Gabrielle Clowdus: We All Have Homelessness In Us (Pt 2)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army in normal folks,
And we continue now with part two of our conversation
with doctor Gabriel cloudis. Right after these brief messages from
our general sponsors, you get the money, you're in Minnesota.

(00:30):
Now you've got you're des paid off. Now you've got
this degree in housing and this master's and undergraduate and
all this other stuff. And again, I'm a planner, so
I'm asking, was there what's next? Or did it just happen?

Speaker 2 (00:50):
You know what? Tell me you know?

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Okay, So the plan was still get the PhD, move overseas.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Oh okay, that's what I was asking. So the plan
was move overseas, some more of the stuff you've.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Been doing, humanitary architecture. My husband would get the license
and architecture. I would get the the degree, and we
would have sort of a design research think tank.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
I love that. That's kind of cool.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Doesn't that sound like a great life place, especially.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
With the whole container thing and everything else, and thinking
about how to come up with creative ways to satisfy
a real need all over the place for cheap, affordable
but livable housing.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Yeah? Cool, right? Design build research with students.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Okay, than you doing hanging around here exactly in a
state you didn't even know existed exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Okay, I'm two years into my program. My principal investigator
that I was doing research with goes on emergency medical leaf.
I now have no funding for my work. Oh wow,
have to go find a new research job. The only
job that's available is looking at chronic homelessness in the

(02:02):
Twin Cities with tiny.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
That's God speaking.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Okay to me, that we got there, Alex, you.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Got recognized that.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
But to me, that's it. That to me is what
can you do with that fast?

Speaker 2 (02:19):
You do what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
You stay faithful to the mission, and when one door shuts,
another opportunity opens if you just got sense enough to
find it.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, okay, that didn't It didn't look like an opportunity
to me. It looked like my nightmare. No, I get it,
chronic homelessness in the Midwest looking at tiny homes as
the solution.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Really, Okay, so this is like ten years ago.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, it's fast.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
That's exactly what I was doing back then. Because you
see how.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
Curiosity and these people in Sweden like build tiny homes
in the mountains and go sit in asana and that's
kind of cool.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
So couldn't we put a home somewhere?

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of how the Dinown thing
was going, totally. Yeah, it's basically a song.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Yeah. I did not want to take on this project.
I was very uninterested. I had I would just be
totally honest and have tell you that I had a
giant chip on my shoulder around homelessness in America. I
was like, I have seen the deserving poort. I have
seen what it looks like to live on two dollars
a day. If you're in America and you were homeless, bummer,

(03:26):
that's a real bummer. But we've got government, We've got
helping professional.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Car igloos out of garbage, right, and they have zero
systematic support. And then in the United States we have
all of the support. So really, if you want to
sit around with your government paid for cell phone and
everything else and maybe even your bike depending on the state,

(03:52):
and talk about whate was.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Me, I hate it for you.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
But okay, now on the unbalanced, yeah, you should see
what I seen right now. I wasn't so much like
putting the blame on the person.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Like I'm not trying to do that. I'm just saying
I'm making a whole different experiences for Americans. Yes, and
so you did have a chip on your shoulder.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
On my shoulder, and I really didn't understand homelessness in America.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
The data it's such a.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah. Yeah, that's why I wanted to talk about the
data at this point, but not soon after this point.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
But okay, So then I sense that God is saying
that it's time to look at poverty in my own backyard.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, so why are we going to go overseas and
fix everything when they're all around right here.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
It's in your own backyard, it's your own neighbor.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
That's actually.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
That's actually been my attitude to We do business in
forty two countries. I see a lot everywhere, and we
sell the manufacturing facilities. So we don't go to London.
We go to you know, Bangalore, India. We go to
really poor places in Eastern Europe that still exist. All

(05:08):
over Eastern Europe, I'll probably have some of that same
issue you saw in Russia. We go to industrial centers
and places like Vietnam and Laos and China. So I see, yeah, right,
I don't live it, and I'm there working, and I'm
not there on a mission, but I do see and
I have felt compelled by some of the things I've seen.

(05:31):
But then I always come back to every time I
go to work, I see lost, hopeless people in my
own city. Yeah, why don't I serve where I am? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (05:43):
How can I step over the person right in front
of me to help someone else?

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah, so that's what was revealed to you.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah, okay, okay, So it's just now it's packing extra
granola bar getting on the train between Saint Paul and
Minneapolis that I rode every day. Turns out two hundred
of my neighbors also ride that green line every day.
But that's just where they sleep.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
And oh, when you say neighbors, not house neighbors, unhoused.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
Unhouse neighbors and starting to get too interesting.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
You gotta be careful when you say neighbors, people won't
understand what you mean.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, well, my neighbor that's sleeping on the street is
my neighbor.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
I agree with you. I'm just I'm teeing it up
for you.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Yeah, it's good. Yeah, I have to see the person
in front of me, right there, in front of me,
and not as someone to step over, walk over, ignore,
look away. I think that does something really really, I
think that's deeply wounding to our souls and your own.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Are the people that you're looking away from.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
Your own when you look away.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
You think, see here's a squirrel, I'm gonna chase up
a tree. Okay, you think that it's impossible as a
human being when you see somebody unhoused or on the street,
or filthy or whatever, you think, as a human being.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
We all notice them.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, you're saying our act of looking away is deeply
damaging to our own soul just because we look away.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, because.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
We're literally hiding ourselves from our own flesh. That is
my brother, that is my sister. I am connected to
that person, and we hide ourselves away. The scriptures say,
God says, you want me. Do you know where you'll
find me. You'll find me in the poor. You'll find

(07:46):
me outside the city gates. I'm the leper outside the
city gates. That's not in the palace, not ruling the kingdom.
I'm in the poor. Want to be with me, you
want to serve me, you love me, Come and set
with me outside the city gates. Come and sit with

(08:07):
the leoper, Come and sit with the poor, Come and
sit with the outcast, Come and sit with the vulnerable.
There I am.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
I do lots of speeches. I've spoken to Nike, I've
spoken to the Olympic Committee, I've spoken Olympic swim Team.
I've spoken to Firestone. I do a lot of public
speaking stuff. Sometimes I get to do churches and faith
based groups. The things you're saying right now are actually
very challenging because the most segregated day in America is

(08:41):
typically Sunday. And I think our faith can be its
own worst enemy, oftentimes by its hypocrisy toward the poor. Yeah,
and it feels like what you're saying is very challenging
to someone who calls himself a Christian, because if they

(09:04):
do look away, they're actually looking away from Christ himself.
That's what I hear he's saying. I'm not trying to
put words in your mouth.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
I believe so.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
One of my common things when I'm feeling my oats
and want to be challenging is a story about when
Lisa wanted shrimp. And Lisa's gorgeous, She's a ten, she's
a drop dead dime. She'd be walking down the street
right now, she'd stop traffic. I mean she's gorgeous, and
I mean, you look at this guy right. So you know,

(09:36):
if I'm going to keep my wife, I mean, you know,
just do what she says right period.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Yeah, good advice to any husband out there.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
So she told me. I was coming back from a
sales trip on the coast. She told me she wants shrimp,
and she said, go down with the dogs, get a
go to Walmart and get you a little star from cooler,
and go to seven eleven and get some ice and
go down there when the shrimp boats come in, get
you some shrimp. Okay, and we live in Memphis, and
pack it on good ice because I want a freshmen.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Get home.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
We're gonna shrimp all tomorrow. The kid's gonna love it.
I'll get the corn and potatoes. You get shrimp like
I'm tired of it. She said, did you hear what
I said to say? Yeah, I'm going to get shrimp.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
So I go down there and I don't have you
ever been to like the Gulf of which certainly you've
been all over the place. You know what those wharfs
and docks smell. Likes fish heads. It's stagnant water. It's
probably doesn't smell like the Gualatemalon dump, but it's a
nice close second.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Okay, you've been there, right, Seriously, they really.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
Do have a hot, wretched, thick stinch to them. And
I'm sitting down there, going my gosh, just place stinks
and waiting on the sh and here come the shrimp boats.
And I found something that stinks worse than the wharf.
The fishermen. I mean, you know, they've been smoking marble
reds all day. Deodoran is more of a suggestion than

(10:53):
a requirement to work on a shrimp boat. And they've
been sweating all day, and the surf's been hitting them,
and they've been covered fish guts and bait, and I
mean they're wretched. Yeah, it's pretty horrific. The whole scenes.
Again not Guatemala. But but it doesn't matter. I'm getting
my shrimp. So I get my good shrimp. I put
it on ice. I'm headed home now, and about halfway

(11:15):
between the coast and emphasis Jackson, Mississippi, and I was
in Jacksonsissippi, kind of recollecting, wondering if my hair and
my clothes smelled like the war for the fishermen because
it's just disgusting. And as I passed through Jackson, I'm
recollecting on that, thinking about Trump We're going to have tonight.
It dawned on me Christ surrounded himself a fisherman. Yeah,

(11:37):
and if he were to come today, he wouldn't show
up in my neighborhood. Yeah, he would show them in theirs.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
And that was another one of these things of being
still and quiet, listening and being faithful and just arriving
at a conclusion that I kind of had it backwards.
And that was about twenty years ago, maybe fifty twenty,
twenty years ago. And I'm just telling that story to
you because I hear the same thought process happening when

(12:13):
you were taking a granola bar on the train with
your quote neighbors, that that's the revelation you were having
in a different way.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
It feels like.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
Totally Yeah, I'm sitting with Christ himself.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Okay, So what you give a granola bar away? Good job?
What's next?

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Get to know people, know them, know them by name,
by face, by story. Start to so you get.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
To start having chats with the people on the train.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
Yeah, it start to build build real friendship. Build friendships
with people, invite them into our lives, into you know,
games and walks and meals and celebrations and Christmas dinner?

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Christmas dinner? How does that work?

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Just build? You know, I mean, once you've built a
relationship with someone, where else are they going to be
for Christmas dinner? It's either to your home? You invite
them to your home. Of course you do. Don't you
want christ at your dinner table?

Speaker 1 (13:13):
So yes, So I guess you would have to talk
to me then. So the point is you would hear
from so all right, I just said it. So you're
literally evolving into this person who's sees, feels and insviting

(13:38):
people to their home that are homeless.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Right, Okay, keep going.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
First neighbor that we build like a real relationship with
my buddy Anthony, build a trusted friendship. Anthony is having
some serious, like kind of dental pain, and convince him
to go and see Go and see a dentist. Do

(14:05):
the research, find a dentist that will take him, you know,
it's thirty minutes outside of the city, drive him there,
sit with him through the appointment because he's nervous to
be there, nervous about being judged, nervous about what he's
going to hear, nervous about you know, what he looks like,
how he smells, and the professionals did a really beautiful job.

(14:32):
That's not always the case that I've experienced when I
bring my neighbors to get help, but in this, in
this particular case, it was they did a beautiful job
not judging him and just welcoming him. They also put
a plan in place for seventeen appointments.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
To get smoked he had that much trouble.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
Teeth back in order. And I remember going home and
just being like John David, I don't have it in
me to bring Anthony to seventeen appointments, Like.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
It's a lot.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
It's a lot.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
I have kids, a family, stuff going on.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
You know, and also I have bad days, right, And
so I think that was the real moment of realization that, like,
we actually have to help people in community, Like we
really do need one another, and we can't just one
family go help someone on the street.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
It's nice. If you're not going to have a macro effect,
you will.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
Our neighbors that are stuck in homelessness, that are chronically homeless,
they've been on the streets for five, ten, twenty years.
The amount of trauma and abuse and neglect and suffering
that has been in their life, that is in their life,
it's so much, that's more than one one healthy household

(16:10):
can take on. And you need, you really need a
community with a lot more health than unhealth. And so
that really started kind of forming this idea of what
does it look like to build a community, a strong
community ourselves where we're actually living intentionally with one another.
Then we can invite the outcasts, the leper, the vulnerable

(16:35):
into the center of our community, and they can find rest,
and they can find health, and they can find healing
because they're surrounded by a lot of that. And in
the process we become more healthy, we become more whole.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
But that requires people who are housed and who have
not found their way into this horrific lifestyle to meet
those folks halfway. That's hard.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
What's hard about it.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's hard to find people willing.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
To do that.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Why do you think that is?

Speaker 2 (17:10):
I don't know, I guess I'm asking you, but I
do think that is.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
I don't think the vast majority of people I know
who have homes and jobs and are taking kids to
soccer and lacrosse and everything would interrupt them their lives.
To join these people in community. And what I mean
in community, I don't mean serve them and try to
help them and give their money to it. There's a
lot of well intentioned people, but people willing to literally

(17:35):
move into that community or bring folks like that into
their community because we're going to have conversations about property values,
We're going to have conversations about are we having rise
in crime, We're gonna have are our children going to
be safe? I'm teeing this up for you a little bit.
I'm being the devil's advocate, but I'm giving you an

(17:58):
opportunity to speak to that because, honestly, I think that's
why the vast majority of the people.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Would think yeah totally. I cannot speak for every person,
but as as a person of faith, you know, we're
called and compelled to a lifestyle of radical hospitality.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
That's the word I was looking for that the phrase. Yeah,
I've read it, You've said that. I've read it a
bunch through here, and I loved it. Radical hospitality, Yeah,
which is exactly what a church should be.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, radically hospitable, radically hospitable.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
Crazy, We'll take everybody for commerce, of.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Course, because because the church is the best place for
people that are suffering, the church is the best place
for people that need healing and need wholeness and need restoration.
Jesus himself said, I didn't come for for the healthy,
I came for the sick, right, So the church is
the place to receive those that are most suffering so

(19:06):
that they might find their healing.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
So you start to envision this idea of a community
where not one family is trying to help one person
at a community where it could get more macro.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Yeah, and I get to stand on the shoulders of
giants before me. So I The research project that I
took on ended up being funded by the largest healthcare
system in our in the Twin Cities, and the University
of Minnesota kind of came together. The healthcare system said, hey,
we've got the chronically homeless coming into our er feigning

(19:40):
an illness for a bed and a meal because you know,
maybe the shelters are are full or they weren't able
to get in, and there's a loophole in our system
and our society. Health care is and entitlement housing is not,
and so can't turn someone away. The CEO of the
healthcare system comes to the University of Minnesota with this problem,
the one that gets hired to somehow solve that, you know,

(20:05):
and he was particularly interested in tiny homes as a
as a potential solution. So as part of my research,
I was looking at tiny home villages for the homeless
kind of across across the nation. At the time, you know,
we're now we're talking nine years ago, there was about
a dozen across the nation and there was you know,
a little village of six homes over here, you know,

(20:25):
twelve homes over here, and then two hundred and fifty
in Austin, Texas, and of course it's Texas. Everything's bigger
in Texas, right, But they were literally calling their community
community first, exclamation point, community first, village community Do.

Speaker 4 (20:40):
You remember That's what Adrian Hillman in California model to
work off of comity first.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
So yeah, so they you know, I mean, many of
us are standing on their shoulders. Twenty five years ago,
a group of six white affluent men got touched by
God to look at homelessness in their in their city.
What I think that problem happens all over the place.
What's distinct about their story is that rather than just
being like, I know what we'll do and coming up

(21:06):
with their own ideas, leaning on their own understanding, is
they humbled themselves, went and slept on the streets of Austin,
Texas alongside people that were suffering and said what is it?
What is it like? What are you experiencing? And they
had a profound insight that homelessness, chronic homelessness, is not
a result of lack of housing and social services, but

(21:29):
the result of a profound and catastrophic loss of family.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
Say it again, This is where your whole story starts
to all make sense to me. Yeah, it really is.
Say that again. It is so this is kind of
the data. Say it again is so important for everybody
listening this to get this through your head.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Yes, As a society, our narrative around homelessness is that
it's around it's about addiction, it's about mental illness, it's
about lack of affordable housing, it's about lack of job opportunities,
it's about poverty. If you unpeel layers and layers and

(22:11):
layers of each neighbor's life, that is stuck in homelessness.
What you will find is a profound and catastrophic loss
of family, often from childhood, childhoods of extreme neglect and
abuse and violence. And that profound and catastrophic loss of

(22:33):
family means that they grow up as adults a feeling unloved, unwanted,
and push to the furthest fringes of society.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
And unseen, primarily because when everybody looks at them, they
look away, So why wouldn't you feel unseen?

Speaker 3 (22:50):
So you're also experiencing a profound and catastrophic loss of community.
There is nobody in your corner. There's nobody rooting you on.
There's nobody looking at you in the eye and saying
you're of great value, you can do good things, you
are so worthy as a human. At best, we come
to them and say, give them a blowney sandwich and

(23:12):
say God loves you, and then we go back to
our own comfort.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
So you have all of this understanding, You have the data.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
There are.

Speaker 1 (23:29):
What'd you say, six to twelve images of this around
the country at.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
This point, tiny home villages.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Would you tell us what a tiny home is?

Speaker 3 (23:39):
A tiny home a home of about square footage two
to four hundred square feet the.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Size of a lot of people's din and eat in area. Yes,
for people who don't really get square footage, you know,
a lot, But I mean think of something the size
of a din and an eat in there, or your
math today, maybe a kitchen and a keeping room area.
That's about four hundred right, yeah, yeah, twenty about.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Twenty yeah, although our homes are built in trailers, so
they're like.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Nine by twenty, okay, but a tiny home, a tiny
home is four hundred square feet.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Ish to two hundred to four hundred.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Square call it three hundred average?

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Sure does it have? What's it having it? What's it
look like?

Speaker 3 (24:29):
I mean you can scale all over. The place where
we settled is we don't want to build sheds shacks.
We don't want to meet the crisis of homelessness with
another uh like crisis solution. We so we aren't trying
to just slap up homes together. We feel called and

(24:53):
compelled to love our neighbor as ourself, so we're building
something that we would want to live in. We don't
put anything in the homes that we wouldn't put in
our own homes. So, and we also feel like we
need to be a blessing to our nation. We not
only have a crisis of homelessness, we have a crisis
of affordable housing. So we build homes just like new
single family home construction, same materials, longevity, durability, but it's

(25:19):
just smaller, and we put them on wheels. The reason
we put them on wheels is to overcome building code.
Building code is highly inflexible and across the nation, depending
on what city, what county, what area you're in. We
define housing in terms of, you know, some kind of
social constructs. We say a home isn't a home unless

(25:41):
it's a thousand square feet with a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.
We desperately think we need to redefine home. If someone's
been on the streets for ten years, do we really
need to be building a thousand square foot home with
a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen that there aren't any funds
actually to do? And so what would be better to

(26:01):
build something that's simple and quality and beautiful but for
a tenth of the cost, or to just say we
can't build something good enough, so we shouldn't build anything.
So we build homes that would be something that we
ourselves would live in. It has a gravity fed water tank,

(26:22):
a sink, a catch basin below so that you can
empty that out into the greenhouse or gardens, or into
your dehydrating toilet. We have the only legal composting toilet
that exists because we have a beautiful aerospace engineer that's
volunteered with us for five years to develop that. Essentially,
we can create and build a home for about forty

(26:45):
thousand dollars, built by volunteer labor, built by normal people.
We aren't three D printing homes. We aren't manufacturing homes.
We're building stick frame homes. Because guess what, just about
every community has people within them that know how to
do that, know how to build a home. We've had

(27:06):
youth groups be able to you know, put lemonade stands,
raise the money and build the home. Like this is
possible in the hands of ordinary, normal people to build
an affordable housing stock for our nation.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
So you got this idea of community, You got to
put these things somewhere. Yeah, And if I'm hearing you right,
you're also not looking to put it on the outskirts
of town. You want your neighbors to be part of
a community, and I assume the community.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
So how's that go?

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yeah, okay, So I got to put these things, You
got to put them somewhere. So I talk about how
did we overcome building code? Building codes highly inflexible. It
makes for affordable housing to be really expensive. We overcame
it by putting our homes on wheels still look and
feel like a single family home. The next thing we
needed to overcome was zoning. Zoning is also the inflexible

(28:00):
and exists to keep the poor out of certain areas.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Say it exists so that the people from the other
side of this tracks stay.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
There, stay right there, don't come in our neighborhood, not
in my backyard, right, not in my backyard. Yeah yeah,
But God is calling us to look at poverty over.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
The tracks to young Thanksgiving. Yeah, just don't come over
asking me for one.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Yes, and make sure you say thank you.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
Oh and if you don't say thank you.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
You know I won't be doing this next year, tossing your.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Turkey next Thanksgiving? Good luck if you got food in
the food pantry, if you don't say thank you.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah. Yeah. So we found a very strong federal land
use law called the Religious Land Juice Act.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
That allows what is that a thing it's a thing
the religious. All right, what does that mean? You can
burn chickens at the steak if you want to. No,
I was just wondering. I mean, you got you got,
you got folks down in Louisianna the practice of voodoo
and stuff, so religious use ACKed Okay, great.

Speaker 4 (29:12):
I mean he says something inapproper you didn't see.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
No, But the point is this is interesting.

Speaker 4 (29:18):
Was sponsored by Orrin Hatch and Teddy Kennedy to people
from different political parties. That's Rances Mormon, Teddy Kenny. I
presume as Catholic. Yeah, no doubt, I mean kind of Catholic.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
You kind of killed the Kennedy's Catholic, but progressive Catholic.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Guy killed the girl Catholic?

Speaker 3 (29:33):
But yeah, who is the largest landowner in America?

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Who?

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah? Uh?

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Single? I would say the federal.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
Government, Okay, after that, okay, the.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Largest, the largest, Now see I love questions like this.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
The largest the.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Single landowner in the United States, I would say the
federal government, and then after them, maybe the railroad.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
Just trying to be a smart asterism. Really the answer
is churches. That's what she's trying to get you to say.

Speaker 5 (30:06):
But the.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Church, say combination.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
That's combination. Okay, that would make a Mormon church.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, yeah, sure, sure when you add it all together.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
I believe, Alex, maybe you can absolutely yeah, I mean it.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Was probably right.

Speaker 4 (30:24):
Those are probably the first.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
I think that the Catholic Church is the largest landowner
in the world.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (30:30):
I think so. The point is, The point is the
church has a lot of land.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, got you.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
The church might be cash poor, but it is asset rich.
The American Church has a lot of land, and turns
out that land is protected under a federal a very
strong federal land use law that says you can use
your land in conjunction with your mission.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
That is a revelation that is so interesting and cool.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
We'll be right back. Who found this out for you?
How'd you found this out?

Speaker 3 (31:12):
I had the best mentor at the University of Minnesota.
It was just the coolest guy, Tom Fisher. I would
come into his office every week tell him the research
I was doing, and nothing was nothing was too crazy
or too out there. He would just encourage me to
explore every possibility. And so we you know, week after
week after week, we were just coming up with the

(31:34):
craziest ideas of how to overcome zoning, everything from I
mean like ice fish houses on the lake to what
kind of zoning is happening on.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
The water summertime might be a little difficult.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
But then it turns into a houseboat.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
They're gonna have wills and a haul. Okay, but then
you found it. That is so so you you found
it in your research.

Speaker 3 (31:59):
Found it the research. We actually found a church in
Saint Paul. Saint Paul's a capital of Minnesota for others
that didn't know about Minnesota like me. That was in
a lawsuit. They were they were suing the city of
Saint Paul for unjust restrictions on the use of their building.
They had rented out their basement to a nonprofit that

(32:22):
had been around for twenty or thirty years that was
a day respite center for the homeless.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
Oh I know why, I know what happened. Yeah, the
neighbors there, you go, didn't want those people walking through
their neighborhood. Yeah, so they started raising hell and they
used their influence absolutely with the politicians. And so the
politicians said, okay, we'll stop this, and the church says,
you can't stop it because we have we have protection
under the federal what's.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
It land use, that's religious land juice.

Speaker 4 (32:50):
So churches rank six on the list. We forgot tribal
land is a big one, and that it's interesting with
Orange Hatch Lbs church owns one point seven million acres
in the US.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (33:02):
Yeah, they need some settled properties.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Let's go.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
But the point is that's what happens.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
And so the church was suing the city saying, we
don't care if these people upset about these un housed
people or whatever coming to use our basement.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
We're allowed to use this under this federal law.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yeah. Not only we're allowed, but we are called.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Well the argument legally is allowed. But their mission is
they feel called as a church to serve these folks.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, okay, well they.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Sound like a pretty nice candidate to talk to you
about your holes and wills houses.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Absolutely. When I met them, they were a couple of
years into that fight and they were weary. But they
ended up winning in federal courts. Oh, it went all
the way to federal courts. Wo. Yeah, and so.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
That actually is pretty good that that happened, because that's
that precedent for you.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
Absolutely, we planted our first sacred settlement in Saint Paul.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
There at that church.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Not at that church. They didn't have any land, but
a church, you know, five minutes down the road.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
No kidding, all right, So tell me what that first.
First of all, we talked about the founder of Settled,
and I said at the top of the show, I
love the title of the organization settled, because metaphorically it
co joins but settle your life.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yeah, settlers.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, you envision people in wagon trains settling, and then
folks experiencing homelessness finally able to physically settle, but also
settle their souls.

Speaker 4 (34:45):
Yes, and we settle our souls because we take ourselves
away from the busyness of life and living community. Yes,
I was trying to be cheesy, but that's true.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
It's so good. It's true.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
I'm just reflecting what you said. It's in the threat.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
So what is this first settlement of Settled? Look like?

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Okay, first settlement. It's a tiny little church about six
minutes outside of downtown Saint Paul, about one acre of land.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
That's all. That's teen I see.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
That's tiny little building. Uh, that's you know, been there forever.
A lot of deferred maintenance. The church they just kind
of did like a replant. It's been around for about
eight years when we meet them, and maybe about twenty

(35:36):
committed like families that show up every Sunday, so very tiny,
under resourced, just outside the heart of Saint Paul, not
much land, and they say yes to the to the
nation's first sacred settlement. They they just their mission is hospitality.

(35:56):
They are on mission to offer radical hospitality. And they
just could. They were like, you know what, we don't
have much, but we want to use every inch of
our land for the Kingdom of God. So if you
can do it here, do it here. And so it
was just a process of learning with them planting our
first sacred settlement. Again. A sacred settlement is an intentional

(36:17):
and permanent tiny home community owned and operated by the
local church.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
That's I was wondering that. So the church's land, who's
on it? They own it?

Speaker 3 (36:27):
They own it?

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Did they own the homes?

Speaker 3 (36:29):
They owned the homes?

Speaker 1 (36:30):
So you build them and then the church owns them.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
The community builds them.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
The community.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
When I say you, the organization, the community, whoever you
spearhead the building, the community does it. But the church
owns the asset. Yes, and that people living in them then.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
Pay rent, Yes to the church.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
Why is that that the greatest full circle?

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Forget for a second, for just a second, let's put
aside the social impact. I mean, pragmatically, that's a really
cool win win for everybody.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
Yes, it could be a self sustaining model then too,
if they're paying rent, right, Yeah, you upload the costs upfront,
but then it gets paid back.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
Yeah, now that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
We see, I didn't get that part reading the prop.
I didn't understand that part that.

Speaker 3 (37:25):
The church owns it and they operate it. This is
the role of the church.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
But so the church and then in operating it, they
are in community with the residents of the dining hose.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
Yes. And then not only is it neighbors coming out
of homelessness living on the church land and using the
church building, but there are also what we call intentional
neighbors that make up one third of the homes there.
These are people that are coming from relatively healthy, happy backgrounds,

(37:58):
feel called and compelled to live in the community alongside
the poor, to augment that role of family that has
been lost. It's almost like your backyard missionary there.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
Because we got to go back to the thing I
made you repeat the data says yes, the vast majority
of the people experiencing homelessness are experiencing it ultimately because
of a lack of connectivity to family. Yes, to a family,
and so this small home community helps recreate what they've

(38:28):
never had or they lost very early. Does it reverse
the patterns that are above the peels of layers once
you get to that slowly we're taking the I'm so
happy you said it that way.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
The answer is yes.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
But there's work, yeah, patient work, patient, slow work. It's
really a work on the heart of the church. You know,
we come in with so much judgment about people about
how they should live their life, how they should spend
their money, what decisions that they're making, and having a

(39:11):
sacred settlement right at your church. It just changes everything.
It's no longer those people. It's your neighbor by name,
by relationship, and a lot of the hardness of our
heart just starts to fall away, like we start to
get plump hearts again, We start to learn empathy.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
We had a guest recently that said it's hard.

Speaker 4 (39:36):
To well, it's actually a quote from Brene Brown that
people are hard to hate close up move in.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
That's a little different from a different perspective, but again, yeah,
it's let's change it. It's hard to look away from
people that are right in front of you. Yeah, and
that kind of community.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, and it's hard to judge my neighbor for how
they're spending the little bit of money that they have
when I have to go back and look at myself
and say like, well, did I need to get my
nails done? Did I need to spend that five dollars
on my water? Thank you?

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Alix?

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Are you going to make me feel guilty about my
monthly pedicure?

Speaker 3 (40:19):
Maybe?

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Don't? Please?

Speaker 3 (40:22):
No, No, Alex is the Catholic in the room. He
does the guilt you and I don't have to.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
You're so right.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
He gives me crap about my peticure all the time.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
Yeah, there's worse things.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
I give you a crap.

Speaker 4 (40:31):
I'm not going to call you.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Out on the air.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
I get the point. I was being playful. So how
slowly and how much change? When did you put in
this first? Or excuse me, when did you guys your
community form the first settlement? How many years ago?

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Sacred settlement? Sacred settlement apologizes Sacred Settlement.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
October twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Two, so we are just past three years.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Three years.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
What a slow change look like three years later?

Speaker 3 (41:09):
Well, first I want to tell you who lives there.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
It's six homes. Two of those homes are filled with
intentional neighbors. One is a thirty something year old young
professional who plays orchestra. Another is nostention neighbors. I'm ano.
There is a husband and wife. He's an engineer, she's
a nurse. They've lived in the community for thirty years.
Gave up their three bedroom to bath house to live

(41:37):
in a tiny home in the community. Wow says it's
the best thing they've ever done.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
People need a trophy on their little tiny man or.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
You think that, you really think that. But the truth
is it enriches their life. It strengthens their relationship with
their adult son, It strengthens their marriage, it strengthens their
relationship with God. Like they are better humans. Three years later,
living there, and you.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
Actually have a really beautiful line about like years ago,
I would have told you this is a homelessness ministry,
But now, yeah, I call it. Can you talk about that?

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, yeah, that is true. I think you know, just
all those years ago, God saying it's time to look
at poverty in your own backyard. I thought we were
building a ministry for the homeless, and you know, fast
forward all these years later, I would say that we're
Our ministry is to the church, like this is for
the sake of the church, This is for the sake

(42:35):
of the sanctification of the church, like we need this.
We need the poor in relationship with us. We don't
need charity. We don't need, you know, a monthly soup kitchen,
or a coat drive or the food bank. All those
things are fine, but those don't change your soul.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
If you knew how so closely you and I sing
after the seeing off the same sheet of music, you
would be shocked. I won't go into any more me.
This is about you, but it's refreshing for me to
hear you say the things you're saying, because these are
things I've been saying in a different way for years.

(43:12):
I could not agree with you anymore. Who are the
other four people?

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Four homes are filled with people coming out of chronic homelessness.
On average, they were on the streets for ten years.
If this church hadn't stepped in and invited them home,
they would have died on the streets. There was no
other option. They are the most expensive to the public
because they cycle in and out of the emergency rooms

(43:38):
and detoc centers and jails because we make homelessness illegal,
most expensive to the public, with the least amount of
options available. This is the group of people that we
look away from, we step over, we're at the red light.
We see them holding a sign saying anything, anything, anything,

(44:00):
and we make all of our quick judgments they must
have done something wrong or the government is there to
help them, that's their role. They should just go get help.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
What do you say before we go to who these are?
And then how this thing looks and the three year question?
Because I do want to get back to that. I
think that's important for people to understand. I can't help
but chase the squirrel up a tree a little. I
always have at least a few bucks in my pocket.

(44:31):
I'm still okay. I'm old school. I don't do credit
cards with much. I'm still cash and carry. And I
live in inner City Memphis, and I work downtown in Inner
City Memphis, and I coach football and Inner City Memphis, and
my life is inside theop. The loop is the Interstate
Loop outside the suburbs inside. So in Memphis, when you
live inside the loop, you're in the city, right. So

(44:56):
there's not a single day I don't come to rest
at a stop sign or a stop light where there's
not somebody with us on, or enter some kind of
store where there's not somebody.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
I can't think of a day i'd been asked for
a dollar.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah, and I really am torn. It's not the dollar.
A dollar or even a five dollar bill really means
very little to me, really does mean very little to me.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Financially. But I don't want to be part of the problem.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
And I feel like sometimes if you're giving money to
someone begging for money like that, that it's not going
to get them a shelter overnight, or get them something
good to drink or a decent thing to eat. But
more than likely it's going to be just another piece

(46:03):
of straw and the haystack of the drug epondemic in
this country.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
And you know, the.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
The continual desperation of the people caught in all of that,
And so I know it, you know, especially to you,
it really doesn't come from a point of selfless selfishness.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
For me, It comes from a point of.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
By giving this person money, am I not part of
the problem?

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Ultimately?

Speaker 3 (46:36):
Sure? So what do you do?

Speaker 2 (46:38):
And so what do you do?

Speaker 3 (46:39):
What do you do?

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Candidly? Sometimes it depends on my mood. Sometimes it depends
on how I'm approached and if i'm if I'm if
I'm seeing someone I've seen telling them the same story,
doing the same thing over and over again, it's usually

(47:05):
a no. If it's someone I haven't seen before or
seems legitimately hungry, or indeed, I typically give it. I
have on occasions said no, gone inside and bought ten
dollars with food and gave him a sack. I've also

(47:27):
done that and watched people when I drove away throw
it down because they weren't interested.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Food and water?

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Well, did you ask them what they wanted to eat?
We're coming to you and pick it out.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
I have a couple times.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
And they still were the ones to throw it away
after they picked it out.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Nothing.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
But I've had people say, man, I'm starving, I'm really hungry.
Can you give me five dollars? And I'm like, no, man,
I can't. But then I'll go in and buy ten
dollars with food and I hand them a sack. If
you're hungry, here's some food. And then I have watched twice,
remember specifically twice I even bought. One time I was
going through the in Memphis. You can be going through
the drive through and they will literally walk up between

(48:08):
the restaurant and the drive through with your window down before.
I mean, there's the person taking your money and having
your food and they're five. You know, it's like a second.
It's like the homeless window against the.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
Wall, you know.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
And I have actually bought an extra hamburger or something,
and one time I watched that person take that brand
new hamburger in the sack and every look at it
and tossing the bushes, and I thought, you know, what
is the right answer here, you know, And I'm just
curious what you think the right answer is.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Yeah, I don't think that there's a right answer. I
think it's being present in the moment and not hardening
our hearts toward it and saying like, what does this
moment require of me?

Speaker 2 (48:57):

Speaker 1 (49:16):
I genuinely empathetically feel for every single person that's in
that state. That is somebody's son or daughter, that is
somebody's brother or sister or uncle or cousin, and and
that is somebody you know, Christ made. And I do
feel empathy. I haven't hard in my heart, but I do.

(49:41):
And candidly, you know, when people are coming through my
town that I'm really proud of and they stop to
get gassed and they get you know, hit up for money,
I mean, what does that say about our community and
our our our our city, our society. I really do.

(50:03):
I struggle with the emotion of you know how on
a personal level to respond to it all, I really do.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
I think that struggle is good. I think don't try
to get out of the uncomfortability too quickly. That uncomfortability
is is the Lord's stirring something and saying something, even
your own soul saying something to you. And it's like,
will I be inconvenienced for another human another human? That sure,

(50:33):
maybe I don't like the way that they're asking, or
I don't know how they're going to use this, or
I feel, you know, we can create all sorts of
judgments to build a barrier between me and them, but
they are human, And will I stop? Will I look
them in the eye and say, hey, sister, hey brother,
what do you really need right now? Do you need

(50:55):
a meal? Then let us go together and go and
find that together. Do you need a cigarette? Do you
need do you need something to take away the gnawing
pain of trauma in your mind? Right now? How can
I help you? I think that empathy is very inconvenient,

(51:19):
and I think we have we try to keep as
much inconvenience out of our lives. But stopping for someone
it's inconvenient, it's costly, and it's risky, and we are
called to do those things.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
I think that's the best answer I've ever heard of
the question.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
Honestly, I've asked the question probably ten different times the
last three years of guests, and I think your answer
is probably the best. Tell me about the other four people,
the unintentional Well, they're all intentional, but you know what
I mean, the other four people in the first house group.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
Yeah, so it's five people in four homes. Three are
individuals and one is a couple. When you are kind
of deemed chronically homeless by the federal government, you are
most often an individual or a couple. By this time,
you're probably not a family unit anymore. That family unit
has split apart, kids have been taken away doesn't mean
that we don't want kids to be reunited with their family,

(52:14):
but likely they're never going to move back in. Our
hope for them was that they would be reunited to
still be mom, to still be dad, and to have
a healthy place to come and visit and play and
have celebrations and birthdays and games. But it's often individuals
and couples. So we build homes for one and two

(52:36):
one person homes and two person homes, and then homes
for intentional neighbors that can look like individuals, couples, or families.
We have all three of those those neighbors that are
coming from you know, resource backgrounds, choosing to live in
the community as a good neighbor. We are We're calling
the American church to look at the chronically homeless, look

(53:00):
at the hardest house, look at the most expensive to
the public, look at those with the least options available,
Look at those who otherwise will die on the street
if we don't step in. Because the chronically homeless make
up about twenty percent of the overall homeless population, using
up about eighty percent of the public resources. Because it's

(53:22):
very costly for us to look away, we are leaving
people on the very margin of survival, and we give
them just enough to just keep surviving for one more day.
What an awful way to live. Why not pull people
as far back from that cliff edge as possible and

(53:43):
into the center of a community that is trying to
carry each other's burdens and trying to love each other
as God loves us, and trying to look more like
Jesus in our very lives. What will that look like
for their lives? Will change the church, It does change
the church, and it changes our neighbors. Three years in

(54:06):
I said it's slow work. It is slow work. We're
rebuilding trust.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Years and years and years of trauma.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
Don't go away within a week of getting a tiny
house just because you've got a tiny house.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
I get it.

Speaker 3 (54:18):
This is not a fix it model. This isn't okay.
You know, come and be healed in two years and
then move on to something else. It's like move on
to what no Come and find belonging here, Come and
be settled here, Come and grow deep roots here, Come
and be stable. Rebuild trust with yourself, with God, with others. Hey,
if mom began drugging you at the age of two

(54:38):
and pimping you out you have trust issues. Wow, and
that is a real story, but not one of the
extreme stories.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
All of our neighbors, that's not an extreme story.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
All of our neighbors come from such extreme abuse, from
childhood abuse, neglect, lens, a profound and catastrophic loss of family.
It will take the rest of their lives to heal
from that.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Would you say, what percent of homeless what percent of
people experiencing homelessness in the United States come from one
of those three things?

Speaker 3 (55:15):
You just said one hundred percent of people in chronic homelessness.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Which represents how many of them.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
About twenty percent of the homeless population.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Okay, what about the other.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
Eighty other eighty are are where we hear like, I'm
just a paycheck away from being homeless, kind of episodically
homeless almost for a little bit, but then can get
back into something or kind of uh, you know, just
homeless for a moment. Do just need kind of a
leg up, need help with rent or that way.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
If those are not the people we typically see on
park benches and stuff, it's the chronically homeless that we're
talking about.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
That's who we're talking about.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
That's who And you're saying one hundred percent of them
come from a lack of family and typically some pretty
dire abuse and trauma that some of us can't even fathom.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Yeah, So I wouldn't just say a lack of family,
because I do have a breakdown a profound loss in
some way. Right. You know, I don't know your story,
but having gone through five divorce a mom who got
married and divorced five times, that sounds like a profound
loss of family.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Now, fortunately, fortunately it wasn't nowhere near his diars.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
What you're talking about, really.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
Well, what makes you different from one of our neighbors?

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Like?

Speaker 3 (56:36):
What made what? Like? Why did your life sss?

Speaker 1 (56:39):
A loving grandparents and a mother that had no addiction
or any problems and absolutely no abuse in the home?

Speaker 3 (56:45):
That's it? You had. You had, you had strong resiliency factors.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
And my mother.

Speaker 1 (56:54):
Worked every day and kept a roof over my head
and kept me in school and loved me and everything else.
So I didn't have any of that. Yeah, I can
see how that can happen.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
Imagine if mom had been abused, she was just an
abused woman, and the grandparents weren't in the picture, what
would childhood have looked through?

Speaker 2 (57:19):
I get it, And.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
Oh my gosh, I hate the victimization of able bodied
people as an excuse. That's a whole other conversation. But
if we're talking about the twenty percent of people experiencing
homelessness that we define as the chronically homeless, and if
the data says one hundred percent of them had a

(57:43):
profound loss of family and were victims of abuse, neglect, trauma,
and everything else, the truth is these people see on
the park bench are most likely victimized, and the victimization
continues day after day after die.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Yeah, you meet someone, you meet a woman that is
in chronic homelessness. There, it's it is almost certain that
she's been raped many times on the streets and often
came from a childhood of sexual abuse.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Like did you see it all the time?

Speaker 3 (58:24):
All the time I met a woman on the streets,
she had been homeless, she'd been kicked out of her home,
she'd been on the streets for three days, she'd just
been raped, and met her right after.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
That three days.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Yeah, life on the streets is really brutal, and it's
not helpful if we continue narratives that like people just
choosing this, they just want this, Maybe they know nothing better,
and they might maybe maybe somehow you're hearing that, But
nobody chooses a life of suffering and pain and being

(58:57):
unloved and unwanted. Every human being wants to be loved
and known.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
So what does three years later look like for the
four non intentionals?

Speaker 2 (59:11):
I think?

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Am I using the right word?

Speaker 3 (59:13):
You called the intentional neighbors? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (59:16):
Intentionally, the four people who formally experience homelessness.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
I'm trying to say it right. But tell me what
three years later looks like for them?

Speaker 3 (59:25):
Three years later for our neighbors coming out of homelessness,
there are five of them, and so three individuals and
a couple, and their lives look better. Their lives look
We don't require people to be sober before they move in.
We don't require them to shape up and get their

(59:47):
life together in a certain amount of time. We just
love people on their healing journey, and turns out that works.
You know, for anyone that doesn't believe that there's incredible
research out there, there's a Ted talk called Everything you
think you know about Addiction is wrong. It's seventeen minutes

(01:00:08):
worth every minute to watch and to just see the
research around around them substance use. So again another narrative
that's just not helpful. If we just continue to perpetuate.
If people want this, they're just stuck in their addiction.
Nothing's going to change. We're just enabling them. Well, have
you tried love?

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
That's interesting? So what's next.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
We planted our second Sacred settlement on the heels of
the first in December of twenty twenty two, so we
at a completely different context. So the first is in
it's an urban area. It's a small conservative church. At
the time we met them, they were under resourced. Three
years later they are no longer under resourced. Then second

(01:00:59):
Sacred settlem is it a first ring suburb. It's at
a progressive Lutheran church that's been around forever, liturgical, affluent, white.
Very different. If you look at the first two churches
that we plant sacred settlements, there's nothing nothing similar.

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
You should pause on that of why they're not under
resource anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Yeah, So three years later, both congregations are experiencing an
increase in attendance, an increase in engagement, and an increase
in tithing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
As you said, what you found out is you're not
really serving just the homeless.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
You're serving the church itself.

Speaker 4 (01:01:42):
Oh I found your quote. It was so good. All right,
so you said somewhere tell me what I said. Yeah,
it was better than what you said in our interview. Jeez,
you said. Uh, yeah, we're no longer just homelessness. We
say that we're on a mission to cultivate home in
a homeless world because we believe that actually all of
us have some homelessness in us.

Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
That's a good quote.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
So the Lutheran Church.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
Lutheran Church, we're planting a sacred settlement at a megachurch
in a third ring suburb, the most unlikely place. People say, Oh, like,
there's no transportation out there. They wouldn't want to live
out there, so far from social services. Actually, why did
you move out to the suburbs?

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
Yeah, I was going to say, what makes you think
they end Quotationans wouldn't want to live in a nice,
safe area in the suburbs. That's all pretty any differently
than you would want to live out there.

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
Yeah, And what I love about the heart of this
megachurch is that they're changing up the script. Megachurches in
America are known for being performance centers. Destination centers, and
they are saying, no longer will we do that. We
will inhabit our land, we will inhabit our building. We
will do this for the sake of the poor and
the sanctification of ourselves.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
How many houses on that one twelve homes?

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Twelve? How many intentionals versus former homelessness.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
They'll be four? Is that right? For intentional neighbors or
intentional households? Again, it can be an individual, couple or
a family. We have all three and then eight homes
for the hardest house, most expensive to the public, with
the least amount of options. We're not cherry picking. We
are going after people that otherwise would die on the streets,

(01:03:31):
and we're saying, come here, this is the best place
for you to be. The church is the place to
wrap around you do the people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
I'm curious to the people that were formerly homeless that
are in these communities now that I actually start attending
church at that church.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
Some of them do not like a Sunday service. No,
none of them. Well, actually, one of our neighbors the
first year she moved there, she felt she felt compelled
to go to both services every Sunday, like she owed
it to them, and they were like, we are not
requiring this of you. This is not an expectation. She

(01:04:08):
is not a believer, she identifies with the Native American community,
but she would go to both services. The pastor is like,
you're the only one in my congregation that comes to
both services.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
I think it's also very very cool that you said that,
And I'll read that somewhere that nobody's required to go
to the church. Nobody's you know, when I read that,
I thought, good, like God do his thing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
Like God do his things, stay out.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
Of the way.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
Yeah, same thing with like the substance use and mental illness.
If we were to tell people, Okay, you have to
be clean before you can come in here, you have
to be on your meds before you can come in here. Okay, Well,
then we're just going to continue to keep the same
people on the streets. Like how can they do that
without being to feel safe and loved and have something
to live for? Like, we need to give them that

(01:05:02):
first and then let those things fall away, which is
what we're seeing three years later, those things start to
fall away slowly because they start to feel safe.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
For replacing the profound loss of family with the profound
growth of a loving community, and over time, one by one.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
Change yeah, and then one by one we change, our
judgments fall away, our empathy grows, and we become more
of who we've always wanted to be. And when we say,
you know, this is your line, right, I wish someone
were to do something about that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
Yes, Yeah, who's someone me? Right?

Speaker 3 (01:05:47):
I get to be a part of this. I don't
have to. I don't have to be an intentional neighbor.
I don't have to live in the community. I mean,
that's a select few and they are called to do that,
but there are hundreds of people that are part of
those communities that are just coming for community dinners or
just coming to have a faithful presence in the community. Hey,
you're already gonna work from a coffee shop today, why

(01:06:10):
not work from the Sacred Settlement. Hey, you're already gonna
make a good dinner tonight for your family, why not
make a little extra and bring it to the Sacred
Settlement and have it there. Hey you're already gonna sit
around and knit, why not do it in the common
house of the Sacred Settlement.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
So it's interesting you said both congregations are actually continuing
to grow.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Do you think the sacred settlements are the reason?

Speaker 3 (01:06:58):
Absolutely. The Lutheran Church was on a slow decline for
thirty years before they planted the sacred settlement. Just like
the Little Nazarene Church, the first sacred settlement had truly
no business. Saying yes to a sacred settlement, no resources,
not very many people looked impossible. The Lutheran Church really
had no reason to say yes to a sacred settlement either,

(01:07:21):
slow decline for thirty years, nobody had come into the community.
They were on a slow hospice, living off an endowment.
But God revealed himself as the God that is trustworthy. Hey,
you can plant this sacred settlement and there will be
people here in the next generation and the generation after
that to take care of this. You can trust me.

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
So who is it that settled the homelessness or the church?

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
It's all of us.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I'll listened to you and start
thinking about all of it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:54):
Is there a third the third is at a megachurch?

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Tell me about that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
So the megachurches third Ring suburb, white affluent, surrounded by
you know, a pretty wealthy community. The community had struggled,
really struggled. That neighborhood really struggled when they heard about
a sacred settlement coming into their community.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
I bet they fought it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
They fought.

Speaker 1 (01:08:16):
Struggled probably sounds like a sweet word for a whole
bunch of people saying, don't bring these people into my
high dollar neighborhood.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Okay, they fought it, and they they you know, they
had the means and the education and the resources to
do that, and so actually authored a bill at the
state level to dismantle all the work of settled.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
That's too bad.

Speaker 1 (01:08:38):
There's a federal law that says house as a worship
can use their land for whatever they want to, even
put chickens on steakes, preach it for the for our
friends in the a.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
She remembered.

Speaker 4 (01:08:50):
Just this week we inter released a Steven who went
through this whole fight. She built a home for teenage
moms in Colorado and she's actually a stand together atalyst too,
and she had a whole zoning fight, you know, over
this issue. And she probably wasn't aware of this law
because it was on the church's property.

Speaker 3 (01:09:08):
She needs to know about it. Yeah, churches get pushed
around all the time. They have no idea. They don't
know the strength, they don't know about the law, they
don't know the strengths as a well.

Speaker 1 (01:09:15):
Well, the thing is, though, if they'd have won that,
then they could have shut down the other two things
you had. So you were looking at an existential crisis
of settled.

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
Yeah, we were. So this happened. So I went on
my first sabbatical in ten years in December, took a
month off, come back in January. My first week back,
I learned about this major opposition. Two hundred very angry people.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
That's what you get for taking a breaker.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
That's what I get. Yeah, that's totally what I get.
And on my sabbatical, the Lord was talking to me
about growth. We've always imagined that this is a national movement.
We want to help churches anywhere and everywhere across the
nation plant sacred settlements on their land because we think
this is good for them and good for their neighbors.
And so I come back into work, made your opposition.

(01:10:00):
I'm like, hey, God, you said we were going to grow.
And I sensed him saying, my church always grows under persecution. Rejoice.
This is a time to rejoice. So we called our
partner churches together for a time of repentance, worship, and rejoicing.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
Yay, we're getting sued. There's the rejoice. Yay they're suing us.
Let's rejoice. It's hard to do, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (01:10:29):
Hard to do, Yeah, can be hard to do. But
when you know that you're on the side of God,
you know that you're on the side of justice and mercy,
easy to do.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:10:42):
So so we also called our community to six to
seven weeks of prayer and fasting fast every Wednesday together
because the.

Speaker 3 (01:10:58):
Our legislation, it's on Wednesdays, and you know, eleventh hour,
the bill doesn't go through, gets completely killed, and the
church moves ahead. There's complete unity in the megachurch, no split,
no no internal opposition to the sacred settlement, complete peace.

(01:11:21):
Watching the leadership of that church walk through this opposition
was one of my greatest privileges. They spoke with such
grace and humility and kindness, never spoke against the neighbors,
never spoke a single ill word about them, prayed for them,
loved them, spoke kindly of them, and trusted that God
was going to bring the neighbors. The neighborhood into the

(01:11:44):
folds of this work. And so now the greatest opposers
of the sacred settlement have now come and been are
now allies and advocates of the sacred settlement.

Speaker 1 (01:11:53):
How many houses there twelve homes, so you're up to
thirty if I'm a math, right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:00):
And then we just had a fourth church vote to
plant a sacred settlement on their land.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
It's a small all same area.

Speaker 3 (01:12:09):
Same area. But we're also starting to work outside of Minnesota.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
Well, first fourth one.

Speaker 3 (01:12:14):
This fourth one is in Minnesota. It's that another neighborhood church,
a Wesleyan church. They likely you know, put half a
dozen homes on their land. That's kind of what the
land can handle and what the neighbor or what the congregation,
the size of the congregation would be right the right scale.

(01:12:34):
Now we're working for the first time outside of our state,
working with churches in Michigan and also Washington. And then
there's several cities that have come to us where there's
community organizers saying, we want to see sacred settlements in
our city. Will you come and talk with our city
and and so that we can gather our church leaders

(01:12:55):
together and talk about this with the hope that the
first church or the first three church will rise up
and say yes to hosting a church a sacred settlement
on their land. The beautiful thing about a sacred settlement
is that, Okay, one faithful church says yes to hosting
it on their land. And that can look like an acre,
eight acres, fifty acres. You know, we have all three.

(01:13:18):
It can look like in an urban core, in a
first ring suburb, or a third ring suburb. We have
all three. It can look at a really really under
researched church, a church that lives on an endowment, or
really well resourced church. We have all three. It can
be conservative or somewhere in the middle, or progressive. We
have all three. God is literally showing us, hey, I'm

(01:13:39):
not Baptist, I'm not Presbyterian, I'm not Lutheran. I might
be a little Jewish, but I can do this anywhere
where my people say yes to radical hospitality. I can
do this anywhere. This just says this is I've already
said yes to this. I already want to see this
in the world. You just get to say the amen.

(01:14:01):
Can we live lives of God's Amen? Can we say
amen to the things that he already wants to see
in the world, and then he will do it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:09):
It's phenomenal that we're having this conversation and the first
thing opened in twenty twenty two. We're not talking about
something been going on forever. No, this is you're still
in the infancy of this thing.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
Maybe, but remember this started with research a lot of
years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
Oh no, that's what I'm saying. I was just about
to say. But it really is formed from a twelve
year old who went to Guatemala, all the way from
a confused participant in a doctoral problem in Minnesota in
the years between. Yeah, I mean, it really is. It

(01:14:47):
took all of that education, knowledge, experience, and faith to
even get to what started in twenty twenty two. But
since twenty twenty two, you're already talking about thirty existing
home and another six on the way, and cities from
all over the place reaching out. Alex often comments, we do.

(01:15:07):
We've highlighted I don't know five to ten different organizations
that approach foster care in many different ways, all have
been effective.

Speaker 4 (01:15:18):
All Right, you often butcher it. You and me, what
can I say it?

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Yeah? And Alex often says.

Speaker 4 (01:15:25):
So there's four hundred thousand kids in foster care, one
hundred and fifteen thousand of them could be adopted today
their parental rights have been fully terminated. And there's almost
four hundred thousand houses of worship in the country. So
just one person and one out of every three of
them adopted an orphan, there wouldn't be any orphans in
America today.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
So let's use that math. If every church had six
houses on their property, would almostness. Chronic homelessness is eradicated.

Speaker 3 (01:15:58):
Oh completely, by a long shot. We actually only need
every every two churches to lift one person up off
the streets. We have about one hundred and fifty thousand
people experiencing chronic homelessness that's probably under like under reported,
and then we have about three hundred and fifty thousand churches,
not including home churches, and.

Speaker 1 (01:16:20):
So there's nothing to say the synagogues can't do this
or moss.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
Yeah, come on, now, you know we're all called to
love our neighbors.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
Any house of worship.

Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
Yeah, So the point is if one of three did this,
we eradicate chronic commerce even.

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):
Less than that, because they're not just going to have
one freestanding tiny home that's not a community right, so
we really.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
That's right, I'm doing the math wrong. It's fifteen percent
ye us six times. Yeah, it's fifteen percent of the
house is worship in the United States. Put up a
six tiny home community.

Speaker 3 (01:16:58):
We've eradicated one of the most wicked problems in our
society and expensive.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
If you don't care about it from a pragmatic standpoint,
think of what that does for society.

Speaker 3 (01:17:08):
And we've added one hundred and fifty thousand new units
of affordable housing.

Speaker 2 (01:17:16):
Okay, well, I'd vote for you for Secretary of Housing
and Urban Development.

Speaker 3 (01:17:20):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:17:21):
And it's not all these one these churches, wo do
it either?

Speaker 2 (01:17:23):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:17:24):
With your first sacred settlement, the other churches in the
community help pay for each of those houses, right.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
Yeah, the churches of the sacred settlements themselves. You know,
if they have the means to be able to put
money into the project, great. If they don't, that's fine too.
At all of our sacred settlements, almost every one of
the homes are sponsored, paid for, and built by another
church in the community because maybe another church says, you know,

(01:17:50):
we don't have the land for this, or we don't
have the culture for this, but we also we want
to help get in the game of responding to chronic homelessness.
So we can lift up one person off the streets
through one home, and then because they're on wheels, they
can actually build the home on their church property, so
that over you know, nine weeks or twelve weeks, they

(01:18:12):
can start to show their congregation, you know, from trailer
all the way to fully built home. How they're adding
one new unit of affordable housing and lifting one of
the hardest house, the most expensive to the public, off
the streets.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
And the crazy spin that makes this curveball really break
is your unexpected revelation of what it's doing for the
church itself. Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, we we do
talk about as Christians declining membership in churches to declining

(01:18:51):
Sunday worship, declining engagement, small groups and Sunday soool class,
declining engagements and youth programs.

Speaker 4 (01:18:57):
And giving only there's one point nine percent of their
disposal income to charity, far away from tithing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
But the churches that are doing this, you're experiencing growth. Yeah, phenomenal.

Speaker 4 (01:19:12):
Are you living in one of these settlements.

Speaker 3 (01:19:14):
I do not live in one of these settlements. We
live at the settled homestead.

Speaker 4 (01:19:18):
I saw does that mean?

Speaker 3 (01:19:19):
Yeah? So settled Homestead is a place of gathering and training.
So we see ourselves as a national organization, and you know,
we also are building an ethos and a culture. It's
not just tiny PLoP tiny homes on land, but it's
and it's not a program, it's a lifestyle. And it's
like in a redemptive model, everyone wins the land, the animals,

(01:19:43):
the people, the buildings. So how do we think about church,
the church, how do we think about how this all
works together? So the settled Homestead is a full expression
of what we imagine in the world and how things,
you know, an ecosystem of how it all works together.
And then we invite church leaders that are discerning a

(01:20:04):
sacred settlement to come and stay with us for a
three day intensive and then we go and take field
trips to the different sacred settlements and show them, you know,
the various pieces of this. And then on their last day,
we do a dreaming session about their sacred settlement and
how they can imagine propagating and bringing this back to
their community.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
Marketing and development, that's what that is, marketing and development,
but at a very faithful manner. All right, somebody's gonna say,
I gotta find out what do you settled dot com?
What do people go to set settled dot org. Yeah,
settled s E T T L ed is.

Speaker 3 (01:20:44):
It's a great domain. I know, like eight years ago
I saw that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
When I started reading it and I saw the title,
I was like, I mean, you hit that on the
now and.

Speaker 4 (01:20:55):
You have really beautiful pictures on there or they look
like I don't know if you had a chance to
watch the video five minute video that is on your
website but also on YouTube shows really put.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
That up on our stuff all way?

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
The video? All right, so settled dot org.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Yeah, and everybody, it's happy cheese gay Brielle. See I
did it. If somebody wants to reach out to you, can.

Speaker 3 (01:21:19):
They Sure, Gabrielle at settled dot org. That's it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:25):
And remember you're speaking to a doctor, so mind your
manners if you reach out to her. Smart woman. That's right, dude,
you're cool. I really really really like your whole thing.
I wish more people were not just listening but watching

(01:21:46):
the doc has a very very very bright smile but
quite discerning eyes, and I think she's uh summing things
up as she goes along pretty much all the time.
Is the feel I get from you? And Wow, what
an amazing faithful journey you and John John David.

Speaker 2 (01:22:07):
What are your children's names and how are they?

Speaker 3 (01:22:09):
We've got Ophelia, Abigail, Fiona and Pearl. Ophilia is eleven,
Abigail eight, Fiona five, b b fio and Fiona's five
and Pearl is two.

Speaker 1 (01:22:26):
Where are these names come from? These are all creat name?

Speaker 4 (01:22:29):
What's your bag?

Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:22:32):
I mean, what's up with the name l Yeah, I'm
gonna label you. No, Really, are the names just whim
names that you just get? You and John David just
liked or what When.

Speaker 3 (01:22:41):
We were pregnant with our fourth with Pearl, and we're like,
we're gonna have a fourth daughter, what are we posibly
gonna name her? We truly we realized that if you
look at kind of the meaning of the first three
girls names, it literally means father, son, and Holy Spirit,
and we had no idea, so we named Pearl pure.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
But with fourth you're out of the trinity.

Speaker 3 (01:23:02):
So now your pearl with the Pearl of great price.
So just like the Kingdom, you know what else has
got it? The others in the Holy Spirit Kingdom, come,
Holy Spirit, got it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:14):
You're gonna get pregnant again. You're gonna have to go
into something else. I know what's the pearly gates in Latin?
I wonder, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:23:24):
Hey, for people listening, if you belong to a church,
send this episode to people out your church.

Speaker 2 (01:23:28):
The pastor.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
Yeah, that's how this happens is we.

Speaker 4 (01:23:31):
Don't go to church. You know people who go to church,
and send.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
It to them.

Speaker 3 (01:23:34):
Right, Yeah, what did we say? Fifteen percent of churches
need to say yes to this? You're you're it, say yes.
If you're hearing this and you fift.

Speaker 2 (01:23:43):
It's not only fifty per cent need to.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
If fifteen percent say yes to this, frontic homelessness is
over in these cities, and come on, the money and
resource and handwringing we do over it, suffering and suffering
for everybody involved. Here's a sir, Yeah fix it. Yeah,
government's not involved, made a really cool law that helped
us out. That's a lot of thanks God, thanks dudes.

Speaker 4 (01:24:08):
Yeah, the bigger change is actually us though there's more
more of us house people.

Speaker 3 (01:24:13):
Yeah right, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:17):
Doctor Cloudis you're a cool person. I love your story.
Thanks for sharing it with us, Thanks for coming to
Memphis and Save Tripe.

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):
Hey. Thanks, it was really generous of you to invite
me on to this show to have me out. And
I love the mission of what the vision that you
see of like, hey, what is what is an army
of normal people? What can we do?

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
We can do everything?

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
Yeah, we can do it. We can fix it all,
yeah we can.

Speaker 2 (01:24:41):
And your proof.

Speaker 3 (01:24:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:42):
Thanks for being here. Thanks, and thank you for joining
us this week. If doctor Gabriel Cloudis has inspired you
in general or better yet, to take action by exploring
a sacred settlement for your church, sharing this episode or

(01:25:03):
their Settled's website with your church and other churches, donating
to Settled or something else entirely, please let me know.
I really do want to hear about it. If you'll
just write me at Bill at normal Folks dot us,
I will respond. And if you enjoyed this episode, please
share it with friends and on social subscribe to the podcast,

(01:25:26):
rate it, review it, join the army at Normalfolks dot us,
any and all of these things that will help us
grow an army of normal folks.

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):
I'm Bill Corney. Until next time, do what you can do,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Bill Courtney

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

Are You A Charlotte?

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Gabrielle Clowdus: We All Have Homelessness In Us (Pt 2)