kraft Heinz merged. They brought all their senior leaders from around the world together for their first gathering. They asked Rise Against Hunger to come and do a team building event by packaging meals. They wanted to package a tractor trailer load of meals, 285,000 meals. They wanted to do it in two hours. They had roughly 900-1,000 employees from around the world. Not employees, leaders. These are senior leaders. They came, and this was to merge the Kraft people and the Heinz people together. They had such a blast. The CEO of Kraft-Heinz was in there among them going from table to table, talking about what they were accomplishing. They are one of our biggest corporate partners now. They were then as well. The energy in the room, when you can have that many people working on the same thing, interacting with people you normally wouldn't interact with, it's magic. Hugh: What is the website where people can go find out about this? Ray: Riseagainsthunger.org. Hugh: Riseagainsthunger. It will be listed in the podcast notes and TheNonProfitExchangeorg. It is listed there along with your pretty picture. We will work the logo as well. The story about getting started is pretty dramatic. I will fund if you start a nrw organization. Talk about it today. How many countries, how many pounds of food, how much reach? Ray: We started in 1998. For the first seven years, we were a crisis relief organization. I was in the Marines, so I am being comfortable being in sketchy situations. We focused on getting into areas where the larger organizations either couldn't go, wouldn't go. We were a fast operation. I mean we would go in faster than most organizations and make stuff happen. I always wanted to move away from crisis relief into a more sustainable attack on hunger. Our original board donor who gave me all the money was not interested in that. His idea of feeding the hungry was crisis relief only. After about seven years, we had some board transition and a lot of other stuff. It was about that time where the Christmas tsunami hit. I found an organization that was doing meal packaging. I came back from visiting with them and said we are going to do this. That time, I had three staff people. We are going to start this in two months. They all laughed at me. We were able to get it started in two months. The first year, we started meal packaging, we meal packaged 1.1 million meals. The second year was 3.1. This year, we will package 75 million meals for the hungry. Hugh: 75 million from the start of 1.1 million. Ray: Yes. Hugh: My goodness. Ray: Now we have offices in 20 cities in the United States. We now have offices in five countries. I always said I didn't want to raise a flag in other countries. We didn't do that until we absolutely had to. What I mean by that is we don't set up offices in countries to distribute meals. But implementing partners that do that well, they know what they're doing. So many countries came to us and said, “We want to package meals and engage volunteers in our country.” South Africa was the first. We looked around, and South Africa had all the resources necessary to package meals. We started working in South Africa. Then Malaysia, the Philippines, Italy. We have a list of six or seven countries that want us to come in and start offices. But we are very careful about going and starting offices. They have to have all the resources available, and it has to be a wonderful thing. South Africa for example, they will package 8 or 9 million meals this year themselves. But what they have done is they have talked to the United States so much. This is the fun part about when you have work as partners. The situation in South Africa is completely different than the United States. They have lots of volunteers, but no funding. The churches in South Africa don't have a financial base. They had to start going to corporate donors where we weren't using corporate donors in the United States so much. The corporations got behind what they were doing and gave significant amounts of funds. We went to school and said, “If they are doing it, why don't we work on that?” Our corporate income has grown by over 70% because we went to school with what South Africa was doing. We learn from each other that way. In the Philippines, our office there said we use dehydrated vegetables in our meals. Rather than buy those on the market, why don't we get farmers to grow them so they can have a sustainable livelihood? They have cooperative farms where the farmers know that when they grow these vegetables, they will be bought at a fair price. Now they are getting the production ready to where these can be dehydrated, which will employ more people. They have the value chain from growing the vegetables to putting them in the meals. Employing lots of people. In India, they are doing other things. Every country operates as its own entity. In fact, I just came back from the Philippines a couple month ago where we had our first strategic global gathering where we are trying to figure out how to operate as a more global organization rather than the U.S. and affiliates. I can't say enough about the board in the United States willing to look at that and say, “We can be one among equals rather than being paternalistic about it.” It's a huge sea change, but it's fun to see that happening. Never envisioned when I stepped out and started Rise Against Hunger, we had probably 148 employees in the United States in five countries. It keeps growing because it's doing what it says it needs to do. Hugh: We are hitting our last five minutes in a wrap here. Russ, do you have some comments or questions for our guest today? Russell: Innovate and collaborate. That is the name of the game. That's what you are doing. You can spread the impact. The sum is more powerful than the parts. It's an ideal model. That's what high performance nonprofits do. I commend you on that. You are doing a remarkable job. What is the big goal for 2018? What is the takeaway? What is the impact that you want to bring in 2018? Ray: Probably, we are in our strategic planning process now. We have just gone from one year budgeting to three year budgeting. In '18, we are going to probably 100 million meals. That is just a part of all that is going on. Our global model will be to be implemented in ‘18 and hopefully by 2020, that will be fully operational. It's more collaboration in '18 than we have ever had, even in '16 or '17. Hugh: I want you to be thinking about a parting word or sponsor that you have for people who want to do something but are afraid to do it and think it's an uphill battle or impossible. You have given them a great story, but what advice do you have? Ray Buchanan, this has been an inspirational hour. You said how long is it going to be? I said, as long as it takes. Well, we could talk all day. As we are wrapping this interview up, what word of encouragement or what thought do you have for people who have a great idea like that but they are afraid to get started or don't know where to start? Ray: Let the preacher come out of me for a minute. Three points. First, I think it's faithfulness. You have to be faithful to what you know is right and what you know you're called to do. That means doing it. The second is vision. When you are faithful to that vision, people will see that and respond to it. The third is get off your buts, and act on that vision. Faithfulness, vision, and action: those three things are what allow you to do far more than you ever imagined you could do. It's what encourages people to get in and work with you. Those three things, you do that, and you can make a difference in the world. I think that's what we are all trying to do is change the world forever. I tell people Rise Against Hunger, the vision is to create a world without hunger. Very simple. What we are really trying to do is change the world forever. I want to be a part of that. Hugh: Little bit at a time. One person at a time. You have compounded that over the years. Ray Buchanan, thank you for spending time with us and sharing your story. Thank you, Russ. Ray: Thanks, Russ. Russell: Thank you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Food for Families https://www.parkviewcommunitymission.org/food-for-families Interview Transcript   Hugh Ballou: Greetings to this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange. We have two guests today. They both work in the same charity. It's called Food for Families. I was down there yesterday hearing some stories. There was a lunch gathering for a bunch of charities that work out of the same building. I have been talking to these guys for a while and said that we needed to tell their story because people have a lot of ideas, and putting some traction to ideas is pretty important. I learn from people who have lessons to teach, but I also learn from people who have life lessons to teach through stories. I am going to ask these two gentlemen to introduce themselves, a little bit about their background, and then we will circle around and talk about their foundation. Ray Booth, who are you? Ray Booth: I'm one of the rare breeds. I was born here, and I'll die here. I'll never live anywhere else. Hugh: We are in Lynchburg, Virginia by the way. Ray: It's a great place. Come join us. I felt a calling early in my life to be an engineer, and I was a simple engineer graduate. After I got out of college, I felt called to ministry and considered that quite a bit. I think I'd do best in public service. I spent my whole working life in public service, first with the state government, then 25 years with the city as Director of Public Works. I have impacted this community. Everywhere I drive, I see my impacts and construction all the time. After I retired, I went to work with my construction company. I did more private/public partnerships here in Virginia in many of the cities and counties throughout Virginia. I retired from that, and now I am a consultant and real estate broker and am still trying to impact the community for the better. Hugh: Gordy Harper, tell us who you are. Gordy Harper: I am the director of Food for Families. Previously I was a real estate broker. Before that, a Harley Davidson dealer in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Hugh: We are across the state from the commonwealth. That is four or five hours away the other way. Gordy: Virginia Beach? Hugh: Yeah. Gordy: Four hours, at least. Hugh: It's real flat over there. Gordy: Yes, it is. Hugh: I ran a half-marathon there. Part of the reason I chose it was because it was flat. The other part was because Yuengling served beer at the water stops. Food for Families, this is a nonprofit here. Let me set the context. We live in Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynchburg has one of the largest populations of those that live below the poverty line. I think 24% of the population. Food for Families is sort of geographically located where a lot of that population is. When was Food for Families started, and why was it started? Ray: Many years ago, Food for Families is located in a church that currently is in a poorest area in the city. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was the heartbeat of the city. The first shopping center was there. This was the in place to be. It grew exponentially and was one of the wealthier cities and churches in the city. As time moved on and the new shopping mall was built in the suburbs and all the retail people in that part of the city left and went to the new mall and the development moved there, this area became more of a transient location. Over time, the poorest people in the city moved into this area. Lynchburg in the early 1900's was one of the six wealthiest cities in the nation. A lot of wealth here, and they built huge homes. We have a lot of beautiful inner city homes. They were turned into apartments in the '50s and ‘60s. Once the people started to come and appreciate the architecture, they bought all of those homes and moved the poor people out. The poor people gathered around the Parkview Community Church. That is now the poorest area west of Richmond in the whole state of Virginia. The church was flourishing. As retail moved out, it started going downhill. They started having a Wednesday night meal every week. Back in 1996, a street person came in, and they fed him. The next week, he brought two of his friends. And more and more of the street people came in. More of the congregation left. They continued to feed the poor, and that number grew and grew. Still to this day, 21 years later, there is still a Wednesday night meal. We feed 125-150 people on Wednesday nights. The church started food boxes in 2007 because they saw all of these poor people on Wednesday night needing food. In 2008, the church was closed, and the food pantry survived another year or two until the guy who ran it died. It was closed for three or four months. Through a grant, we reopened the food pantry in 2011 as a client choice facility, the first one west of Richmond and one of the few- Hugh: Tell us what client choice means. Ray: Client choice means the neighbors come in and get a grocery cart and actually go back through the pantry and pick up the items their family will eat. Pick a produce, meat, dairy, bread, so forth. They only shop like you would shop in a grocery store or anywhere else and pick up the items their family will eat. That was very successful and still is to this day. There has been a number of changes over the years. In 2012, a gentleman who has never been married, very poor, never owned a car died and left $225,000 for the benefit of youth in Lynchburg and to be used by the district superintendent. They developed a partnership with UMFS, which houses foster care and adopting. They agreed to put a regional office there. They used a third of the money to run the space. After they came, the district office moved there. We divided expenses three ways and utilities, and the Lord has continued to bless over the years. It has really taken off, and now we have 13 different nonprofits in the building. Many of those are very complementary to Food for Families and the neighbors, and today we serve 25% of the poor people in Lynchburg with food. That's 3,000 individuals. We have had as much as 80,000 pounds of food going through the facility. Hugh: 80,000 pounds. I have been by there on a Saturday. There is people waiting. Ray, when did you join this organization? Ray: I joined in 2010. Hugh: 2010. This is 2017 when we are making this recording. People may be listening to this in some other year or universe. Gordy, when did you join this organization? Gordy: 2016. Hugh: 2016. Year and a half. Ray is the chairman of the board, and you are? Gordy: The director. Hugh: What other data would you like to share? What I'm hearing is there are people who were doing something that was meaningful and they stayed with it. There is people listening to this who've had an idea and tried it, but haven't really stayed with it long-term. I've also heard because of the value of the people staying with it, you attracted some funding and some other synergies with some other organizations. What other things do you want to share about what you know from the history and what the history is from 2016 going forward? Gordy: As I came in, what we tried to focus on was changing the culture. I would sit in meetings in the city and hear people talking about how they didn't feel respected when they went into those places. A lady said a culture of respect, and that locked into my brain. I went back and we tried to change the culture and help people see our neighbors, our clients who we call neighbors, not clients. Our focus was on changing the culture. A lot of that is in developing relationships because what I was hearing was people needed to help them come from where they are. I just knew from my own life that if you wanted to help me come from where I was, you were going to have to have a relationship with me, to be able to sit with me and share with me and listen and take it to heart. It mattered the things you said to me. The first year I was there, I was trying to build relationships and trying to bring down the walls that people build up around themselves because of where they are. We tried to show the love of Christ to people. Hugh: Russell, they said a couple magic words. Relationships. They said culture. Do you have some comments or questions for these gentlemen? Russell: Culture is more than just a cereal. It's supposed to be good. It's wonderful because what you are talking about, and I have dealt with it a lot, is basic human dignity. Sometimes it's hard for people to reach out for help because they are in a circumstance through no fault of their own, and it's important to treat people with that basic dignity. I commend you for making the effort to do that and connecting with these people that you're serving. I was also excited to hear that you are co-located with a number of different agencies. If you could, talk about some of the things you have been able to do with some of those other folks that are partnered with you to provide a more holistic service to those people you are serving. Gordy: We have a free clinic. We have tried to build relationships actually with all the different partners in the building. But we have a welcome center. Our welcome center is like a resource center, and I have set them up a satellite in our office. We are in the lower level of the building. Everything else is in the upper levels of our building. We have tried to establish ways to draw them down to where the neighbors are. But we have set a lady up in our office that can actually one-on-one with the neighbors. They are actually in the room waiting for hours at times. Some days I am there at 7:30, and there is a 2:00 distribution with people waiting already. We try to capture those morning hours where people are waiting to be able to shop and draw people in that can lead them to resources. The free clinic, we have an establishing relationship. There is a nurse practitioner in there that is going to come down and meet with the neighbors, announce what services are available, and what she has actually talked about is coming to the Wednesday night community meals and establishing relationships by sitting with the neighbors and letting them know what's available. We are trying to get flu shots. There are little things we talk about just from what we hear with the neighbors and try to see what needs they have. We have a relationship with the local bank and a lady that is vice president there who is coming in and teaching personal finance classes, basic computing classes, reading, math skills, different things that will help people be in a better position to get employment. Ray: There is a nutritionist that has been there several years that is teaching cooking classes. While the neighbors are waiting, she is up there showing them how to cook. We also have a counseling service there. This facility started even before everybody else moved in with a facility bin there. We met there for over seven years. As a result of that synergy that came around that facility and those people being there, you have 50-60 people there every day at lunchtime for an AA meeting. As some of those people were able to overcome their addiction, one of them started a telecommunications company that is in the building that provides low-cost Internet and phone within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the building. Two others actually formed a counseling service using the peer group model that is now extremely successful. They have contracts with all of the local school systems and hospitals, so if a student gets caught with drugs and alcohol, instead of being suspended, they are sent there. They have nine counselors now. They have a lot of people whose lives have turned around as a result of that. The UMFS has foster care and adopting services for the entire region. They have contracts with all the schools as well. We have three churches that meet there. One on Saturday that is in a growth of the AA group. A lot of the people at the church service are across the spectrum. We have doctors, lawyers, all types of people there that through prescription drugs and other things, you read about it so much today, that were cured or came off the addiction that didn't feel comfortable in their own churches or places. They come there with brothers and sisters who shared the same war and are helping each other. After the worship service, they have a meal together. That's every Saturday night. We have a Sunday morning church, and then we have a Sunday afternoon church. They are now getting more involved in the mission. Most recently, we have had one of the larger churches move their church office into the building because they want to be close to the neighbors and be more involved in administering to the poor. We have a number of different things there. We are continuing to try to expand more services as we get there. It's continuing to grow. Hugh: Russell is one of the first people. SynerVision is the synergy of the common vision. I have trademarked that name. We like the word charity because nonprofit is a stupid word. You have to make some profit if you are going to do any good. We like the word charity a little better. It is a tax-exempt social benefit organization or social capital. Lots of ways to describe it. People think of nonprofit as a philosophy, not a tax classification. I don't hear any of that thinking from what I hear today. Russell and I have reinvented the consultant model. I went from being a consultant to an insultant to a resultant. Now we partner with them to help them find the way, so we are WayFinders. We created a whole different paradigm because 98% of the consultants out there give the rest of us a bad name. Maybe they give answers, maybe they don't. It's the stock answer. Our calling is to give people information, free or at a price they can afford, so they can improve their culture, their service, and therefore improve their funding. I wanted to talk about two other pieces here. We teach leaders that you don't push, you influence. I am hearing some of that in your dialogue. You have been steady. You have worked out these collaborations with these other organizations with some synergistic work. I am gathering you were the first one on board and the others have come on board since then. Because of the impact of your work, I want to shift, and a lot of charities do that, but I know since I've heard your stories. There is measurable, profound impact from the work you do. That is part of the position of influence. Your operational guidelines, your high standards of integrity, the value you give people: those are all really strong principles. Those are part of who you attract, both in the collaborations and in the funding side. If that influence piece makes some sense, you talked about improving the culture, redefining the culture. I'm not sure what word you used, but it was working on the culture. I watched you yesterday where you had most of those organizations represented at lunch. It was a lunch to share stories and be together. You were a servant leader there. You were handing out plates and checking on people. I don't know if you were official, but you were an unofficial hospitality person yesterday. It gave me some insights into your leadership, sir. Culture is so important; that's part of the work you do. Leadership is a culture. It's not just a person, it's the culture. What's been your journey of helping them—I like the word transform rather than change—transform their whole idea of culture? Give us a snapshot of what that journey has been like. Gordy: It goes back probably. For this journey, when I was seeing it, people don't really mean some of the things you see sometimes. It's just more the nature of people as a whole unfortunately. I was watching. I would hear certain things and watch certain responses. It just wasn't the outcome I was hoping for. I want more of a warm and comfortable- The way I have tried to sell it is the people we are serving don't really get experiences. If I want to take my kids to Disneyworld or my grandkids, we are going to go. They don't really get to do the same thing. We have tried to help people see that we want to create an experience where you look forward to coming back. I know it's just shopping to some people, but to our neighbors, when you see that they will come, some come at six in the morning. I have had people tell me- We start at eight, so I come around 7:30. There can be 10-15 people waiting. It just makes me understand the value. I know it's free groceries. But they get to come once a month. I would like over that month's gap for them to really look forward to it. We try to take everything, implement everything we can to make it an ice experience. We want to do it like the nice stores do, like Walmart. You want it to be. We need vests to say, “How can I help?” We want it to be clean, well-stocked, and with customer experience. We have to put it in the mindset that an average person would be thinking. When you walk through the grocery stores, what do you see? What is happening around you? Everything is neat and in order. The only difference is that we bring our pallets right through the front door. We set them right in the middle of our produce room and start picking through it to be able to distribute the food. It's harder to keep it clean. We don't have people come in the middle of the night to stock us to be ready for opening tomorrow. We have certain challenges that Walmart has mastered because of finances and the help they were able to bring in. if you think of it as creating a wonderful experience and not just feeding people- Hugh: I love it. It's the visual of people waiting in line for the new iPhone. They are excited. Gordy: It's hard because my family does what everyone else does when they want to do it. We have been very blessed. But I realize these folks don't. Hugh: It's hard to realize that. Russell, we were born into white privilege. It's not a disease, but there is a cure for it. I was in a room yesterday, and I said to Leigh Anne, “It's nice to be in a room where everybody doesn't look like me.” Because if everybody were to look like me, that would be scary. We had a cross-section of Lynchburg in that room. Age demographic, educational background, race, some of us better-looking than others, but not me. The culture thing is something that we work with charities and churches on because we have inherited a culture. We don't realize that people aren't responding to us because we are doing the things the same way. I started a workshop Saturday with church leaders, and I said, “Who knows the seven last words of a church?” Nobody knew. “We have never done it that way before.” I said a lot of us come to meetings with that written on our foreheads. How about stripping it off? Let's start with an open brain. You came in 18 months ago. Ray, what sort of transformation has happened during his tenure so far? Ray: Obviously his approach is very positive and very much like what we were all looking for. Our previous people took it more- In fact, he was a retired military person and was more for giving orders and this is the way we do it type of approach. That doesn't create the same level of respect. You have to have a heart that you want to share and relate to these people rather than treat them as something to go through the door. Gordy has brought the heart into it. As a result of his faith, he has ben able to share that heart and love with the people. That is something I strongly believe in and something I try to do. I grew up very poor, not white privilege. I relate to these people really well. It's all by the grace of God. It could be any of us. It's been wonderful to see Gordy there and the way he has transformed the people there. The other thing that has been such a huge benefit is the tremendous amount of volunteers we have. We have only a couple part-time people. Gordy is part-time. It takes at least 30 volunteers to run a distribution day. We have brought hundreds of volunteers in and hundreds of volunteer hours. If it wasn't for the volunteers, we couldn't survive. It's important for the volunteers to have a good experience as it is for the neighbors. If they don't appreciate and we don't appreciate them and what they do, they wouldn't be coming back. We have a tremendous amount of volunteers repeat on a continuous basis. Also, Wednesday nights, we have numerous groups that cook the food, serve the food, provide music devotions, and relate to the people. That is probably 30 different groups over the years. That creates an experience of love and a relationship that carries forward into the volunteers on Thursday and Saturday and Wednesdays. Hugh: This is what Gordy's brought to the table. We like to teach that culture is a reflection of the leader. We want to criticize other people and take the blame off of ourselves. I want to ask some stories. Russell, what questions are you hearing, and do you want to throw some questions on the table? Russell: What we are talking about is critically important. There is reasons why people want to support you. A nonprofit that is effective creates win-win-win scenarios: wins for the people who are working, wins for the people they serve, and wins for their supporters, whether they are giving time, talent, or treasure. Having the connection with people. When you go into a community, particularly if you look different, there is a bit of a level of suspicion you have to overcome. That has been my experience. People get to know you and see you as genuine. You go in and ask a lot of questions; you don't walk in with a lot of answers. People respond to that, and it's a constant dialogue. How can we make this better? How can we serve you best? What is something that we can do that we're not doing? These are all things to be critical. It's having these conversations. You have hundreds of volunteers. I am seeing people like Travis Smith, who has spread impact locally to 11 cities now. He has been successful at leveraging large numbers of volunteers. The question that I have is: What are you learning as you ask the people who volunteer for you why they keep coming back, why they enjoy serving, what makes them want to work with you? Gordy: That's a tough one to figure out. We do get responses and things from people. I haven't really done a lot of research on it as much as it seems almost a standard amongst, especially the students. I see the students come in, and they start, they don't know where to plug in. Some of them require hours and things like that, community service hours. You can start to see develop within them a heart for service. I think most of the young people nowadays really want to do something. They have something inside them that is stirring to give back. It's interesting because I know one of the local colleges, they get 20 hours they are required to serve in their community. Over and over, I get comments of, “I had to do it up until then. I want to do it now.” It's just something stirs within them to make them come back and want to do it. I think any of us, they will actually step outside of our comfort zone and go into these places and start to invest your time and energy, it's in us. Ray: All of us want to do things and please people. When we serve people, these people appreciate it and show their appreciation verbally, nonverbally, and so forth. Everything you do is appreciated. That warms people's hearts, and they want to continue to be able to help the people. It's all about being able to help and se that immediate impact and the smile on the face. That is what brings them back, and that is why if they get past that first hurdle and get comfortable, at least talk to people, then they can develop a dialogue. Particularly for young people, they don't have the boxes that older people do as it relates to race, culture, etc. They more quickly join in if you will than the older people. They have a harder struggle sometimes getting past that barrier. One of the big things that has been in Lynchburg the last five, six, seven years is Bridges over Poverty. We have gone through lots of training on that. Just a local pastor recently shared with me that he had the white privilege, if you will, to serve in larger churches. He really didn't know how to talk to the poor. He went into one of these Bridges programs and came back and tried some different things. All of a sudden, they responded, and all of a sudden, he comes back every week because he's retired and he sees how he can bring a smile to these people's faces and how they can all of a sudden smile rather than sit there frowning. Hugh: We bought this house recently. I said to the realtor and the mover, “You do this all the time, but we felt like we were your only clients. We move once in a great while. You move somebody every day. You sell a house every day.” These people, it's a unique experience for them. You're doing it all the time. What I am hearing about the culture it is a profound experience for everybody. You have created a win-win for everybody. Parts of white privilege don't have to do with money. Just because we're old white guys, there is a lot of dimensions to that. What I am hearing is you have evened the playing field in that people are people. I'd like to hear a couple of stories that you can share. We have some time here. Is there a story of impact? Either one of you can start. Is there a story that you'd like to share that warms your heart or really made a difference in somebody's life? Gordy: Recently, we had two ladies come in. it was an off-time in our schedule. They were homeless. The way it hit me was it was impactful because of the pieces that came together. We are sitting in the office. We were able to draw the lady from the welcome center. She was in there. We were able to see them get their housing that evening. By establishing the housing, we were able to establish their food. She was able to get them bus passes. All the pieces, we stood in the office, and we talked it all through. All the pieces in a matter of 15 minutes came together. We stood there, we all held hands together, prayed together. We said, “Wouldn't it be something if six months from now, we talked about, Remember when we all gathered here and figured out all the pieces?” In two weeks, they came in and both had jobs. It was powerful for them to come in and share and for us to remember all the different resources aligned at that moment. It's a powerful image of us remembering to draw the resources. You have to keep a pool of everybody together. They wanted me to understand all of our resources there and make sure what's happening and get everybody everything they need and understand that the other partners in our mission are in as well. We have come to find out they are in as well, and they were actually doing some things that I hadn't even realized. The counseling, I sat with one of them and said, “I really want to figure out what we can do together.” They're like, “Did you not realize Steve has been sending people up for a long time?” I'm like, “I did not realize.” Steve is the face you see first when you come into the office. Steve has been directing people to the resources they needed. Ray: There are so many stories that happen all the time. We had a guy come in the office, and we had been getting money from somebody that gave us $100 a month for a long time. We didn't know who it really was. One day, this guy comes through the door and says he didn't have a car or anything. He rode the bus. “One month, I didn't have the money to give you, and I got on the bus. Somebody got on with a bag of groceries, and I said they need it more than me.” He came back and gave us that $100. That guy has since come back numerous times, and he had Gordy go with him to the bank. The bank is sending us a check for $100 every month from his account. He had money when he first came to Lynchburg, and he has donated most of it. He has enough just to live. He really has the heart to help people. You look at him, and he has a long beard, long hair, but he has a heart. You never underestimate people. Don't judge a book by its cover. Hugh: That's a remarkable story. What do you think, Russ? Russell: I think that's great. That's probably typical of the work you're doing there. It's all about people. As you bring people in, they come through the front door, and it's almost like having them slide into your funnel as it were. When I worked for a tribe, people walked through the door. My programs were about jobs and business, but I was familiar with all of the other programs around me within the tribe. When somebody walked into my office, they could start anywhere in that office, and they would be walked around from one end to the other, or across the street to the health clinic. When they walked in, they left with what they needed. Nobody took time to say, “This is not quite my job.” They would take the time. As a program director, we take time to walk people from one office to the other and make sure they are getting what they need before we hand them off. It's a team effort. I looked at it as I worked for the community. I had a boss, I had the tribal chief and the tribal council, but I worked for the community. I am on display with everybody I serve. It is important for them to have satisfaction. It is important for people writing the checks to be satisfied. It is important to have good relations with the community. All of that is important. Everybody has to feel like they are winning here. I commend you for setting up that type of environment. Asking people what they like and why they serve is critical because once you find out what it is they like, you can do more of it. Even if they have to do a certain number of hours, they can do those hours with any nonprofit in Lynchburg, but they choose you. That is because of what you have been doing. That is your work on the culture. Find out a little bit more. I am in the frame of mind you can never ask too many questions to find out what makes people tick and to be there and to be that solution and have that heart of service that people need. As we are coming up on this holiday, this is a great time to remember a lot of these things we are grateful for. Are you going to see some people over the next few days? I know the holiday is coming. There are a lot of meals to be served. What is on the agenda for the rest of this week? And Giving Tuesday is coming up. What is on the agenda? What do folks need to know so they can help support the work you're doing because you serve a lot of people in need there? Hugh: We are recording this prior to Thanksgiving in 2017, to put in context for people listening to the podcast. We are approaching a holiday where a lot of us eat a lot of food and celebrate with family that other people don't have that option. What I have learned is when you are down and out, the society doesn't help you most of the time. You guys are giving a hand up. This is so encouraging. To relay Russ's question, what particular reflection do you have this season of the year? How do you interact with people that is different? Or is it different? Gordy: I don't see it as different. Hugh: A lot of places shut down. It's a trick question. Gordy: I don't understand the question, haha. Hugh: A lot of places shut down, Russell. Oh, it's a holiday. We are going to take time off. A lot of them close today and open again on Monday. Gordy: We have our Wednesday night dinner. It will be a sit-down, serve you at the table. Hugh: Who comes to that? Gordy: Everybody in the community is allowed to come. It's an open-door policy. We don't even know who will be there yet. But the expectation—I reached out today to get more tables and chairs because we are expecting a huge crowd. Hugh: Just to go back to the lineage and history of this that we heard, this was a very active large Methodist church. It dwindled down in membership, and it was no longer viable. The building is owned by the Methodist church. It reverted back to the district office who had to maintain it. Through the wisdom of the district superintendent, they started using it. It had a rebirth. Not just one church worships there, but there are at least three. Plus you have 13 different organizations. The ministry has sorted- It's not all under the umbrella of the church. They are still ministries, I think. Go ahead. Ray: It's a building that originally started in 1857 on that site. It has grown until now, where it is 26,000 square feet. Then it died, and it's now been reborn and rebirthed in even a greater sense. It's how the people use the facilities. What makes this site so unique is that it is in the very heart of the very poorest area. Two blocks away is the Salvation Army and the Center of Hope. Across the street is the public health department. Another block is a recreation center. There are ten Methodist churches within a two-mile radius of this. There is probably another 30 or 40 storefront churches and others around this. We have now partnered with another church, where a bus picks up people in the neighborhood. We give out so much food. We average 30 pounds of food for an individual in the family. A family of four will get over 100 pounds of food. The biggest problem they have is getting it home. They can't get on the bus with that much. They all have to get taxis and share. It is a tremendous undertaking to take 80,000 pounds and distribute it in over two days. This past week leading up to Thanksgiving, we had over 300 families that went through there. Hugh: Say those numbers again. You just slid those in here. How many pounds of food? Ray: 80,000 pounds a month. Hugh: 80,000 pounds of food per month. That other figure. Ray: This past week, we had the most families we've ever had of 320-something families on Thursday and Saturday, just those two days. Hugh: Over 300 families. That's a lot of people. Ray: Over 2,000 individuals. Hugh: Wow. On Saturday? Ray: Thursday and Saturday. Hugh: Thursday and Saturday. That is just one week in this month. The impact of your work is pretty huge. We find that helping charities define their impact in quantifiable terms helps them attract regular, recurring funding. Talk a bit about how you sustain this, how you continue to make sure there is operational money, food in place, and you pay the light bill. How do you attract the funding? How many sources does it come from? I'm sure there is some in-kind, but there is some cash in there, too, isn't there? Ray: We have been tracking the cash. It comes from different areas. We get from churches, we get from organizations, we get a lot from grants. A lot of individual donations. If you donate $10, it will feed a family of four for one month. That is based on the supply of 100 pounds of food. We are able to present it that way. A lot of people respond to that because they want to help. It's individuals, churches, organizations, and grants. Our biggest supporter by far is Walmart. Over that 80,000 pounds of food, a third of that comes from Walmart. We pick up from three Walmarts, a Little Caesars, a Panera Bread every week. Walmart supplies are tremendous. 30-40,000 pounds a month comes from Walmart. They have given us grants. We have had a $55,000 grant to widen the entrance so we can get food in easier. Last week, we got another $55,000 grant from Walmart to buy a refrigerated truck so we can keep the produce fresh longer and pick it up and keep it fresh. They give community service grants as well. The people here are just so supportive of what we do. This community is very supportive. Hugh: We qualify for that by showing the impact of your work. I want to point out to any businesspeople listening to this. You heard three brands mentioned here: Walmart, Panera, and Little Caesars. Those companies support you. You don't have to toot their horn about their brand. It's good for business to do this. This is the Walmart Foundation. It is philanthropic, but you have also had support from local stores, which is another source of funding. What I heard you say is you have individual and company donations. You have in-kind donations, which is the food. You do get grants, so that's three. We teach charities there is eight streams of revenue. We have money, which we call partner money. It comes from a rotary foundation or a church. They have designated funds for particular projects. It's not really a grant or a donation, so it's partnering. They have the funds and aggregate and take a bunch of churches or a groups like a rotary foundation. Each rotary has their own foundation. They can purpose special gifts. For charities to think about partnering with churches, synagogues, and other community organizations that want to give you a little bit of money, and you multiply it by 10 or 20 organizations, then you have some sustainable revenue to help you sustain your work. Are there other sources of revenue? I heard those. Ray: I think you hit most of them there. You just never know when the Lord is going to bring something. Recently, last year, we got a big donation from an individual we have never heard of before, from another city. They just happened to have a family member that heard about it, and the foundation wrote us a check. We had to find out where it came from. You just never know how the Lord is going to provide and how the money is going to come. You never know. Hugh: Russell, we are on the final wrap here. We are going to run over time. Any closing comments from you or a parting question? Russell: I'd like to thank you for the fine work that you're doing down there. You have some marvelous opportunities to leverage all the work you're doing. I could say the same thing about the business. Find out what it is they like that makes them support you so you can just keep doing more of that and bring in more people through the door and keep talking to people. Those relationships are important. Keep working on culture because that is where it starts. This is what draws all of these gifts. When you have the right culture, you create the type of energy field, and the synergy to bring all this stuff about. Keep up what you're doing. Blessings to you. Enjoy the holiday. I don't know if you planned anything special for Giving Tuesday, but that is an opportunity to reach out and talk to people. Go on your Facebook feed and talk about the work you're doing. Remind people that Giving Tuesday is an opportunity to support you. Hugh: I want you to think about a parting comment. There are people out there struggling who have not been able to get traction. What encouragement would you give them if they are thinking about starting or they have tried to start and haven't got traction? As we are signing off here, which one of you wants to give a challenge, tip, or thought for somebody who wants to up their game? Ray: Never give up. Just keep trying. Gordy: Love the people you are doing it for. Hugh: Love the people you are doing it for. And I heard with. You do all of that. I watched you in action. You can't hide. Thank you so much for sharing. Russell, we are three guys having coffee in my kitchen. This is a kickback. Russell: I am having coffee with you guys. It's great. I noticed that I am drinking more coffee than you guys. Hugh: We don't subscribe to whether it's half full or half empty because we think it's all refillable. Russell: It is. Hugh: Blessings to everyone. Thank you for great stories on this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At a recent meeting of my mastermind group, I was asked an interesting question… “What exactly to you do, Ray?” It’s a great question that deserves more than just a one sentence answer, so I’ve decided to do something a little different for the next few episodes of The Ray Edwards Show. I’m going to do a deep dive on precisely how I help you start, run, and grow your online business. Don’t worry, all your favorite segments like Spiritual Foundations and Tip of the Week will still be there for your listening pleasure. In fact, this week in these segments I ask some compelling questions of my own, like: If you have a real relationship with someone, is it a one-day-a-week thing, or an everyday thing? Is it ever okay to sacrifice authenticity for comfort? And…what in the world did we do to turn my son Sean, who had a professed disdain for to-do lists, into a productivity junkie? Click here to download or listen to this episode now. Spiritual Foundations     Why I Don't Eliminate My Spirituality From My Business For me in the past, my spiritual life was a Sunday thing…I was covered with a 7-day eternal fire insurance. My relationship with God became a real daily relationship. The Bible says we are the Bride of Christ. When you are married to someone, when you love someone, you don't pretend they're not in the room. The fact is: It is our job to be WHO we ARE! Tip of the Week Todoist is a task management app that keeps you focused so you can get things done! It's clean. Distraction-free design It Simple and Easy. It's flexible. Not only can you log in from your computer, but there are apps for your mobile devices so you can stay on top of your tasks when you are on-the-go. Feature Segment: What Do You Do, Exactly? 7 Reasons Why You Should Start a Business You won't get fired from your own business. If your boss turns out to be a jerk or an idiot, you can make them change. Despite government meddling, owning a business is the best tax strategy going. Every day you get to start over. You literally write your own paycheck. You help other while helping yourself. Only entrepreneurs will save the world. 7 Reasons Why You Should Start a Wisdom Enterprise Accelerates your own personal growth. Multiplies your personal income quicker than anything else. Enables your to surround yourself with extraordinary people. Delivers a value to people in the best way possible Attracts influential people with unique opportunities for you. Promotes the mastery of your life skills. Provides the best way to express your gifts and talents. Share the Love Subscribe to the show in iTunes and give us a rating and review. Make sure you put your real name and website in the text of the review itself. We will definitely mention you on this show. We are also on Stitcher.com, so if you prefer Stitcher, please subscribe there. Connect with Ray on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn. Get The Transcript Click here to get the transcript now.