An Army of Normal Folks - The 7 Things Every Person Needs to Flourish (Pt 1)

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

What does it actually take for a person—and a whole community—to flourish? That's the nut that Joe Woodward from Stand Together is trying to crack in Wichita, as part of their goal to make it a model city for the country. In this episode, Joe shares the 7 conditions every person needs to thrive, why healthy families and communities matter more than we realize, and how ordinary people can solve problems that institutions can't. From a $500 e-bike that transformed a single dad's life to innovative efforts tackling foster care, housing, and poverty, this conversation will challenge the way you think about service, empowerment, and your role in helping your community flourish.Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andri and I were looking through Care Portal recently in Wichita, and there was a need where a single dad was asking for an e-bike. But then you read the story, it's a single dad with a special needs child, the other one needs to go to daycare, and he's got to get to work. He's got no car. He's got a heart condition, so riding a bike is tricky for him. He's got a little bike trailer where you can put a couple kids in that trailer, this little bugging. This caseworker was asking for $500. to help him get an e-bike to remove the barrier of transportation so he could take his kids to daycare and get himself to work. $500 solves transportation for a family. That is the best example of a

hand-up instead of a handout. And it's actually people who want to help. That actually helps. Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm a football coach. in inner city Memphis, and that last part somehow led to an Oscar for the film about one of my teams. That movie's called Undefeated. Guys, I just believe our country's problems are never going to be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits using big words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks. That's us. Just you and me deciding, hey, I can help. That's what Joe Woodward, the voice you just heard, has done.

Joe is the head of every person empowered, which has the crazy and awesome goal of making Wichita a model city for the entire country where every citizen has the opportunity to flourish. And he's a big reason why one of our new local service clubs is in Wichita. Joe is going to teach us all kinds of fascinating stuff, such as the seven conditions for human flourishing. I was glued to that part. Also, he's going to teach us why we need to go upstream in fighting poverty

and has personally lived all of this out. I can't wait for you to meet Joe, right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. It's like love. You feel it in your heart. IAR Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride. Canada, your favorite hits, and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated

playlists, like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone, or listen now at iHartRadio.ca. Hey, it's us to Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, news?

Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special.

So how did we actually come up with a name, Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. And, well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band. Before Jonas Brothers was. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this.

We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it.

Keith Gianmanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy. But I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like?

No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever, because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Ely Boulevard.

Get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes. In Rebel Spirit, Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space.

We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joe Woodward from Wichita, Kansas.

Welcome to Memphis. Great to be here. I see you bought your better half. Always. Always. I have friends whose name spelled A-N-D-R-E-A. Some do Andrea, some do Andrea. Which one are you?

Andrea. Well, welcome to Memphis, Andrea. I hear you all flew in last night. We drove in, actually. From Wichita. Oh, yeah, it's only eight hours. It was great. Is it really?

Is that all it is? All that one filled time with your best friend? Yeah, but it feels like it's so far away. I was actually, when I googled it, I was surprised. So you just drove it. Oh, yeah. All right, everybody. Joe is the, and this is the title, head honcho.

When I read that, I laughed out of out. I actually didn't know what his real title is. That's what I put in there. Oh, you put the head honcho. Oh, well, he is the head honcho of every person empowered in which talk hands us. And obviously, we're going to get to that. But this is in some shape and form, a little bit of an unusual interview. you because a lot of it is for our show's benefit.

So before you even start, Joe, thanks, and you probably don't even know what you're being thanked for, but I'll explain it. You're a big reason why one of our first six local service clubs is in Wichita. And I'm kind of looking forward the opportunity now for me to learn more about your work and while we're doing this together in Wichita. But our audience is going to get a ton of this, too, why we need to go upstream versus downstream. And when Alex wrote that in your prep, I laughed out loud because there's a story about upstream versus downstream that I think is really awesome. And I've repeated on the show

probably too much, but I'll do it again. But first, Joe, who do you work for? Yeah. Well, Bill, it's great to be with you. So I work for Stand Together Foundation, which is part of a broader philanthropic community founded by Charles Koch. And as we think about what we actually do, it's really in the name. It's a community of business leaders focused on solving the country's biggest problems. But we feel like the key part of that is taking a stand on these timeless principles. This July, we're celebrating 250 years of the Declaration of Independence. And we believe the principles in that document are the same principles we should use now to solve problems. But not only to take a stand, but not to stand alone, but to stand together.

Our whole philosophy is built on partnership. And so the new partnership with Army of Normal Folks is a great, example of that. You guys have been leading the way on inspiring bottom-up solutions, and we saw that shared vision and some complementary capabilities. We said, hey, let's do more together. And so that's a little bit of the history there. Before we go on, why did you choose to work for them? Yeah, so grew up in Wichita. Right out of college, I went to work for Coke Industries, doing accounting and finance, and then HR and internship programming. And I was just captivated by this idea that there are timeless principles kind of baked into the universe. And when we apply those

principles to solve problems, like people flourish. And when I was at Coke, we were really focused on applying principles to solve problems for customers, which then in turn created value for our employees and our team, as well as the communities we served in. But then after that, I took a turn at youth entrepreneurs and saw these same principles applied to help people get out of poverty through the entrepreneurial mindset. And so when I saw stand together starting to get into more of this comprehensive work, not just business, not just education, but actually investing in community-based solutions. And then hearing that they wanted to hyper-focused that on a handful of cities,

Wichita being one of those, I was chomping at the bit. Being a Wichita kid, fourth generation in my family to go to Wichita State University. We've always thought we had some. Let's go, baby. 2013 Final Four. Really good basketball. and have had really good baseball teams in the past. That's true.

You got to go back to 2013, though, Joe? Come on, man. I think your colors are brown and yellow or yellow and white. Yellow and black, that's right. Golden black. Black and yellow. That's right. See?

That's right. Pay attention to that stuff. Oh, yeah. I got a question. Sure. Before we go further, we have worked really hard since day one to emphasize that I don't care what you look like. If you're Hispanic, white, black, Asian, I don't care how you vote.

I don't care who you love or what you think about love. I don't, honestly, to some degree I do, but for this conversation, I don't care how you worship. None of those things matter. All of those things that have seemed in the last couple of decades to become divisive talking points with national narratives surrounding groups segregated by all of those different titles. I really don't care about any of that stuff because if you're serving somebody in your community and you're using your blessings to work to better a situation of someone who's not as fortunate as you, I can celebrate you.

And I don't care how you vote, what you look like. like who you worship, who you love, how you love. I don't care about any of those things. I can celebrate that about you. And likewise, you can celebrate that about me. And if we can conval us and we can celebrate and have success around that, then all of a sudden I start understanding your humanity. And I think, therefore, an army of normal folks really,

working hard to make sure we don't involve ourselves in any of that kind of stuff serves not only to help those that are the most disadvantaged among us, but also breakdowns these weird barriers that have started to separate us. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, all of those things are just distractions, right, to solving real problems. And so I've mentioned principles a few times. You just articulated better than I could many of our principles, starting with the dignity of every person. Like the reason why none of those things matter is because we are each created with value and dignity and just the fact of being human, we should be respected, right? But not only that, you've also hit on this idea of mutual benefit is that when we work together, both sides can be

better off. There's this really terrible competing paradigm that's focused on this like fixed pie. There's only so much to go around. And because there's always so much to go around, we need a we need a group up in our different cliques and such, and we need a war over pieces of a fixed pie. But we actually have an abundance-based view of the world, and I think most Americans do as well. They see that when people work together, the pie can actually grow, and then everybody can win. Although government has a role to play and big foundations and philanthropy have a role to play, we really believe, and again, that's why we're partnering with y'all, is that the army of normal folks, that everyday citizens are going to be the ones who solve our problems bottom up.

And when each of us play our role and we take what we have and do what we can, we can actually achieve that big idea that was promised in the Declaration of Independence. When I heard that explanation that you just gave different words, but same concept, that's when I got excited that somehow Alex had tripped around and wrangled an association with you guys because that, it is unbelievable that I mean, that is exactly how I feel. And then that's why the marriage to stand together has been a beautiful one so far, although we're still on our honeymoon.

So we may do something to really piss you off before it's all over with. I'm not sure. More likely that you're going to do it, not me. Oh, it's going to be me. There's no doubt. I'm going to have to apologize to somebody at some point. That's what's going to happen. Hey, before we move on, you got a good riff that we're going to talk about later.

That I think is good, but talking about if you care about social justice, people think, like, you've got to do it through a nonprofit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, this was a big part of my own journey, was understanding how the ordinary work that so many people do is actually a big part of making a world where people flourish, right? So when I was doing recruiting at Coke Industries, we had a lot of these interns who had come in are like, man,

I'm an engineer or an accountant, and I kind of feel like I sold out, because I really want to change the world. And a big part of what I got to walk along with students with was helping them understand. Actually, the normal work is actually what actually helps solve a lot of these big problems. So you think about if you want to be a part of solving world hunger, well, come work for a fertilizer business that's helping to feed the world without fertilizer. You can't feed seven billion people.

Or if somebody cares about clean water in the developing world, come work for our chemical technology group that's actually creating the water filtration systems that people can then use to drink clean water. Or if you care about safety, it's like come work for InVista that makes half the airbags in the world to help save lives. And now a few messages from our generous sponsors. But first, Alex finally, after a year of people begging,

has gotten off his rear end. And we now have our merchandise store is alive. all you got to do is you go to normalfolks.us and click merch and you'll see all kinds of cool stuff shirts, hoodies, hats, magnets, bags, banners, and all of this for each of our six local service clubs too. So you can get a generic one that just says an army of normal folks or you can get one that says an army and normal folks Memphis, an army and normal folks, Wichita. So you can get it for your service club or you can get it just for listening, you know, wearing your normal stuff. The other thing we've done,

is we really did want people to wear it. So we've priced every item at the cost to make them $0 in profit for us. So we figured the more folks that can afford this stuff and the more items they can buy, it's just helping spread an Army and Normal Folks across the country. So we're trying to make it as inexpensive as possible for all of you. So get yours at NormalFolks. Us today. Help us grow the Army in your community.

and look cool representing the Army and normal folks brand. We'll see you wearing that stuff when you send us pictures and we get to post it on our social media. We'll be right back. You feel it in your heart. IAR Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride.

Come together, celebrate low. pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone. Or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, new?

Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to a... We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special.

So how do we actually come up with a name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas.

And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential. title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is.

Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Dillie. Boulevard. Get to the grocery store. I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job.

I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit season two goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky Statehouse that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling. fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit season two on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Keith Giamanka seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that. I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that.

I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So what is this place-based work thing that you guys are calling every person empowered? Well, when I joined Stand Together Foundation, they were already doing great work all across the country, investing in some of the most effective social entrepreneurs that are solving problems bottom up. You've had a lot of those folks on your podcast, folks from back on my feet, settled, Samaritan, Care Portal. I mean, all these amazing organizations, right? And so at a national level, investing in solutions is transformational. And some of our leaders saw the opportunity to hyper-focus a lot of those capabilities,

in a handful of Midwest cities to show that individually, these solutions can be transformative, but together they create ecosystems where it's actually, it's normal for people to get out of poverty. It's normal for people to have a world-class education. So anyway, so the Every Person Empowered strategy is really just the most simple way for us to summarize all these principles we've talked about.

Every person empowered. Again, not charity. It's about contribution. is about empowerment. And so our work at the local level is really aiming to prove that... Local level, Wichita. Yeah, Wichita, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Oklahoma City, Dallas. There's more markets coming on every day, it seems. But this idea that we really believe communities can solve problems bottom up, and we want to show that and inspire the country. And a place like Wichita, here's what we have going for us. We've been called America's most average city, which, for

For some of us, we're like, no, we're not average. We're awesome. But when you think about testing some of this social change theory, you look at our demographics, you look at our economy. It actually looks a lot like the country. And so if we can solve problems in Wichita, maybe Wichita could inspire the country. I think before we go on a little more with your story, I think it's important for audience to understand.

my understanding is stand together, finds people and communities all over the country that are doing great work, and they work with them to scale their ideas. They walk alongside folks to help them take the model that they have, scale it, scale it to other cities, but also reach data points about what's good and bad about what they're doing, what the, you know, to really work hard on what they're doing well and to fix what they're not. And I'm butchering this. What does stand together really do? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it all starts with partnership. And I'm going to actually steal a mental model from our friends at Care Portal. I don't know if Adrian went into this, but they've got this. Adrian went into everything. And he was awesome. What a guy, man. What a guy.

He was just in Wichita a few days ago. Got it. He's amazing. Care Portal has this framework where they call the circles of care. So you've got the child at the same. center, surrounded by loving family. The family is supported by supportive community. And there's a role for the experts, but it is supporting communities who support families who empower children. And on the outside, there's a role for government. You know, the role of government is to protect

our rights and our liberty and our property and our freedom. It creates this framework for ordered liberty. And so there is a role for that that stand together is involved in. There's a role for the professional nonprofits and social services. But the key thing is that all of those create the conditions where communities can solve problems. So when you think about Stand Together's role in that, Stand Together is supporting those folks that are investing in community-based solutions. So groups like Care Portal, they're not doing the work. They are actually creating the platform for neighbors to show up as the heroes and to do the work. I gave you one of my favorite examples, Bill. Our guy, Kevin

Harding was on the podcast recently, right? Smokers and Jokers. Is that what he said? That's right. What a guy. And so Kevis is a local social entrepreneur. He's a pastor, former police officer. You know his story. And he felt a calling to rebuild the neighborhood he grew up in. So his focus was affordable housing. But he knows that people need more than just a safe place to live at night. They need jobs and transportation and education opportunities and all the rest. And so Stand Together's been able to work with a handful of other funders to help Kevis build more homes,

but also connect his residents to other solutions as well. But here's what's fun is when we first met Kevis, he was doing about two homes a year, but he had a vision much bigger than that. And when we heard his vision to build hundreds of homes on the north side of Wichita, we thought, gosh, we think that could inspire the country. And so there's a few things he was running into, though. One is the cost of building was way too much. And there was a talent shortage and all the rest.

So he paired up with the former CFO of Koch, Steve Fellmeyer, and a handful of business guys who said, hey, Kavis, we believe in your vision too. Let's help you go from two homes to 200 homes in the next couple of years. So you see the institution of community, folks like Kavis working with businesses who were financing and supporting his work. But then he ran into a regulatory barrier. And it's the coolest story. there was a little second grader named Brinley. She attended public micro school that does work out of the learning lab in downtown in Wichita, something staying together I've been a part of.

And this idea that solutions can come from anywhere, Brinley is a great example, second grade girl, and she saw more and more people experiencing homelessness. And she said, I'm going to do something about that. And her school was all set up with project-based learning, experiential. So she said, I want my project to be building a tiny home for somebody experiencing homelessness. And her teacher, who's amazing, her parents who are amazing, said, let's go, girl, we'll have your back. And so she did a little fundraiser. She raised $2,000 to build a tiny house, which wasn't quite enough.

But her inspiration was actually her biggest contribution. So she called around town. She said, hey, I'm building this tiny home for somebody experiencing homelessness. Where can we put it? And nobody wanted her tiny home. She had like the closest she could find was 90 minutes out. of Wichita, anybody that would want her tiny home. Because the regulatory environment was so tight in Wichita that putting an accessory dwelling unit in ADU was just, it wasn't worth the hassle.

But Kavis Harding said, hey, I could use your tiny home. Because not only is he building homes, but he's also building entrepreneurship opportunities for people in the neighborhood. So he actually buys one of these tiny homes. He with some support from staying together and inspiration from from Brinley. They raised the rest of the money. They build the tiny home. They're ready to rock and roll. And it sits empty for six months waiting for regulatory approval. That's so ridiculous. How are you going to solve affordable housing if every new unit takes six months to get approved? And so part of the stand-together community Americans for prosperity said, hey, we see a barrier that like people want to solve problems bottom up and they're not allowed to in the regulatory environments. They worked with partners to actually have accessory dwelling units by right.

And there's the shot clock approach that if basically local municipalities have 15 days to approve a new project or it's automatically approved. And so it's an example where like government removes barriers, businesses help create solutions. Community members help to right size those solutions and scale them. And even somebody like a second grader could be the inspiration behind all of that. somebody living in that thing? I believe the answer is yes. So the legislation just passed two weeks ago. You're kidding.

It's wild. It's wild. And we think there's actually a lot of scale potential. I mean, back to the Army of normal folks, most of us have a backyard. And everybody's looking for a little bit of extra income, too. There's actually a way where you can build one of these homes, rent it out for $500 to $600 a month, which is way less than market rate is today. So you can actually rent it out and make a little bit of money, but more importantly, you're solving a problem, which is pretty cool.

A second grader. Let's go, right? That is very, very cool. When I first heard of Stand Together, it was all about bottom up solutions. Bottom up solutions. I'm not fancy. I don't use big terms and big words, right? So I'd never even considered bottom up versus top down.

I mean, I was like, well, what does that mean? And I started thinking about it a little bit and stand together is such a bottom up solution thing. An example of top down is I had a guy that worked for me that I cared a lot about. He has recently passed, but he worked for me for 25 years. When I first met him, he'd been in the Marines, he'd gotten out of the Marines, he'd gotten into drugs, drugs led to charges, and he screwed his life up. And when he came to me, it was on the hills of about the 12 years between when he was a Marine and Marine. when he'd gotten screwed his life up. He was just trying to get right.

He was living at a halfway house. But he almost couldn't get out of his own way, right? Because of all, every time he made some money, somebody garnished it for something he'd done. And so we worked real hard to straighten out all that. And over course, two years we did. And he went from a guy that was living on the streets to a homeowner who eventually married and adopted his wife. three children became their father and was a manager of my business making six figures. It's one of the greatest success stories of my life, not that I did, but just being able to

walk along somebody who wanted to do the work, but I was able to help him. And really ended up one of the best, I spoke at his funeral, and I miss them every day. One of the greatest lessons I got from him was when he bought his house and he and Regina moved in, I said, Sam, you need to marry her. Get a marriage license and go get married and show the children that you love per children that you are now their father, basically, what a committed marriage looks like. And he said, I can't.

And I said, why? And he said, because we're barely making it. And if I marry Regina, Regina will lose the money she's getting. from government as a single mother. So marrying her actually makes it so we can't afford our house. And he looked me dead in eyes. And he said, but it's typical. And I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, all I hear is that the things I got to do as a man is to go back to the organic family. And that's all I'm told. And I want to do that. But I'm paid not to do it. He said, it's really confusing. To me, there's this top-down thing of support for single women with children that I think was well-intentioned. And that is a big top-down policy.

But what was happening effectively was it was prohibiting the people you sought to help from actually doing the things that they needed to do in their lives to help themselves. That's a top-down solution that was well-intentioned, that is. ends up never reaching what it needs to reach in the proper way. The flip side is when you're bottom up and you don't engage with a group of people, but you engage with an individual, Sam's life story is a beautiful example of what bottom-up solutions do because of where he ended up outside of those policies that ultimately were keeping him in poverty. That's what I'm saying. So let's double click on Sam's story. Sam is the customer here. We want to see Sam flourish. Him and his family. We want Sam to be the hero of the story, right?

But there's a few things that every person needs. People need an opportunity to earn money, earn success, right? They need safe and affordable housing. They need transportation to access opportunity. They need healthy relationships, which you mentioned. There's these seven solutions. that every person needs. But the tricky thing is, you know, if you were to design a solution, you just couldn't do it because everybody's unique. And that's the fallacy of top down is that there's a group of people smart enough to design solutions, almost like social engineering. We're going to design solutions top down versus social entrepreneurship, which is bottom up. It's discovering what people need.

So you've got the customer here, which is the focus. People need certain things. The one, the customer's the one. You need solutions across these seven areas. But then where those solutions come from is they come from people closest to the problem, right? They come from families. They come from neighborhoods. And then they come from communities of mutual benefit, which is exactly what you're talking about.

Are those the three? Those are the three. Which is. Yeah, so family. Family. Neighborhood. Neighborhood. And then community.

Community. When those things are healthy, people tend to flourish, right? And then they're not dependent on these top-down systems. So as you think about the work that Care Portal has done to mobilize churches to support families and caring for children, that's not too different from what you did. As an entrepreneur, as a business, you were that point of care for Sam, which again, that's the institution of community. Nobody's telling you, you got to hang out with Sam. You got some benefit. He was one of your best employees. He got a ton of benefit because you invested in his life.

And so in this situation, the business was the place that helped Sam get on the right path. But what's key across all of those is its relationships. It's relationships. Like systems don't know your name. They don't care about you. But people do. And when we can come together and solve problems. It's pretty powerful. So the whole idea is how do you see what you saw with Sam happen every day of the week, 365? How do you make that normal? So is that the goal of every person empowered? Yes, that's right. We'll be right back. It is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers

plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride Come together celebrate love Take pride with you anytime anywhere Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada stream us on your phone Or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca Number one hits, millions of records sold,

awards, sold out tours You think that Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer.

Can you tell you not to audition at the office or something? I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to him, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is.

Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easy. than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. Get to the grocery store. I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job.

I'm Akila Hughes. In Rebel Spirit, Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House. to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit.

How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit season two on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mainstream media is full of cruel depictions

of the unhoused. Stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We the N-House is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator, and host. And for years, I've created a space where the un-housed and their advocates can tell their own stories.

In the last few months alone, I've interviewed un-house parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBTQTIA-plus community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. Weedian Hous is a two-time Webby and Signal Award-winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Gio Wichler, a street doctor turned influencer whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community.

Listen to Weillen House on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You know, a great example of this is my boss, Darren Babcock. he was a part of Darren Babcock. Darren Babcock. Is your boss? Is he not the coolest guy ever? Derek Babcock.

Tell us who Darren Babcock. Remind us who Darren Babcock has for long-time listeners will remember his story, but we hopefully are gaining audience and maybe some people don't know who Darren is. Yeah. So not only is Darren an incredible entrepreneur,

he's one of the best people I've ever met. And I've seen Darren in the highs and the lows and this guy, he's the real deal. So first part of his story is he kind of lived the American Dream. He was very successful, working in private equity, making big money in a gated neighborhood in North Dallas. And then he had his personal story faced a lot of hardships. His wife died from cancer. He hit rock bottom. And as his life was rebuilt, he discovered the power of community-based solutions. So anyway, you know, his life is good again. He's on track.

He's doing great, great things. And he gets involved in a prison ministry. And some friends of his, through the prison ministry, moved back into their neighborhood in South Dallas called Bontan. And long story short, he realized that he was getting a lot more from them than they were getting from him. He got inspiration, friendship, but his friends were stuck in a neighborhood that was a food desert, a job desert, a transportation desert, half the men went to prison before their 30th birthday, the life expectancy was 10 years less, highest crime neighborhood in the whole county. and Darren felt a calling and he was invited by his friends to come move into the neighborhood. And over a 12-year period, this neighborhood went from worse to first when it comes to safety.

From the highest crime neighborhood in Dallas to statistically the safest place in the county. And they didn't do it through top-down programs. They didn't do it through a bunch of policy work. Darren didn't go in and save anybody. That's right. That's exactly right. It was bottom-up. It was the people living there who were the solution. So they started seven businesses.

They started an urban farm, started a Christian school. They got landmark criminal justice legislation passed. Interestingly, what they got was access. That's right. That's right, 100%. And so Darren's really been the one who has pioneered this idea that you need solutions that come from community that help individuals flourish. And what's so fun about that is it's all the things stand together is working on at the national level.

You know, we're focused on the issues that Americans care about most, education, health care, upward mobility, all the rest. And the reason why we care about those things is that's what people need to flourish. And when you can bring them all together at a local level, it becomes really powerful. Love Darren. Okay. The last part of it is why we need to go upstream versus downstream. Yeah, yeah. So I stand together because we believe in market principles.

Again, in the market, the customer is king, and the providers respond to the needs of the customer. That's why there's new restaurants that open every week and new restaurants that close every week. It's because the customer's voting with their dollars, right? So we believe that we could achieve some of these same market efficiencies by elevating the customer's voice. We've invested a ton of resources into something called customer-first measurement. If we could find a way to measure customer value, that way. would help the social sector, all of us trying to make a difference, it might help us actually make more of a difference. And so one of the things we did just very, very simply was we developed technology

that partners with 211 systems across the country. It's like if you're in a physical emergency, you call 911. If you are one step from that in a social emergency, you're homeless, your water's turning off, you don't have enough food to eat, you call 211. It is probably the most important call center in the country. And when we started working with 211s, 99% of those calls I need help were never followed up with. That's what I remember reading about it, which is insane. You got this cool network and you call and ask, but nobody follows up. That's right. That's right. And so how are you supposed to know how to make better referrals and better solutions when people's voices aren't heard? So we just added a very simple closed loop technology. So when you call for

help, you get a text message shortly after saying, hey, these are the three places we recommended. Were you able to connect with any of them? And if so, how is your experience? On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend somebody in a similar situation as you to tap into this resource? It's the classic net promoter score question, which again in the marketplace, that net promoter score question is the closest proxy to actual profit. When your net promoter score goes up, your profits follow shortly behind.

although in the social sector, we don't have that same profit measure. If we can measure customer value, we think we can get to a similar spot. So anyway, headline here, we implemented this 211 technology. It's in probably 10 states right now. And what we thought we'd learn is which nonprofits were the highest performing. And we saw some of that. But what we saw specifically in Wichita is that most people who actually got help, they were really happy with it.

It was mostly nines and tens, whether they went to Alex's Soup Kitchen or Bill, you know, housing place or Joe's job training program or whatever, most people who got help rated them at nines or tens. The tragedy is that less than 20% of the people who called for help actually got the help they needed. And the reason for that is just an overall undercapacity of the social sector. The professional do-goaters, there's just not enough. There's not enough systems and social workers and all the rest to solve. the growing need. And so as a, you know, strategically, well, what do you do with that? You know, one option is you could try to 5x the capacity, which I don't know, maybe somebody could do that.

Or we could move upstream so that fewer people needed support from systems and instead got help from community. And so when we talk about moving upstream, it's that same stuff we've been talking about so far. How do we strengthen families so that kids don't need strangers to teach them how to read? their parents can teach them how to read. How do we strengthen communities, businesses, churches, recovery groups, football teams, right? Rotary clubs. How do we strengthen them to be effective at solving problems? And you can see all of this happen at a local level.

It's the old adage. You can keep pulling kids out of the river, but eventually you go upriver to find out why they're coming in in the first place. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it's, you know, Harvard did this big study. They asked the question, does the American dream still exist? And their conclusion was, when did they do that?

Well, they did it in 2014, and then they did it again in 2024. So they've been measuring it every 10 years. I can't like to hear what they found. Oh, it's fascinating. First of all, individual agencies still exist. I mean, people can overcome horrendous obstacles and achieve success. A lot of this podcast is that very thing, right? But although people can overcome the odds, if the source,

soil in your community is healthy, you are more likely to rise. So the simple answer to their question, does the American dream still exist? It kind of depends on where you grow up. And so they took this data. They got everybody's tax returns. And they asked the question, all right, when Bill was growing up, how much money did Bill's parents make? And then when Bill became an adult at 30 years old, how much money did Bill make? Not that how much money you make is the most important, but it's the easiest thing to measure. So upward mobility economically. And what they found was, you know, across the country, they would rank cities. And there are some places where if you're born poor, you'll be just fine. So like Salt Lake City, Utah, you'll be just

fine if you're born poor in Salt Lake City. Because there's more access and more availability. Well, see, that's the big question. Is from the data, what principles can we pull that actually predict upward mobility, and it's all the stuff we've talked about. There's four big things we pulled out. Number one, the number one predictor is having a healthy family. And Harvard found this. This is data. This is not conjecture. This is not some blue-haired church woman saying you should be in a this is data. It's data. Now, you can debate, you know, causation, correlation. Good people have those debates, but the idea that if you were to predict upward mobility based on the data, the number one factor is a healthy family. Number two. Number two is a healthy and connected

community, right? So the social factor, so like when you're engaged in sports teams and church and recovery groups and businesses, when you have a diversity of relationships, your odds of moving up, it's back to the old adage. It's not what you know, it's who you know, right? Number three is your neighborhood. So being poor is one challenge, but if you live in a neighborhood where everybody's poor, that's a big challenge as well. And then the fourth one is what everybody would guess. It's the quality of your education. And so you think family, education, neighborhood, and community, those are actually things that you can't solve top down. You must solve bottom up. And that concludes part one of our conversation with Joe Woodward. And you don't

want to miss part two that's now available to listen to. So right before you queue it up, go to normalfolks.us, click merch and buy yourself an army of normal folks t-shirt, hat, hoodie, sweatshirt, something, then put it on and listen to part two. Together, guys, we can change this country, and it starts with you. I'll see you in part two. One hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold out tours. You think that Jonas brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.

Hey Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at the office or something? I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly, I was the idiot.

Thank God he didn't listen to him, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. Is everyone lying to me about who they are? I felt such desperation.

I felt it was what I had to do. Listen to deep cover the family man on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get. your podcasts. For years, the unhoused have been presented as a monolith

in mainstream media. Weedian House is a podcast that's changing the narrative. I'm Theo Henderson and I created the show why I was unhoused on the streets of Los Angeles.

We've grown into a two-time Webby Award-winning podcast. The only podcast that shares unhoused stories and news from the unhoused perspective. Listen to Weezy and House

on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcast. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. From IHeart Podcasts, Saigon. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. It's for Vietnam.

They're pouring patriots all over here. Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.