Kim Emch: The Only 3 Generation Family ESL Program (Pt 2)

When Kim found out that thousands of kids in her suburban community were going hungry in the summer, she couldn’t look away from the problem. Her nonprofit Festa now feeds over 800 children in the summer, but as Kim puts it, they don’t just want to help people live in poverty a little bit better. So they serve 1,166 people with America's only 3-generation family English as a Second Language program, to help their families escape poverty . 

Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premium

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army in normal folks,
and we continue now what part two of our conversation
with Kim Im? Right after these brief messages from our
general sponsors.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
So I wrote a letter to the twenty two churches,
and six called me and said, we want to help ad.
What do you want us to do?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Do we need to call out the other sixteen that
didn't know I'm kidding, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
They started coming some time, but I've just been right away.
Six called right away, and one church said we actually
knew about this problem, but we didn't know what to do.
And the other five said, we were shocked, just like
you were, Kim. We didn't know there was even a problem.
And so they said, what do you want us to do?
And I said, well, clearly, I'm going to say up

(01:00):
a free summer lunch camp like they like what exists
in the urban communities for the children, and so how
about if you help with that?

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Are the urban city free lunch camp things? Are they
typically city run or are they private organizations too?

Speaker 2 (01:17):
They're usually nonprofits, so whether it's a religious organization or
a nonprofit a city community center, they're usually run by nonprofits.
Many of them are under the USDA Summer Food Service Program,
but they yes. And the concept in my mind was, oh,
I could just receive a free lunch and hand it
to a child. Okay, I could do that.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
That seems easy, but nothing is easy safe. I think
it's interesting though, that you said that, like in the
urban areas, there were three different places children growth on
the suburban none. But here's the thing, and that's why
I asked if it was like a public or a
private nonprofit. You said nonprofits they went where the need was,

(02:02):
but the need has shifted, so now there's no one
meeting the shifting need, which I found upon really interesting.
And so you get these churches to meet this need.
What do you need? And you said, well, I'll just
get a free lunch and give a free lunch. It'll
be easy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, And I have to say, I feel like I'm
the perfect person to say out loud, there literally is
no such thing as a free lunch.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
That was econ one O one first day.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
I think, literally there isn't. So I uh so I
recruited about eleven people. There were twelve of us to
help and sort of lead this as volunteers'.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Six five churches. Six churches, Yeah, yep.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
And like I found a man who had just retired
at our church, that senior pastor I reported to connected
me with him, and he said, you had me at
hungry children. What do you want me to do? He
ran an international company, had just retired. He brought to
retired and with him.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
There was a stay at home dad that joined us,
some other moms that I knew from the community who
joined us. So there were this group of twelve people,
just volunteers who wanted to feed children in our town.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
And so in the summer, yes, when they didn't have
a free lunch, got it.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
And again I learned on March fourteenth, and summer starts
in June, so of course I needed to start this summer.
So we uh.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
April May June. You had three.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Months, Yeah, three months months, four.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Churches, twelve people who love serving, feed twenty one hundred
kids and bring the community with you. No problem, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
No problem. And again, we weren't an organization, so we
don't own a building, We don't have a board of directors,
don't we don't. I mean I kind of pictured myself
slapping together peanut butter and jellies out of the back
of my van, which my children will tell you is
insane because I don't. I'm not I cook because I
need to eat. I don't cook for any other reason.

(04:03):
And quite honestly, once I started this, my husband started cooking,
my children would honestly say to me, how are you
feeding people for a living when you hardly are cooking
for us. So the fact that I'd be called to
feed people is the irony is insane. Truly, I'm not
a foodie. I'm the opposite of a foodie. So then

(04:23):
I learned, well, you could order in, and I thought,
that's perfect, I'm going to order in. So we and
none of us, by the way, had ever seen a
free lunch program because we didn't know about this the
summer previous, so we couldn't go visit one, and so
we just pictured in our minds what it could look like.
And long story shore we found a strip mall. We

(04:46):
would walk around the city kind of praying, like, where
should we have this? It should be at a place.
And the superintendent, one of the assistant superintendents of schools.
He had worked in Columbus and he knew poverty better
than I did. And he said, Kim, if I was
going to do this in Hilliard, I would go to
this intersection right here because there's a bunch of apartment
complexes and the children could walk to you. So we

(05:08):
just walked that intersection, the twelve people and I looking
for any space, and we found strip malls and none
of them were full, and so we thought, well, we
could use an empty storefront of a strip ball. So
there was a grocery store, a local grocery store that
had gone under and it was the anchor of this
strip mall in this intersection, and it was empty for

(05:29):
eight years. So we found the out of state property owner,
who was a woman living in Chicago. She'd only been
to Columbus once to sign the papers to buy the
strip mall. And I found her and she took my
call amazingly, and I said, I'm this lady in this
town who wants to feed twenty one hundred and fifty
eight children this summer. Would you let me use one

(05:50):
of your empty storefronts for free? Because I don't have
any money. She said, I have two children, and I
can't imagine if they were hungry. So yes, So we're
kidding just like that. We never met. I couldn't tell
you her name right now if I tried. Wow, okay, yeah,
So she and she said, well, how about the end
unit because it had been a pizza shop, so you know,

(06:13):
lunch pizza. You could use that. Now if I lease it,
then all bets are off. I'm going to have to
say you have to stop. And I said, well, I'm
just going to risk that. I'm going to pray you
don't lease it for twelve weeks of the summer. And
so she called me back. So we figured out how
to order lunch in under Columbus Parks and wreck. They

(06:34):
said they'd sponsor us and they'd send us the food.
We started recruiting volunteers. We started telling families, we're going
to be at this intersection at this strip mall, come
at this time every day for ten weeks and we'll
serve lunch. And I'm at the grocery store personally, just
doing my shopping and I get a call from the
strip mall lady and she says, Kim, bad news. I

(06:56):
leased the pizza shop. You can't run it. And this
was Memorial Day weekend and we're supposed to start the
first week in June lovely. So I hung up the
phone and I just started crying there in the grocery
store with my cart. And I called that first volunteer,
the man who was the retired CEO. His name is John,
and I called him and I was crying, and he said, Kim,

(07:16):
are these happy tears? Are sad tears? I said, they's
sad tears and he said, what's going on? I told
him and he said no, I'm gonna pound on your desk.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Bill.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
He said, no, you call her back and you tell
her we are feeding hungry children and we need to
use a different one of her empty spaces. If we
can't use that one, there's other empty spaces in her
strip mall. We need one of them. And so I
called her back and call her Dy. She knew it
was me. She took the call and I said, no,
I have to feed hungry children. Can I have a
different space? And she said, well, what space do you want?

(07:47):
And he's over here saying to me, ask her for
the old grocery store the cart storage area, And I
said what he said, the cart storage area, It's like
a thousand square feet. So I said to her, could
we use the cart storage area of the old grocery store.
It's a thousand square feet and she said, yeah, you
could use it.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
So a church donated those cafeteria style tables you see
in a lunch room of a school, ten of them.
They fit perfectly in the current storage area. And so
early June we started free Summer Lunch camp. And the
day it started, I had to drive maybe three miles
to the lunch site and it took me about forty

(08:24):
minutes because I drove two miles an hour. Why because
I was having a total tantrum fit with God in
the car.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
What was that all about?

Speaker 2 (08:33):
I was telling them I didn't want to go. Why, Well,
because I knew, I mean, my skill set is to
rally groups of people administrative. I can vision cast and
get her done. And I'd done that, and I knew
if I went there and I had to look into
the faces of the children, that my life would never

(08:55):
be the same. And I was scared about that. But
you will, Yeah, I felt like, you know, God like
let me tantrum, and then he just said to me,
I know, go and so I went, dragging my feet,
but I went and we were both right. So I
looked into the faces of these beautiful, amazing, gifted, talented children.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Hungry children.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
We're hungry, but very similar to the amazingness of my
own children. And I knew my life was never going
to be the same because I just I had a
love for them that I couldn't explain.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Did you ever go hungry?

Speaker 2 (09:34):
I am. I never went physically hungry.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
You were close. If you're coming up in a five
times divorced thing, you're not that far away.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
I would say that's probably true. I didn't know that
as a child, though. I never Yeah, well.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
These kids also didn't know they were not supposed to
have lunch on summers, but it doesn't make it right.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Yeah, yeah, first day.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Just to know what the first day was.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Well, we honestly didn't even know if anyone would come.
I mean, we put flyers, we had grassroots flyers all
over town, We had an article in the Columbus Dispatch,
all these things, but we just really didn't know. We
didn't have registration, We didn't know who would come. And
we served two hundred and forty six children that summer

(10:21):
with over one hundred and seventy volunteers, and they just
they walked along the edges of the strip mall, and
they just came to us and ages, oh, babies to
eighteen year olds, babies, moms brought their children, their littles
with them. They would sit and help their little ones eat,

(10:41):
they would chat with us. We realized very quickly. And
then the library came and said, hey, we really want
to expose this demographic of children to books. But guess what,
they don't come to the library. Could we just come
and bring the summer reading program here to your lunch site?
We said sure. Another church, a woman who's one of

(11:01):
my dearest friends now pastor Irma. She brought her youth group.
She said, we heard you were feeding hungry children. We
brought face pain and balloon animals. We thought, maybe we could,
you know, do something on the sidewalk after they leave lunch.
So quickly we could see what camp could look like,
and quickly we realized that simply handing food to a
child might help them live better in poverty, but it

(11:24):
was probably not going to help them out of poverty.
And we couldn't look in the faces of our new friends,
these beautiful children and their family.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Our exact neighbors, I mean children were saying my children.
The volunteers. Children were saying, oh, I know, I know
Mohammed from school. We go to the same school. I
mean they knew each other, The children knew each other.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Were these Smalian kids?

Speaker 2 (11:52):
You know they were children from It's interesting.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
I knew when I say Samalian kids, let's be candid
Samali refugees.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
We came to understand over the course of the summer
that they were children from all over the globe. I
knew that we would see all different beautiful skin tones
and ethnic groups and cultures and races and religions. I
didn't anticipate that we would meet parents who were foreign born.

(12:22):
That surprised me. I didn't know that until the last
day when we threw a big party and the children's
whole families came. When I heard the accents of the parents' voices,
when I saw their clothing, that's when it hit me, Oh,
you weren't born in this country, not one hundred percent,
but the majority.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
What does that look like?

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Especially what nations just it it literally is the United Nations. Then,
when we started saying, you know where, what's your family's
country of origin? Where where was your where were your
parents and your grandparents born. We were blown away.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
We'll be right back. That had to have been. I
gotta be careful here as we think about the vitriol,
and I want to be real careful from both sides

(13:25):
of the aisle regarding immigration and everything else, and all
we have dealt with, and in fairness, not only this administration,
but the Ford administrations before this one. I have a
real thing on the whole immigration deal. As you're sitting there,
feeding hungry children and meeting these families and parents and

(13:47):
people and everything else, did you have maybe some and
I don't mean ill willed, preconceived notions, but did you
have some notions that you thought you understood about our
culture to destroyed? In that moment?

Speaker 2 (14:01):
You know, I realized that there was a huge mosque
in Toledo, and I grew up not ever knowing one
Muslim person. And I remember the first day that I
had a significant conversation with a Muslim mother. And it's
strange because I even have a picture of it. Someone
just happened to snap a picture right before the conversation.

(14:23):
But she was walking to me, straight to me, because
I was in charge of this lunch program, and she
had a question and I remember thinking to myself as
she approached me, Oh my word, I don't know what
I have in common with this woman who is walking
toward me and I'm about to have a full conversation with.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
She's wearing a head dress or whatever.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yep, And I just thought, I don't have any life
experience to prepare me for this moment right here.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, because you're suburbanite, white Christian mommy with a van
with a van with a minivan.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
I've never lived outside of Ohio, who's no ever left
the country.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah, So what was that chat? Like?

Speaker 2 (15:03):
I felt again a whisper in my ear from God
that just said, I know, go just she's a mom
like you. Just talk to her. And we talked, and
she had questions about her children, and I introduced her
to my children because they were right there. And we
had a full, really great conversation, and I felt like
I had things in common with her beyond what I

(15:26):
could have dreamed or imagined. Quite honestly, that is not.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
What Sinn and Fox tell us we're supposed to do.
What is wrong with you? You're so weird, Kim, you know,
being human?

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, I feel like, you know, there's a lot to
my Christian faith. But love God, love your neighbor is
a pretty key verse for me, and I feel like
once I've mastered those two things, I'll go on to
the next. And my neighbor. I mean, I've asked dozens
of five year old kindergarten does when I say neighbor,

(16:02):
what does that mean to you? They can explain it
really easily. To me, It's that person right there. It's
the person who lives right next to me. It's the
person who lives above me, beside me, below me, who
goes to school with me, who's driving the car next
to me. Those are my neighbors. And so you know,
those two calls on my life, love, feed and serve

(16:24):
your neighbor, and bring the community with you. It's just
pretty simple. I mean, it's complex, but it's also simple.
And I came to realize that all of the children,
all of the volunteers, all of these people were my neighbors.
And I didn't know most of them before this.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
Twenty one hundred or so of which we're living in poverty, yeah,
and hungry. So that's first year, yep, take us through it.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
So at the end of the summer, the parents said
at that party. What are you doing next? We like this, literally,
what are you doing next? Because this was amazing. This
didn't feel like charity. We didn't feel ashamed and embarrassed
to pull up here. Our children couldn't wait to come
every day, and they didn't have to come. It wasn't school.

(17:19):
What are you doing next? And I said, well, maybe
we'll come back and do this next summer. How about that?
And they said, that's lovely. But we have and you've
identified a significant issue this summer, hunger. It is significant.
Thank you so much. But the parents said, we have
another really big problem we want to talk to you about.

(17:40):
I said, okay, and they said, we believe in education.
We know education is our children's way out of poverty.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
We get that, which is why we're here in the
first place.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
That's what they said. That's why we're here. No, that's
why we came as a refugee.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
We're so bad. Everybody listening to us would understand. People
are not uprooting their families. Listen. Of course, there are
bad actors and YadA, YadA, YadA. It's the smallest, smallest
percentage people are not uprooting their lives and walking away
from everybody they know look like, worship like, and speak

(18:20):
like and risking life and limb to come to this
country because they're trying to get free crap. No, they're
doing it simply because they want opportunity for their kids.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
The same exact things I want for my children.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
So let me ask you a question, Not you, yes, you,
but everybody listening, every parent out there, ask yourself this
question right now. If you are surrounded by gang violence
to the point that you were afraid to go outside,
you could not find enough money to put a roof

(18:56):
over your head other than a dirt floor, and you
feared for your children's life, and you knew that just
to make ends meet by your child's twelfth, thirteenth or
fourteenth birthday, they would have to quit going to whatever
kind of remedial education they were getting and go to work.
If you knew that that was the existence for you,

(19:18):
and probably generationally the only opportunity for your children and
their children, would you try to do something different? Would
you be willing to live that way your whole life?
If there was opportunity elsewhere, would you take that risk
to better the possibilities for yourself and your children? Would

(19:38):
you and I mean, I think every parent would say,
of course, I'd do everything I could, even though it's
rought with misunderstanding and cultural norms and desperation and everything else.
I would do that for my children. So it's not
at all surprising that you met people that said we
need help with education, because the whole reason they're here

(19:59):
is to try to better their lives. The vast, fast,
fast majority.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, I have a restauranteur who works closely with me
as a mentor, and he says it this way. You
know what if if bomb started going off in my city,
in my state, in this country, and I'm out.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
In Hillard where people started dropping bombs all over you.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
And I had to gape and leave this country and
start over with my wife and my children and not
know the language or the culture or have any connections
in that country, would I want someone to help in
any way? And I think that's that's what it comes
down to. I mean, I know families, a beloved family

(20:39):
to me if I call them my family of ten,
but they're from Africa and they came as refugees after
living in a refugee camp for eleven years.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
And eleven years in a refugee.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Camp or they left the Congo and were in Burundi.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Oh boy, and that's that's civil war and ethnic cleansing,
which is.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Still going on today. And they got the magic golden
ticket from the UN, not Australia, not England, the United
States was the golden ticket and they got it and
they got to come here. So so yeah, I think
the parents said yeah, which is comparatively from infinitely better.

(21:22):
And so when the parents said, we believe in education,
we want education for our children. We are going to
this great suburban school district. But guess what, Kim, they
said to me, our children are falling behind in this
school district, unlike yours. Kim, And I said, why why
in a great school district are your children falling behind?
They said, because of our own illiteracy, lack of English,

(21:45):
lack of knowledge, work schedules, and lack of technology they
were naming the fourth utility back in two thousand and seven.
They said, those are the reasons we can't help our
children with homework. And they said, Kim, how much do
you help your child with homework? And I'm thinking, you know,
the ten o'clock run to Walmart for the poster board,
A lot and they said, we can't help our children
with homework. They're falling behind in school every year and

(22:08):
they're not gonna be able to compete or catch up.
Could you help us with that? We can't afford a
private tutor. And I thought, okay, that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
That falls under love.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Serve, Yeah, and feed the educational mind of the children,
because we'll start with the body. If you're hungry physically,
you can't learn, but once that need is met, feeding
the mind is next for the longevity of the thriving
of this beautiful child. And so I had again tutored

(22:41):
for years, but I never ran a tutoring program, and
I'm not a teacher or a social worker. So I
was like, let me get back to you on that.
Let me look into that. So I went back to
the volunteers and the team, and again we had one
hundred and seventy more volunteers as summer, and I said,
how do we run a tutoring program that's free effect.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
We're still in the basket area in the abandoned grocery store.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Well, we'd moved out because she just said for the summer.
So now we had no physical location at this point,
and so I spent the whole fall trying to figure
out how do you run a tutoring program that's again
effective about effective and helps children with their homework, but
also safe for children above reproach. And so I figured

(23:25):
that out and in January of two thousand and eight,
we started after school tutoring and homework help. And I
went to because in Ohio it's kind of chilly in
the winter, so I didn't want to be outside, and
I went to one of the biggest apartment complexes in
that intersection and I went to the manager and said, Hey,
can we use this leasing office and do some tutoring
after school? And she was like, uh, who are you again?

(23:49):
I said, yeah, I'm just this lady. Did you like
here children going to summer lunch camp? That was me?
And she's like, who do you work for? I was like,
not really, anyone that would help you trust me better.
So I said, We're gonna bring volunteers. Background checked volunteers
will be here in your leasing office. She said, how
about one afternoon a week. We'll see how this goes.

(24:09):
And so we started after school tutoring every Wednesday January
through May of two thousand and eight, and in about
two months. We had so many children we could not
pack them in like sardines in this leasing office. So
we started praying for decent weather in Ohio on Wednesday afternoons.
And I'm here to say that from March until May,
it didn't rain on a Wednesday afternoon, and it wasn't

(24:32):
bitter cold. So we would take half the children outside
and blow some steam off, play some soccer and jump ropes,
and tutor the other children and then flip them half
and half. We had over one hundred ohly smokes. Again
scratched an itch. And so then the next summer we
went back to summer lunch camp and we had two locations,

(24:53):
this time one in a church, one across the street
in a different strip mall. And again half day camp
now to official half day camp. And very quickly children
we noticed translating for their parents to talk to us
this whole time, you're kidding. Very quickly, and then parents
started saying, where can we learn English? Can you help

(25:14):
us find a place? We are desperate to learn English.
Can you help us find someplace?

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Nah, but maybe we create it.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
And we looked around. In fact, today Columbus is the
fourteenth largest city in the country bigger than San Francisco.
I like to tell people because my mom lives in
California and a fastest growing in the city or in
the country, fastest growing city in the country, Columbus. And
there are so few adult English programs that four percent
of foreign worn people can find one.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
Really, so what did you do about that?

Speaker 2 (25:45):
I found a couple English programs, and God bless them.
It was a lovely, caring human who ordered some books
online and were like, I'm gonna give this a whirl. Again,
God bless them. But it was sort of like Laura
Ingall's Wild or one Room Schoolhouse, which there's a reason
we don't do that. Fuck, there's a reason we don't

(26:07):
do that. It's like perfect for two people and too
hard and too easy for everyone else. And so I
again didn't want And here I'm again families are in
pover tea food on the table for their children. They
want to learn as fast as they can. Lower Engle's
one room schoolhouse is not fast. It's the slow boat.
And so I started saying, well, we could do better

(26:30):
than that. What if we found a way to do
better than that? And there was one English program in
our town that I had sent people to that the community,
a technical school was running with a church adults only English.
I had sent some parents there. They came back the
next summer and I could have a little more conversation

(26:51):
with them, So I thought, oh, I think it works.
I think the class is pretty good. So I went
the summer of two thousand and eight to see that
class because after summer number two, we were going back
to do after school homework help and I didn't know
where to go because we ran out of space at
the leasing office. We had to go somewhere bigger. So
I went to the church that we ran summer camp

(27:14):
in and said, could I do it here? The pastor said, yes,
we built this to be full, and it's empty more
than it's full, so come and bring as many people
as you want. And so we started doing that and
I went to see the English program at the same time.
And when I went there, I heard these wee small
voices in the hallway, miss cam and I turned around

(27:35):
and I saw a ton of children from the summer
because that's what they called me, and they were hanging
out at this English program in the church nursery by
themselves while their parents were learning English. And I'm a
mom first number one, and I thought, that does not
look so good. You know, like twenty children ages two

(27:57):
to fifteen hanging out in church nursery by themselves, night
after night. Not bad things could happen. I mean from
toddler's falling over and six year olds not being able
to find something to do in getting bored, and fifteen
year olds I'll be able to get their home. We're done.
So I went to the leaders of the program, but
the English classes looked good. So I went to the

(28:18):
leaders of the program, the church and the technical school,
and I said, what's going on here in your nursery
and they said, yeah, it's kind of a problem. We
have all these children because parents don't have a sitter
or family to watch them. And I said, so take
me down the path. What happens? They said, people start
and then they quit. I said, okay, what if we

(28:38):
brought our after school tutoring program and we combined with
your adult English program and we took care of all
the children. And they said, oh, thank god, yes, please,
could you do that? That would be amazing. And so
we said we'll care for the children babies to eighteen
year olds you teach English and we'll work together. And
the church and the school, the technical school had been

(28:59):
working together for ten years. Had fifty five adults coming,
which is the biggest English class I had found, by
the way, well three four different classrooms. We started in
the fall. By January of two thousand and nine, one
hundred and twenty one adults were coming.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
Because they had a place for their kids. Phenomenal. We'll
be right back. Let me ask you something as I'm

(29:34):
listening to this story, because we got more to go,
but I want to ask you this. One of the
biggest gripes cultural gripes is you know, we're a nation
of immigrants. We want people to come, but you know
what they need to assimilate to our culture when they
get here. My question is, if you don't speak to English,

(29:55):
you don't know the culture, your kids are kind of ostracized.
Exactly what can you assimilate to? However, if you see
a program like this that's caring for your children and
you're learning the language. An interviewer and an attorney are
supposed to adhere to one basic fundamental, which is never
ask a question you don't know the answer to yet,

(30:18):
and so I'm breaking that right now because I really
don't know the answer to this. But I'm curious. As
you see these adults and families go through the English
classes and go through these programs, do you see them
become quote more American assimilated because they're able to have
you seen a cultural shift at all?

Speaker 2 (30:38):
Like someone said to me, it's like eating like beef stew,
where you've got chunks of beef, chunks of potatoes, chunks
of carrots, but it's all in this really delicious broth
called stew. I would say people keep the parts of
their culture that they love that define who they are

(30:58):
as a person. They add on things from our amazing
country called the United States of America into that.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Because see, I think that's awesome. And I don't think
that's any different than the Italians and Irish that settled
here one hundred and fifty years ago. I don't think
that's any different than the large Swedish community that is
in Wisconsin and Minnesota. From they I think as a

(31:29):
bunch of MutS, the melting pot we are. We're always
When I asked you what your name was, you said
it was Swiss German. You're an American but you still
honor that culture and that heritage. And that's what you're saying.
These people are doing.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
What's the difference except that they're from Africa not Asia,
I mean Africa not Europe. There's no difference. And the
until we see that, we're not being all we should be.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
In my mind, yeah, my Mexican godfather we had Tamali's
most times when we went to eat at his house.
My mom's Polish. I still get pudo y at Easter.
I mean, these are parts of who make us who,
the parts that make us who we are. And they're beautiful, amazing.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
But they're not anti American. They're just part of our culture.
But if we can learn the English and our children
can grow and become educated and become tax paying members
of society, then the quote assimilation looks like the very
thing that quote assimilation look like one hundred years ago,

(32:40):
just from Europeans.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
That's right. And let me be clear, people are that
I have met in the last eighteen years are desperate
to learn English and learn how and feel you absolutely
learn how our education system works, and our medical system works,
and our legal system works. And they're desperate to learn.
In fact, I've had a women who I've become friends

(33:03):
with who say to me, I want to hang out
with more Americans because I want to learn, I want
to understand, I want to know more. The curiosity is there,
and it's beautiful. It's people are hungry.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
Being from one culture and being an American are not
mutually exclusive.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
I agreed.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
So it's so interesting that we're having this conversation on
the heels of simply wanting to feed some hungry kids. Right,
It's phenomenal where this goes, how deep this can go.
I mean, we've gone from feeding a few hungry kids
to cultural assimilation, which is one of the things that

(33:49):
our country is struggling with right this very second. Okay,
you keep saying eighteen years, get me there.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
So we partnered in that way for about four years.
We ran out of space at that church to run
what became a three generation family English program, so we
moved it to what is my home church again, one
of the biggest Lutheran churches in the country, which has
one hundred and fifty eight thousand square foot building. We

(34:20):
moved it there in twenty twelve and it just exploded.
We kept serving free summer lunch camp. We started adding
adult English to it in two thousand and nine, though
I just I had met with hundreds of people in
Columbus trying to figure out how to structure this, how

(34:41):
to put some infrastructure around it, and about eighty people
said to me, you need to start a nonprofit. I
thought I should just go under another nonprofit's umbrella, economic brain.
I didn't think the world needed another nonprofit. Quite honestly,
I thought we should like work together better. But they
all said, wait, suburban poverty, hundreds of volunteers, no Bill bilding,
and you're running serving hundreds of people, will squealsh you.

(35:04):
You need to start your own thing. Because it's so
unique what you're doing and how you're doing it. You
need to start your own thing. And so most of
them said they'd help me. So in two thousand and nine,
we started our own nonprofit called Serving Our Neighbors Ministries.
People called us SUN Ministries for sure. We rebranded to
FESTA twenty twenty one, but we got some infrastructure because

(35:25):
I started feeling like, if I follow the turnip truck,
what happens? How does this continue to sustain? And so
we just continued to all through the years build real
relationships with each other. So volunteers with children, families being served,
relationships that went far beyond the lunch camp or the

(35:48):
family English program where people met, that went into their
own living rooms, into the parks, into the PTO meetings.
People building relationships across every line of difference you can
think of.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
You mean, bringing that community alone, that's it.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
That's what it was. And the community coming that whole
piece isn't sprinkles on the cupcake. It's the sugar and
the cupcake. Because if children get education and food and
then they go into a community, a workforce, a school
district where people don't understand them, have prejudice against them,

(36:29):
that's not that helpful. So if they go into those
places and they know someone because that guy came in
and taught business skills at their summer lunch camp, and
now they need a job and they're asking him to
hire them, that's great. That's all the better. And so
we knew that the volunteers, just like me standing on

(36:53):
the tar roof, needed to be prayed for. The volunteers.
I mean, the surgeon gener says, American epidemic is loneliness.
I mean, the volunteers need relationships with their neighbors, people
who look different, sound different, but have a lot in
common with them.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Oh, we talk about almost every episode that the payoff
all of this is you get a thousand times more
out of it than you put into it. And that's
what you're saying, you know, moving into the most recent
of the years, tell me about Ukrainian and Afghany families.

(37:34):
That's crazy to me.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, whoever, wherever the problems in the world,
wherever we see those problems, we then within the next
year to three years see those people at our programs.
And so we had in the very beginning we had
lots of Iraqi refugees, really lots of Iraqi in fact,

(37:57):
more than Somalian refugees. By the time we started, we
had more Iraqi refugees and heard all kinds of stories
of you know, dads who knew English helping the American soldiers.
And then all of a sudden it became really dangerous
for them to be there because they got found out
and had to get moved so they wouldn't be killed.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
And I know that happened with Afghany.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Same thing. Oh my gosh, we had eighty that December
of twenty two. I think December of twenty two, we
all went home for our Christmas break and I felt
like God was saying, You've got to let Afghan families
into this family English program. And by then, Bill, we
had over seven hundred people coming to one program.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
Seven hundred. You know, the next time you squinch up
your face or look down your nose at somebody that
looks like they might be from Iraq or Afghanistan, you
might run to remember that it's very possible to the
member of their family saved Americans lives by translating for
our troops.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
It is true.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
You better get your arms around the facts about that.
And I will tell you the oddest thing in the
world is retired American military service people that served in
Afghanistan are the very first to stand up for these
Afghanistani people.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
We have a donor who was in the Marines, and
that is why he donates to.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Us because of as Afghanian interpreters and the people that
he made friends with. Another thing, boy, I'm well off
your subject. But another thing I learned there were a
very big misconception is when we were in Afghanistan, there
were far more Afghanistans fighting than there were American military personnel.

(39:40):
And once we left the country and abandoned it, especially
in the way we did, all of those people's guns
were taken from them and they ended up being the
enemy of the state and were hunted. They thought alongside us.
We left and left them in their families to be hunted,

(40:02):
and now they end up in the Lord, Ohio with
hungry children, not knowing how to speak English. Literally, we're
not supposed to do something about this. Literally, you know
these things to be true. Yes, you serve these people.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
That's it I mean. And so that Christmas I thought,
oh gosh, well, we had eighty nine people that we
let into the program that January, even though we were
full and had a waiting list, and it was nine families,
eighty nine people.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
Holy Oly Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
And there were some families that were from rural Afghanistan,
like you said, helping our soldiers. And we had to
start in our adult English part of the Family English program.
We have seven classrooms, six levels of English, and two
of the true beginner classrooms. One is if you're literate

(40:59):
in another language. One is if you're not literate in
any other language.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
They were illiterate in everything.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
We had Afghani refugees who were from rural Afghanistan who
couldn't read or write in Pashto their language. Wow, and
they were farmers, I mean they they didn't. We even
learned over the months of getting to know them in
the beginning that they didn't have the mental construct of

(41:27):
a calendar.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
Living in suburban Ohio for goodness sakes, can we want
these folks to quote a smolite right, They're just trying
to get through a day. Yeah, And then we throw
their kids in an American school and say, hey, learn
free education. What's wrong with you?

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Right? Right right? And we watched in Ukrainian I mean
same thing. We do this registration night in the falls
when we start our family English program. And again, let
me be clear, at this point we take eight hundred
people in our large program. People start coming hours before
to get registered. And there was a Ukrainian couple two

(42:08):
years ago and they were at the beginning of when
I had to start a waiting list, and the wife
started crying because they were so desperate to get into
an English program. And I said, We're opening a second
site in two weeks. Here's the address. Come to that
one and then long story short, they got into the
second program, and every single time I saw her at

(42:31):
that program, biggest smile on her face. She would come
and hug me, thank you, thank you. The camaraderie that
people have with one another, with a Ukrainian, with an
Afghani with Iraqi theship. Yeah, the relationships that people build
together because they have a common life experience of moving

(42:53):
to America.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
Speaking of the registration line, given you went there, can
you talk about how you always make sure you're at
the registration line and why?

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah? So now our three generation Family English program picture
picture your own family bill, so infantstagrandparents. Everyone comes to
the same place at the same time, and every single
person in the family gets the education they need to
go from surviving to thriving. So babies, toddlers, and preschoolers
get preschool. Their best way out of poverty is to
be ready for kindergarten. Kindergarten through eighth grade, get homework, help.

(43:25):
Two year olds to eighteen year olds get dinner every
night that they come. Eighteen year olds are teen interns.
They're gaining work experience. Second to eighth eighth graders run
their own business inside of the program and then adults
have seven levels of English, so they're exactly where they
need to be to learn as fast as their brain
can learn English. So that's what the three Generation Family

(43:48):
English Program model is that we have honed since two
thousand and nine and want to scale. So when we
start registration, clearly we could do online register. We choose
not to because we want to serve the people who
are struggling the most in poverty and you have to
be able to get to our location to come anyway.

(44:09):
So we have people come in person and in ten minutes.
The last two years of opening our registration, we have
brought in eight hundred people, which is full for that program.
And I, as the founder, stand at that line to
start the waiting list line. Quite frankly, my coworkers just cry.

(44:34):
They just they can't.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Do it, and so I bes you have to say no.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, and we have to say no to another five
hundred people.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
You could serve fifteen hundred, thirteen to fifteen hundred a year.
What's prohibiting you from opening more?

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, So we have a second site and we are
serving one one hundred and sixty six people right now.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
Again, do you take a second to realize what you
just said. You fed eighty kids one summer, yeah, one thousand?
How what?

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (45:07):
How much?

Speaker 2 (45:09):
And sixty six people were in our two family English
programs this school year.

Speaker 1 (45:13):
Are you still doing the summer feed?

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah? We saive about eight hundred children and then parents
with adult English in the summer.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yep. How many volunteers over one.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
Thousand a year in Pillard, Ohio. Yeah, it's Columbus wide
now because people come from forty eight countries and forty
nine zip codes to come to our programs because there
isn't anything else like it. They are desperate and they come.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
Please tell me someone wants you to scale those elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
That's what is on my heart. We want to scale
it across the country.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
How does that happen?

Speaker 2 (45:50):
We have started to teach other communities how to do this.
I don't think I need to run them all, Bill,
I can just teach other people. We spend five years
with the AmeriCorps Vista program documenting everything we do and
how we do it. Because clearly, when you bring people
in from ninety one countries, including the United States, into
the same space, whether it's a gymnasium to play soccer

(46:11):
or an adult English class and you just hope it
goes well. It's not quite that easy, but we have
written down how we create the environment that's built on respect,
built on honor, built on relationships and community. So we
have started teaching other communities how to do this. We

(46:33):
taught Springfield, Ohio last year.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
We'll be right back. Howled were you and you were
standing on that roof, tarn.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
It, I would say fifteen.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Yeah, it's funny two things that you mentioned in our
short talk that were really obviously imprinted on your mind.
What country was that in? Where were our appalationships? I mean,
what state was that in?

Speaker 2 (47:12):
We were in West Virginia.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
West Virginia is a West Virginia man with an oxygen
mask on when you're fifteen years old, slopping tar on
his roof, and a Mexican godfather. I just wonder if
without those two, one was a long term and one
was kind of an instant influence on your life. I

(47:34):
just and of course, your your stepdad taking you to church.
I mean, isn't it weird how three separate, very innocuous
seeming events culminate themselves into what becomes one's life's work.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah, you can't underestimate the power you can have in
someone's life, whether it's one moment or days and months
in years, it's to encourage another person, to serve another person,
to see another person, really see who they are and
care about them is hugely impactful.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
After eighteen years, you have to have kids that you
served those first couple of years that are now adults,
that you know. Tell me a story, tell give me
a heartwarming they were hungry and you fed them and
what they're doing now. Story. I know you have to
have those.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
I have so many that I in fact, I love
your job here, Bill, because just to talk to people
about their stories is pretty much my life dream. I
love stories. I love people's stories. So you have a lovely,
lovely role here that I am honored.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
I appreciate it. But Alex is the whole reason I
do all this.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Alex love.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
I mean, I was minding my own business about two
years ago when he came up with this idea and
told me it would take about two hours a week,
which is a complete another lot, but anyway, tell me
so there, Thank you, by the way. That's gracious say,
but it's you just talk to cool people and let
them tell their stories and trust stay out of the way,
which I do a poor job of. Oh, shut up,

(49:17):
you've all the day, Hey, Cassius, would you pull the
sheet back so he's no longer in the room. Shut up.
It's like the Wizard of Oz. He's the guy back there, right,
it's an irritating dude behind the hurtin Go ahead, would
you say so? Yeah? Shut up, She's about tellus a
cool story.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
There's a young man that I am just over the
moon proud of who I met when he was in
elementary school. In fact, he's the star of one of
our videos. So in twenty twelve, he was in elementary
school coming to our summer lunch camp with his siblings
and his neighbors and just a lovely, lovely young man.

(49:57):
And he was part of eleven children at one of
our summer lunch sites who came to me. Actually the
leader that summer said to me, Kim, the children are
getting They're just I'm trying to swim upstream. They're swimming downstream.
Every activity I plan, they they poo poo it. Will
you come talk to this group of about eleven children

(50:18):
with it, who are sort of spearheading the opposite of
what I'm trying to accomplish here.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
So I buttholes, which is what kids are.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Yeah. I was like, okay, let's chat. And she said
you know them, she was just hired for the summer.
She said, you know them better than me. So I
sat down with these eleven children and they're sort of
second to fifth graders, and I said, you know, what's
the deal. Why why are you not really wanting to
do the activities we planned for you this summer? And
they said They looked at each other and they said,
we're bored. I said, okay, I respect that. I mean,

(50:50):
I'm not a teacher, I'm not a social worker. I
plan these activities, but you know I didn't get it.
I didn't get it right. So what do you want
to do here? Because we're going to be together every
day for the next seven weeks. What would you like
to do here at camp if you don't like the
things we planned because we could do that. What is it?
And they kind of looked at each other. I said, no, seriously,
I'm seriously asking you and they said, well. They started

(51:14):
brainstorming and they said, well, what if what if we
ran a restaurant? What if we what if we ran
it ourselves and made the food. And I said, well,
who would you serve? And they said maybe the younger
kids at camp, like the kindergarten and first graders. And
I'm thinking I order lunch every day. I don't think
that's gonna work. So I said, well, you know, that'd

(51:36):
be fun. But like, what if I brought you real
customers that you could serve, like the mayor and the
head of BMW Financial Services and the guy who sells
insurance down the street. What if they have to eat lunch?
What if they came to your restaurant to eat lunch.
I brought you real customers. And they started just squealing.
They said, we could use our family recipes and we

(51:58):
could do the whole thing. We could run it again,
second to fifth.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Grade, fifth graders, fourth graders second to love it.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
And I said okay, so when would you like to start?
And it was the Monday before fourth of July and
we were closed for fourth of July. And they said, well,
how about how about next Monday? And I said in
one week and they were like yeah. I said okay.
So I told the leader of the camp, this is

(52:26):
what they want to do. Will you help them do it,
and I'll go find people to come eat. So I
called on my friends and said, you know, will you come.
I don't know what you're going to find, but you
should come. So we that day. We came back down Monday,
and one of the little boys met me in the
hallway and said, welcome to Taco Bell Junior, Miss Kim.

Speaker 1 (52:50):
Taco Bell Juniors.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
And I was like what what and they said, it's
Mexican restaurant. And I said, okay. He was in a
three piece suit and it was July.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
That's hilarious.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
So they started a full restaurant. They had like the
plastics silverwhere in the napkins with little turly ribbon on it,
I mean the whole thing. They had music, they had
some of the best beans and rice I've ever had.
I mean it was great. And so that exploded. So
this young man was one of those inventors of what

(53:26):
we now affectionately call Taco Bell Junior at our company.
And he grew up and he became a teen intern
for US, which we affectually call orange shirts because we
buy them orange Veesta T shirts. And so he was
a teen intern with US and volunteered and served the
younger children at camp and family esl and then he

(53:48):
got hired at McDonald's and got a paid job in town,
and he started believing that he could do more. In fact,
like I said, he's in one of our videos with
a microphone like this in front of him, and I said,
someday you're gonna have a microphone because he just picked
it up as a young child and started talking on
our video. No practice was amazing. And so he decided

(54:10):
he was going to go to college. Lives in the
trailer park, the least expensive place in all of central
Ohio for a family to live, and so he applied
himself at school, got good grades, applied to the Ohio
State University, got in. He just graduated two years ago
with a double degree in mathematics and meteorology microphone and

(54:34):
kept working at McDonald's. He was working there all through school,
and because of the things like the PELL grant, he
was able to go to school with no payment. He
banked all the money that he made at McDonald's because
he didn't need it for school, and he could live
at home while he went to college. And so when
he got out of college, he decided to buy a
house and he bought a house in Hilliard with a

(54:57):
pool in the backyard. And he's twenty two years old.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
And what's he do now?

Speaker 2 (55:01):
He still works for McDonald's. He's a regional manager and
they have treated him well and he's very happy there,
and so he stayed. He has stayed.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Without showing up for a free lunch one day. What
do the demographics say he'd be doing now?

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Yeah, I mean he's clearly the first person in his
family to go to school to dream of something much bigger.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
Can I ask a question? Yeah, what's more American than
a house with a swimming pool? Warris regional manager for McDonald's.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Isn't it the best?

Speaker 1 (55:34):
It's the American literally?

Speaker 2 (55:37):
And he I asked him, what do you love about
your job? And he said, I love because you know
you've been to McDonald's. You've got adults and you've got
teenagers who work there. He said, I love to work
with young people and pour into them and challenge them
about what they could do and what their dreams are.
And clearly English is not his family's first language. Spanish is,

(56:01):
and so he's able to be completely multi lingual in
this franchise's business, which helps tremendously on every level.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
McDonald's actually a great business. Most field don't know this.
I've interviewed the former CEO and the chairman and two
thirds of their executives had their first job at McDonald's
and rose up within the company.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
The thing is, though, this kid grew up in a
trailer and suburban poverty, so the phrase we now need
to normalize in suburban poverty and showed up one day
at a vacant grocery store for free launch and look

(56:41):
where it is now.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
If there is any better way to love servant fee
to human being them out and it goes far beyond
the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
That's it. That's it, and the relationships that get built.
The French said he still has today with so many
of the children he spent all of his summers in
school years with at Our programs are thick and beautiful.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
How do people hear more about FESTA?

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Yeah, you go to our website or contact me. So
our website is we are Festa dot org.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
And uh we are Festa dot org.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Yea, we are fested dot org. And our phone number,
our address, everything is on there ways to contact us.
But like you said, we want to scale this across
the country.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
We can't. How do people find you?

Speaker 2 (57:36):
Oh it's k and then my last name emch at
Werefesta dot org. We can't find anyone else doing three
generation family English across the country. We're working with a
national group who's also searched and they have not found
it either. And so we know that every major city
needs this and we can teach it to them.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
What's so cool about that part of it, too, Bill,
is so many people cannot go to these literacy classes.
There's nobody to watch their kids. So I mean, the
three generation it's just so huge.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
It's just amazing that just from a I found out
that these kids don't have anything to eat during the
summers has evolved into what it is today. And it
just speaks to just go across the street, open the
door and try, and you never know what can evolve

(58:31):
and happen as a result of the effort. And the
person behind all this is the daughter of five divorces,
who grew up with trauma, who had no family that
ever really been to college, who stupidly went to college
because she got one piece of mail from a questionnaire

(58:54):
she left in an offering plate, who was living the
two kids and married life, working at a bank, who
simply felt called to love, serve, and feed their neighbors
and bring their community along. And now look at the
lives that are being changed. If it is not the
quintessential story of what an army of normal folks is

(59:14):
supposed to be about, I don't know what it is.
Do you allow yourself when taking stock of the last
eighteen years, do you allow yourself celebrate what you've done?

Speaker 2 (59:27):
I think I love most to celebrate with my friends,
the families that I've met through through doing this. I
mean that gentleman I called in tears at the grocery store,
who said call her back. You know, he became a
father for me. His one of the men he brought
with him, John and Bob were two fathers to me. Man,

(59:52):
God knew I needed that. I'm going this summer for
a month in June to Jordan with a family I've
known for twelve years through through this nonprofit ministry work,
who want me to come to their country and meet
their family. And it's an honor of my life. So
that's the way it looks like to celebrate. My Thanksgiving

(01:00:14):
dinner table is full of children and families that we serve,
we have served and gotten to be in close relationship with.
And I think the biggest joy for me is watching
families thrive, seeing when we meet them, whether it's depressed
and sad and full of grief and not enough food

(01:00:36):
on the table, to running their own restaurant and employing
ten other immigrants to work for them. I mean, that's
the celebration for me, to watch people thrive.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
I'm in all of you. It has been just an
honor to meet you. And somehow I kind of believe
that you are going to scale this. It just doesn't
seem like you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
Have a stop but I can't not stop it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
And anybody who wants to support Kim or learn more
you know how to go there now. And anybody who's thinking,
my goodness, this would be great in the community. You
have an email address, reach out and I would imagine
you're the kind of person that would say, come see
what we do. We'll teach you everything.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Absolutely, And like Alex said, there might be people are
who have an ESL classroom, a one room schoolhouse, or
even a couple, but they see their students drop off
and quit through the year, or they might be doing
an after school program and seeing foreign, boring children coming
to their after school program and they just want to

(01:01:43):
figure out how to put the whole thing together. I mean,
that's the family model. I'll say it this way. It's
not it doesn't. I'm not lost on how amazing it
is that people from Eastern culture, which I consider the
whole world except for America and Europe, which is all
the countries that we are serving.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Except for Australia, New Zealand, but the rest of.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
The whole complanet Earth, so who love hospitality so much,
who are so dedicated to family, would come to America
to teach us to keep families together. And this family
model of serving the whole family together is so simple,

(01:02:27):
but yet we've missed it pretty categorically in serving people,
whether it's workforce development or anything else, we've missed keeping
the family together and serving them together. And that's the
model that we've perfected, and we just want.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
To scale kim imps, I'm still don't know they I'm
saying it right. You're doing great, Bill, founder of FESTA.
What an amazing legacy you've left on your community, and
there's just so many lessons to have been learned from this,
starting with suburban poverty and all the way through all

(01:03:08):
the lives can be affected. You're awesome and I just
can't tell you how much. Thank you for joining me
and telling your story.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Oh Bill, it's truly an honor to be here. Thank
you so much for inviting me. Thank you, It's.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
It's by honor. I'm just sorry you had to spend
so much of the time with Alex. Alex Alex is great,
but I got to have somebody to poke it, right.
I can't poke my guests, so what have I got
to do? Thanks for being here, Kim, Thank you so much,
and thank you for joining us this week. If Kim

(01:03:47):
mch has inspired you in general, or better yet, to
take action by starting something like Festa in your community,
donating to them, or something else entirely, please let me know.
I'd love to hear about it. You can write me
anytime at Bill at normalfolks dot us, and I promise
I will respond. If you enjoyed this episode, share it

(01:04:10):
with friends that on social subscribe to the podcast, rate
and review it. Join the army at normalfolks dot us.
Consider becoming a premium member there any and all of
these things that will help us grow an army of
normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do what
you can