An Army of Normal Folks - HIGHLIGHTS: This State Is Solving The Foster Care Crisis (Here's How)

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

This is the shorter "highlights" version of the episode. Coach Bill Courtney sits down with Chris Campbell, Executive Director of Oklahoma's 111 Project, to unpack how Oklahoma has cut the number of children in foster care nearly in half—from 11,500 to 6,000—and what communities across America can learn from their success. Rather than pointing fingers at government, Chris shares how churches, nonprofits, everyday citizens, and public agencies began working together to build practical pathways for people to help. From recruiting foster families to preventing children from entering foster care in the first place, this conversation is full of ideas that any community can adopt. Chris also shares the deeply personal moment that changed the course of his life: holding a two-day-old baby with nowhere to go. In this episode: Why America has a foster parent shortage—and the consequences for children. How Oklahoma dramatically reduced the number of kids in foster care. Why prevention is just as important as recruiting foster families. The story behind CarePortal and how a simple app is helping keep families together. Why supporting struggling families often matters more than removing children. The surprising role churches can play in solving one of America's biggest challenges. If An Army of Normal Folks each did what we can, this is one problem we really can solve. Check out the resources below! RESOURCES Learn more about 111 Project at 111Project.org | One Church, One Family, One Purpose Follow 111 Project on socials @111projectok Interested in fostering? Search for foster parent classes in your community and join them. No commitment required. Exploration is the first step.  Want to help prevent kids from unnecessarily entering foster care? Sign up for CarePortal at https://www.careportal.org/ ARMY ACTIONS Subscribe to the podcast and rate & review us! Signup to join the Army, visit NormalFolks.org Follow us on social media @ArmyofNormalFolks Join or start an ANF local service club at https://normalfolks.org/service-clubs/ Take The 10 Level Challenge, "the hero's journey for service" at 10LevelChallenge.orgSupport the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We need around 140,000 more foster homes than we have today. And because we don't have enough home for these innocent kids, there's devastating consequences. And I get handed a two-day-old baby with no place to go. And I didn't know we had a place that we stuck kids with no place to go. It's places that we take 18-year-olds and we move from the kid shelter to the adult shelter because we don't have a better plan for them. And that reality, to me, was like, this is unacceptable. Today's guest is Chris Campbell, executive director of the One-One-1 Project in Oklahoma,

which partners with churches to recruit one new foster family a year and help strengthen one vulnerable family a month so that they can avoid foster care. Care portal now operates in all 77 counties and has served over 54,000 children, 20,000 just last year. Holy smokes, dude. And every day grows, right? Like even since that, 61,000 kids as of today. You've reduced the foster system from 11,500 to 6,000 children in foster care. We created pathways for people to engage and partner, and what do you know? That makes a difference. Their success in cutting foster care in half is incredible.

I mean, it's wild. I've never heard of a state achieving such a reduction until now. And you're about to learn how so that you can do this in your state too. You can do small things from meeting a need on care portal, which is the largest care sharing technology in the country. or significant things like actually becoming a foster parent. And if there's an army of us doing these things together, we can solve this problem. But I see four million people in the state of Oklahoma

that if we can't figure it out, I don't know who can, but I believe we can. This is the Army of Normal Folks podcast, where our mission is to make service easier for all of us and together change this country. Car, the host of the podcast, Encore. Check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry.

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at you. I mean, Alice is excited about it, but I'm not sure how excited I am. The podcast is now live on YouTube, which means now you get to see me in case you prefer watching it there. And we're switching up the audio format of the podcast. You can now either listen to the full version of the podcast on the same episode, meaning you no longer have to go to part one and part two to hear a whole episode we got going. Or you can listen to a 30-minute version of the podcast that will be labeled as highlights. And we get it.

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And keep it coming. You can email us anytime at normalfokes.org and we will respond. Now, let's go to the episode. You guys have helped cut foster care and task in your state in Oklahoma. From 11,500 kids to 6,000. How? Yeah, so there's 6,200 churches in the state of Oklahoma. So the big idea was, man, what if we got more people involved?

There's enough churches. There's enough families. And there's enough people that want to help. They just don't know how to help. So how do we create those pathways for more people to help? Because the government can't do it on their own. So we created pathways for people to engage and partner. And what do you know that that makes a difference in the lives of kids and families that can keep kids out of foster care, can help kids reunify faster.

It can support those professionals that work day in and day out to take care of those families. So that play, what we've gotten to see over the last 10 years has actually led with a whole bunch of collaboration of work on our government side as well to changing our system and making a difference in it. So I love that you're not one of these guys are just saying government sucks. Yeah. Yeah. You worked with government. You got to work with government. You know, like in our state, you know, our state agencies is some of the largest.

I mean, if you look at capital and investment and staff count, you know, they're doing good work because they care. But sometimes they have obstacles in red tape that prevents them from doing it as well as we would all like to see it done. And so we can either throw rocks at them and say, just get better or we can lean in and try to help learn what needs to be changed and fill those holes, those gaps in the system where they can't, they can't function. And just put a number on it. It's a lot of people from you told me. It's like 3,000 child and family service. So just in the child welfare division, there's about 3,000 staff. Employees. So if you look at it from a corporation, right, it would be one of the largest. employers in the state of Oklahoma. You know, so if you look at these different government entities, they're investing a lot in people.

And we talk about all the time, you know, a lot of churches will know about their fire chief and their police chief, but they don't know nothing about child welfare or some of these other government agencies. But these are the people that are responsible when it's the ceiling fan. It's the government child welfare folks that are in the middle of the hardest of the muck with families. And so I have deep respect for my government counterparts and the work that they do. I actually love to hear that.

I don't hear that all the time. And I love to hear that. So one of the things we talk about often because it is such an effective idea. And its implementation has now been incredibly effective across a broad array of uses. But you guys got involved with care. We were the very first implementer of Care Portal. Were you really? Yeah, we were.

Yeah, we were. Oklahoma, surprise, you know. So Care Portal had done a couple of pilots in a couple of different locations, and one of those locations was Oklahoma. For those who haven't listened to the Care Portal episode or even know what Care Portal lives that may be listened to us for the first time, briefly. Yep. What is that? Yeah, you have workers over here that are working with families that need help, and you've got people over here that want to help. Care Portal is the web-based platform that connects the two. And really simple to give opportunity without the red tape, to directly. serve families through that worker. And so that platform's now been around 10 years. It's on people's cell phones. Yeah, on cell phones. It's a web app and a phone app now. Over 500,000 kids serve through this. Hey, somebody who knows the family, advocates for the family. Somebody in the

community that cares responds and says, hey, I can help with that, whether it's a dishwasher to a car seat, to a bed, to utility bill, to advocate for the needs of the family to know. what the reality is that they that they have, but also recognizing that there's that worker, there's that government worker who's saying, hey, here's a family that we think can make it, right? I mean, they could put on a request for any family, but most likely the families that they're putting on Care Porter are the ones that they think have a chance because they're cheering for them too, right?

They're cheering for that dad that's waking up at five o'clock in the morning and walking 12 miles to get to work, but then trying to figure out how he's going to do his, you know, addictive recovery case plan and his child welfare plans and his kids visitation, right? But he didn't have a car. But the worker sees the hard work that dad's doing to try to change his life. And she's like, yeah, I want dad to have a bus pass. You know, like, I want dad to be able to have transportation. I want dad to have people cheering for him because he's an amazing dude, you know.

But when he's on drugs or when he's under the influence of alcohol, he's struggled. But he's making this progress, and we all need to be celebrating that, and we want his kids out of foster care, you know? So sometimes the best family for kids is not a new one. It's the one that they've always had that just needs that extra support and extra advocacy for them. And so she puts that on care portal, somebody buys a bus pass, and it's great. And that way, it's not somebody that wants something asking, is somebody advocating for someone who needs it. In 2025, the one-one one-one project, I guess it's called, celebrated a land. Mark Milestone.

Care Portal now operates in all 77 counties and has served over 54,000 children, 20,000 just last year. Holy smokes, dude. Yep. And every day it grows, right? Like even since that, 61,000 kids as of today. And what's been really cool is, of course, strategically, I think we all look at. and say, hey, where's the greatest amount of need?

Go there. So you've reduced the foster system from 11,500 to 6,000 children in foster care. And Alex says there's 6,200 churches in your state. That's right. You literally have one church for every child. So why do we still have kids without a foster or adoptive family? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think part of that is understanding.

By the way, that question can be misconstrued. That is by no means a criticism. Yeah, that's right. Because you've cut it in half. But it still is an inconvenient fact that there's that many. So I guess what next? Why do we still have this going on? I think we all recognize that sometimes we have simple goals.

goals for the sake of communication. But then when we get underneath, we realize the problem's a lot more complicated than any of us want to make it out to be. Right. Is that not universal? That's in business, families, anything. Yeah. So we want to make it the reality of it simple, but we would be ignorant to say it's that simple. And so on the church side, the reality is a lot of our churches are small little family churches, a lot that, you know, are aging, right? That are, that are of an age that they're like, hey, we can't raise kids anymore. But they have a lot to offer, but it may not be in opening up their home. We'd also recognize the challenges with a lot of our kids in the system.

Not every family is out of the gate equipped, you know, even if you've had kids. You probably need some additional equipping and training and development to make you ready to parent kids that come from our places, kids that come from trauma or kids that come from a different cultural context that you do. And so what we recognize is that kids are coming out of places of need, sometimes of rural poverty and even sometimes of urban poverty. But kids in the foster care system come from all sorts of different scenarios. So even a blanket foster care is ignorant because it's as complicated as people are, right? As different as people are. But I think the simple idea is we've got more than enough people, you know, but it's a lack of development and it's a lack of connection that keeps people from saying yes, which ultimately, Bill, I think is fear.

I think I agree. We have talked foster care a fair amount on here. I mean, it's not something that we just, it's not a focus. It's just we've talked about it. It's just come up, right? Right. I, from all of them. of those interviews and all of the different faces and all of the different work being done, I do think fear plays a huge role in it. And I don't think it's fear of opening your home. I think it's the fear of, you know, how much work is this going to be? How far is this child going to be? Is this child going to interrupt my already organic nuclear family and what's that going to be on my own children? I mean, and I think those are legitimate fears. Those are all legitimate fears. And I think for all of us, experience and relationship over time is what gives us the context or the wisdom to say, okay, I'm ready for that, right?

Or there's other ways that I can be involved. And that is just as good, right? That's just as helpful. And so all of us that are in the foster care space would say our heart is not to grow foster care. Our heart is to keep kids out of foster care. Yeah, you'd like to work yourself out of the job. Absolutely, right? And so I think every state, if they're doing the things that they should be doing, they're thinking more about going upstream and prevention and community work. And then secondarily, they're thinking about kinship care because, like, kids should belong in, if not their immediate family, and this broader family, if possible. And so that work is all work that we're trying to do. So to say, hey, more families is the easy answer. Yeah, but it's the right. right kind of families that really can provide those kids a thriving environment, whether it be

their complex behavioral needs, whether it be the disability that they have, or whether it be just the room, you know, hey, I've got siblings and we want those kids to all be placed in a home together. Well, for anybody to take on one extra child in their home, but to take on three, four, five, that's a significant jump, right? But we would believe there's more than enough families. It's finding them. It's equipping them. It's giving them pathways to have those experiences to get them to a yes

versus just trying to cherry pick them off and thrown them in because they saw a picture of a kid and we're like, oh, you know, I feel empathy, but they're not ready. And so I think the big work that even what you're talking about on this podcast to do is How do we develop a community and a culture that gets the experiences so that they are ready for those yeses instead of coming in for the wrong reasons and the wrong, wrong ideas? And now a few messages from our generous sponsors. But first, earlier this year, something we're really proud of, Army members launched six ANF local service clubs around the country. Their design is to make service easier for your fellow community members by really having zero requirements of the club's members.

All you got to do is just sign up and join our service activities whenever you can, when it works for you. And you welcome kids to join us for everything. And they cultivate an in-person, family-like tribe, for lack of a better term, that makes service even more rewarding. We are now really because of the success of these first six looking at launching more local service clubs. And if you'd be interested in either leading or serving on the leadership team of a new one in your community, email Alex at Alex at normalfolks.org and he'd love to connect with you about this cool opportunity. We'll be right back. You've heard the chaos.

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It's your girl Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks?

Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all. week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka, showing out.

She beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcast. This is Chelsea Hamler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. If you come over here to play games, I'ma check you, okay?

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Oh my God. And many, many more. Open your free high-heart radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tutro. And listen now. Alex made a point off-air that's an interesting question, which is how many foster

families do you still need to recruit and maybe more important, not more importantly, but equally importantly. What's that gap and what happens to kids inside that gap. Yeah, it's a great question. So in foster care, just like any entity, right, if you're not recruiting new, you're dying, right? Yeah, because there has to be attrition. There's always attrition. And a lot of it's fair attrition, right? I change of season,

life, circumstances, whatever. Moving. But in Oklahoma, in every state, we try to not talk about it too much, but the reality, a lot of children are being adopted. And so, every year in Oklahoma, 1,500 to 2,500 kids are being adopted out of the state of Oklahoma child welfare system. About 50% of kids go home in the state of Oklahoma, but about 50% of the kids will never go home. And so those families adopt those kids, the foster families that love those kids, who knew those kids, who have fought for those kids, tried to get them reunified with their families. When that doesn't work out, 95% of the time, it's the foster family that adopts that child and we want to celebrate that. But the reality is that work is still not done at adoption.

We want to like say, hey, this moment, check, it's done, right? And everything's great. And when in reality that we know some of the toughest work actually happens post adoption, right? When a child goes through those teenage years and they're dealing with the realities of how can my mom and dad do these things, right? Like when that weight begins to hit and the emotions and the feelings, even in the best of homes, it can really rock a young person and create some really tumultuous years. And that family doesn't need to be fostering more kids as they're walking through that with that child, right? That makes so much sense. So as they adopt and as they move on, the number of foster kids, if we haven't gone upstream far enough and stopped it, they keep coming.

So if you're not constantly developing families, you're losing. You're always losing. Your numbers are ratio-wise are going down. So if you look at the math, you know, I didn't love algebra, but you know, you got numerator, denominator, that kind of thing, right? You can impact one of the two sides. You get more foster families and your ratio looks better. Or you help prevent less kids going into the system, you know?

And so both are worthy causes. Both you don't have a whole lot of control of if you're doing the, the work right, other than how can we provide more supports for these kids and families from different communities to make sure kids don't go on care. So in Oklahoma, you know, we have 0.5, five families for every child in the system. Yeah. So one family for every two kids pragmatically, right? You know, what's interesting also is you said there were 3,000 people working for the government, and there's about 6,000 that all. means you have one worker for every two kids. You would think with one worker for every two kids

and one family for every two kids that y'all would have this thing under wraps. Right. And from the outside looking in, the data makes it seem like, well, there's a lot of waste there, right? Or a lot of fluff. That's what it feels like. What it feels like. So let me, let me unpack that even a little bit, because I think this is really important. And I would say every day I learned something new. I've been doing this now 10 years and I can share part of my story. I had a friend invite me to a local shelter. I was a church leader of a really large church. What's a church leader? A minister? I was a minister. I was a paid vocational pastor and my job at this big church was to help people serve in the community and be connected in community and small groups. So you're like the outreach.

I was the outreach small groups pastor. I was in charge of all things adults for a church of about six to 10,000 at the time. Okay. It was a big job. It was a big church. Lots of people. And I had a friend that said, hey, I love, God was doing some really cool stuff with adoption in our church. A lot of families were adopting. People were saying, hey, man, our kids ministry looks like the UN, right? I love that. Because these kids were coming in from all over the world and it was really cool.

That's as Christ-like as it could possibly be in my mind. It was beautiful. Yeah. But one of my good friends comes knocking on my door one day, and she's got an idea. And as a leader, you know, ideas are a dime a dozen, right? everybody's got an idea, right? But this is a really good friend, a really smart friend, a friend that I deeply respect. And she's like, hey, I want to take you someplace.

And I'm like, absolutely, Rachel, where do you want to go? And she's like, I want to take you to our local kids shelter. I didn't know we had a kid shelter. I'm a, you know, not old old man, but 30-year-old man, right? That's been highly involved. My head has not been in the sand. And it's my job to get people connected in the community. And I didn't know we had a place that we stuck kids with no place to go.

And so she takes me to the shelter and I get handed a two-day-old baby with no place to go in the state of Oklahoma. And this is pre-1-1-1. This is like 2009. And literally she's like, yeah, this baby came from the hospital. Why the heck is this baby here? Well, there's no foster family available anywhere in the state of Oklahoma that at this moment can take this two-day-old baby. And I'm like, how the heck is that a reality in my state where we have more churches than gas stations? How is that a reality in the United States? United States of America, right? And I'm taking families around the world to do these trips to work in orphanages and that kind of thing. And pragmatically in our own backyard, we have this thing we call a shelter.

10 minutes for me. It's supposed to be temporary. But yet, as Ashley crossed, that same place that Ashley talked about on this podcast, it's places that we take 18-year-olds and we move them from the kid's shelter to the adult shelter because we don't have a better plan for them. And that reality to me was like, by worship of this is unacceptable. How can we like tolerate that, right? And and I think in the science of this stuff that we're talking about, right, like the pain of the current situation has to outweigh the effort that's going to be required for change, right? And so for me, that was my moment where like the pain is too great. We got to change things. We got to fix things. So our church began to lean in, we begin to send folks to that shelter to meet those kids and to play basketball and do hair and have pizza parties and do financial classes, right? This is a temporary shelter.

This is supposed to be a temporary shelter. That's, that's about, that's my point. But if there's no home, it becomes permanent. It becomes permanent. But it was never designed or set up to be permanent for children. That's right. That's right. And we know institutions aren't good for kids.

Yeah. If you don't have a mom and a dad and then we say, hey, go bless you, go be an adult. figure it out. And you've never had an example of what a functioning household looks like, right? You've never done your laundry. You've never done your dishes. You can't cook meals because of the liability associated with, you know, food handler permits and all that, right? Like, the complications of institution make things not healthy for kids. And so it sets them on a trajectory and spiritually for the church, I echo to this church is how can a kid ever, fall in love with this Heavenly Father if they've never had a good earthly one. Right? Like we could talk all we want about God loves you when they've never seen it with skin on. It's going to be a big jump for them. Right.

So foster care, the thing I didn't know, a state of Oklahoma, just state of Oklahoma, 80,000 phone calls every year to our hotline. That's how many? 80,000. Okay. So that's a coach. That's a teacher.

That's a neighbor. that somebody who cares that's 2200 calls a day somebody who cares says something's wrong here right and I think it's a scary thing in Oklahoma we're mandatory

reporter so if you're the youth pastor and you see a kid come to come to the camp and he's got bruises or scar like you're required to call right we're supposed to report but the reality that's a lot of things to investigate and so our 3,000

and staff, their primary responsibility is if that seems like a legitimate call, because some them are silly, right? Like, there's a marital spat that's happening and husband or wife because they're mad at their spouse or making calls just to create some drama because they're mad, they're angry, and that's their only thing that they can do. But in the midst of all that chaos and sometimes even deception, there's a reality that kids are being harmed and they're unsafe. And so our frontline child investigation staff, it's their job to figure out what's true around.

And they're handling 2,200 calls a day. And then not only do they just deal with the child, they're dealing with the mom and the dad, but maybe the aunt and the uncle, maybe the neighbor, maybe the teacher, right? Grandparents. Now, grandparents and foster parents. Everybody's got an opinion. Everybody's got a perspective, right? They've got a supervisor.

They've got a judge. So one situation involving three or four kids now becomes this inner web of complication. Here's the part I would celebrate our agency. And once again, the outside is much simpler than the inside of this. But in Oklahoma, 75% of the kids, even in situations of abuse and neglect, stay home. Or stay with a family member that cares. because what they recognize is, man, it's much better to support that family than to remove that kid. Because once we remove that kid, the trauma to the kid is not worth it, right?

Like just removing a child from their family creates enough chaos. But even for dad, what happens psychologically to a dad when you remove his kids from? Even a dad that's struggling with an addiction. might that dad, when there's a kid in his home, have some checks, even as faint, you know, is that that voice is still in his head? Like, maybe I should party this hard tonight because that's interesting. Right? I'm going to have my six-year-old that's going to be knocking at my door tomorrow morning. I may throw some things at that six-year-old, you know, because I have a hangover.

But we would all recognize that there would be some accountability for having a child in most hopefully, these situations or family situations. But when you remove that kid, what motivation is there for dad anymore? Right? The one thing that he might be proud of. The one thing that he might be hopeful for. The one thing that, I mean,

what parent doesn't want? Good parent wants their kids to thrive or wants to brag on their kids. And so when you remove the child from their home, it really hurts actually the success of progress you can actually have with family. Whereas if you can leave that kid in there, wrap around supports, right?

So that's the work of the agency that people do not appreciate. So we need to talk about 3,000 people. It's really not that many. Not that many. For that kind of work. And recognizing also, because we don't have enough foster families in the state of Oklahoma, that child may be placed three hours away from where that worker originated that case. So guess what they're actually really doing?

They're driving to pick up this kid in this part of the state to this part of it, just to do a family visit for an hour with mom. and mom because she doesn't have transportation might be there late, might not, right? Like she's struggling herself and we're blaming mom. Well, mom may be walking five miles to

so the whole system once you get inside of it, you realize how really complicated and hard it is for somebody. And so the ones that are making it and it's a $45 bus pass to help them be successful, it's like, why wouldn't I want to fix that?

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Listen to Discraseland on the I-Heart Radio app, podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to ask two things before we move on. You have set goals for churches yearly and monthly. Can you talk about that? And goals may be, I may be saying a little too crass, but like targets that ideally,

in the idealized world that all each church would be doing and then how are you guys doing against there right now? Absolutely. So simply, you know, there's about 15,000 kids that come in and out of the Oklahoma foster care system every year, right? The math would say they're in twos on average. You know, like people are caring for them and doubles.

So if you have 6,000 churches that served one family every month, that's 12,000 families that are served every year. That touches every case in the state of a month. So the simple challenge to an army of good is, are you willing to serve a family a month? a whole church one whole church it's not much to ask it's not much to ask right like that simple goal now it would be ignorant of me to say that that that takes care of all the problems but dang it sure would oh boy that makes it down right yeah because the caseworker is saying dad could make it if he had

a little extra help if that if dad had a rent deposit that he can't currently afford we could speed up his pathway to housing because he's got a job he's on a pathway for being clean, but he needs a dang rent deposit. So he's either going to wait three, four months before he gets his kid back or we could do it today, right? The scripture alludes to this idea of where our treasure is, there are hearts follow. Right. So the simple concept is, if I want to care about the stock market, what do I do?

I put a little money into it. And now, now what? I follow a stock because I've got some investment there. That's interesting. Right? And you're saying if you put a little money in a human being, now you're interested and you follow and then relations. Time, energy, capital, right? Time treasure talents, whatever those things are. But when you make that investment, you're in. You're in for sometimes a life. You didn't realize where this thing was going to go. And the challenge with institutions and even with government is they control for liability and protection. And they do this. And nobody's ever able to get connected or invests. But when we open up some. doors, some pathways, some honor

answer people to them, they get involved. They begin to care. They begin to realize that child welfare worker is just like their college kid that they have that just graduated that is pursuing a dream and their dream was helping people. And so they got into social work because they felt called

to social work. But yet the daily opportunity that they have kicks their butt every day and they want to quit. And so they don't last long, right? And so you begin to meet people and make friends and see opportunities. But here's what's also beautiful is as you get involved, you begin to see the gaps. And what caring people do is they fill gaps. They solve problems.

And there's so many problems that are so different in every community that if you don't invite the community in, they'll never solve it because they don't have any ownership in it. They don't have any buy-in that's there, right? But when you invite them in to be a part of it, You've got churches that are starting bunk bed ministries because there's not enough beds for kids. Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace, right? Or Judy Sharon from New Hope Baptist in small town, Oklahoma, right? She doesn't even have a sleep in heavenly peace.

She just makes it bad. You've got churches that are creating small little medical clinics because they're hearing in their community. People are not getting their medical needs addressed and they can't drive and there's not a close clinic. And so some of their clinicians are giving extra time. and they're using a Sunday school class to serve two or three families a week. On the surface sounds simple.

You connect churches with kids who need families. Hold on. I think we missed one of the goals, though. I didn't answer your question very well. The other one was the church is trying to recruit. One family a year. Recruit and support one family a year. So in the state of Oklahoma, we have 3,500 families that are in the game.

We have 6,200 kids. If we had a net, three, that. families, we would have a one-to-one ratio, which the federal government says is like unreal. Yeah, right. But if we had every church recruit and support one new family every year, it would overwhelm the system. The problem would be we would have excess and we would say that it's waste.

Right? Like how do we license homes that we're not even going to use? It creates a whole other set of problems that we would have to solve, but that would be really good problems. Like, oh, we have options? We have five families to choose from. Yeah, I would think that that would be what you would want. Chris Campbell, everybody, executive director of 1-1-1 project, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, which is basically Tulsa.

Dude, thanks for coming to spend an afternoon with me. Yeah, thanks for your advocacy, your voice, and let's raise up some more people to get in the game. I love it. Let's get a club going in Oklahoma City or Tulsa somewhere. Do it. All right, buddy. Thank you. And thank you for joining us this week.

if Chris Campbell has inspired you in general, or better yet, to take action, by getting involved with Care Portal, the one-one-one-one project, starting something like it in your community or something else entirely, let me know. I really do want to hear about it. You can write me anytime at bill at normalfolks. us. I'm telling you, guys, I'll respond. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with friends, share it on social. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you're watching or listening to it from. Rate it, review it, and give us five stars. Join the Army at normalfolks.org.

Join or start one of our local service clubs. Take the 10-level challenge. Buy our birch. Any and all of these things that will help us grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do it you can. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

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Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

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