Episode 10 – Just Say Yes

Lisa Graham (00:00):
Welcome to this week’s episode of the Change The Rules podcast, I’m Lisa Graham co-founder of Notley. And today we have Alan Graham in the studio, and Alan is the co-founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes. It’s an Austin nonprofit dedicated to restoring dignity to the homeless. It’s their mission to empower community into a lifestyle of service with the homeless. And what I’d like to start out asking you is about Mobile Loaves & Fishes and where your journey began. How did you start this organization? And when did that begin for you?
Alan Graham (00:30):
I would probably take it, I mean, actually I would take it back a long, long, long, long time ago, but that would take us too long. But in 1996, I went on a men’s retreat, given by men for men at my parish where had I known that men were going to hold hands with each other, and maybe do that bromance, hug it out thing, I’d never gone to that deal. But I go into this retreat and it starts out exactly that way. And I’m in this completely uncomfortable space, but over the course of about a 30 hour period of time, I was just blown away. And so this intellectual relationship that I had with Christ ended up dropping a floor into my heart, and I began to adopt a philosophy that I called just say, yes, what do you want me to do? And that just say, yes, begins with just doing the simple things at church or becoming a better father, a better husband or whatever all that stuff is. And within about a two year timeframe God was kind of nudging me out on to the streets of Austin, Texas, to a point where a girlfriend of mine and my wife’s were sharing about a ministry from Corpus Christi where multiple churches would come together on cold winter nights and pool their resources to take out to the men and women that lived on the streets. And at that moment, the image of a catering truck entered my mind as a distribution vehicle from those of us that have abundance to those that lack. It was just that, that simple of a thing. I had no clue that it was going to drive me 20 years later to this space.
Lisa Graham (02:16):
And how did you go from having that idea to getting it started? What did that look like?
Alan Graham (02:22):
Well, I’m a serial entrepreneur and serial entrepreneurs – I know I’m sitting across from one right now – get these sick fantasies in our minds about how we can take the smallest idea and turn it into the most ginormous idea. So I’m completely guilty of that deal. And the idea of this catering truck, for some reason, I just thought that I could, you know, “franchise that” to every church in every city, every state that has a homeless and indigent poor population. That’s the idea. It really was. I mean, at worst case hundreds of trucks in your mind. But I’m also a guy that knows that you better start very small. So I don’t, I didn’t go out and try to venture fund a hundred trucks. I went out and funded one and then the second one, because I’m a blocking and tackling button and singling kind of a guy, because I know that that’s actually the way that we can get this thing across the finish line. So it was that kind of entrepreneurial mindset to that. And it’s just pretty much had folded radically, although there’s not hundreds of trucks. I got moved into a very different direction.
Lisa Graham (03:51):
And when I first was introduced to you guys, it was another entrepreneurial venture within Mobile Loaves & Fishes that you guys were doing, which was empowering homeless individuals in our community to start their own businesses with their own trucks to sell things. Can you talk about how that idea came about and how that has empowered the people that you help?
Alan Graham (04:10):
Yeah. So I’m a pretty inquisitive guy. You first start, you know, why are people homeless in the most abundant country on the face of the planet? That seems ridiculous to me. And then why are there people standing on our street corners begging for money? You don’t see that in third world countries. You see a gauntlet of entrepreneurs when you get off the plane in Mexico or Nicaragua or Italy or Africa or wherever. Why, why are our people begging? Why is it that when I moved here in 1976, there were no beggars on the street corner? You had men and women selling flowers, bottles of water, newspapers, velvet, Elvis art, and cow skulls. Today you don’t see any of that anymore. Why is that? And the reason is because our government that we own have so over-regulated entrepreneurial-ism at the lowest level of poverty that the only remaining bastion of entrepreneurial-ism is the first amendment free speech right to beg.
Alan Graham (05:14):
And when I, when I learned that I began to investigate that seriously. And then as I was building relationships with men and women, I learned that they are a lot like me and probably Dan Graham – they’re ADD. They can’t be put into a box. We’re not going to work an eight to five job, which I honor. But that’s not our spirit. We’ve got to constantly be on the move and they’re that way too. They’re not going to go to work at Walmart or McDonald’s, where everybody says there’s plenty of jobs. They’re not going to be stable in that type of environment. So how do I bring back an entrepreneurial micro enterprise type of spirit? Then you begin to look at things like Opportunity International and Grameen and these things that are doing things on an international level and could something like that work here? And the answer for men is basically no. But what would the modified version of that? And that’s when we started creating a number of micro enterprise opportunities for people to go out and earn a dignified income, and then we block and tackle our way through the conduits to move their products and services into the economy, without them having to deal with the bureaucracy of government.
Lisa Graham (06:41):
How do you get around those city ordinances that, you know, don’t allow one of these individuals to go pursue those opportunities themselves?
Alan Graham (06:49):
Well, on the, on the very simple philosophy. I think that it – and I believe it is constitutional, nobody’s ever challenged this, I’ve talked to constitutional lawyers that believe how we treat this as unconstitutional. But I believe at the core level that you ought to be able to walk into Sam’s club right now, go buy a box of blow pops or any other pre-packaged, already made in a certified inspected commissary factory somewhere, and walk out on the streets anywhere and sell those products. I believe that we should have that fundamental freedom, but when you look at the bureaucracy that inhibits that free flowing mobile vending for pre-packaged food items. And so we went in, in 2013 and got an ordinance changed or amended with the city of Austin, a mobile vending ordinance that would allow an organization like ours to implement a mobile vending operation dedicated to the homeless.
Alan Graham (07:55):
It was very structured. So it didn’t open up a Mexico type of thing that maybe people didn’t want to see. So we did that. And right now we’re working on doing a downtown commissary. But we’ve also created lots of opportunities on site – catering and concession, artwork, glassblowing, leather work, pottery, blacksmithing, farming, food production from the farm, canning, you know, stuff like that, that allows us to take those products and move them into the economy. Just last year alone, I just got the numbers a couple of days ago, we distributed just about a couple of hundred dollars, more than $400,000 last year in what we call dignified income to men and women working on that entrepreneurial basis.
Lisa Graham (08:50):
That’s great. And you mentioned onsite, I think this is a great time for you to describe what the site is you developed – a place called Community First Village.
Lisa Graham (08:56):
Can you describe what it is and where that idea came from? Because I think we can then talk about the journey to get there, which I think is fascinating as well.
Alan Graham (09:09):
It’s a 27 acre master planned RV park on steroids. It’s a KOA campground basically. The idea had an interesting evolution. I’ve hunted and fished all my life, love it, raised my kids, on the deer leases from the youngest. I mean, I was taking kids hunting in car seats and oftentimes on our deer leases, we would be in these little bitty tin can of an RV and the memories of stories and memories that flowed were as if my kids were going to Walt Disney World. To go into this little RV and get their little chocolate milk out of the little refrigerator and cook their little breakfast on the little stove and eat it on the little and pull down their little bed from the thing and crawl up in there. And then if it was really frigidly cold, they crawl in the sack with me and we snuggle, and these memories were very vivid.
Alan Graham (10:15):
And then when we started doing our car summer trips, you know, around the Western US, I had a rule which would be a tent one night, cabin second night, and hotel, third. Okay. And then tent, cabin, hotel. And most of those tents and cabins were in RV parks or KOA. And I began to notice an inherent sense of community inside these RV parks. Somebody would drive up in a million dollar or more Prevost and park next to somebody that’s in a $12,000 Jayco RV. Families would come out, they’d be cooking burgers together. There was no divisional lines of the haves and the have-nots. It was just very interesting to me. So in 2004, a buddy of mine, one of the co-founders of Mobile Loaves, Bruce Agnes said, “I’m looking to purchase a ranch in Fredericksburg. You want to go look at this thing with me?”
Alan Graham (11:15):
And we drove out there and really it was an opportunity to go with my buddy and drink a beer, not necessarily look at the ranch thing. But there was a deer camp with an RV on it. And I jumped out of the truck, went and ran over to that RV. And I said to Bruce, I could live in something like this, not, not quite this thing, but something like this, what would that cost? And he said, I think you could buy one of these for $3,000 to $5,000 all day long. I go, you’re kidding me. We get a homeless person up off the streets for three to five grand. I found that stunning in my, keep it simple stupid mind. So we went and bought one first one ever for $5,000. It’s sitting out on that village property today. Lifted a guy up off the streets into a privately-owned RV park on March 1, 2005. And then, obviously with the serial entrepreneur thing, began to develop RV parks everywhere in the United States of America. And here we are today.
Lisa Graham (12:22):
Can you talk about the journey to get the land where you are? I know it was a long one and there were a lot of discussions and a lot of city ordinances and things like that that are in place. So how did that come about?
Alan Graham (12:39):
So, I thought I was onto a great idea and I’m a real estate developer. That was where I come from the real estate development and investment and brokerage background. I developed air cargo facilities on airports, shopping centers, office buildings, land deals. So I had that real estate entrepreneurial thing. So I went and hired. I knew nothing about RV parks. And so I went and hired a guy that was one of the foremost consultants in the industry. It turns out he lives here in Austin, Texas. And tell me everything there is to know about developing and operating an RV park. Then I went into a couple of architect friends of mine and I took one of the RV parks that we first moved into, which was the Midtown at 7th and Airport, added another hypothetical eight or 10 acres to it and said, this is what I’m looking for.
Alan Graham (13:35):
I had another friend of mine that was a videographer put a video together about one of the people that we had lifted up off the streets. And then in 2006ish, I think late, maybe early 2007, went and picked up Will Wynn. Mayor WIll Wynn down at the city hall, drove him out there, showed him the video, showed him the plat and Will looked at me, and first thing out of his mouth is my grandfather was homeless and was killed at the corner of 6th Street and Red River. I think he was an alcoholic as a homeless guy. And that was like a wow moment and a beautiful moment for, for the Mayor and myself. And then the second thing he said was we need one of these North, South, East, and West. And so I proposed to the city through the Mayor that if you would provide me with a tract of land anywhere in the city of Austin, I don’t care where it is.
Alan Graham (14:39):
I have two requirements. Requirement number one is it must have the entitlements – zoning, water, sewer – to do what we want to do. And the second thing is it must have reasonable access to public transportation. Doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ll go solve the imperfection side of that deal. If you do that, lease it to us for a buck a year, because you’ve got real estate everywhere, I’ll go out and raise all the capital to do this deal. So in April of 2008, under Mike Martinez’ leadership, city council voted unanimously to grant us a long-term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin off of MLK and Harold Court. About four months later, after our team putting in maybe a half a million bucks, Mike and I went to a neighborhood meeting that just turned into my euphemistic version of Armageddon.
Alan Graham (15:42):
It was horrible. And the neighborhood was just livid with the idea, although everybody loved the idea, just not here. And so it was my first giant encounter with the “not in my backyard” movement. Mike wakes up the next morning, calls the press conference in order to postpone finalizing the longterm agreement for 12 bucks to put it on hold, which was essentially putting in a bullet into that deal. By the way, Mike and I are still great friends today. I hold problems or grudges. Actually, I’m very grateful that we’re where we’re at and not where we were. So it all worked out. But wasn’t feeling too good about it at that time. And then we spent the next couple of years trying to tee up more properties with the city and every time it would just run into the giant “not in my backyard” impediments.
Alan Graham (16:48):
And then I realized, I didn’t really know this and understand this, that in the state of Texas, there is no discretionary land use authority outside of municipal boundaries. There’s no zoning in the county. And zoning is where the “not my backyard movement” gets its teeth, because without discretionary land use, without being able to argue that this is an improper land use, because see, it’s fundamentally against federal law for me to say, we can’t have disabled people, or we can’t have this color people, or this religious people, or this gender people in my backyard. So what we do is we leverage zoning in a way that becomes, and can become, very discriminatory. And so being able to go out in the county was a game changer. So in 2010, I put a piece of property under contract that shares a property line with the city of Austin and where we could access utilities from the city of Austin.
Alan Graham (18:00):
And the relationship’s been a beautiful relationship, because I understand the politics. I’m not condemning anybody for all this. I, I understand the, the political nature of how we have stereotyped the chronically homeless and created the fear as to crime and property values and all that stuff. So I don’t judge anybody on that. But we have to work around that to prove that that’s not really what will happen.
Dan Graham (18:26):
And how has the relationship been with the neighborhoods and the people who live around the property?
Alan Graham (18:30):
Yeah, so initially that would be, you know, there would be some heartburn. So we got the final site development permit on phase one in August of 2013. Of course, the vote was unanimous by both the city and the county commissioners because it involves both. There were a few people from the neighborhood that expressed some extreme concern.
Alan Graham (18:55):
Also had several people from the neighborhood that were very pro who we are today. Today, we’re in partnership with that neighborhood. We have together formed a new neighborhood association out there called the East Austin Community Hills. Each neighborhood association, we’re working on a combined little farming gardening project. They come and they come to our movie nights and dog park and hang out and volunteer. I’m not saying it’s a thousand percent, there are still nervous people out there, but we’re an extraordinary asset to that neighborhood. And I think most people know that.
Lisa Graham (19:38):
Can you talk about this idea of community and why it is so powerful and why? And something that you’ve said is housing will never solve homelessness, but community will. And how has that been exemplified by this Community First Village? Can you talk about that?
Alan Graham (19:53):
What we have done, not architected and then, and then built, so people can come in and go, you know, like here’s the visionary founder of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, like it truly it didn’t work out. That’s an RV park, you know? And along the way, there’ve been certain things that, that happened. And, you know, Americans are alone. We are isolated. We have become so individualistic and focused on who we are as individuals. Nothing represents that greater than the subdivisions that we have built, where we are now living in these hermetically sealed single family sarcophaguses that we call the American dream. We drive up to them in our tinted windshield SUV’s with Sirius XM radio spewing into our cars, we push a button on the visor or maybe don’t even have to do that, Siri open the garage door and the garage door opens.
Alan Graham (20:54):
We drive in, garage door close. We go into these homes that have everything on the planet that we need, want internet spewing in. We go into our backyards, there’s eight foot tall privacy fences, swimming pools, sport courts, barbecue pits. And we think we got it made. Now, when I grew up as a kid in the fifties and the sixties, we’d get on our bikes, I’d be, you know, on a summer morning, down at the community swimming pool with a hundred other kids, all of them peeing in the pool at the same time. And then I’d look across and there would be Lisa. 12 years old. I’m 12. She got that cute little bikini thing going over there. And I would fall in love right there. And I’d never met you before in my life.
Alan Graham (21:45):
And then in five minutes, you’re over there with Dan holding his hands, and now I’m devastated. I’ve been rejected by you. And I’m now I’m angry as all get out of you. So I’m going to figure out a way to get you into the parking lot and just put a whoopin on you. And we’d get out in the parking lot. We’d flail at each other for about three minutes, and then we’d look at how stupid we were. And then next thing you know, we got our arms around each other and we’re best friends. You see what I’m saying? This was what used to happen when we lived more intimately in community. And we don’t do that now. We’re so isolated in the way that, that we live. And when you are chronically homeless, you’re chronically homeless because you have been abandoned for whatever reason by your family.
Alan Graham (22:32):
And there are a lot of reasons. Catastrophic loss of family is what we believe is the single greatest cause to homelessness. They come out into society and we see them standing on our street corners. And all we want to do is yell and scream and push them further away. Okay. We don’t even want them under the bridges anymore. We want them so deep. There’s a growing population of homelessness on the fringe of Austin today, because of all the efforts to get them out of our respective neighborhoods without ever moving the needle. So they’re totally without a community. They got their little isolated community.
Dan Graham (23:09):
There was just an article in the Statesman about this, that over the last three years, we’ve issued as a city, over 18,000 citations for trespassing and other offenses that are specifically targeting the homelessness. Over 70% of those have resulted in arrest warrants because of inability to pay. And criminalizing essentially poverty.
Alan Graham (23:31):
Yep. And there isn’t anybody on the planet other than people that are just not involved in that conversation that thinks that that does anything other than creates more of a train wreck for us. So that’s, that’s what we’ve done at the Community First Village. People are living in very small houses, micro homes that are 200 square feet or less, RVs that are 399 square feet or less, some of them less than 300 square foot. We call this place a 250 bedroom, $18 million mansion. And when we reframe what home means, it begins to have a different impact cause you and I will look at home as that address place that we live. But in reality, home is much bigger than that. And then if you come in to the Community First Village, there’s an outdoor Alamo Drafthouse movie theater.
Alan Graham (24:29):
There’s a 500 seat amphitheater. There’s a bed and breakfast that we believe is the largest bed and breakfast in the state of Texas – 20 units with about a 75% occupancy rate, which is about 2x the normal occupancy rate of a BnB, a medical clinic, a store, operations building, art house, woodshop, blacksmithing shop, glassblowing shop, full blown, organic farm, dog park, neighbors irritating each other and coming together and resolving a conflict. You know, like we used to resolve at the swimming pool deal. And it’s all about that stuff. And the fact that it’s a tiny house was peach. People are enamored with the tiny house thing, but that’s not the thing we should be enamored with. We should be enamored with how we welcome each other and learn how to be far more tolerant than we are of all the different aspects of human beings that we have in this world.
Dan Graham (25:30):
I’d love to, you know, kind of going back to the entrepreneurial mindset a bit, you know, and I think one of the most fascinating things to me about this, in addition to the outcomes in the community that’s built, is the model and the ability to scale and continue to go solve these problems and these challenges that we have as a community and bringing dignity back to the homeless. And I mean, those RVs and the places that they’re staying, those aren’t free to them. They’re actually paying rent and using all those stations and areas of the, of the land that you mentioned as places to earn income. And so there’s, there’s an economy and an ecosystem there that I think is fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about how that works?
Alan Graham (26:19):
Well, I’m a, I don’t really know how to describe myself from a political point of view. I’ve actually wanted to start a new political party called the Repub-Dem-Lib-Indie-Bendic party. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, with a benevolent Dictatorship as a side to that deal. But I’m an extraordinarily, socially conscious human being, but I’m principally conservative. And it was kind of the mirroring of those two philosophies that oftentimes seems at polar opposites in the political realm. I love our government. I love how we struggle so hard to take care of the poor in our country. But we also have to work out how we diminish a humans value by creating an entitlement mentality. And I don’t want to use the word entitlement the way that a right wing wing-nut would use that that word.
Alan Graham (27:32):
It’s just that you and I as human beings need to be purposeful in our lives. We need to be able to participate in the economy. We need to be able to participate in a way that allows us to meet our basic needs. And there are things that we have done publicly with laws that prohibit that, that make it very difficult for somebody to participate. When people pay rent and everybody pays rent, there is no free rent anywhere in the United States of America, there’s subsidized rent, but there’s no free rent. When people are paying, they’re invested into their community. They have skin in the game. And people also, I believe that there’s two fundamental aspects of who you and I are as created by God, number one, you and I desire to be fully and wholly loved, pretty simple.
Alan Graham (28:35):
I want somebody to hug on me, snuggle me, do all the things. And then we also want to be fully and wholly known. We want somebody to be able to say, you know, Lisa, Dan, what you are doing is a value to our community. And when you don’t get either one of those things, it becomes very difficult. So in the entitlement world, when we have discerned that you were disabled and you receive SSI or SSDI, it’s very difficult for you to go and participate in the world and earn additional income over and above that. And I have a whole nother philosophy, you know, around that particular deal. And that’s actually telling people, we want to keep you right here in this space. And what we want to do is we want to be able to come in and I think justly help them through their disability, but then say, we’re going to give you some extraordinary flexibility to build on top of what you need as a stable foundation.
Alan Graham (29:48):
And so the rent thing and the working part of the deal and the micro enterprise side of the deal is very important. And I think it makes sense for us, because if you don’t, if we don’t allow people to earn more income than the allocated disability income that’s out there, they’re either going to do nothing and that’s going to cost us because when you do nothing, it has a physical and mental negative collateral impact, or they’re going to go and work underground money and not contribute back to the economy. And I bet that’s billions.
Lisa Graham (30:23):
Wow. You all recently received I think it was a $2 million grant from the Downtown Austin Alliance to expand Community First Village. So what’s going to be happening there?
Alan Graham (30:35):
We launched on November the 8th and I’d been working deep here with several folks at the Downtown Austin Alliance for, for quite a long time, you know, about participating with us. We launched on November 8th the ten-year plan, a $60 million, 10 year plan to mitigate homelessness. We don’t really use the word solve and cure, we’re a mitigator. I think we’re going to have homeless in 10 years. We’re not going to, I mean, I’m 62 years old. I haven’t seen anything solved or cured in my 62 year period of time. So I’m thinking that this is going to be around. But can we become the city that’s actually going to move the needle more than anybody else has ever moved the needle? And I believe with our collective efforts in this city that we can, we can do that. Downtown is very focused on Downtown. The Downtown Austin Alliance. I am a giant fan of downtown.
Alan Graham (31:28):
I used to sit on the board at the Chamber of Commerce. I was in business here for many years, still am with, you know, Mobile Loaves & Fishes. It’s a viable, ongoing business. I love our downtown. I understand clearly the struggles that the downtown community is having in regards to the homeless population down there. But if downtown wants to mitigate that problem, they have to stop pointing the finger to city hall and step in and do that themselves. And I think what the Downtown Austin Alliance did was threw the gauntlet now, as one of the greatest witnesses that I’ve ever seen in this community, by saying we’re in, who else is going to come in with us? Because government, our government, our beautiful, awesome city government, state government, national government has got a lot on their plate. And homelessness happens to be one of those issues. So if we really want to do something meaningful, we have to really go to government and say, look, we’re going to take this deal on, private citizen people, but we need you to play a subsidiary role to the great work that we’re doing. And that’s, that’s the movement that we hope to get going, and the Downtown Austin Alliance slung it out there in such an extraordinary way. I’m impressed.
Lisa Graham (32:51):
That’s great. You are actually sharing your life’s work in a new book. Can you talk to us about the book, the title, where it came from and your inspiration for writing it?
Alan Graham (33:04):
A lot of people were asking me for a long time to write a book and I don’t write books.
Alan Graham (33:13):
I’m very ADD and I’ve got some writing skills, but, I don’t have the skill to sit down and craft all that. So I always said that I had to have a co-writer in order to do that. And I’ve had a number of people attempt to come in, but in order to do that, you had to capture this voice. And that’s not easy. My -isms that are out there.
Alan Graham (33:38):
But a couple of years ago, I ended up giving a tour to the wife of a pastor here in town. Her name is Susie Davis, wife of Will Davis from Austin Christian Fellowship. And we’re going around and all my -isms are coming out and she goes, you need to write a book, man. I go, I’m not writing a book. I get asked that all the time, it’s not on my bucket list to do. If that’s ever going to happen, I got to have a real publisher and a real writer that’s going to take my stuff and put it down on paper. And standing there was a young woman – she was 24 years old, I thought she was in her mid thirties – that worked for an agency here in town. A literary agency called The Fedd Agency owned by a woman named Esther Fedorkevich. And they started calling me and I wasn’t paying any attention to the deal. And finally they got mad at me and sent Susie Davis after me. She said, you need to answer this. It turns out that Fedd has 50 New York Times bestsellers. And so we put this proposal together and they ended up getting Harper Collins, Thomas Nelson, big publisher, and this young woman, Lauren Hall, and I, started meeting (who I thought was in her thirties). Had I known she was 24, I would’ve said “I’m out”. But she is a beautifully gifted writer.
Alan Graham (34:54):
It’s a movement that begins with an introduction about the Gospel Con Carne and ends with a chapter called “To end with the beginning in mind”, which is a play on Stephen Covey’s to begin with the end in mind. And the beginning to end with the beginning of the mind goes back to the book of Genesis and the garden of Eden, where God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it. And the chapters in between the front and the rear are all these relationships that I’ve had with men and women over the past 20 years that are just compelling stories and how each one of them connected me deeper and deeper and deeper into what the real true meaning of home is. That’s what you’ll get out of that book. Plus I think you’ll be inspired. It’s a pretty dang good book for a guy that doesn’t write books. It’s on Amazon. It was released last March. So Amazon, anywhere there’s books sold online, you will be there.
Lisa Graham (36:07):
And it is called “Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home”
Alan Graham (36:12):
Yep. That’s it. Thanks for that plug.
Lisa Graham (36:20):
Thank you so much. You guys just do extraordinary work. And I also just want to throw out, we’ve been out to the Community First Village. It is an amazing place and it’s very welcoming and you can come out and see the beautiful community that they have built and that where people are living right now. It’s really incredible.
Lisa Graham (36:35):
To learn more about Mobile Loaves & Fishes and Community First Village, sign up for a Saturday tour on their website, www.mlf.org, or pick up a copy of Alan’s book “Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home”. The Change The Rules podcast is sponsored by Chez Boom Audio and the talented Shayna Brown. You can find her studio at https://chezboomaudio.com/. That’s C H E Z Boom Audio dotcom and Change The Rules is now on iTunes. You can find every episode by searching Change The Rules, subscribe to follow us, and if you like what you hear, leave a review. Thank you.