An Army of Normal Folks - Daron Babcock: The Urban Farm That’s Cultivating People (Pt 2)

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

After the loss of his wife, Daron spiralled out of control and into brawls & cocaine. He found redemption in rehab and eventually dedicated his life to helping others write their redemption stories. Today, Bonton Farms is one of the largest urban farms in the country, but produce is far from its most important fruit. Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with An Army of Normal Folks, and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Darren Babcock, right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenniplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten. This month, we're bringing you the stories of athletes. There's the Italian race car driver who courted danger and became the first woman to compete in Formula One.

The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the US and around the world in the 1960s. The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice. The mountaineer known in the Chinese press as the tallest woman in the world. And the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first ever woman

to compete at the Olympic Games. Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband, doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. They led me into the house and I mean, it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops were guarding him.

Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself. I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. You not just say, I wish she was dead. You actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him. He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. MUSIC Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. MUSIC Music Festival presented by Capital One. Coming back to Las Vegas. September 20th and 21st. Streaming live only on Hulu. Don't miss. Big Sean, Camila Cabello, Doja Cat, Gwen Stefani, Hozier, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboosie, The Black Crows, Thomas Rhett, Victoria Monet, and more. Get tickets to our 2024 iHeartRadio Music Festival presented by Capital One right now before they sell out at AXS.com. All right. So do you get out of rehab

after the prayer and the work and the awakening that is in you? for the prayer and the work and the awakening that is in you, it feels like maybe you're able to get past all the shame and everything because of this. That's a daily battle too. Really? And every time I slip up, I'm like, you know, the enemy says you're, you're just a fraud. Well, are you able to forgive yourself? I think it's a daily thing. I mean, I wish it was a one time for me. It's not a one time thing. And then then everything's sunny again, every time I see my kids, you know, I

wonder I have like, what they love me, so they're not going to blast me with what happened and that but you know, I hurt the people I love the most. And the people that I have been given responsibility to protect. But grace is about redemption and surely you believe that. I do and I have to remind myself that every day. It's not something that I've given money for and have as a possession.

I have to develop a daily practice so that the voices in my head, that the truth is louder than the deceiver. And some days it's quiet. Some days it's quiet. Some days it's quiet and others it's not. If you get cut off in traffic leaving here today, the voice will come up maybe.

I'll hear a voice and then the voice, the true voice overrides it, that's why it doesn't happen, but it's still a process. That's so interesting. I could literally talk for 10 hours with you about this and maybe one day we will. Hopefully we would, I would love to do that. We gotta move on to you're out of rehab.

Anne? Everything was different. Like my whole life was built around relationships that I could leverage to get what I wanted, accomplishing what I wanted and doing what I wanted, accomplishing what I wanted and doing what I wanted. And the thing about this rebirth for me is that all of a sudden I cared about other people, like really cared. And I didn't care about money or status.

That was the exact opposite. Yeah. So what do you do with that? Like every, everything that I desired in my life had been flipped on its head, and there were these new desires that I don't know what to do with. Well, I read that you sold off the Schleskis business,

and then you got a really good job. Mm-hmm. So you're back on track, right? Yeah. Well, back on some tracks, you know, that really good job. Well, you're healthier at least. Oh, yeah. And I have a relationship with Christ. Like, I am centered, but the battle doesn't end there, right? And so, enemy is what... His mission statement is the same, to still

kill and destroy through deception. And so all of a sudden God had changed my heart, but I got placed right back in the environment that drew me back into if it is to be, it's up to me. Which is the corporate world and hammered it. Oh yeah. And who were you hammering with? And you know, Blackstone group was owned H Hilton Hotels and a bunch of fancy things. So when we travel, they know your name.

Like it's an elixir. That's an ego thing. It's alluring and it's an elixir. And it becomes this who are you and whose are you. That wrestling match continues. So ultimately you're working for subsidiary of a Blackstone Group company, which is Blackstone's what a one to be in dollar organization. No, no.

Oh, yeah. How many? Yeah, it's probably approaching a trillion now. Okay, so Blackstone Groups ridiculous. They're, they're, their annual income is greater than the GDP of more than half the countries in the world. And you're working for a subsidiary of it, running it. And that's what I mean when I'm back on track.

You're healthy, you're not doing drugs, you've got a great job, but you have an epiphany while there, which is? Well, I'm not sure exactly which one you're alluding to. The one that says, I can't believe I'm working this much and fly this much and I don't have much work-life balance. It was this constant tug of war about I don't know what else to do.

I have a responsibility as a Christian to provide for my family. The skill set that God's given me always tends to be things that require me to be out and about meeting and working with people and travel. And yet I had this longing to foster relationships and to talk about life and the things that truly matter. And so I didn't know what to do. So I started kind of going on short term mission trips. I wound up asking permission if I could start a thing inside our company that I called Soul Shine Sessions.

That, you know, we're we spend a third of our life at work or more, and it's all about work and people like me are wrestling through life. And where do you do that? The other third's asleep, and the other third you're doing stuff. So when do you spend time to really wrestle through life? And so we started these things called Soul Shine Sessions. And I was just searching for a way

to tap into what God had planted in my heart when everything from the world was still trying to anchor me back to what it was. And so I was working towards pulling there. And I think in hindsight, I wasn't mature enough for God to entrust me with a mission. But He was growing me to that. And so some of these were little glimpses of things to come and Then when the friend invited me to Bonton It was Providence without question

perfect segue so Before we get to The fact that you founder of Bonton Farms and all that you're doing now, the redemptive part of this remarkable journey that life has taken you through and where you've ended up. Let's just talk about Bonton in terms of a neighborhood. What Bonton is, give us all an understanding of how Bonton even exists and why and what it looks like.

Maybe a little bit of demographics of Bonton prior to you showing up there. And then also why you even showed up there in the first place. Well, Bonton is a Freedman's town. Before it was Bonton, it was just on, it was a land mass south of downtown Dallas that's on the bank of a Trinity River. Is that near the old fairgrounds? It's about three and a half miles straight south of the fairgrounds. When I was reading about this,

I was, you know, I've driven through Dallas a hundred times on business, and I remember that old fairswell back to the right, downtown, pretty downtown to the left, and then back to the right, and I actually had a customer back in there 25 years ago that made kind of crappy cabinets, and he was about a mile back behind the fairgrounds,

and it was crazy, because you could be in downtown Dallas and driving around, Rolls Royce is passing you, and in six minutes, by the time you got past that fairgrounds, it started to get rough. Really rough. Is that the area? I'm worse, three miles south of there is worse. And this is on top.

I'm sorry to interrupt you. Freedmen, go ahead. So, you know, after slavery, we entered this time called emancipation. And emancipation was all of a sudden I'm free, but what does that mean? Where do I go? And I can't live where there's plumbing or electricity

or other existing houses. They wouldn't let me there. Really? You couldn't move into an existing neighborhood? No. A former freed, a former slave now freed. You're free, but you're not really free. You're not enslaved, but you can't live. You can't just go buy a house next to somebody or rent a house next now free. You're free, but you're not really free. You're not enslaved, but you can't live.

You can't just go buy a house next to somebody or rent a house next to somebody. They wouldn't let you move in to their neighborhood. So where could I move? Well, we established the little Freedmen's towns. This one just happens to be on the bank of a train river because it floods. Nobody else will build there.

So we can. So it starts this little black community of folks trying to find their way. And like, if you're familiar with the story of Black Wall Street, this happened all across the country. Tulsa, right? Yeah. Happened all across the country.

Not as profound as Black Wall Street, but what happens when you have a community with a bunch of folks that can't go to your restaurant, they can't shop at your store, they can't go to your hospital, I can't participate in society, so they had to collaborate and build their own institutions. And so prosperity happened. Black Wall Street's the most notable example of that, but that happened everywhere. If you come to Bonton and walk through it with an 85-year-old neighbor of mine or older, they'll tell you that Bonton used to have businesses owned all through the neighborhood from people from that neighborhood.

And prosperity happened. And then as prosperity happened, they're like, well, I would like to live in a neighborhood that doesn't flood every spring and in a neighborhood that's running water and paved streets and maybe some street lights here and there. And so they started trying to buy land and that was met with bombings. So before we had a name... Met with bombings? Yeah, bombings. Bontan was called Bomb Town before we had the name Bontan.

Why? Because they bombed... People would come into their neighborhood and bomb them? Yeah, they would bomb the houses that they would try to buy in their neighborhood. Yeah, they would bomb the houses that they would try to buy in their neighborhood. Yeah, they bombed them. I'll show you. I've got the old news article clippings. I'll show you when we finish.

So the story becomes more tragic because prosperity was happening. You know, at this time, African Americans had the highest intact family rate of any ethnicity in the United States, over 80%. There was this flourishing that was happening, this resiliency. We talked, you suffer to that degree and survive, that resiliency is going to allow you to build something that's indestructible. And that's what was happening in this era. And then all of a sudden we have our mayor at the time was a mayor named Wallace Savage. This is fast forwarded to the late 40s. Because of the violence that was happening, our mayor, the federal government came out

with a new program for public housing. Our mayor puts, there's a book called The Economy. Our mayor of Dallas. The Dallas mayor. Our mayor of Dallas, whose name was Wallace Savage at the time, said in the old Dallas Times Herald that in order to prevent the Blacks from moving into our neighborhoods and bringing with them disease and violence, we're applying for federal money to get public housing to keep them where they belong. That's the quote in the Times Herald newspaper.

So this happened again all across the story I'm trying to paint is this isn't just a Bonton story. If when I'm talking, think of Bonton as one of the 825 Bontons across the country that are home to 40 million Americans. Happened in Memphis. And so when we talk about systematic racism, we need to drop our preconceived notions at the door. We need to quit saying, well, I was born in 1985 and I've never done anything like that. And we have to honor and be respectful of and be honest about the truth. So this is important when we start talking about these things, I believe. My grandfather used to say that the past is best used as a guiding post, not a hitching post.

It's a great saying. So I think that's really important here because it gives us permission to talk about the tragedies of the past without anchoring to it and becoming a victim. I love that. The history can be a guiding post, not a hitching post. Because if it becomes a hitching post, we become victims. Victims are powerless. And victims are powerless. And victims are powerless to change. And nothing changes. Yeah, and so if you're a victim, if you hitch to history, become a victim of it, we need to talk about it for perspective and lessons so we don't repeat these sins,

but we're not gonna be victims to it by letting the past define us. But here's the good news to me also, because what created this was a system. Systems can be changed. To me, that's the best news. If this were a people problem, like how do you change people, a person at a time,

to move forward to where we have a new reality? We don't have to change everybody. God created all of us in his image. We're all special. If the system that has created so many people to suffer is a product of that system and not broken people, which I deeply believe, then we can re-engineer a system to produce what we want. There's a guy studied in business school named Edwards Deming. Are you familiar with him? I love him because an entrepreneur, he doesn't fit the mold.

Edwards Deming was a brilliant man. And during the time of globalization, as Malcolm McLean came up with shipping containers and all that, and opened up global markets. Edwards Deming was this guy waving a red flag saying, be careful because we in America are going to have more demand than we can meet. And if we don't build processes and systems that are consistent, our quality will go down and we'll lose our place in the marketplace. But nobody cared because money was coming in hand over fist because at that time, American products were the best in the world. And everybody said, go take a hike at Edwards Deming.

And after World War II, we sent Edwards Deming to rebuild, to be the architect to rebuild the Japanese economy. Is that right? And guess who became the highest quality production country in the world. And when we used to laugh at the thought of Japan replacing American cars, they did. Yeah, and TV and whatever. Electronics and whatever they make. So you know, it's a Japan's enclosed society

and the top business award to this very day you can get is the Edwards Deming Award. No kidding. That speaks to how profound the foundation that he built. But anyway, Demings has this quote that I think we should anchor to. It says, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

So if you don't like the outcome, you change the system. And he says that in the business context, because it's too often in business when there's a problem, we blame the people. And what he's always saying is look at the system, and is it enabling people to be the kind of people you want? But if you look at the people first as a problem, you're never going to build a system. You see that in companies like Chick-fil-A. How do all Chick-fil-A's operate at such high level efficiency with such consistently day after day? high level efficiency with such consistently, day after day, they've built the same.

Paying the same amount of money that you see in other fast food restaurants when you can hardly even get a burger right. You can't and people won't even look you in the eye and sometimes they act like you're doing them a favor. Or you're irritating them for showing up at the drive-thru. Yeah. But it's so true, and it's the system

that provides that stability and consistency. We'll be right back. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten. This month we're bringing you the stories of athletes. There's the Italian race car driver who courted danger and became the first woman to compete

in Formula One. The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the U.S. and around the world in the 1960s. The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice, the mountaineer known in the Chinese press

as the tallest woman in the world, and the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first-ever woman to compete at the Olympic Games. Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.

Doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. They led me into the house and I mean it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops were guarding him. Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself. I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. He did not just say I wish he was dead. He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.

He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to Las Vegas. September 20th and 21st streaming live only on Hulu. Don't miss Big Sean, Camila Coveo, Doja Cat, Gwen Stefani, Poesier, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboosie, The Black Crows, Thomas Rhett, Victoria Monet and more. Get tickets to our 2024 iHeart Radio Okay, so it became Bomptown. So it was Bomptown and civil rights happened and this is really important. This is an opinion of mine. I have nothing to base this on other than anecdotal observational evidence. But what I think happened in our country is civil rights happened around the same time as well. And people like me

said, that was horrible what we went through. But we've overcome it. And we can move on now. And then we have these communities like Bontan are like, wait a minute, how can we move on? We have nothing to build from. And you took it from us, you took it from us, you burned it out of us, you bombed it out of us. And you've created a whole bunch of systems that don't allow it to be rebuilt. Redline, I mean, you could go through all of the Jim Crow stuff that happened. And so we have a portion of Americans that are like me, that were removed from that, that grew up after all that stuff that had happened. And it's like, why can't we just get along now?

We have civil rights, but we haven't created the, we haven't rebuilt the system to produce the kind of foundation where all Americans can thrive. We've left those barriers, that really bad system in place, and it's destroying the lives of... You've seen it. When I got to Bonton, the thing that stood out to me is how dangerous everybody told it was and how... I mean, you could not drive into Bonton. There's two ways in and two ways out. There's one of them's under the railroad tracks

and the other one's under the highway. And they have sentries at those places and you can't come in and out unless you're from there. Doesn't matter what color you are. At what time, when was this? In the, well, when I moved down, it'd been that way for a long time. I know people, there's one of my really good friends,

I'm walking down at Bonton Farms, is on the back of the cul-de-sac that abuts the river. So our community is a triangle, 1.92 square miles, surrounded by a railroad, a highway, and the river. So we're absolutely cut off from everything, seven minutes from downtown Dallas. And so you can enter from the rail under the railroad or you can enter on the north end under the under the highway. And then it dead ends in the river. So if you get back there, you can't get out. You

just can't fight your way out of there. So one Saturday, I'm on the dead end of the cul de sac and there's this guy down there wandering around and I'm walking off the there's a levy now that protects the community from flooding that by the way, wasn't built until the mid nineties. When did public housing come in? Early fifties. Yeah, I was going to say early fifties. We built public housing. So we moved four black families into this place and we allowed it to flood for

another 30 something years until we built the levy system. Hold it. We gotta get to, that's what Bonton is, but we've skipped how you got there. So let me wrap up the, so Bonton at that point in history before public housing, the way that the old timers describe it is rich in community, but always materially poor.

And again, that's important thread to draw because in the time where we were forbidden to participate in the goods and services and economy that existed, we had to create our own and we did. Then all of a sudden public housing comes in and now you can lose your life by walking down the wrong street with the wrong color on. It's important because it's a man-made construct that didn't exist naturally. It's when we intervened and congregated in density, a bunch of people with no resources in one place, we had to fight each other over crumbs. Violence is a product of scarcity.

Right? So, we were scarce before, but before the intervention, we could collaborate and build things. And when that was taken from us, the resources that you give me are the only resources I can get because I can't create resources of my own. And so now we fight each other over that. And that's where gangs formed from. Two public housing developments were fighting over crumbs. So this one forms, it starts as a clique.

This one starts as a clique. They start fighting each other. They get whose street this is, who can do business on this street and all that. And then that starts to progress and becomes gangs and other things. But that's a manmade construct. So now in Bonton, fast forward to after the projects,

when I get introduced to it, Bonton, there's 3,800 zip codes in the state of Texas. Bonton incarcerates the highest percentage of our population than any zip code in the state. We have the second highest team birth rate, highest infant mortality rate, lowest educational attainment, average median household incomes about 20 grand, Lowest educational attainment, average median household incomes about 20 grand, started at 13 grand when I moved in, it's now 24 grand. We have, we suffer from more than double the rate of cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes and childhood obesity than the county we're in. And if you look at Dallas County as kind of the county that surrounds the city of Dallas

and Bontron's this little donut hole in the middle. Men in our little donut hole will live 12 years less than the average lifespan in the county that surrounds us. That's Bontan today. That's what I walked into when- But why did you walk into it? A friend of mine, well, one, God was working on me. I was seeking out how to live my life the way I read in the Bible, and I hadn't

found it yet. So he's maturing me. But there's this longing. I'm looking for something. He's planted that in my heart, and I hadn't found it yet. And then one day I'm meeting a friend of mine that is my accountability partner. And all of a sudden, we just sat down and started having a cup of coffee. He said, I'm so sorry, I gotta go. I said, what do you mean, we just sat down. He's like, I am sorry. I promised a friend of mine that I would go down.

He had met with through a prison ministry, a guy that was inside prison that got paroled, happened to be from Bonton. So he promised him that they would continue that relationship when he got out. So he started going to Bonton to meet with him and you've seen it in our community. We don't encourage each other. We do the opposite. How, how can we beat everybody down?

Because nobody feels good about themselves. And if anybody starts to rise, it makes me feel bad. So if kids get good grades in our community, they'll get beat up, get beat up, getting off the school bus. It's like this drain, but we're all human beings made in the image of our Creator, and we're made to be in community, and we're made to nurture and encourage one another. So we all desire that, whether you experience it or not. So my friend was a Barnabas. He was a great encourager. And guess what? People just started showing up because they want to be believed in. They want to be told that they're a child of God.

They want to be told that they're capable. And so people start showing up. Nobody's ever heard that before. The next thing you know, this guy's outnumbered. We get invited in to help him start meeting people that we'd have never come in contact before that were just thirsty to say, you're special just because of who God says you are. And people thirsting to death to be told that. And then you decide I'm going to become a resident of Bontak?

Well, I mean, you know, we go down there for two hours on our Saturday and bring our little breakfast and then leave and all that changed is we felt a little bit better about ourselves. That's what, that's what I, that's what I had to wrestle with. Our listeners who are regular listeners will hear this and understand and smile if you don't understand it, I'll tell you about it later, but that's what we call a Turkey person. Alex just shared that with me before. It's a beautiful metaphor. It's what it is. Yeah. Yeah.

So you were feeling turkey personish. I was feeling like worse than a turkey. You know, it was, I'm trying to not be selfish. And yet, again, I'm being deceived into being selfish through the act of trying to be obedient, doing good. selfish, through the act of trying to be obedient and doing good. So I went, there's a funny story. This was when this was all fermenting in my head and I went on a business trip and I bought a USA Today and I hadn't had a chance to read it. So on the way home, I pull it out of my briefcase, I sit back in my first class seat, open up my paper. And in the side of the front cover was this article

about a guy named Arch West. You ever heard of Arch West? No. He was from Dallas. And the story was that in can't remember that I think it was in the 60s, Arch took his family on a vacation to California, Southern California, and they're walking up and down the beach and there's all these street vendors and one of the vendors had a really long line so they made the assumption that that must be something special. We should be patient and wait in line to see what it is. So they did and when they get back home, Arch cleans out his garage and he is determined to try to make whatever that was they had. And in doing so invented Doritos.

You're kidding me. And so Arch winds up selling Doritos to PepsiCo. And the story goes on to talk about it. Arch wasn't a one trick pony. He was a brilliant businessman. There was a point in time where the Pace Pocani sauce had lagging sales. I believe his name was Daniel Pace, one of the sons called Arch and said, look, our sales, we've tried everything and we continue to lose market share. Will you take a look at it and let me know what you do? He called him back a couple of weeks later and said, the problem is, is that your pecanisauce is on the aisle with ketchup. And when people buy their bag of chips, by the time they get to the ketchup aisle, they forgot and you're missing opportunities. You

need to talk to the stores and see if they'll let you relocate your pecanisauce near the chips, which is now what we know is cross-merchandising, but then was a novel thing. And so the story concludes with as they lower arch into his resting place, his family and coca workers stood around his grave site and sprinkled Doritos on his casket. I love it. And what what God used that to speak to me was I'm sitting on this first class flight coming from this big business meeting, thinking I'm kind of a big deal.

And no matter what I would have done in my professional career, it would never be as significant as a mid-dreados. And even if it were, if that's what I had to, if that's what people had to sprinkle on my casket when my life was over, would I be okay with that? So there was all the, God was like, He was like yelling through a whole bunch of variety

of megaphones at me. And that arch west story was one of the big things that gave me the courage to walk away from a career and sell my home and move into the neighborhood. But before I could do that, you can't just move into Banton. I had to ask permission and they laughed at me. They said, you won't make it a week here. Was there a single white person living in Banton?

No, no, no. There was a lady that was living there that was part of this ministry that was there. There was a white lady that lived there. So, one. Who'd you have to have permission of? The men that I knew. I mean, somebody had to say... Bounce for you. Bounce for you. Did they think you were just out of your tree? Yeah. Well, the first thing was that you'll get kicked. You won't make it. So don't do that.

And then we started talking. I was like, well, I started sharing with them what was on my heart and why I felt like it was on my heart. They knew my testimony and they knew my past. And, and, um, that just like I had been given grace and I had been believed in and, and mentored to rebuild my life that if something's not here to catalyze that for them, how does anything change? So eventually said, if you'll, if you'll move here, we'll fight for you. We'll have your back. And they gave me a list of things I couldn't, couldn't do and said, if you, as long as you

honor this list, we will. Oh, I got to hear some of those. Well, it was two places that I couldn't go. Why? Because they're controlled by gangs and they can't protect me there. If I wind up there, they can't, it would, 10, 20 people would die protecting me.

I got it. So you can't go there. Don't go there. The second thing was don't approach anybody. We'll bring people to you and you have, but let people come to you. Don't put yourself on anybody. Because again, if they can say, he came to me and did this, then I can't, I can only go so far to protect you. I get it. I'm not gonna betray my community. So you can't do that and put us in a position

where they can say you did this to them. It's just a whole set of different realities that most people live in. Yeah, very much so. So you move in. So I move in, well, I couldn't move in. So I'm like, well, you know, they gave me permission, so this will be easy, I just need to find a place there was no place

to live everything every single place in our community was designated as low income. And even though I had quit my job, and had no income, I still didn't qualify as low income. So it took a while, eventually a habitat house defaulted in our neighborhood when somebody moves out of their home, the dope fiends come in and rip all the copper out of it. And then once the home's open it becomes a trap house. And so this habitat house had been abandoned. The family couldn't make it for one reason or another, moved out in the middle of the

night. The people that are out all night saw the family move out, came in, took the copper out, then they moved in, started selling dope and prostitution out of it. And that became the place the only place I could live because once somebody defaults on a habitat house, the rules fall off of it. So there was one place I could move in Bonton and that and it was into an active trap house.

Wow. Yeah, with with I'll show you pictures of that too, if you want to see him from what it looked like when we got there. Okay, so you're here now. So I'm here. But now what do you got to do? Well, I don't know. It to me. The only plan was to be present for those men that I'd fallen in love with

You know that detrusted me to allow me to come there and and and were willing to fight to protect me to be there And so I want to get to know him and to be Present for them. That was all and so we but you're talking about systems in the back your mind I know that though. I didn't have a clue the best gift I had is I was ignorant and I was worse than ignorant because everything that I thought from watching the news and hearing our society was wrong. Yeah, I learned that too. But my question is, why then? If you're not there to change systems because you don't know that yet. Is it all about you just feel like you were redeemed and now you wanna try to provide redemption for others?

I want to be a facilitator like the people that brought me to rehab. The people that didn't give up on me when I'd given up on myself and everybody should have given up on me that didn't. Those people that persevered when I was not worthy to be supported or walked with are the reason I'm here today. And if somebody was willing to give that to me, then

I have a responsibility to give it back to others. That's literally how it started for you. That's it. Had nothing else to give. So now you're in Bonton. Yeah. So that's a heck of a long way from Bonton Farms. Oh yeah. Well, not that far. Well, I mean, it's not that big. The beautiful thing is this is not that hard. We'll be right back.

Hello from Wonder Media Network. I'm Jenny Kaplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the that. became the first woman to compete in Formula One. The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the US and around the world in the 1960s. The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the first Asian American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice. The mountaineer known in the Chinese press as the tallest woman in the world.

And the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first ever woman to compete at the Olympic Games. Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning and now we're sharing an all-new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.

Doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. They led me into the house and I mean it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops were guarding him. Stacy learned how far her husband would go to save himself. I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. He did not just say I wish he was dead. He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.

He to me is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. Listen to betrayal on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeart Radio Music Festival presented by Capital One. Coming back to Las Vegas. September 20th and 21st. Streaming live only on Hulu. Don't miss. Big Sean.

Camila Cabello. Doja Cat. Gwen Stefani. Hozier. Keith Urban. New Kids on the Block. Paramore. Shaboosie.

The Black Crows. Thomas Rhett. Victoria Monet. And more. Get tickets to our 2024 iHeartRadio Music Festival presented by Capital One right now before they sell out at AXS.com. The guys told me that if they didn't get a job, they were going to die or go back to prison. So that gave us some starting point because they knew what they needed, but they didn't know how to get there.

And so I thought that with my experience, maybe I had what it takes to help them get there. So I looked at them and said, well, if I could, you know, Blackstone owned a portfolio of 120 plus companies. So surely, if surely I can find somebody's willing to give you an opportunity, especially given that you're fighting to build a life for yourself. Like they want this and they're willing to do what it takes to pursue it. So I asked him, I was like, if I could get you an interview, what would you tell them you have to offer? Tell me your value. Looked at me like I was speaking Mandarin. And so all I told him is like, look, if you don't know your value, nobody's going to take the time to figure it out for you. So I just said, look,

our community is a disaster. Why don't we work together to clean it up? And in the process of cleaning it up, we're going to, I'm going to measure you every day on whether you can do eight or nine things that take no education or experience to do. It's all heart. If you want to do it, you can. Show up on time.

Leave on time. leave on time, be a good teammate, which means making the other people around you better, be dependable, be responsible, have a positive attitude. These are things you can choose to do. And at Blackstone, I've read every two years they come up with this IBM CEO study that's like 60 of the most prominent CEOs from around the

world that do this report, this landscape report. And in this one that I had just read, it was about this topic. And it was saying that the generation entering the workforce are coming in more educated than ever before, but they don't have the fundamentals right to be contributors, because these are the fundamentals that they're missing. They can't show up on time, they're not the responsible and dependable.

And so that's where that came from, interestingly enough. And so we started that and immediately about half of the people that were working with us, cleaning up the community were too sick to show up every day. Like it's a big number, 50%. Too sick. Yeah. Diabetes.

Yeah. I mean, I had one that was legally blind from diabetes and another one that had undiagnosed high blood pressure that had now converted into late stage renal failure. So we had dialysis three times a week. Had one that three months after I moved there was limping all the time. Didn't know why. He had diabetes and had that bottom left part of his leg amputated. I'd never heard of dialysis before.

And so I'm like, why is everybody here so sick? And they're like, what are you talking about? I was like, I'm 47 years old. This isn't normal. But they had never known it because it's normal to them. I love this quote when it comes to this work. It's silly, but I think it's profound. It says, I don't know who discovered water, but I know it wasn't a fish. Because it's all I know. I don't know how to describe something that's

just always been there. I don't know what to compare it to. And so that's why this, this relational equity comes in where when we come together as a people, there's things that I cannot bring to the table that my community in Bon Con can. And there's other things that they can't bring to the table that when those things merge, that's when the kingdom comes. So you found out- So health was a problem.

So we planted a garden. I didn't know what else to do. It was a silly little thing. We have right by my house, we have a liquor store and a beer and wine store right across the street from each other. Unbeknownst to me, the liquor store was selling dope out of it. So a lady gone into the liquor store, bought some dope, walked outside shot up, walked across the street right by our garden. There's a bus stop bench and she sat on that and started nodding off, which happens.

You can go through my community right now and there's people nodding off on the benches. So nobody pays attention until somebody did and they went up to check on her and she'd have eaten and died. So when they found out the dope came from the liquor store, DEA and FBI and the cops and code enforcement and everything come down, There's crime tape around the building. And it just so happens to be that was the time when we finally got something besides grass and weeds to grow in our garden. We had our first harvest. So one of my guys was walking in front of that bus stop bitch just a few days later with a bag of vegetables. And one of the guys that's

posted up out in front of that corner store walks up to him and says, will you have any bag? He says, vegetables from our garden. He said, let me see. So he opened up the bag and the guy said, I'll give you $3 for it. So they made the deal and a code enforcement officer walks across the street and writes him a ticket for it.

For what? Selling vegetables. Oh, for gosh sakes, are you kidding me? I can sit on my front porch and watch people being sold and nothing happens. And we get written a ticket for selling vegetables. So being, I guess this passive aggressive thing still rages in me. We started calling ourselves Bonton Farms just to poke the city. And I lament it.

That's hilarious. I lament it. That's hilarious. I lament it because people think we're about a farm, and we're not. I mean, if you think of the word farm, what it literally means is to cultivate, is to grow and cultivate. And it's just that we grow and cultivate people. The metaphor is not lost on me. But I'm glad you said it because people need to understand it.

So it started with a garden. So it started with a little workforce program. Which through the lens of a garden. Well, we were cleaning up our community. The guys just said we need to work. And so we've got to create a mechanism for them to get the kind of confidence and to understand what employers value. Because employers don't pay you to show up,

they pay you for what you contribute. Value creation. But they will fire you for not showing up. Yeah, because you're not creating value. That's a good point. It's all about value creation. But the point is those basic tenets and fundamentals of what you have to do to be a good employee,

through the lens of cleaning up and starting this garden and all these things, you are actually instituting those fundamentals into their ethos, right? Yep, absolutely right. And then I start being awakened to the systems thing because the next thing you know, if you're too sick to work, guess what? You can't work.

So those health outcomes I outlined earlier, it's a plague in our community. It's not an anomaly. So if half my community is sick and dying, how can we ever be productive? You have to address health. So all of a sudden, it's not just one thing, it's a couple of things. Then we're successful getting our first guy job. The guy looks like Ray Lewis. Like he is a, he's a scary physical specimen, but his personality is the opposite of his stature. It's the sweetest man you'll ever meet. And he shows up at my door,

and he is crying like a child cries where your whole body shakes. He's having a panic attack. And I'm like, what's going on? He's like, I'm afraid I'm gonna lose my job. If I lose my job, I'm going back to prison. I can't go back to prison. Like I can't go back to prison.

He's just like, on a scale of one to 10, he's at a 10. And I'm like, come in the house. He comes in and I was like, what's going on? He's like, they're trying to repo my car. I said, you don't have a car? I drove you to your interview a week and a half ago. He's like, well, on the application, they asked me if I had transportation to get here. I didn't think they were going to hire me. But when they did, I couldn't be a liar. I had to get a car.

I said, but that's, that ain't been, it's just been a little over a week ago. I don't understand. He's like, Oh, I make weekly payments, but I'll get my paycheck for two weeks. I've never heard of weekly car payments. Bring me your paperwork. So he brought me his paperwork. What was the percentage? He paid $8,400 for a car that had a $3,500 blue book value, was being charged 30% interest on top of that and had weekly payments. Oh my God.

So the next thing is, I've asked this question for about eight years now. Another system. Could you be and do what you've been and done if you never had access to credit? Say it one more time. Could you be and do what you've been and done if you never had access to credit?

Could, I'm answering the question. Could I be and do what I have been and done? Be and do what you are and done what you've done without access to credit. I've asked that. Hold done what you've done without access to credit. I've asked that. But it's access to fair credit. It's a better way of saying it. Well, that's true.

But you understand what I'm saying. Absolutely. No. I've asked that for eight years to maybe 10,000 people now, and I've not had one person say yes. So when that happens, what you're saying is that one barrier alone suffocates your potential.

Just that. Wow. We never talk about fair credit. I mean, certainly I guess I'm cognizant of that, but I don't know that I've thought about it in that stark of reality, but it's so true. If you have no access to credit, how do you start? That's the whole purpose in credit in the first place.

Well, it's just the nature of the society we live in that credit is a really...access to fair credit is a really important part of building a life. In fact, I argue you can't do it. When I got my first job out of college, I had to rent a U-Haul. Well, I'm old enough that they didn't give out credit cards to kids that didn't have credit yet, thank God, because I would probably be in jail still if they did. And then I had to put a deposit down in an apartment and I'd pay first and last month deposit up to get utilities

because I had no record. I had to borrow $5, dollars to accept my first job. Your first business, I'm sure you didn't go buy slaski's for cash. You're probably barring the money on the land, appreciating it. But it was 15 as I started a roofing company. So, you know, you have to before that, I had a lawnmower that around. I had credit to do everything I've ever done, even if it was $100 for my dad to go buy and refurbish his lawnmower.

It's still credit. It's still credit. And that's real in my world, because when I have people come out to go to work and their battery's dead and I don't have $85, I have to, if I have the title to my car, I take it. If I don't have a title to my car, I go get a payday loan advance.

And if I don't have that, I have to go inside and take my TV off the wall and go to the pawn shop to get $100 to buy a battery so I can get to work. And then by the time I've done that, I get to work and they say, sorry, turn around and go home. You're two hours late. You're fired. For 85 bucks. I started micro lending out of our community when this happened just out of my home.

Our average loan is $47. And it's the difference between being evicted, our utilities being shut off, losing job because I came out in my tire flat. It's I have a lady that what's your default rate? Three, a 7%. We have a 93% payback rate, but it didn't start that way. In an area where you would expect that to be 40%. Yeah, no.

This is one of the- You said it didn't start that way. No, it didn't start that way because people are so grateful that you intervene on their behalf that they over promise the repayment. They feel bad that they had to ask you. They still grow so grateful that you were willing to build that bridge to help them that I over promise my payback. And I'll pay back next pay period.

And they just can't. I can't. So once we started saying, look, I don't care if you even pay me back. What I care about is you build a bridge through your trust and your word. So if you can't pay me back for a year, tell me you can't pay me back for a year. Because by honoring your word, you're building a bridge that next time you need help, I can help

you again because you've established yourself as trustworthy. So don't I don't care about them. It's not about the money. It's about the care. The thing you talk about, it's about building character to be who you say you are and do what you say you are, because that's how social fabric builds and trust and healthy relationships establish. That's not normal in my neighborhood. So from this Bontemps Farms, which is that point is nothing more than a garden next to the house

in front of the truck stop across street from the liquor store. Which is, I mean, my mind's eye, picturing you sitting on the front porch of that in this neighborhood is a little bit hilarious. It's also really heartwarming. Tell me what Bontan Farms says today. Bontan Farms works to create the conditions for flourishing. We believe that people are made in the image of God and that if the conditions for flourishing exist for people to do so that they

would. It is not a people problem, it's a system problem. And so those outcomes that I told you, there's another quote that I love that says, if you show me the outcome, the journey will reveal itself. The system will reveal itself. So when I moved to Banton and my neighbors showed me the journey or showed me the outcome, the systems revealed themselves. That to me is the best news you can hear because it would be exponentially harder

if people were the problem. It's one life at a time. It's a grind. Not everybody's the same. So it's not a science, it's a grind. Not everybody's the same. So it's not a science. It's an art. So how do you figure all that out?

But if it's not a people problem and it's a system problem, we can simply rebuild a system and people will leverage that system just like we did. Why is it that in Amarillo, Texas, blue collar, middle class city at best. We graduate 98% of our kids from high school every year for generations. Because it's a system. Why is it that we don't have those negative health outcomes? Why is it that we don't have high teen birth rates? From across generations,

there is a system and culture established there that's conducive for who God created you to be for that potential to manifest. And that's the best news of this is this can be done easily and by creating the conditions for flourishing one neighborhood at a time. And what happens is that when the conditions for flourishing happen over time, those outcomes normalize. Who wouldn't want that? So Bontan Farms is creating a change in systems for its residents. We think there's a framework that anybody could use anywhere. We don't prescribe anything.

Like this is not a model. A model would say, this is what you do. A framework suggests you consider categories of work. But we have generations as you learned during your time coaching at Manassas, there's generations of kids that are bringing generations of trauma and brokenness forward. We have to reach back and love on those people, walk with those people. So people development and love and caring for one another, mentoring and discipleship have to be a part of it.

It's the hardest part of it because it can't be formulated. It's a life at a time. It's an art, not a science. God doesn't treat me the same way as he treats you and even issue to issue in my life. Sometimes I have horrible consequences for stuff and sometimes he loves me through things.

And so there's this art that goes to that. The second part of the work is the conditions for flourishing. We call them human essentials because I like for people to know this isn't something special you're creating for some poor people. These are things that we all enjoy and we're just applying it to places that have never had it before.

So the term human, the singles, Oh, I love that. Makes me think that I'm no different than anybody else. This, you're not doing anything special for us. You're just doing the same things for us that everybody else has enjoyed. So, um, we think that those seven things, if you think about growing food, there's three things that you need and three ingredients you need.

You need sun, soil and water, You need sun, soil, and water. You need nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. There's a whole bunch of micro-ingredients that will make it better, but if I don't have those six, you won't get fruit. If you don't have five, you won't get fruit. Any combination of them. If I took at the front of your building and put where there's light and got a cotton ball and I wet it down and put a carrot seed in there

and put it in the window and it has water and it has sun, when can I come back and get a carrot? I don't know. Never. It's missing soil. You can't. If I put it in soil and gave it water and put a piece of tin over it so it never got sunlight, when I come back and get a care never didn't get so why is it that we go about?

This social work doing what if they just got a job if we could just get them third grade reading level if we could Just do because they don't have all six things one and of itself is not my work That is a brilliant metaphor and of itself as not going to work. That is a brilliant metaphor. You know, in Psalms or the scripture, it says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim his name and day after day they pour forth speech.

Like the creation shows us, right? If you just look at creation and how it works, it's a model for how we work. They're not separate things. He created the natural environment around us to for how we work. They're not separate things. He created the natural environment around us to show how things work. The fall, the leaves fall down and they die. And then they decompose and they convert into nutrients

and then it gives life to something new. This is all through creation, he's showing us how to do this work. And we're just masters of hitting the bullseye of the wrong target. We'll be right back. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenni Kaplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten. This month we're bringing you the stories of athletes. There's the Italian race car driver who courted danger and became the

first woman to compete in Formula One. The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the US and around the world in the 1960s. The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice. The mountaineer known in the Chinese press as the tallest woman in the world. And the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first ever woman to compete at the Olympic Games.

Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband. Doctor, father, family man.

It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. It led me into the house and I mean, it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops were guarding him. Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself. I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. You not just say I wish he was dead. He actually gave details and explained different scenarios

on how to kill him. He to me is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple 21st, streaming live only on Hulu. Don't miss. Big Sean, Camila Cabello, Doja Cat, Gwen Stefani, Hozier, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboosie, The Black Crows, Thomas Rhett, Victoria Monet, and more. Get tickets to our 2024 iHeartRadio Music Festival, presented by Capital One right now, before they sell out. At AXS.com. How long have you lived in Bombard? 12 years.

What are the changes you've seen? We, I mean some silly little things. We can get food delivered to us now. Internet providers will come in and install internet. When I moved in and called to get my utilities on an internet service, they took internet services. We don't service your area. Are there places you still can't go? One just one. It's, it's not in our neighborhoods. Why?

It's just outside of our neighborhood and it's just a, it's controlled by gangs. It's called little world, but we know it as murder world. It's just a it's controlled by gangs. It's called Little World, but we know it as murder world. It's just it's a. But the rest of that footprint is no. Yeah. And you don't have to have permission to come into Bantan now. Do the police come now? Yeah, sometimes.

Are the police? How's that dynamic? Very well. We have an amazing police chief, Eddie Garcia, that believes that opportunity, the lack of opportunity is births crime and that you can't police your way out of the problem. And so he loves the work that we do, supports the work we do. In fact, about every quarter, they get everybody that is a violent

offender in our city that's not locked up. And they invite them out to have pizza. And they have the FBI there. They have the DA comes, the mayor comes, police chiefs there, the sheriffs are there. And they say, we have zero tolerance in this city for violence. But we don't believe you're a bad person or that you're a violent person. We believe that it stems from lack of opportunity. And so there's people here that whatever opportunity or resources you need, you can get. And so I know that I can sleep at night because I'm connecting you with the people that have what you need. And if you don't take that help and you commit a violent act,

everybody in here is coming after you. It's your choice. But everybody in here will support you. You're not a bad person. We know that the actions follow desperation and lack of opportunity and a feeling of being isolated alone. So here are the people that will help you. And if they can't, let me know who can and we'll connect you to those resources because we believe in you. But if you don't take this opportunity and you choose to do violent acts, we will come after you. Well, I got to believe people sitting in that very room are from Bantan.

A lot of them. Well, they're from the book. There's 40 Bantans around in South Dallas. We're a tale of two cities. So that if you go across downtown Dallas where I-30 cuts across it, south of I-30 is a- North is beautiful and all that. North is what you see on TV and South is what they don't show on TV.

Beyond the farm and the jobs and really the job training, the farm and the jobs and really the job training, getting people really hireable. What are some other stuff? I know you've done some stuff with banking and we talked about predatory lending, but housing, what else? Everywhere I go across the country, it's the same things. And it might not be all seven, but it's some combination of this is that things. And it might not be all seven, but it's some combination of this is that we have lack of economic development. And so we have to we have to create jobs, not just prepare people and place them in jobs. They say the average dollar stays in the inner city six minutes compared to middle class communities six days. So say that again, that's another one is in the inner city six minutes because if I if all the effort is workforce development

to get me a job somewhere else in an economic center and I go there and earn my paycheck and I come back home and there's no goods and services to spend that money on, I wound up giving it right back to you. So there's no fly wheel of wealth building and economy building because so far most of our efforts have been job preparation and go work where there's already jobs. We have to create economics in our neighborhoods so that the dollars get exchanged and it creates this flywheel of prosperity and wealth building because our dollars start to be exchanged with one another.

So economic development, health care, access to health care, access to fresh affordable food. We've launched a program in partnership with Kroger that called Grocery Connect that is just extraordinary. We can end food deserts in the United States in five years. The plan is there to do that. Remedial banking, we have to have a way, banks exist for people. Replacing your $47 loans.

Yeah, because if somebody has to come to my house when I need to get to work and I came out and my battery's dead and they have to hope that I'm home, it's just not dependent enough. We need the financial institution. It's also not building a proper credit life or score. That I get it. The micro lending taught me the lessons so that we could come up with an entrepreneurial

solution to outcompete predatory lenders with this remedial bank model. Love it. Education, you know, still most of the country funds schools based on property taxes. So kids that live in areas where property taxes are low don't have the same kind of fields, resources, equipment. You've unfortunately experienced a lot of that. So we have to, and education means a lot of different things. It's not just primary education.

How do we build culture and the wisdom? If our families have been decimated for generations now, the wisdom that we're talking about being shared today that's been so freely given to me. How do we start to instill that wisdom as a form of education in our communities? You spent a lot of your time on character. What are the three things I picked up on that you kept hammering those kids home on? What were the three character commitment? Yeah. Commitment and yeah, yeah. So it's, it's a form of education. Safe, affordable housing is a really challenging thing.

And in Bonton, we, um, we had worked with the city to bring some innovative products. Most zoning is all designed to build, to be, to draw people to a city for economic benefit, and it's never really been thought of housing when it comes to people that fall out of that 80% framework rule. Every single thing you said is so consistent with one over arcing tenant. You're changing the system.

That's the system. Every one of those is a systematic change. Yep It's phenomenal. Yep What's next? So I think you've experienced this I don't put words in your mouth, but When you do something profound something transformative, there's a part of the world that wants to make you a hero And if this is a kingdom work, that's a really dangerous thing. Because then people think, well, it's because of coach Bill, or it's because of Darren Babcock. And if that happens, and people don't believe that it can be done anywhere and everywhere,

that it takes some special person to do it, then we remain paralyzed and stuck. So because this is a kingdom work, and I believe that it's incredibly important and it can't just be in Bonton, it has to spread. When COVID hit, we implemented a plan or the next three years strategic plan and part of that was a succession plan. And I was gonna have to walk away because it was becoming too much about me and too dependent on me. And that can't happen. I mean, that would kill, Bontan might make it, but nobody else, it wouldn't help anybody else. So we did that and I thought I was going to have

to go back to business, which I lamented, but I was willing to do. And again, providentially, it's just like every time I'm obedient, God orders my steps. And every time I'm not, I wind up in these really dark, lost places. But Stand Together Foundation called and said, I've been telling them for eight years, it's not about the individual things that you're doing that are all beautiful.

But if we don't build healthy foundations and fences by building systems of flourishing, then we can't put enough Humpty Dumptys back together again to win this battle. And they finally called and said, well, we think that's right, but we don't really know how to go about it. Would you consider coming and joining our team

and building a place-based workforce? So now I get to go everywhere, meet amazing people like you guys. I get exposed to some things I've never seen before so I can add it in. And then I also get to share what we've learned in Bonton with other people that haven't seen that before. And I believe that the breakdown

that we're experiencing in our society, if you just take, our country is a country because of people, right? If you have no people, it's not a country. It's just a landmass. So our country is us. We put too much on government and all these other forces and use this as an excuse for why things are the way they are.

We have the power by loving one another. That's it. You mean an army of normal folks? Yes, I mean an army of normal folks. And that we can leverage this into something where, if you look at what are the most glaring things that you hear about across society that are social issues that we spend vast amounts of resources trying to solve.

Ah, there's a bunch of- Poverty, homelessness, addiction, human trafficking. Criminal justice. Criminal justice. Those are symptoms of a problem. If you address symptoms and not the cause, which is what we've done for the last 150 years. So what we're encouraging everybody to do is where is the breakdown happening?

And the breakdown's happening in data. It's irrefutable, comes from two places, and it affects our whole country. Areas of concentrated poverty and the breakdown of the family. End stop. And we need a huge part of our philanthropic community, our faith community, and hopefully with the proper support of government to come together and to make investments to see that our families are held together and restored and that the areas of concentrated poverty have the conditions for flourishing.

Because all of those downstream symptomatic issues that I just described are being filled and populated. The pipeline to those is coming from those two places. Could not agree more. Now I'm somebody that didn't come from a broken family. So, so obviously that's not true. No, there's anomalies, but it's 10%. If 90% is coming from those two things, shouldn't we focus on that 90%? If 90% is coming from those two things, shouldn't we focus on that 90%? If somebody listened to me has a Bantan near them.

They do. Right. Everybody listening does. Right. But if they have a Bantan near them and they have a heart and a desire to do the kind of work that you've done. How do they find Bonton or you or how does that happen? How does somebody wanna, or maybe there's just somebody listening wants to support it. How do they find it?

Where do they go? Well, if you ask around, because I got the privilege of touring this beautiful city yesterday, and every neighborhood we drove in, there were some amazing people out there doing fantastic, beautiful work. And so you just have to seek it out. I don't recommend people just driving in and saying, hey, here I am.

I think it's good to enter through someone that has some equity and relationship already established, and then God may lead you into your own thing. If they wanna learn how you did it. Yeah, I think if you Google Bontan Farms, you'll read an abundance of stories that kinda talk about how we did it. Yeah, so Googling Bontans, you can hear the stories and all of that,

which, there's a Bontan, you can hear the stories and all of that, which there's a Bontan literally every 10 square miles in any municipality, right? So I mean, the founder of Bontan and now your exit, but what is Stand Together? Stand Together Foundation is a national foundation that for the last nine years has been immersed in the social sector because we look around the country and say,

there's a report that came out recently that said less than 2% of all nonprofits show evidence of real transformation. So just to put it in context today, there's over, if you take churches and educational institutions out of it, there's a million and a half nonprofits that represent over 10% of all jobs in the United States. 5.7% of our GDP. And if you take government money out of it, consume $500 billion a year.

And yet every problem we care about that we just highlighted is getting worse. Yeah, it's like there's this massive amount of resource, of time, effort, talent, and money being employed, but it feels like it's a million different birds pecking at it rather than one conjoined effort. And what if we could pull all of those resources together and Instead of having you know, a lot of little pecs of something have a massive drill born a hole in the problem. Yeah So that's stand together is like for us to stand together

We know that we know that the data reveals that we're we need to Desperately figure out a way to start winning on these issues that we care most about. We know we're not and the status quo is not okay. We don't know what we don't know. So how do we learn to be able to advise, counsel, and come alongside and partner with people? We need to just go immerse ourselves in the market and do it. And so they've done that for over nine years now.

And you are what with them? With? Stand together. What you are what with them? With- Stand together, what do you do with them? I have the responsibility of building their place-based work. So my title is Director of Community Transformation. And the work that I've developed, the place-based work we've developed, we call it RADIUS.

And we have the opportunity to go all across the country and to learn from other people. And then we like to get invited into places to say, can we come alongside you with all of the 10 years of experience and resources that we have and capabilities we've developed to help bring something really special to your city. But we won't come unless we're invited.

So that's why it's like this past least travel. It takes some time to earn that, takes some time to build relationships, takes some time to see if your vision for your city aligns with what capabilities we have to bring to bear. But we have patience and so we've been invited here to kind of start a conversation about just learning about your city

and where you guys hope to take it. Just learning about your city and where you guys hope to take it. Darren, when you look at the mirror this morning and you think that it wasn't that long ago that you were numbing your sadness and depression with cocaine and fights, and you are where you are now. What do you feel? Just gratitude. I feel an awful lot of grace, because it's the only thing that allows me

to know that I've been extended grace and because I've been getting extended grace by my Creator, I can give it to myself and learn to give it to others. I feel an abundance of mercy because I didn't suffer all the consequences that I should have. I've been spared from so much. And I think the last thing is just joy. You know, gratitude, grace, mercy and joy are the things that define my life more now than

ever before. From a dude who grew up in Amarillo and came up, blue middle class, Oklahoma, wrestling and all of that, built a business. Oh my gosh, with a six and seven year old son loses his 30 year old wife, the wheels come off and then he fights through, finds his faith, finds a relationship with God, gets back, starts killing the corporate environment, and walks away because he feels responsibility to give the same grace and mercy he received in his life at the depth of the darkest, deepest

place, and then moves into a place like Bontan, builds it up, turns it over, and is now going around the country with stand together trying to find ways to use that experience to help facilitate other growth. That's your story. Yes, sir. I'm sticking to it. Wow. Dude, thank you so much for sharing it with us. Thank you so much for

the work you have put in to help other people. And man, the wisdom, you know, I just hope our listeners paid attention to the understanding that people are made in God's image and therefore they are good. Systems are made by human beings and therefore they are failed. And if we will believe in by human beings and therefore they are failed. And if we will believe in the human beings and not believe in the systems,

then we can change our culture. And I think that's what I get the most from you. And he's model-lipped. Creation works because he designed the system for creation to work. That's why the moon rises the way it does and the sun sets the way it does and the tides come in and go out and the seasons come and go.

He designed a system that shows us what it looks like to have a flourishing system and all of creation enjoys it. And so it's not like we have to come up, we just need to be observing that's what God's showing us already all around us every day and then emulate it. Darren Babcott, the founder of Bonton Farms and now we're staying together and really the arbiter of some pretty exceptional wisdom.

Thanks man for joining me. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to meet you. It's an honor to meet you, dude. You've done a heck of a lot more than I have. I'm just, instead of being an interviewer today, I've felt more like a student and I've appreciated the lessons.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. And thank you for joining us this week. If Darren Babcock or other guests have inspired you in general or better yet inspired you to take action by volunteering or donating to Bonton Farms, starting something like it in your community or something else entirely, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. You can write me anytime at bill at normal folks dot us.

And I promise you guys, I'll respond. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and on social. Subscribe to the podcast rate and review it. Become a premium member at normal folks dot us. All of these things that will help us grow. An army of NormalFolks. Thanks to our producer, Ironlight Labs. I'm Bill Courtney.

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