Lisa Steven: The Former Teen Mom Empowering Teen Moms (Pt 2)

Lisa Steven is a former teen mom who went on to build the only home for teen moms in the entire state of Colorado. Their resource center serves over 280 teen moms per year with free empowerment programming and early childhood education. And now 3 other communities have adopted their model!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Everybody. It's Bill Courtney with an army and folks, And
we continue now what part two of our conversation with
Lisa Stephen right after these brief messages from our general sponsors.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
You know, my mother in law was just so accepting
of me, and more than just accepting, like she she
wanted good for me. She wanted good things for me,
for me, not just for you know her and for
her son a new wife.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Well, she clearly just had empathy for you as human being.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
I think she's mother very important, yes, and she was
she was acting out of her own faith. I mean,
I'm quite sure personally she spent a lot of time
talking of got about what in the heck, you know,
But but what she reflected out of her faith was
you got this, you can do this. I didn't have
any friends at that point, even Liz kind of you know,

(01:11):
when you become a teen mom, you either never had
good friends in the first place, or you lose your
friends because you're in a different place in life than
they are now.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
And come on, we're high schoolers.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, we're high schooling.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
And can you imagine the girls you were hanging out
with when you got pregnant. The crap they were hearing
at home from their parents.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
About before you were and all the stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Don't hang around bad people. I'm sure I don't mean
that bad, but I just if you conceptualize how those
conversations want, you're not tang around her blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, I'm sure, and you know I was.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
But that's also more of a stigma for the people
you serve today that they deal with exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah. So essentially, you know, she
became my kind of my mom, really, I mean she
she had a baby shower for me and called her
friends and had her friends older. It was so cute
that they were. So this group of women is known
as the Fenton Street Gang because they all lived on
Fenton Street at one point in time. And they were
the first group of women to start MOPS Mothers are preschoolers.

(02:10):
It's now called the mom Co, but for many years
was called MOPS and they were the they're kind of
famous for being the group that started MOPS International because
MOPS is now this international huge, hundreds of thousands of interview.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
And I actually thought about it too. She had done
it in Oxford, Like it's a big really.

Speaker 4 (02:30):
Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
Big well, we need to find out who the grand
foo bios that all started.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
She wrote.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
She wrote a testimonial on your book that a good interview.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, so she was instrumental in helping you form a
different view of what a family looked like.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah. So when the first time Johnny goes to the
bathroom on the potty, you know, we're potty training my son,
I call her. I tell my mom my. Mom's like,
that's what they're supposed to do at this age. I
call him mom and she's like, come over, we're making
a cake. Like she celebrated everything to this day. Like

(03:08):
at Hope House, we have this enormous gong, like an
orchestral gong, and every time one of the girls gets
their ged or passes their driver's test or whatever they
thing to celebrate, we make them ring the gong. They
have to ring the gong, and they usually don't want
Is your.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Mom still around?

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah she is. What's her name, Michelle Stephen?

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, Michelle, you are a rock star. And I know
you're going to listen because if you make a cake
for Poopy or your daughter in laws on a podcast,
I know you're going to listen. So, Michelle, I just
want to tell you I would love to meet you
one day. What a phenomenal human being you are. You
changed lives.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
So yeah, thank you, And now you're gonna get me
all choked up. Yes, so she you know, she then
told me so by this time, you know, MOPS has
been in existence for whatever twenty years. At that point,
she says, you got to go to you gotta go
to MOPS. I'm like, I'm not going to mops. Like
this is a bunch of women who are all married
and like it right, you know, like when you're a

(04:01):
teen mom, you face judgment everywhere you go.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's what I was saying. That's what I was trying
to say a minute ago.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yep. Like the stigma, Yep, the stigma.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Goes you feel like again, back to something else we
said on the Reset conversation, you don't feel like, Yeah,
you look even when you live in the crappiest houses ever,
most all of them have a mirror.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
And you know what you're looking at. Maybe not everybody
else does, but you do. Yeah, And oftentimes you don't
like what you see. And when you don't like what
you see, or you feel beneath or whatever. It is
so hard to feel like you could go to a
place like MOBS where these are organic families with perfect

(04:53):
mommies and children, and when you're looking at the mirror,
you're seeing a very broken person who did it all wrong,
and you just don't feel like you belong.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, you don't feel like you belong exactly.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Culture, to society, not just to MOPS.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah exactly, Yeah, to church all the things.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
So to church yeah yeah, well and MOPS was exactly,
And MOPS was a Christian is a Christian ministry. So
it's like, oh man, this is gonna be But my
mother in law wanted me to go, and I would
do anything she wanted me to do because I just
wanted her to be proud of me.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
So important to understand all of that stuff again, Yes,
when we get to Hope.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yep, yep. So I go to my first MOPS group
and man, it was nothing like I thought it would be.
They were super welcoming. All these moms were just they
treated me like any other mom, super non judgmental, uh
just and even gave me an opportunity to be a leader.
About a year in they let me be the co
leader of the Mopets group, which is the Little Kid's program.

(05:50):
And I wanted to like ask if anybody wanted to
see my idea. I'm like, I think I'm twenty by
at this point, Like, are you sure I've never been
in a meeting.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
I've never seen an early start all this.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
I mean they saw something in me I didn't see
in me. I guess to let me have a chance.
That's interesting in leadership, and it was life changing. I
came to know Christ in a whole different way, came
to know, you know, kind of what what my mother
in law knew about being a believer. Like she was
the one who said, you know, you can ask questions,
like read the Bible and ask God questions. He doesn't
mind if you ask him questions.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
There's a very different perspective of people like your mother
in law, And I think the inaccurate portrayal of people
like your mother in law are the biggest deterrent to
people sitting on fences to faith.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
True.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, and that perception is the little gray lady, gray
haired lady at church, who's going to guilt you into
reading the Bible right, or who's going to judge everything
about about you.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, Unfortunately, probably a good bit of the judgment that
comes to our teenage moms comes from the church. I mean,
if they have a church experience.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
And the point is, I think, with as we have
had continually over the decades, reduced numbers of membership at church,
going to church, engaging in church, I think the church
itself has been one of the biggest problems.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
I would agree, yeah, that the.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
Ch the organization of church. And it's because maybe many
have forgotten that Christ was a revolutionary He surrounded himselves
with stinky fishermen.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
And hookers, the least of these for sure, and served
them so and his mama was a teen mom.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
Christ like is not sitting on a throne judging the
crap out of everybody. It's it's it's actually engaging with
the least of these. Right, So when you say that
your mother in law showed you what faith is supposed
to look like and how it works, I feel that
because I also have felt the judgmental part before.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, I mean, it's not the way to
welcome people to church is to be judgmental. Yeah, she
definitely was. She just loved me like Jesus loved me.
And that is, you know exactly what we try to
do now today with all of the teen mamas we
work with. Just love them like Jesus loves them and take.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Us to the mops evolution. And I think a really
interesting other thing that helped you to be really effective
is didn't the doctor say your kid had scratches or
something like that?

Speaker 2 (08:55):
I tell you, so that's just a great example or
not very good example actually of the kind of judgment
that teen mom's face and why myself, but also the
moms I serve now are so scared to ask for
help because asking for help can be almost dangerous on
some level. So I had taken my son to the
clinic to get his shots and knew right away the

(09:19):
minute the doctor, lady doctor came in and she just
was she just sized me up. Yeah, you just knew.
She's like, oh man, she doesn't like me much. I
think she might hate me. Actually, I'm like, what the heck,
I don't even do anything. So she tells me to,
you know, undress Johnny and put him set him on
the little table. Well, it was a metal table and
there were no coverings on it. So I got him undressed,

(09:41):
and these four kids sitting there six months old. I'm
standing there. Hold, I'm freezing, and she finally comes back
in and like gives him his shots. About two weeks later,
I'm you know, I do. I was doing home daycare
at the time, and I get a knock on the
door and this woman says, Hey, I'm from Social Services,
the child protective ser says, and we've had a claim

(10:02):
about your son, so you need to go get him
up from his nap, and I need to check him
out because the doctor you saw announced totally unannounced, and
I don't even think she was supposed to tell me this, actually,
but she told me that the doctor had said that
he had deep scratches on his back.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
And I'm like, what what kind of scratches?

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Deep scratches like something? I don't even I don't even know.
So I go get the kid out of his bed.
I'm like, oh, jeeszu, this is gonna go badly, Like
you're waking a six month old up from a nap.

Speaker 4 (10:28):
Good thing.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
He just charmed the pants off that girl. He was
in a happy mood, and of course he didn't have.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Any marks on it.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
Yeah, he is a charmer. Yeah that's good. I got
that now I got that out. Yeah, so you know
it ended there. She left and she finished her report
or whatever, and I never heard anything more about it.
But the fact was in that moment that as a

(10:55):
teen mom, you're like, oh my god, that woman could
have just taken my son and walked out the door.
And I don't know that that's actually could have She
for sure could have had him removed if you know
who knows. You know, babies bump into things when they're
learning to crawl. What if he had a big bump
on his head or something. It could have gotten worse
than it did, for sure. But for me, it was
just this feeling of like total you have no control,

(11:17):
no agency, like no control of your own life, like
other people have control of very important things in your life,
like whether you get to parent. And so I get
it when our moms today are like, I'm not saying
my kiddo needs extra services or he's got a developmental
delay or speech delay, because someone's going to call CPS
and I'm going to lose him. And I get that

(11:38):
on a hard level. In there.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
We'll be right back. So all of this experience and
I think, really, you're you're deep into mops, right.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, I'm deep into mops at this point. I've been
volunteering with mops for years. My kids are all in
school by now, kids now three, So we have three kids.

Speaker 1 (12:17):
Johnny Johnny is at this time yea.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
At this point he was probably ten. Uh and then
our middle son was seven and our was five, Nathan.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Nathan seven and five is Heather heavy?

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, yeah, so I get the get the last one
in school. I'm like, yes, I'm going to go to
college now. Like, uh So. Something that's important to know
is that even though I grew up in a chaotic household,
I grew up in a household that experienced what was
considered situational poverty, which I didn't know what any of
that was un till after we started Whole House, but I.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Certainly the way you've described it, food stamps and yeah,
red milk or whatever that.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
Was, but it was. We grew up in a household
with middle class value. So generational poverty and situational poverty
are very different things. And I still grew up in
a home where you were expected to go to college.
Education was a norm, saving money was a norm if
you had it, Like I grew up with what are
considered middle class middle class values.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
H So, my situational was your situation. You were in poverty,
but your attitude about it was not.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
It wasn't generations of so both of my sets of
grand bores systematic exactly. It was not systematic. So even
though my dad stumbled and fell, his parents were, you know,
healthy financially. My mom's parents were healthy financially. They came
from backgrounds of you know, having financial health, not necessarily wealth,

(13:45):
but financial health. There there weren't generations of people who
had lived on the system and experienced poverty, uh, domestic
violence and addiction and abuse and homelessness and the things
that our moms deal with.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
That's so interesting. I don't know that I've ever really
thought about the difference in situational poverty and what you're
calling generational or systematic poverty.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Same thing, same thing, exactly.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
So you came from situational poverty, meaning the idea of yay,
they finally are all in school, I'm going to go
to college to you was natural. Even though you came
up with nothing, that was still a hope of dream
and an expectation and something was attainable.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Exactly. Yeah, by this point. My one of my sisters
is an attorney and the other is a doctor. So
this is this is real. Yes, so wow, this is
the expectation of you know, you go to school.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Three of you pretty strong.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Overcame, didn't we all overcame? Yes we did. I'm proud
of those girls. Doctor of what she's a mose surgeon,
so she's a dramatologist.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
And your and your other.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Sisters an attorney. She lives in a small town in Colorado,
so she practices several different kinds of law because they
don't have a ton of attorneys. A lot of re.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Solute to them too. I mean they overcame all the.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
Same, absolutely, definitely did. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
So again the difference in generational situational poverty is they
still had at least a model and a vision and
a dream of being able to get out of this mess.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
Yeah exactly. We were raised in a way that the
expectation was that you go to school. Yeah, and not
so for the moms that I work with today.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
So your kids are going, You're going to college.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
I'm going I'm going to college. And then Mops International
decided they were going to start this thing called teen
Mops for teenage moms, and our group at this little
church or of out of Covenant church, they decide we're
going to be the first group to do a teen
MOPS group. So I'm like, oh, this is cool. I'm
going to volunteer for this because my kids are now
in school, I've got a little time. I can handle
that and going to college. So I get, you know,

(15:42):
involved in teen mops and man just like blew my
mind what those girls were dealing with, Like, you know,
I thought John John's family absolutely not okay.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
So when I read that, my initial reaction was that
is really interesting that a church who teaches abstinence until marriage, yeah,
because that's the gospel. Yeah, and who some might think

(16:17):
would look down on teenage pregnancy actually wants to start
a program for teen moms. To me, that is an
illustration of faith.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah, that was I didn't find out n till later
that the pastor of that church, Weswonson at the time,
got a lot of crap from a lot of other
pastors in town that oh, you're just promoting teen pregnancy.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Now, right, what are you going to do next? Give
out our control and condoms?

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, I'm sure you probably heard those things and fortunately
he was a true man of God who went to
God and God said, no, you're supposed to love like Jesus,
Like you said, who did Jesus hang out with? Well,
And we had no idea would moms even would these
teenage moms even come to our group if it's out
of church, Like I didn't know any teen moms at
the time. I just had this heart and I had

(17:03):
experienced it and wanted to be I loved mops and
I loved teen moms and made sense. So I was gonna,
you know, volunteer for this thing. And at the time,
you used to get these like big fat notebooks when
you were in charge of a MOBS group with like
all the directions of how to run a MOPS group.
But they were new to it. They didn't know what
they were doing yet. So we got four little pieces
of paper stable together like.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Oh maybe, I said, hey, make a big notebook, would
you let you figure it out? We did.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
We ended up making a big fat notebook for him
after when time passed. But yeah, we didn't know what
we were doing. We were just inviting these girls to
you know, where do you even find teen moms? It
was like, what, how do you what do you even do?
So we started talking to schools and nurses and just
telling people we were going to start this group with
support group of teenage moms. And the thing is, once
you kind of love on them, then they tell their friends, hey,

(17:50):
you should come here. They'll they'll love on you, you know,
and you can get brownies. Like we made them home
made brownies. And how did that go on? For about
four years and got to know these moms had gotten
pretty good deep relationship with them, started really understanding what
was happening in their worlds and how difficult it was.

(18:12):
We had some very unrealistic expectations of being able to
help them to kind of overcome things and maybe move
towards self sufficiency. I don't know if we use those
words back then, but it was like, oh gosh, maybe
we can help them get their ged or finish high school. Well,
the truth is, you know they're living in homes where
you know, one mom, I went to pick her up,

(18:32):
brought her the whole plate of cookies. I go up
to her door to pick her up. This guy answers
the door. He's like clearly about to die from alcoholism.
I mean, he was so yellow and big like patches
under his eyes, and his clothes were all in disarray,
and I'm like, oh man, this is you know, this
can't be good. Well it's her stepdad. He did die
about five months later from alcoholism. Like they're dealing with

(18:53):
things that no plate of cookies is gonna fix fix
And certainly us unexperienced, you know, just normal folks, like
an harmony of normal folks, were just normal folks volunteering
with these girls. I was the only one who had
even been a teen mom. We didn't know what we're doing.
Moms didn't know what they were doing at the time.
They just wanted to love, you know, love moms, all moms.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
But the key to being a part of the army
in normal folks was the first step. So at least
you were taking it. Yeah, but you quickly found out
how unequipped you were to really deal.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
With Yeah, yep. Yeah. And you know, tragically, one of
our moms ended up being killed by an ex boyfriend
in a domestic violence incident. We ended up pooling our
money to even have her buried because her family didn't
even have money to release her body, and her twin
sister ended up taking her daughters to raise, and it

(19:49):
was just it was a terrible situation that you know,
you're you're I'm mad at God, I'm mad at our community.
I'm like, who's doing anything about this? Why isn't there
somebody doing something about this? And you know, John'll say
that was kind of the moment when God's like, well,
what if somebody is you?

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Oh you mean who is somebody?

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Who is somebody?

Speaker 1 (20:08):
Yeah? I think say that a lot exactly who is somebody?
How to do something about that? Maybe I'll look at
that same.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Mirror, Yes, what if you're that somebody? Which for me
meant and I knew it was a calling. I mean,
I was super excited about this whole idea of what
if we start something for teen moms because there isn't
a place for teen moms to go in the Denver
metro area. There's we literally are still the only after
twenty three years, where the only residential program that a

(20:36):
parenting teenage mom can go to. And so it sounded exciting,
It sounded like it made my heart leap, like I
knew it was something God was asking me to do,
but it also meant that I wasn't going to be
and I knew that deep down, I knew if I
say yes to this, I'm not going to college. I'm
not going to be a teacher. I'm not you know

(20:57):
whatever it was I thought I was going to do,
Like I'm gonna have to put my plans and pick
up God's plans and trust him. Which that's a biggie like.
It sounds good when you're just saying it, like, oh, yeah,
I just trust God. We're going to start a home
for teen moms. Well, the truth was, okay, that's first
of all, you're totally not qualified. This is terrifying. You
have no business doing this, like all the noes, you

(21:17):
have no money, all the things playing in your Yeah,
like we had no money. I literally have a background
of working at JC Pennies and doing home daycare. I
don't know how to start a nonprofit. I don't have
a social work background.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Probably don't want to know what the five, one, C three.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Oh yeah, we had to figure it out. Yeah it was.
It was one big like and this was before Google
and before computers, so it wasn't like you could google it.
So we're, you know, on the phone, trying to call
the irs. Just imagine nobody answers the phone at the irs,
let me tell you. But yeah, we figured it out.
We the little group of us that were the leaders
of that teen mops group and our husbands. And I

(21:53):
think that was what was key, is that our husbands
were it was John's calling before it was my calling.
And I think that's that was really crucial, because the
husbands in that kind of group, that first working board
of directors were the ones that asked them. They asked good, hard,
tough questions. Us girls, we would have been like, we
want to save the moms and their cousins and their

(22:15):
grandma's and their babies, and we just want to save everybody.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
And make cookies and make cookies.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
And the guys are like, can we just do teen
moms and figure this out and then we'll figure out
the next time.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
That's rifle shot it, yeah, instead of just the shotgun
a buckshot all over everything.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah. It was a good thing. But nobody in that
group of you know, normal folks, had a background in
anything related to any of this. I mean, one guy
sold insurance and another guy worked at a gym, and
John's the machinery just all care and we just all
happened to care, and I say this often. We are
the embodiment of when God calls you to do something,

(22:51):
he will equip you to do it. And he surround
us with like the most amazing people, and we learned
so much.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
The story of how it goes is great, and that's
what's coming next. But I do want to say to
you this, and our regulus as are probably rolling their
eyes because they've heard this one hundred thousand times, but
I'll just say it to you. I believe, after doing
this for almost two and a half years, that I
have been taught a very valuable lesson, which is magic

(23:19):
happens when one's passion and discipline And I don't mean
discipline in terms of doing the right thing. I mean
discipline in terms of their toolbox when one's passion and
discipline collide with opportunity. And the opportunity was thirteen moms
that you knew about from moms, and you were passionate

(23:41):
about it because it was your life, and you had
a discipline for it because it was your life, and
you cared. Yeah, And it seems to me that you
were yet another example example of where you're disciplined from
having been a teen age mom. So it was in
your toolbox and your passion because you cared about these
people intersected an opportunity. That to me is yet another

(24:07):
example of what amazing things can happen in the world.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
I've never heard it put together quite like that, but that,
I mean, that is what happened that, you know, all
those three things did collide, and yeah, and we just
in terms of discipline, it was you know, once we
made that decision we were going to move forward. Then
we were moving forward. And it was a long journey.
It was almost three years of meeting with this group
of people to you know, we're looking at programs from

(24:33):
all over the country. Who's doing what? How does it
work in other states? You know, we're trying to raise
money for a dream, which is hard. We did finally
get our five O one C three. Finally had to
pay a lawyer.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
So easy, isn't it. Yeah, you want to peel the
skin off about this, I just give you a finger
and you give me the five one call it even
there you go, because that's easier than.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Exactly. So we finally did get that, and we're out there,
you know, telling everybody that to listen to us. We're
gonna open a home for teen moms. And we had
a pot look on Saturday night with Alex and a
bunch of the army of normal folks, just amazing families,
and I told them all that it's just it's crazy
how how God moves and works and when you say

(25:21):
yes to Him and are willing to take that first step,
how he will provide then the next step. But we
had met with a guy named David Nestor, who at
the time was the president of a board of an
organization that built low income pound home like villages, and
he was nice enough to have lunch and tell us
about his work, and so we brought him home made brownies,

(25:42):
because that's how we thank people after they graduated from Yes, Yes,
any jokes today you're you got your house because of
homemade brownies. So we had, you know, met this guy,
and you know, another year, year and a half goes by,
finally getting to the point where it's like maybe we
heard God wrong, Like we've been at this trying to
make this happen for so long now and really honestly

(26:03):
getting close to just saying we're just going to give up.
My my co founder kept saying we're going to keep
doing this till there's one day where there's not one
thing to do, like, not one phone call, not one meeting,
not one project, something that we can do.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
That person's name job.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Hey, Yeah, it felt like job man. But we finally
get a call from about ready to give up, and
got a call from David Nestor and he said, hey,
we've got this land we purchased. It's got a ranch
house on it. You can move in, get started, open
your home. You'll probably have about two years and then
we're going to tear down when we build our town
home community. So we did. We moved into that house,

(26:37):
took in our first teenage moms. My son's friend's band
raised three hundred and fifty dollars for the first month's
rent playing a concert. It was crazy, and I thought
three hundred and fifty dollars was a lot for rent
back then, and you know, we didn't have very much money.
Now we have to hire staff because Amy and I

(26:57):
weren't planning to sleep there, and this is a sidential program.
So we take in our first two teenage moms. Fendia
was our first mom. She was from Haiti and had
been in the States for about five years had gotten
pregnant and her family, her mom kicked her out. It
was not acceptable in their culture that she was pregnant.
So she comes to us with a five week old

(27:20):
baby girl in a broken car seat and a bag
of her clothes and a trash bag. She was eighteen, wow,
And Tiffany was seventeen when she moved in. Her daughter
was six months old. And so here we are trying
to figure out what looks great on paper, all this
program we developed of how we're going to help these
girls become self sufficient, and we're trying to now make
it actually work with real life people, and you know,

(27:41):
go figure it doesn't all just work exactly the way
you think it's going to when you're dreaming it up.
So we're barely figuring it out and we get a
call from David and he says, Okay, we got annexed
into the city of Arvada like way quicker than we thought.
So we got to tear the house down. And I'm panicking.
I'm like, what do you mean? You got to say what?
And I had never heard of a capitol campaign at
that point. So we have no, hardly any money, barely

(28:02):
paying payroll waiting for miracles in the mailbox all the time,
just to pay payroll. And now they're gonna, you know,
tear the house down. I'm like, oh, jeez, well, I
don't know what we're going to do, but we're not
going to make these girls homeless. We're gonna figure something out.
And about a week later I get a call in
the second call from David Nestor and he says, well,
we uh, we met as a board and we've decided
you can have the house, but you got to pick

(28:22):
it up and move it off our property.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
Like, okay, I guess this was a wooden house.

Speaker 5 (28:28):
Yes, well, yes, it was a it was a stick
belt it was but crazy, like I mean, none of
us knew anything about this on our little board of
directors and so was tough, but it was also like awesome.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
It was like, Okay, this is great because now we
can get a loan. So we get a loan against
the top half of this house because now the house
belongs to us, so we have collateral. The bottom half
of the house was a basement. It's going to get
plowed under. So we get a loan on the top
half of this ranch house one hundred thousand dollars. We
think we're rich. We go out get a real estate
and start looking for a place to move this house,
find a house mover. Only bad guy in the whole

(29:04):
story he tells us that you can only move the
house seven miles within a seven mile radius, and we
believed him, like idiots, like you haven't seen a house
driving down the highway from Iowa or something they can
go more than seven miles.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
Why because he just didn't want to do it more
than something.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
He didn't want to get a permit to go down Sheridan,
which is a state highway that ran in front of
the house. Got it, We didn't know. So we you know,
we're out there looking for land. We think we've got.
You know, we got sixty grand left because he was
taken forty of it. Can't find anywhere within seven miles
or twenty miles or anything. And finally the realtter calls
me and says, you got to be done, and a

(29:40):
lot in the book you'll hear me talking about me
arguing with God, like I'm just I cannot understand this guy,
Like why you give us a house and then you
don't give us anywhere to put the thing. So we're
just going back and forth. Well I'm going back and forth.
He of course knew exactly what he was doing as usual,
and probably has a lot of things to say to
me someday when I get up there. But I'm I'm
like having a heart attack. And finally get a call

(30:03):
from this pastor and never met the guy, and he says, hey,
are you the people looking for land? And I said, yeah,
we are, and he said, well, we've got someone we
want to give you. And I'm just like, who are
you again? What are you even talking about? Like I
don't think I said thank you. I just was what
is even happening? What do you mean you have to
land you want to give us? He's like, yeah, come
on over, I'll point it out. We're like sixty fourth

(30:26):
and Sheridan's. They're five blocks down and one block over,
six blocks there, within six blocks.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
So we'd hop in the car, me and Robin my
program gall at the time. We go over there, and
here comes this guy gets out of his car and
he's the pastor and he's like, yeah, we just we've
got this two and a half acre and we want
to give you about a third of an acre and well,
whatever you need for your house and your playground, and
I gotta go to lunch, and he gets back in
his car and we're just standing there, going what And then,
of course, you know, the deacons get involved and city

(31:11):
gets involved and gets more complex than just here you
go and waving his hand at the land. So Robin
and I go down to the city of Arvada and
we're talking to the city planner. We're like, well, we
got to subdivide this piece of land from the church.
They're gonna give it to us, and she's just cranky Carol.
I love Carol, She's so cranky. She's like, no, never
gonna happen. You get You're gonna have to rezone. That'll
take a year. This house gets has to be moved

(31:33):
like now, because they're gonna break ground next month. And
we're like, I'm standing there at the counter arguing with God, like,
what do you mean we got a house, we got land,
and now goud you're not gonna let us zone it
whatever it needs And she says, yeah, you gotta have
a think. It was an R four zoning and I'm mad.
Robin's just like, can you just go check what the
zoning is. So she goes over to this like big
old lateral file cabinet in the back and pulls out

(31:55):
this huge plat map and down in the bottom it's
like our four big green stamp. And she's just looking
at us, and we're looking at her, and we're like,
what the heck. Well, it turns out that church had
twenty five years prior zoned just a third of an
acre for a maternity home and never put ministry on
that land. So before I was ever a teen mom
before I mean, any of this had ever happened before

(32:16):
Hope House was a glimmer in anyone's eye. God knew
exactly what he was going to do through that land,
through me, through John, and through an army of people
that he sent around us.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
It was zoned twenty five years earlier on a whim. Yeah,
and it just happened to work.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
And it was big enough to PLoP Rtshaw Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah. I mean it was a miracle. I mean it
was really literally nothing short of a miracle, which is
why I wrote the book, Becausejohn said, you got to
tell people God still does miracles like today, not just
like back in the Bible times. Or overseas, like he
still does miracles in our own backyard.

Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah. When I read that in the prep, I paused.
I just stopped and thought about before you were ever
a team mom. Yeah, the plot of land was set
aside for what eventually would be Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yeah, and then it was just an old fashioned barn
raising from there. Literally, I didn't know the term an
army of normal folk, but if I had, I would
have used it, and I probably will use it now
because that's what happened. An army of normal folk just
came out of the woodwork. Like we had a contractor
who's like, oh, I'll donate my time to be your
general contractor to oversee the project. And another guy says, oh,

(33:33):
I own a company that does excavation. I'll build a
dig you a basement. I go to a small group
at a church to tell our story, and some guy's like, oh,
by the way, I own a company that does fire
sprinkler systems. I'll put that in for you. Like literally,
that house was donated. From the digging of the basement
to the roof, it was all rebuilt and it was
just it was just our community again.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
Did the door to the new.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, a New Hope House on Pals on.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
The third of property that had been waiting twenty five
years for a structure on it. When did the door
swing open?

Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, I tell you what. The one thing about having
an army of normal folks who are so amazing and
volunteer all their time, it's also on their time schedule.
So it took almost two years to get that thing rebuilt.
So we're in a town home with our moms for
a number of years. And on Easter Sunday two thousand
and six, we moved.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
After Sunday, yeah really.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Back into that first dinner was on the front porch
with all the kids running around white picket fence, just
for symbolism, and the house was completely rebuilt in twelve bedrooms.
We have room for six moms and their kiddos and
how many we have room for about six or seven
moms at a time, depending on how many children.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
The same house.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
We still have that same house. We purchased the rest
of the land from the church in twenty well twenty eleven,
we started a capitol campaign. It took till twenty fifteen
to raise the money buy the land from the church,
and twenty nine eighteen we opened the doors to our
brand new resource center right there on the same property,
and then last year we opened an early learning center

(35:07):
for the children of our teen moms. We could do
full time childcare so our moms can go to school.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
R and miracles did happen. Yes, So tell us now, yeah,
we know you, we know why, we know everything. Tell
us what it does. Yeah, tell us what Hope House is.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
Yeah. Well, our mission is to empower parenting teenage moms
to become self sufficient. Our heart's desire is that our
moms come to know just how much God loves them.
And there's nothing I love.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
What you're saying parenting teenage yams.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, so our MoMA's not a.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
Teenage mom who's dropped their kid off with their mother
and he is out partying. You're talking about parent teenage
moms who are making the choice to be a mother
actively daily.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yep, exactly. And also, I mean so they have to
have already given birth to their child to come into
our programming, So we're not a maternity program per se.
We're there still trying to make a decision about whether
to keep the baby or give it up for adoption.
Because we build on what we call a mommy motivation
is our secret sauce, their desire to be a good mom,
and they're really really deep desire to create something different

(36:16):
for their child than what they've experienced. We're building off
of that. So today we serve about two hundred and
eighty teenage moms from across the Denver metro area.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Two hundred and eighty.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
Two hundred and eighty we have.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
And you have how many residents?

Speaker 2 (36:31):
Just six? But we have a housing support program that
provides all sorts of navigation of housing in general. So
lots of partners, transitional living programs, we partner with, lots
of just helping a mom understand like what does this
lease even say? What is this language? I don't know
what I'm signing up for, or she doesn't understand eviction
and why we don't want eviction on our record. And

(36:53):
we our moms come into our program between the ages
of fifteen and twenty one, already parenting. Yeah, we have
fifteen year old moms. We have moms. Her youngest mom
was twelve when she got pregnant. That's not typical. Yeah,
it's not typical.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
But that breaks your heart.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, yeah, breaks your heart. I know this is really
heard statistic, But the younger the MoMA, the more likely
that it was something inside the home, yeah, stepdad, or a.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
Just statutory rate.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
But like right, yeah, it's it's the misconception that a
teenage mom got pregnant on Prom night and then her
mom got mad and kicked her out. That's baloney. Like
our moms literally are growing up in generational poverty, every
one of them. We don't have any middle class mamas
at Hope House. So all two hundred and eighty of
these moms have experienced trauma.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Because if they're not, they probably have a family like
John's to support you.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
And they don't need you. They don't need us, Exactly.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
You're dealing with not situational poverty, but generational and systematic
poverty because the situational povy, somebody in that orbit can
step up.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yep, exactly.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
Which is interesting that you made that distinction a little
while ago, because that makes I mean, what you just
said just dawned on me. Oh well that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah. Yeah, that's why the book is called A Place
to Belong. It is the place our moms come and
say this is my home, this is my second home,
or this is these aren't. This is my family.

Speaker 1 (38:21):
So the people, the moms that you're serving that are
not residential but are come into the resource center, right,
what are they going home to?

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Well, so I'll just a typical way that it might
look for a teen mom. So she's sixteen, she gets pregnant,
She and the boyfriend are going to try to make
it work. They try to live with boyfriend's parents. Boyfriend's
mom is an alcoholic. They get kicked out, He goes
one way, she goes back to her mom. Her mom's
got a new boyfriend. That boyfriend doesn't want her and
her baby at the house. So pizza Tuesday because no,

(38:56):
because they're very abusive. I wish it was because they
like naked It's Tuesday. Frankly, that'd be way more healthy.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
But it is moving around. I have also read this
reminds me of something I read Gosh. I haven't thought
about this in ages, But oftentimes in that situation, the
boyfriend is mad because the mother he's dating is choosing

(39:24):
to spend time in allegiance with her daughter and her
granddaughter rather than him, and so there becomes a power
struggle in the house.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, it could be, you know, it's all the situations
are different. They're all really.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Ugly.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
They're just they're just ugly situations. We had a mama
that was she's Mung family came from Laos. She was
born here. But her mom does whatever her husband says
because that's the way their clan works in the suburbs
of Denver, and he pays a dowry and marries off
this kid at fourteen to another Mung family. She's not

(40:00):
whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoah, just marries her off.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
He paid a dowry and just married her off in.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
The suburbs of She's fourteen. She's fourteen, So now her
job is legal, it is, but nobody knows it's happening.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
And so you know that in the United States.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Oh yeah, a year later.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
She's the dad just tells them all this way it's
going to be because this is this is our culture.
And he takes money for the fourteen year old and
marries her all marries her off too.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
How old of a person he was sixteen, she was fourteen.
So her new job now is to take care of
her husband's in quotation marks family. So she's going to
school still, she's going to high school, but she's cooking, cleaning, uh,
doing the dishes. She's there. Yep, she's a servant now
and still trying to go to high school. Of course,
she gets pregnant by by the boyfriend by the her

(40:53):
husband didn't quotation marks, who he's a petty theft criminal,
ends in jail, and her and her sister, who's also
a teen mom by this point, end up sleeping in
a park by themselves and call us and they're like, well,
you know, we got nowhere to go, so I say
this now. The beautiful piece of that story is this

(41:16):
young woman's name is Tina. Her story is in the book.
She is married to an amazing guy. She's got four
amazing kids, all thriving, they own their own home. There
she's doing all the things. And not every mom ends
up in like a perfect world. But sixty five percent
of the moms we serve at hopas will become fully
self sufficient like they are.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
That's that's the numbers. Yeah, how many teen moms have
you served since opening the doors that easter?

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Oh man? Somewhere around fifteen hundred, maybe eighteen hundred, I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
And sixty let's call it fifteen hundred sixty five percent.
One thousand. Yeah, you're telling me, since you've opened the door,
there's one thousand teen moms in and around Colorade that
are now fully self sufficient.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
Yep, fully self sufficient there.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
What do you think the number would be without Hope House.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Well, only about fifty percent of teenage moms nationally graduate
high school and two percent graduate college. So they are
chances of and it's like two thirds of them will
their children will become teen parents. I mean, the statistics
are the statistics for a reason. They're hard to break.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
Two thirds will become.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
So their child will become a shit.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
You go from two thirds that will be this again
to two thirds self sufficient successful. I mean, it's a
complete reversal of the numbers.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
It's a complete reversal. They're tax paying, saving in our county.
It saves our taxpayers in Jefferson County, Colorado, about forty
five thousand dollars. When someone is like off of all
governmental assistants per mom, her mom, yeah, and her child
and her child's child. Because again this is generational. So
fendia that very first mom I was telling you about,

(43:04):
her daughter is now twenty years old. She's getting a
degree in psychiatric nursing at Metro State University, and Fendia
is also a nurse. So these My favorite story is
our twentieth anniversary gala. We had twenty moms, one from
every year that we've been in existence, and we went
down the stage and my son was the first. He
stood there first and introduced Fendia, and then Fendia said,

(43:25):
you know, I was the first mom. I'm however old
I am now and I'm a nurse. And then she
hands the microphone to her daughter. Her daughter says, I'm
going to school at Metro I'm going to be a
psychiatric nurse, and then she hands it to the next mom.
Next mom says, I'm a stylist and hands it to
her daughter. Her daughter's got a full ride scholarship to
go to school, hands it to the next mom. The
next mom is now our housing or our yeah, our

(43:46):
housing support manager. She works for us, and her daughter
has a full right scholarship to play volleyball. And they
just keep going down the row till we get to
the little one. The four year old said he wants
to work at Target. So that's pretty good.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
But the point is is that is a beautiful illustration
of the chain of hope.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah yeah, and that they have literally broken the cycle
of poverty for not just for two generations, but for
generations to come. Because now Fendia's daughter, of course, is
not gonna I mean, as a psychiatric nurse, I would
presume she won't be in poverty. But they're breaking the
cycle for generations to come and all because they're so
motivated for that little one. They just need someone to

(44:27):
model it, just like we did. Like, you just need
someone to model.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
And to be clear, you're not just riding them a
place to stay.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Ged teaching And when we say teaching, not just not
teaching what a healthy lifestyle looks like, teaching how to health, lead,
take care of your child. You are engaging with these
people to reverse all of the things that created the
trauma in their lives in the first place.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Right. Yeah. So we have a proprietary measurement system. We
use a rubric where we measure self sufficiency in seven domains.
So we look at economic self sufficiency and personal self sufficiency.
Economic is all the things you can think of. You're
going to like, we provide a colleging career program, high
school and gd financial literacy budgeting, transportation assistance, what we

(45:16):
call economic navigation. A lot of times you're starting out
without even your birth certificate or a state I D.
So where do you go from there if you don't
know how to get that. We have a legal advocacy program.
And then on the personal side, it's healthy boundaries and
healthy relationship and your spiritual life, which is all optional.
Everything we do is optional. Our moms are here because
they want to be nobody's court ordered. They're coming in

(45:38):
and out as they choose as it allows for their life,
to take classes and move forward. By the time they
hit what we call graduation, which means they're hitting stable
scores on our measurement system, they've typically been in our
program about four or five years. They've completed one hundred
hours at least of class time with us on a
variety of things. And that's totally separate from getting their

(45:59):
ged diploma and going to college or getting a good job.
We always say, you want a job that's going to
be a career, so we want to be able to
move up, and of course we're looking at a healthy relationship.
So somewhere along the line before they turn twenty five,
which is when they become an alumni, they've typically gotten
into a more healthy relationship by that point, and that

(46:20):
helps you know having two incomes is we have many
moms who've purchased a home. We don't have any single
moms who've purchased a home. They've always been in a
healthy marriage by the time they are able to afford
to purchase a home. Yeah, and then we're essentially staying
in relationship with them after they become alumni. So I
think at this point we have seven of our moms

(46:41):
who work for us as one alumni always on our
board of directors, and lots of them that give back
through volunteering or monthly donations.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
So this is really not bad for a JC penny
clerk who make it to college. You just used a
lot of big words. Look what God can do break
and Rubik's cube I never heard of.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
It was just to tell you a secret. It was
developed on a paper like tablecloth at a restaurant.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
Because you didn't get a big fat binder.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
No, I didn't get a big fat binder.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
We made the kind of did it as you go?

Speaker 2 (47:19):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Do you pinch yourself?

Speaker 5 (47:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (47:21):
There are definitely times I pull into our campus and
I just sit there and I'm like, oh, man, like,
how did this even happen? Like, yeah, really literally had
this even happen.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Before you get closer to wrapping, and it would be
great for you to talk about the early learning center
and the two generation aspects of it.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah. So one of the things that's most difficult to biggest.
So the three biggest barriers to self sufficiency are housing, childcare,
and transportation. So housing we're working on it. Childcare, we
can't find enough childcare centers in our town city that
will take what's called SEACAP, the Colorado Childcare Assistance Program.

(48:11):
Every state has a childcare assistance program. It's federal dollars
that come down to the state, but most centers won't
accept SEACP because they don't get reimbursed at the same
rate as private pay. So we can't find enough spots
for our kiddos.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
And before anybody villainizes the childcare facilities for that, those
things are expensive to run and the insurance rights on
them are insane. I've actually did a little research on
this one time for a whole nother project that I
did not end up getting involved in. But they are
not getting wealthy.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
No, they are not. Their margins are about two percent.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
They are, And so if you have to charge them
a pick a number, five hundred a week and the
government will only pay you three eighty, it's not that
you don't want to take them. You literally can't afford
to that's right, unless you can raise that five hundred
to six hundred. So all that the full paying people
are literally supplementing the government people, and you really can't
do that except in really affluent areas. So the fact is,

(49:11):
even though we have child assistance from the government, it
rarely is enough to actually provide child assistance from the government,
which you nail the irony of ironies.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Yep, yep, totally nailed it, which of course then keeps
them in poverty because then they can't get a job,
they can't go to school. So yeah, we built a
one hundred spot center, two story center on our campus
that's been open a year. Having some struggles because we've
got a lot of there's a lot going on politically
right now and some of it is impacting SEACP situation

(49:44):
and sore. We have sixty open spots and none of
our moms can get SEACP SEACUP is currently just closed
in our.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
Is because of the shutdown or because no, it.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Goes back farther than that. It's I mean, very quick version.
Federal government decided about four years ago that we should
reimburse centers at a higher rate so that more centers
will take SEACAP kids. Totally great idea, but it didn't
come with any federal funding for a federal mandate, so
the cost to do this got pushed down to the states.
Our state, Colorado has about a one point two billion

(50:16):
dollar budget short pall last year, so they can't afford
to cover this new like seventy million dollar increase to
what you're going to have to pay.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
So you have a center waiting for people, so yeah,
they can't get their money because Colorado.

Speaker 6 (50:29):
Doesn't have it.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Yeah, so you have counties that just basically said because
the money comes from the Feds to the states to
the counties, and the counties just said, nope, we're done.
We're closing all the wait lists. We are not going
to be able to afford the kids we've already got
on our roles. We can't take any more new kids.
So now we've got you know, hundreds of new moms
coming all the time, and they can't get seacap, so
we have a mission problem because they can't get sea caps,

(50:51):
so they can't get a spot, so they can't go
to school and go to work. And we've got a
financial problem because our brand new childcare center can't enroll
the kiddos who we built it to enroll. And so
we've got, you know, a big financial short pall because
of that. We're raising the funds to cover that. But
and we have we're very, very blessed to have you know,

(51:11):
amazing folks around us. So at this point we're okay
for now, but something's got to happen in the next
couple of years or we're gonna we'll have to start
taking private pay and do a mixed model because we want.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
To have a choice.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
So I get I've also gotten to learn a lot
about how but that's go works.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
That's once again a beautiful example of how systematic poverty happens. Yes,
I mean, as bad as all of that is, yeah,
it is a very real example of how it happens.
And I think in fairness, there is a civic debate,

(51:50):
civil debate to happen around there's there's a there's a
finite amount of dollars. You can't just tax everybody over
and over and more and more and more and more again.
So there has to be a conversation around where these
dollars best utilized. Yeah, And unfortunately we have to rely

(52:14):
on a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians who are not
really business people to make those decisions, and oftentimes things
like this happen.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Yeah, that's so true. But I will say when an
army of normal folks gets together to do something like
what Whope House is doing, you can break that cycle
and then you don't you won't have to rely on Yeah, because.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
One of the things we always say before we look
in that mirror is if you're waiting around for the
fancy people on seeing in fox to do something about it,
or government for goodness sakes to go do something about it,
if that's if those are the somebody out to do
something about it, yeah, Well you can wish in one
hand and poop in the other, yeah, I mean yeah.

(52:57):
And the truth is the point is this happened because
you and your benefactors and you have another capital campaign
and your passion and your concerns for these kids and
these moms. You just make it happen.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Yeah, yeah, I say all the time. That was the
reason I wrote the book. Like whatever it is, it
doesn't have to be go out there and open a
home for teen moms, and maybe twenty years from now it'll,
you know, start spreading across the country, which is what
we're what we're doing now. It can be Hey, I
love kids, I'm gonna go hang out and volunteer at
the children's hospital, or I'm going to go hang out

(53:31):
and volunteer at a childcare center that's struggling, or whatever
it is. I'm gonna make brownies. I love making brownies.
I'm gonna make some brownies. Like just say yes, And
like you guys always say, Now, I know that we're
just part of an army of normal.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Folks doing the things who have an ability and a
passion and fillin area need. And if we had two
or three million people across the country doing that. Your
place is full of kiddos.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Amen, you are a.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
Delight John. I guess you knew it when she waved
at you from the pea green piece of crap, Bwick.
He just said, let me pull my nova over, race
my engine at her because this is a cool check. Amazing.

Speaker 4 (54:13):
Let's talk expansion now too.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
So you have other spots in Colorado doing this, and
I thought I saw Orange County too.

Speaker 4 (54:19):
Tell us about your grand plans.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
Yeah, so we have we're building out an affiliate network.
We have one affiliate in northern Colorado, one in the
southern part of our state.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Towns names.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
The one in northern Colorado is in Greeley, and the
one in southern Colorado is in Canyon City.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
You never know who's listening in places right now. Might
as well throw it out there.

Speaker 4 (54:41):
Best smelling town in America.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yes, exactly, Greeley, Colorado.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
That's uh yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
And then our first out of the state of Colorado
affiliate will be opening in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
Really all the way across. You must have friends there.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
So we have those former employees, two of them who
moved to North Carolina about six years ago. YEP. One
of them is a former teen mom and has been
the executive director of a housing program for people coming
out of incarceration and just felt like God was calling
her to open Hope House. So she's gonna be opening
a Hope House in the Raleigh area and looking at
Chicagoland and Oklahoma City.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
For the next two anybody's uh in those cities?

Speaker 4 (55:22):
My Chicago and Oklahoma City.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
Because we know someone there same thing as Yeah, there's
some people galvanizing champion.

Speaker 5 (55:30):
We call it.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
We need a galvanizing champion and then we can go forward.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
Www dot what how do people go and find out more?

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Yep, www dot Hope House, Colorado dot org, RG.

Speaker 4 (55:43):
Or orsh Lately she's ready to shore.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
If somebody wants you can email me directly Lisa dot
steven S T E V E N at Hope House,
Colorado dot org.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
John, your kids think she's a rock star or do
they just say, oh, that's what mom does.

Speaker 4 (56:03):
Oh my get it, you gotta get it on a bike.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
It's at the end, making you move and switching. Yeah, anyway,
you sit in that chair, You're better than Alex in
there anyway. So I'm curious do they do they think
this is just what mom does, or they realize this
is rock star status stuff.

Speaker 6 (56:25):
I believe they think she's a rock star. I think
when they were younger, it was kind of they felt
a lot of us everything was about hopeals. Yeah, a
lot of our conversations and things we did were Hope house.
But as they've gotten older, they think they're super proud
of her and inspired by her for sure.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
And Johnny is now how old.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Three little granddaughters with him. He has a beautiful wife
and three daughters.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
That is phenomenal because it really started with Johnny.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
It did it all, just talk about it.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
This could be Johnny's house of Colorado if you wanted
to do, John what do you do?

Speaker 6 (57:03):
I'm a machinist at Sierra Space, got it?

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Aerospace machinist, an aerospace machinist. Yes, sir, that's actually kind
of cool. That's a whole nother story. I remember John
somewhere in the prop when y'all had Johnny baptized, you
got turned off to the conventional church because of the

(57:27):
judgment of the pastor.

Speaker 6 (57:29):
Yeah, he was you can tell he was sizing us
up when you have to do a meeting before you
before the ceremony, or when like a week before or
whatever and kind of found out our ages. You can
see him do the math and then it just he
just got cold, and I was like, this is no
place to be, you know, Like, but you.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Were raised by your mom, who was the antithesis of that.

Speaker 4 (57:52):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 7 (57:57):
So what's that like today, judgment wise? No, for your kids, oh,
for you know, it was super interesting.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
We watched Undefeated because I wanted to just understand your
story and there was a part where you kind of
talked about your kids had given up a lot, and
that kind of hit home. I guess maybe I felt
a little defensive. John said, you think our kids felt
that way, and got a little defensive. I'm like, yeah,
I know they felt that way. I know they felt
like they They've told me as adults that that, you know,

(58:33):
they came second sometimes to Hope House, and yeah, that stinks,
but they know we love them and we're a strong family,
and I do think they're proud now. But in the
midst of it, when you're putting in the sixty hour
work weeks, and we were pretty careful. We didn't miss
ball games or award ceremonies or any of that stuff,

(58:55):
but we you know, there were hours I was I
work a lot. It's like a startup, you're starting up
a business. You're working a lot, work a lot hours.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
It is. It's tough to balance all of it, and
you do the best you can and you love. But
you know, if it was damaging your parents, your kids
wouldn't be proud today.

Speaker 2 (59:18):
Yeah, yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
It's true. I've told this story before my last game
at Manassas, which is chronicled and undefeated. Before the night
before that game, we were sitting around having family dinner,
releasing me and the four kids, and then I think
there were like nine, eight, seven and six or somewhere
in that age rain maybe to lie, I can't remember,

(59:41):
but whatever, they were right in there. And I had
not told anybody I was leaving manasas yet, but I'd
made the decision. I was because of this very thing
that my boys and girls were starting to get it
to where they were starting to play sports, and that's
where I needed to be. And after seven years at Manassas,
it was just time for me. And I said, hey,

(01:00:01):
I want y'all all to come to the game. It's
really important to me. And they're like, you know, we've
been to games for fifteen years that you've coached. What's
a big deal. I said, well, it's the playoffs and
if we lose, we're done. And they're like, okay, well
we'll try to make it. But if you lose and
you're done, there's next year. I said, no, there's not.
I'm not going back to Manassas. And a hush fell
over the table and they were shocked. And I looked

(01:00:27):
over and Will, who's my third eight or nine, just bawling,
And I said, buddy, what's wrong? And he said, Dad,
you can't equip an asses. I said, why I need equipment? Asses.
I want to do stuff with you guys. And he's like,
they need you more than we do. When you engage

(01:00:48):
in something that convinces your own children that other children
need their father more than they need their own father,
you have gone too far. Yeah. And it is then
that I really started to understand the importance of balance
and how much you do have to give up to

(01:01:09):
do the work that you've done and that many thousands
of others of people have done. And I think only
you know when that line of balance is. But my
kids have brought of me to and we love each
other and have a great family, just like You're proud
of you and you're the rock star of your kids.

(01:01:29):
So I do encourage everybody listening to us, at whatever
you're engaged in, find the balance. But understand time is finite,
and you're going to have to be willing to put
in the hours and put the work to make a difference.
But if you're passionate about it, and you're good at it,
and you see that opportunity need and you feel it,
you change lives, and you change lives of those in

(01:01:51):
your own family and those around you. And that is
the miracle of an army of normal folks and how
it can work to change our culture and our society
for the better. Lisa, you are absolutely a member. You
are You are a glaring example of exactly what that
is and that you don't have to have some PhD

(01:02:11):
or come from some big nng O or have a
whole bunch of money to do something extraordinarily important. You
can do it just being a normal person working. So
thank you for joining us. John, I know you didn't
really want to speak on Mike, but thanks for a
little bit you gave us, And thanks for sharing your
wife with us this afternoon and telling your story. Alex,

(01:02:32):
you got anything else, They're good.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
Just on that last conversation, Bob Mazerkowski had a really
good line. If you need to teach your kids that
they're the most important k in your life, but they're
not the only kid that matters.

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
That's so good. I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
Yeah, that guy is one of the greatest guys I've met.
He's so cool. Yeah to me, who said that? Going
home today?

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Or yeah, we're head of the airport alex.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
United, probably going back, safe travel.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
See.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
Thanks for joining us. I'm glad you got to enjoy
a few days in our fair city, and we'll stay
in touch. I can't wait to hear what happens next
with Hope I's of Colorado and all the Hope Houses
you're expanding to and from the bottom of my heart
from a very needy nation of people like you, thanks

(01:03:21):
for all what you do.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Thank you, You're welcome, and thanks for having me, and
thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
For joining us this week. If Lisa Stephen has inspired
you in general, or better yet, to take action by
buying her book A Place of Hope, donating to Hope
House Colorado, exploring their model for your own community, or
something else entirely, please let me know. I really do

(01:03:50):
want to hear about it. Just write me anytime at
Bill at Normalfolks dot us, and I promise you I
will respond. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with
friends that are in social subscribe to the podcast, rate it,
review it. Join the army at normal folks dot us
any and all of these things that will help us
grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until

(01:04:14):
next time, do what you can