Time We Discuss: Starting a Nonprofit to Address Homelessness | Good Samaritan Home

Transcription

(Music)

John Graham: It's about getting people to see that person on the street as a real person and then saying, maybe I can do something to make a difference in his life.

Dan: Today on Time We Discuss, I wanna welcome John Graham and it's time we discuss what it's like starting a non-profit. John, thank you for joining me today.

John Graham: Very glad to be here, very glad.

Dan: John, this is exciting. I've had a handful of people on my show where they talked about what it was like starting a non-profit, but I recognize that everyone's story is different. So I always welcome different stories and different perspectives. So let's start with this. The name of your non-profit is Good Samaritan Home. So let's start with what is it exactly and then how you got started.

John Graham: I was 53 years old at the time and I had been through numerous careers, give or take six or seven or eight careers and hadn't done very well in any of them because I was over educated and under prepared or under disciplined and coming out of the sixties, we had more answers than we had questions. And we were trying to tell the whole generation what to do with their lives and we couldn't run our own. And here I was 53. So I decided particularly with President Bush started the faith-based initiative that maybe we can turn what we believed to be the moral principles guiding us into something more practical. And so I wanted to open a shelter and we bought the oldest house in town, started fixing it up because I had construction skills and we use that as a homeless shelter, which was extraordinarily dangerous when you think about it because you're taking people off the street into your own home. And it was just my wife and I at the time, but still we were more inspired than we were wise. Let's put it that way. But that evolved. And I will say this with the nonprofit, there's a lot of well-intentioned people who go in and say, here's what I wanna do for the community, but the community doesn't want that or it's not there or more important, there's no need for it to be there. And so what evolved out of our shelter was the Department of Correction that I had been volunteering with, meeting with, said we need someone to take someone coming from prison because they're homeless and they're legally allowed to be in the community, but they have nowhere to go. And all the data says that that's more dangerous for everybody. Can you use your shelter and we will compensate you as a nonprofit for the per diem? So I would have my bills paid and they would have an oversight on the shelter. And we started doing that in our own house. But here's the problem is that, my well-intentioned motivation scared the hell out of the neighborhood because they thought all those people are coming to our little white rural town and they're all coming from the black inner city in their minds. And so there were protests and there were petitions and there were threats and council meetings and it got nasty. But what we found was that the current political climate is yell at one another. And we've found that if you do that, you never win. No matter how good your argument, you never win with meanness. So we started doing things like cleaning everybody's sidewalk. Instead of yelling at our neighbors, we served our neighbors. And over time, it took years and it took attorneys. But over time, now the county comes to us and they say, we have some men who shouldn't be in jail but they're homeless. And if they go to jail, it costs us $100 a day. Can you house them for free? And we do. And so now the county thinks I'm a good guy. But it took 25 years.

Dan: That is awesome. That is really, really cool. That's one thing I was thinking about. When you create something like this in a neighborhood environment, my mind immediately jumped to what was the stigma attached to it? Because like you said, it's like those people. It's so sad because, and I've talked to people about this before, in my head, when people go to prison, it's for restitution, I guess. One, learning from their mistake or paying for their mistake but also like a rehabilitation kind of thing. So you have to take the stance that when they come out of prison, they serve their time. We need to look past that. But there are so many people that don't do that. it's me hearing how you kind of tried to overcome that and you got the neighborhood to kind of take a different view on that, it sounds like.

John Graham: It's a long, slow process. The church has a tendency and my motivation is my faith but not my verbal motivation. It's my feet motivation. So instead of saying what I believe, I try to show that and sometimes it simply means going to that store where they are opposed to what you're doing and shopping there and not returning. I learned this from Dr. King, is that the only thing you can return with hate is love. And sometimes love is not simply giving a hug which you'll never get away with but what you give is kindness. And John Lewis was a strong motivation, still is a strong motivation for me because he put his feet into his faith.

Dan: At your level now as the executive director and founder, how much of this are you doing kind of like, I hate to say it but boots on the ground or are you more of like trying to make connections and get donors, what's your role like now?

John Graham: I used to do it all. Everything was in my head. We're responsible for daily house checks with daily involvement, keeping the house maintained. And we started off with our own house and then it was another house and another house. And now we're in three counties with 21 houses. So I've hired 10 people, but I don't just hire bodies. I hire people like me who have made a lot of mistakes, know we need a second or third or a fourth chance. And the truth is I'm not that far removed from my residence. I just haven't been convicted of anything illegal. I've made a lot of mistakes that were legal but stupid. And really what we deal with a lot right now is mental health and addictions, a lot. And addictions, you can help to a degree, mental health, you can't. And so we sometimes the best we're offering is a safe place for you to be off the street. And we're not gonna change people, but at least we can protect the community and them for a short time. A perfect example was Jimmy, mentally ill, schizophrenic. He was in and out of hospitals and he was a veteran. And so when he was found by the police on the street in winter, freezing to death and the VA hospital referred him to us and he had social security income of, I think $900. And you can't live on that. And his friends always took his money anyway. So Jimmy came to live with us and he stayed 14 years. And we kept him and we even evolved into rentals. And Jimmy eventually died at age 81 in our house. And he said this before he died. This was the only house I ever had in my entire life. That to me is exactly why we're here.

Dan: Wow, it's very inspiring, very powerful remark. So you talked about opening different houses in different counties. Did you have different hurdles you have to go through as you branch out to different counties? There's a kind of like all the rules are basically the same. What was that like for you?

John Graham: Well, the town I live in is a white rural community of 13,000 people. Everybody's inbred. I like to say they all wear glasses and have the same limp because they're all related. But it's 35 miles from Dayton and Dayton is one of the five major cities in Ohio and have all the city attitudes and actions. And it's predominantly in our community. Let's put it this way. It's not uncommon to have a woman on the street ask for business. Here in Greenville, you don't get that, but in the city you do. So we have a different set of problems, but the city is actually much more street wise and they're much more tolerant because they see what we're doing is critically necessary. Here in the rural communities, there's a tendency to think we don't have that problem and we never say it, but race is always a factor. It's just part of the white culture. Those people we see on the news are always black. And the truth is the numbers show us that the predominant numbers in prison are white, but we don't feel that in our own prejudices.

Dan: Before you talked about fixing up the houses on your own or fixing up the house, I think that was the very first house you bought the oldest house, you fixed it up. What financial were there for you? Did you have to take out loans for that? Did you get donors for that? How did you fund the repairs of that first house?

John Graham: Well, this was in '01 and the house was 140 years old. And I told my wife and we walked in three months, I'll get it fixed up. And 14 years later, when we finally got it livable, we were living it the whole time, but we literally went back to the strip the plasters, strip the plumbing, strip the heating, stripped everything out of it while we lived in it. In fact, my one Christmas gift to my wife was a table saw. I'm not making that one up. And she loved it. (Laughs) But what we did was we used the house as a model in the community of a changed house can be a changed life too. And if we can make our house a model, and we had a lot of issues in our corner of the community, if we can change and make our house safer, maybe we can make the community safer. And we did. We found over time, other people fixed up their houses and we don't get the same street crime. We don't get the same noise because I became the eyes and ears, the de facto neighborhood watch, because I wanted to make sure that my guys aren't causing a problem that blows back on me. But I will tell you that we used our own money. And in fact, my wife got a small inheritance when her parents died and we used it. She used it actually. She used all of it to buy a house across the street so we could now use another house instead of our own house for housing strangers. And there was no salary for five years at all. We like to think there are plenty of government grants, but there really aren't. So what we ended up doing was we made a contract with the state of Ohio. They had a need for housing and we offered that and we had a need for stable income. And now we are audited by the state. And so we're accountable and they hold us to their standards. So everybody wins.

Dan: So John, I have this question for you. I spoke with Lisa from Colby's Army, which is a nonprofit. I spoke with her last year and I also spoke with Erica from Stephen's Wings, another nonprofit. I spoke to her last year as well. Both of those women, they had very powerful starting stories. If I remember, I think Lisa maybe lost her son and I think Erica lost her brother. I think I'm a little fuzzy. I'd have to go back and review. But they had these very powerful stories. So my question for you, what prompted you to tackle homelessness in your area? Why homelessness?

John Graham: I graduated back in 1970 and that was the Vietnam era. I had been part of the, not physically on Kent State campus, but I was on a protest the day of at Ohio State and the guards surrounded us and the guns and the whole nine yards. So we grew up in that horrid time of chaos. And so I had a degree, but no motivation, no direction and no trust in the government. So I went from, I was a children's home counselor. I was a truck driver. I was a fireman. I was a building contractor. I was a journalist. I was even a minister at one point. And the truth was that I found that I was over educated and under prepared and I just never fit in. And that's when I realized that I feel a lot like the people on the street. They made the same wrong choices as I did. It's just that I had a BA degree. And so what I ended up doing was I went back to school, but I got a degree in what we call applied theology, which means what can I do in the street with what I believe in the church? And that's where we learned to shut up and let our feet do the talking. And that motivated me to say, what is the need here? And then with all these people coming to my door while I was a minister, I realized that the church kept closing their doors to these people because they make us uncomfortable. And they have a legitimate complaint because you're not gonna solve someone's problems by giving them a sandwich. But maybe if you give them a conversation, maybe if you give them time, I call it mentoring now. And that's when we learned that you come across Jimmy who's schizophrenic, but over 14 years, he dies in safety and in peace. And maybe that's the best you can do with some people. So the need motivated me to go in that direction. And I didn't plan to work with the Department of Correction. They just came with the specific need. And in the past 25 years, we have literally helped 2,500 men and women stay off the street.

Dan: You talked about Jimmy, you talked about on a more general level on mental health. So what kind of, if any, what kind of partnerships have you been able to create over the years with like mental health professionals, for instance, and kind of bridging that gap and helping people that you take in get the help that they need?

John Graham: Absolutely critical because number one, we like to think nonprofits like to think they can have everything in house and control everything because we nonprofits like to be the boss. And you have to be the partner. You have to go with what you do well. And housing was a big element for us. We could offer it because of my background and, but I can't offer rehabilitation. I can't offer mental health counseling. And I'll be quite honest, some of the people we deal with have some serious problems and serious offenses. And so we partner with the Department of Correction and the parole officer because he's the one that says, there's the line, you crossed it. Now I'm gonna lock you up. We say, when you get out, you can come back to us. So we're the good guy, but we have the bad guy right next to us because he's not really the bad guy. He's simply the guy with the boundaries. And we work with a rehabilitation or recovery services. We work with mental health. And the most important one in Dayton, Ohio is very conservative state, but they're amazingly progressive when it comes to reentry, probably foremost in the country. And in Dayton, they have a reentry coalition and they've started training people. This sounds silly, but they train people over eight weeks how to get a job. Because we always say, well, just go get a job. But what if you never filled out a job application? And what if you were locked up and all of a sudden you came out and the phones are no longer on the corner in a box, but they're in your hand. And you can't go to the newspaper want ads because there is no newspaper. And how do you work this thing again? So they teach them, but here's the best part. At the end of eight weeks, there's a service that donates a suit to each graduate. And I cannot even begin to tell you how proud they are when they can stand up there with a certificate that they've never gotten before and wearing a suit they've never worn before. I am somebody. It's enough to make you cry.

Dan: I believe it and I can only imagine what that must make them feel like, just that sense of accomplishment and the pride that goes along with that. That is fantastic. How did you go about finding these different groups to partner with? Is there like, I hate to say, like the directory was all through the corrections department. They kind of connected you with other people. How did you get all of these resources?

John Graham: Yes, yes, and yes. When we started offering housing, then everybody started coming to us because that's what they need. The goal was temporary housing, but what we found was that we, after say 90 days or after six months or even after a year, what do you do if nobody will rent to you because your offense makes the landlord nervous? So that's when we expanded into rentals, but not rental at market value, rental at affordable value. Say for example, instead of renting for a thousand dollars a month, we rent in what we call a boarding house arrangement where you have your own room, bedroom, but it's a shared common area, a boarding house. And you only pay say $380 a month, including utilities. So that means if you're making social security, you can afford it. If you're making a minimum wage for 16 hours a week, you can afford it. But more important, it's a way to mentor through budgeting. I have a guy who's $2,000 behind on his rent right now, and everything says you need to just put him out, but he's doing the best that he can right now. So it's not about the money. How can we reach him? Is he trying? Can I help him take one more step? And he's done it. And I may lose some money, but that's not the point. He has a safe place and he's got a job and he's working hard to learn how to budget. And then he's a good example.

Dan: If someone's looking to do what you're doing, they wanna start something very similar, what is some good advice you can give them on the quote unquote right way to get started? What's going to put them off on the best foot to get started doing something like what you're doing?

John Graham: Well, legally you have to be a nonprofit and that requires an attorney and it also requires that you go through the IRS because there's a lot of fly-by-nights. And it's absolutely legitimate because you must keep people accountable because, and the second thing is there's no real grant money that you think there is, but really there's not. And you're not gonna get a lot of donations because we might get, our budget runs easily a million dollars a year and we might get $20,000 in donations. And we used to get, the most grants we ever got were $60,000 and you can't live on that. But what we learned to do was we found a way that we could be at what we call a vendor. So I would say be adaptable, look for the need in the community and you go in and say, how can I help you meet your need? And what do you require of me? And then you just have to work like it's, just like you're running an auto shop or you're running a bakery. You wouldn't dare put food out there that had bad yeast in it. Well, the same thing here. You wouldn't dare have offer a house to somebody that didn't have water. So what they do, one thing they do to check us by saying, let me check your hot water, do your toilets work? And the key element is how do we know that you're not using your position to disadvantage? So they interview our residents and they get firsthand information if we're doing a good job.

Dan: Now, earlier in the conversation talked about, I think you said getting audited every year. Is this kind of like part of that audit process or is that something completely different?

John Graham: No, the state audits our performance. And of course word gets out and my staff takes great pride in our reputation. And so there's a lot of places where you're put into a homeless type of shelter, particularly if you're a felon and you're just caged. So the word gets around and they say, you've got to go to the Good Samaritan Home. It's the cleanest house in town. And so all of a sudden they get these referrals and that speaks volumes because that's street talk. But we're also audited through our accountant. And one of the main reasons I never went into accounting is that all the paperwork is an absolute pain and I'd rather have somebody else do it than me. Because we've been six months just finishing up our April taxes and I'm just giving them information. But we hand that off and they hold me accountable. A good example was my accountant said, "18 months ago, there's this check. What did it go for?" So I had to go back through 18 months worth of checks and document where that came from. And if I couldn't find the source, I had to pony it up because I'm accountable to that. I did, we found it.

Dan: John, this is really, really great information. It's such a great cause of the service that your nonprofit organization is providing. One thing I like to do whenever I'm speaking with someone, I like to give them the opportunity to talk about a project they're working on, a cause they believe in, more about their business or nonprofit. So if there's something specific you'd like to discuss, I'd like to open the floor up to you.

John Graham: The biggest thing, when we were starting off, we went to the city council and there were meetings and there were angry protestors. So I came in because of my academic training, I came in with reams of data and I showed them all the statistics thinking that if they would see the data, they would say, "Oh, you're right. Your information has proven that I was in error and I'm now a believer." But I had bright people. I had attorneys who were, I don't wanna say conservative, but they were ultra local and they simply said, "I don't care. I don't care what the data says. I just don't like it." So what I've learned is nobody is influenced by data. Nobody is influenced by fact. That's why if the church were to say, "Here are the doctrines," and nobody listens because what's the only thing they listen to is their dinner after church. Because that's the language they understand. So what I learned to do, just like cleaning the sidewalks in the winter, I learned how can I communicate to the community in a way they understand? And the best example is Titanic. If I were to say to you, "We're gonna have a documentary on lifeboat safety," you could hear the crickets because nobody is gonna watch a documentary on lifeboat safety. But what if I said, "Jack and Rose are gonna be on the Titanic and they're gonna fall into a mismatched love affair, and I guarantee you, you'll be crying by the end." We would still be, and we are still talking about it. So I wrote a novel called Running As Fast As I Can, and it's a fiction story, but it reads like a memoir about Daniel Robinson growing up in abuse and poverty. And when he turns to his pastor for help, you know what happens. He's taken advantage of, and he spends a Forrest Gump journey through the 60s trying to find love like Forrest did with Jenny. And the average book when it's done, I spent 10 years writing it. The average book sells 200 copies from an independent publisher. In other words, they just don't sell. But in the past year, this story called Running As Fast As I Can has sold 20,000 copies. And what matters, it's not the money, because we put all the money back into publishing it. But what matters is the readers wrote back and said, "I've never read a book as emotional as this. You wrote about my life. I had Kleenex on every page. And this is exactly what I wanted to do. And what we're doing is we're getting people to feel the need in the community, not head, think it, but feel it with their heart. And that to me is, I felt it was worth all those 10 years of moaning and groaning over every paragraph. I really enjoyed it. There are certain conversations that animate me and being with you today is one of those. I get very animated with Good Samaritan Home, but it's not about the book. It's about the issues in the book. It's about getting people to see that person on the street as a real person and then saying, maybe I can do something to make a difference in his life. Maybe.

Dan: Yeah, and that is huge, changing people's thoughts and opinions. That is just a huge, huge thing. John, again, it's been awesome having you on Time We Discuss and we learned what it's like to be a founder of a nonprofit organization.

John Graham: My pleasure, thank you so much.