Patterns & Paradigms | The Pattern Podcast
Patterns & Paradigms | The Pattern Podcast
Patterns & Paradigms | Season 2 Episode 03: Unshattered: Social Enterprise & Recovery with Kelly Lyndgaard
After hearing a woman's heartbreaking story of addiction, Kelly Lyndgaard was moved to make a difference. Inspired by the strength and commitment of women doing the hard work of recovery, Unshattered was born. This week we’re exploring social enterprise and the road to recovery through the lens of Unshattered, a Hudson Valley non-profit with the mission of helping women in recovery to build a path forward.
This week's episode features Kelly Lyndgaard, Founder & CEO of Unshattered, a 501c3 non-profit social enterprise providing pathways toward economic independence and sustained sobriety for women winning their fight against addiction. The women of Unshattered hand craft bags and accessories out of repurposed materials as a tangible representation of the transformation happening in their own lives - something discarded and without purpose crafted into something beautiful, purposeful, and meaningful.
We are experiencing a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the way we usually do things. We are intentionally choosing to see the silver lining opportunity arises. We can shine a light on the things that weren't working well on those things that weren't really working at all, we can regroup reevaluate and re-engineer it's time to explore new patterns and paradigms those that inspire us to rise above the chaos and explore how the conditions of today and take us to a better tomorrow patterns and paradigms the pattern podcast from Hudson Valley pattern for progress. Your listening to season two, episode three, unsheltered, social enterprise and recovery with your host pattern, president and CEO, Jonathan Dropkin.
Speaker 2:I hope you're able to join us last week for our episode with architect Michael Murphy, Michael is truly one of the most creative architects that we've run across in a long time. Um, who's has the capacity to, to integrate environment with, um, buildings in a way that has gained recognition throughout the world. I hope you have a chance to listen to it. Um, I'm going to be brief about a trend that I want you to look at, but it's so exciting that if you were ever a fan of the Ford motor company, Mustang, Tesla is now going to build an electric version of the Mustang. And so if you bought it because you wanted to, um, have a car that had horsepower, if you've ever driven a Tesla, this is going to, so they were previewing this for a group of people and the reaction, the list of people who own the high-end automobiles. Um, but this is, uh, actually I think it sells, it's going to be sold for just over 40,000 with a$7,500 rebate from the federal government making the cost about 32,000. So not crazy, not obviously for your, you know, person with less money, but kind of interesting in watching this trend of what happens with electric cars. Um, please remember to subscribe to us at Apple or wherever you find your podcasts. And other than that, Joe, Cheika what's up, Joe. I thought this week we had to the governor Cuomo's state of the state. And, uh, there was a lot on housing.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So as you said, last week, the governor released his state of the state in, he did it a little different this year. It was in a series of, of, uh, three or four different press conferences. And so part four, the state of the state included language on how to ensure access to affordable housing. And as you know, as a past secretary of HUD housing is very near and dear to the governor's heart. So I wanted to cover a couple of highlights very quickly from the governor. And we'll start off by saying, we're entering now the fourth year of a five-year housing plan that he had set forth in 2018. The plan had promised a hundred thousand preserved and new affordable housing units and 6,000 supportive housing units to date. Well, the States about 66,500 with 2100 new supportive units with another 5,000 in the pipeline who are doing very, very well, right on, right on target the governors for proposals for housing in 2021, we're going to run through those pretty quickly mortgage relief for homeowners and assistance for renters moratorium on foreclosures. Now set until may and proposed to be extended through the end of 2021 moratorium on evictions through may in a ban on fees for missed or late payments to the property owners, the renters are actually going to be able to use their security deposits for immediate payment, and then repay those deposits over time. Again, these are proposed for 2021 number two investment in supportive housing. He wants to create an additional 20,000 units over the next 15 years. That's a pretty big target, but I got a feeling they're going to be able to do that. Number three, expand access to the state of New York mortgage Hagen's agency. Otherwise known as sone may in an effort to combat discriminatory lending practices and build wealth in historically red line communities, neighborhoods of color and low income households. They want to expand. Sony may essentially reducing the barriers to entry for homeowners. They want to increase a program that's called the downtown down payment assistance program from 3000 to$7,500. They want to expand the number of lenders that can actually use Mae products by adding more small banks, credit unions, and an entity or entities that are called community development, finance institutions, otherwise known as CDFI. And they're primarily in business to, um, to serve people in, um, in, in low income communities authorizing sone may to offer temporary loan modifications. So borrowers can stay in their home homes during these, uh, these times of crisis. That's, that's the last part of his sone may proposal opening other pathways to home ownership. That's his fourth component of housing launch, the give us credit program, and that has five pieces. He wants to target borrowers with non-traditional or fluctuating sources of income allow financial support for family members and friends allow borrowers to rely on traditional sources and various layers of down payment assistance makes it easier for applicants to overcome past financial hardships, to qualify and reward borrowers who demonstrate a song, a strong alternative credit history that about wraps up his four elements of proposals for 2021 in housing.
Speaker 2:Hey Joe, um, I, there's a big difference between the way in which the governor delivers the, um, state of the state. And this year was actually very different than how we did it in the past. It was broken into four separate half hour presentations. Um, but then there's the 330 page written version, which you and I, and the staff had pattern, Oh, he's actually read the entire document. Are you satisfied with what you read? You know, all these elements, these sound like they came from actually the written document. And was there anything that you were hoping for, or do you think that these are actually heading us in the right direction in, in new York's housing crisis?
Speaker 3:I think they are heading, you know, they're, they're pushing us in the right direction. Uh, clearly over the last three years, there's been a great advancement in housing. Has there been enough? No, there hasn't, but it does come down to, to, to critical element of who's going to pay for it. And there's one missing piece in here that I thought should be in here and that's grant assistance to property owners because of missed rent from people that have been impacted from the financial crisis through COVID-19. I know that the state has put up some loan programs and the loan programs are good to a point. And the reason I say that is people will have to pay those loans back. They are not grants. They're not going to be forgiven and landlords may or may not end up receiving all of the missed rent from their tenants. So at some point the rent does come due. So does the mortgage, so do all of the other expenses. So this domino effect, dominant domino activity of the rent doesn't get paid. The landlord doesn't have the dollars, somebody's going to end up missing something in there. And a grant program I think would, would be a great help.
Speaker 2:And it's very interesting. I know that, you know, your work in affordable housing, um, your concern for tenants, um, but you're actually saying, as you look at the entire picture of housing, there are a number of, um, landlords that still also have to, um, have enough working capital so that they don't walk away from the buildings they own. And that's part of the puzzle.
Speaker 3:Well, that's right. And if they do walk away or if they're not able to make, uh, you know, maintenance repairs, if they're not able to make those other improvements, that's going to unfortunately have the potential of leading to disinvestment. And that's just the opposite of what the governor wants to see. Um, and obviously all of our housing agencies want to see in, uh, in our, in our communities. So it's, it's going to be a, it's going to be a tough road to come back. Uh, the next six months, I think we're going to learn a lot. And then the latter half of this year, uh, we'll we'll make, um, there's, there's going to have to be some changes made. I think that's my prediction for 2021.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Joe. And we'll all look forward to when the governor presents the budget for the next fiscal year, because, um, while the state of the state is sort of like painting a canvas, it's the budget that actually tells you what he intends on doing. So, um, thanks for that analysis on housing, Joe, and I appreciate, um, your take on that section. Um, so let me introduce our guest for today's episode. Her name is Kelly Lynn guard. Kelly is the founder and CEO of an organization, a not-for-profit called unchartered here in Duchess County. Um, it is one of the most fascinating models that has been developed for taking people who've gone through drug rehabilitation or alcohol rehabilitation and move them into the next step of recovery. What unsheltered does is it teaches them skills for the production of women's handbags. Not surprisingly all of the participants in the program are women. Um, there have been at least 25 people. It's a relatively new model, um, that have worked with unsheltered and have successfully during their period, which unsheltered. Um, Kelly will tell you a hundred percent of the people while they were working with her, did not go back to whatever their, um, substance abuse was. It's a quite a remarkable record. It's remarkable story made even more remarkable by Kelly's background. Kelly actually was an engineer at IBM for 18 years. Um, she started off as an engineer and grew all the way up to the director of database management. Um, she did TJ planning for them. She worked with billion dollar portfolio and then decided that that was not what she wanted to do with her life. Um, so I hope you enjoy this special episode with Kelly Lynn guard and a discussion about unsheltered and the way in which even we hope our listeners could look at their lives. Um, and this is not just the people who participate in unsheltered, but pay attention to what Kelly did herself with her own life to pursue her dream. Hi Kelly, and how are you doing and how are you fairing throughout the pandemic?
Speaker 4:Well, thank you so much for having me hello to you. It's an honor to be here. I'm fairing pretty well. All things considered. It was a tough year for a million reasons, not the least of which is I unexpectedly last month lost my father at the beginning of the onset of COVID last March. And then he was an only child and his mom, uh, got sick. And so I have spent the last year caring for a mom and a grandmother on top of trying to keep a business alive here. So I'm doing well. I'm happy to have good people in my life that love me. Um, but for everybody it's been, it's been a lot, hasn't it?
Speaker 2:It sure has. I keep saying it's like concentric circles until that keep coming in on you. And then that circle is people, you know, very closely and it's, it seems that it's only a matter of time, but let's, let's just leave that aside for the next 40 or 45 minutes. And let's talk about this really fantastic program you've developed called unsheltered. So tell me a bit about its mission and what is it?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. So unsheltered is a non-profit five Oh one C3 social enterprise, our mission to end the addiction relapse cycle by employing women and providing pathways toward economic independence and sustained sobriety, not to pass that I ever thought that my own life would take, I was an executive with IBM here in the Hudson Valley.
Speaker 5:Wait, hold on. What did you say? You were an executive with IBM for how many years? And
Speaker 4:Yeah, I spent 16 years with IBM. The last couple of that, I was in a couple of strategy roles and I owned IBM's database business. So I had a P and L of over a billion dollars that I had responsibility for was growing my career and never thought that I would leave.
Speaker 5:So do what, what's your, uh, training? Was it engineering or
Speaker 4:Engineering and physics? So I'm a physicist by training. Yes.
Speaker 5:Okay. So I think there's gotta be a pretty good story here for how you go from an engineer and a physicist working at IBM would a billion dollar portfolio, two unsheltered what happened? Okay.
Speaker 4:Well, I happened to be at an event at my church and they were partnering with a local recovery program here in the Hudson Valley. And a couple of women from that program spoke that night about their journey through addiction and recovery. Leading up to that night, I was the type of person who thought maybe you should just be more responsible and put down the bottle or stop sticking a needle in your arm and get a job until I actually heard those women's stories of how addiction happened, how hard it was to get out of it and how hard it was to sustain their sobriety once they had gone through recovery. So in particular that night was the story of a woman named Emily who had been eight years old at the time she was taking care of her mom who was ill. She was from a broken home and her brother and at eight years old, a 15 year old neighbor thought it would be funny to get an eight year old high, fast forward, 10 years later, her addiction escalates and she is a homeless IV drug user that started at eight years old. And I just thought, wait a minute, what? I had no idea how young it started for most people, even my team right now, the average age of use is about 11 years old. I have one that started at five at the hands of a father. Um, and all of them would tell you that the substance abuse wasn't the problem. It was the solution to a different problem. It just turned out to be a really bad solution. Uh, so I got involved with that program fell in love with the work that they were doing and the journey that these women were on of getting to sobriety. But as I watched people step back out into society in a lot of cases, they didn't have job skills. A lot of cases, they didn't have an education, but most importantly, they didn't have a safe community to go back home to the relapse rate is really high. Um, depends on the substance you're talking about, but arguably between 60 and 80% of people that achieve recovery relapse and particularly in this opioid epidemic, that relapse often is death. And it just seems like a bad plan for us to cycle people through relapse program until that's the natural outcome. And I really believe that there was a way to change course for women and tap into their natural skill sets and help them thrive and survive in sobriety.
Speaker 5:So you, but when you started working with that program, were you still at IBM or w
Speaker 4:Yup. I was. So I, somehow I did it nights and weekends for a couple of years just getting it off the ground. In the very beginning, I just thought I was providing jobs skills training. So helping them, um, have a path where they had someone that could speak well of them and say that they showed up on time and they did hard work and they were learning leadership skills. But when you started watching women make these handbags, um, we'll talk about this, but they're all out of thrown away and discarded materials turn that literal trash into something beautiful that a consumer wants that moment where they sold a product that somebody wanted because they made something beautiful and useful, turned out to be life-changing for them. And I just saw this switch go on of potential and possibility and meaning, and we just needed the right pathway. So even if we got them job skills, and even if we got them an employer, the only place where they had any kind of relationships was back where they had been using, and it just doesn't work as much as you desire to go home and stay sober this time, it's a recipe for relapse. And so I realized that we didn't just have to solve the employability problem. We actually had to provide the job. We had to provide transportation. We had to had a connection to housing. Uh, we had to solve all of those resources to begin a pathway where women could succeed and build that economic stability so they could deliver all those things for themselves on their own.
Speaker 5:So, okay. So during the course of the program, you're volunteering with something happens, you hear, you know, a story, you know, dozens of stories. And then how do you conceive of the structure that you wanted to do for unsheltered? I, you know, the little that I understand of it, there's, you know, three stages are stage one, stage two, stage three, but you have a very deliberate approach. How did you figure out what you wanted to do?
Speaker 4:Yeah. While we've have certainly iterated and learned along the way. But I think the first realization, like I said is that, um, we had to get women away from going back to where their use was, the abuse was happening. Uh, and so I had built a program where they were learning job skills. They were making handbags. We were doing the six month internship process. It became clear that there was enough viability to the product and enough interest in talent from the women that we could turn this into real jobs. And so I left my career with IBM in 2015, and started to build a pathway that included all of those steps along the way. Uh, people often ask why in the world were you making handbags out of it? You get there. Uh, first I always have to confess that I have loved handbags since I was a child. I go to store to visit the handbags in the same way that people might go to the zoo to visit the animals. So I've always loved a well-designed bag. Um, and then I had, after my grandfather passed away, I had his suite codes and it hung in a closet for a long, long time until, I mean, it was, the seams were ripped out. It was too big for me. It was just going to stay in the closet, but it was special and I would never get rid of it until one day I got brave enough to cut out the good pieces of the suede, sew them back together into a tote bag and have something that was meaningful and useful at the same time. And so I thought, I'm sure we could get people to donate some old leather coats. We could recover some fabric from companies that are throwing it out. I'm sure we can find a few pieces. I knew how to, so my mom taught me growing up and those were the components, but it just took off like wildfire beyond, even beyond my wildest dreams of what we were capable of doing, um, together with these women.
Speaker 5:So as, as I understand it, stage one is in recovery at one of your residential programs that are partners of yours. So how does someone go from, how do you find the women that are then part of unsheltered? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yes. Well, obviously I do not have a background in social work or in addiction recovery. And so it's very important to partner with organizations that know how to bring people out of addiction, to do the detox, to get them back on their feet, to rebuild the health and psychology around sobriety, right? So we lean on those partners to help women get to sobriety. Our job is to step in and build that pathway. I like to say that we paved the road between sobriety and long-term success. So we partner with recovery programs around the country. Um, most of them are 12 month programs that tends to work the best a 12 month residential program, and then offering a woman an opportunity to come in. So, so for the local one that we work with, we will start training them while they're still a student in the program. Um, but for some of them, we will bring them to unsheltered after they complete their program. They start with a 10 week training program where we're just teaching them how to be an employee. Uh, that took me a long time to figure out is that in a lot of cases, not only have women not held a job themselves before, uh, but often they didn't have parents that were coming and going to work each day. So they, they lived in some chaos that they just never learned those principles of employment and employability, that that's where we have to start to teach them that part. And then at the end of 10 weeks, we kind of treat them like an entrepreneur that if they are doing the right work with the right attitude and, um, contributing their max to the team, they're eligible to create employment for themselves to come into full time employment with unsheltered.
Speaker 5:So are you also then helping them find a shelter, a residential, is there, is that a component of unsheltered or it's just something that you will assist them in and you're really the employer side of this.
Speaker 4:Yes. So we partner with one of the local recovery programs who has a transitional program, so they can stay in that. Well, they're a trainee. They stay in that program as no at no cost. Uh, we run a shuttle back and forth. So they have transportation to, and from work, they can stay there for roughly up to a year in transitional living. Our track record is that within a year of employment with unsheltered, we've been able to get everybody into their own home or apartment. But during that year, they can stay in transitional living. It's reduced rent. Uh, like I said, there's a shuttle, so they get transportation back and forth to work. And then we're working with partners in the community to help find them lower cost apartments, or people that have a room to rent, or, uh, right now we have a few of them that are roommates renting a great house near our location as well.
Speaker 5:So I, in your material, it says that you have a 100% rate of people who have been in the unsheltered program. That doesn't necessarily mean those who are coming out of a recovery, but once they're in your program, they remain, uh, sober. And if it, do I have that right? Or
Speaker 4:We like to say that we have seen 100% of our employees continue to choose sobriety. So we don't track after they have left us. In some cases they will leave and they'll choose to go back home. It's kind of proof of our model that if you choose to do that, we think your risk of relapse is really, really high, but we've had a 100% success rate. Every single one of our employees in our going on five years of providing full-time employment for women in recovery, we've seen every single one of those shoes sobriety during their time with us.
Speaker 5:And what's the, what's the give us a couple of examples are the longest couple of years that people have been with you or
Speaker 4:No, we, um, we have several that have been there going on about three years. Wow. One of them incredible success story. Amanda was a heroin addict, many, many years, several relapses in her history, uh, incarcerated, homeless, um, you know, all kinds of tough circumstances and choices in her life and came through our partnership with hoping home and has been with us. Gosh, I think over three years for her now, she has been promoted several times. She is our, um, product manager and creative lead. She last spring completed, uh, the leadership Duchess class with the chamber of commerce in September. She started her college education. Uh, she's built a relationship back with her young kids. She has a son of her own, so she has her own apartment, uh, with her son that she's able to support and just has been an incredible success story. She's spoken, um, in New York city at the business council of New York state, she's spoken at the white house about her story. She's spoken on podcasts, just really unbelievable to watch her thrive and grow and be an incredible example for the rest of the team.
Speaker 5:Fabulous story. So in thinking of your model, which is been, um, finding a, a, the next step from recovery is then finding a job and supportive environment. Have you looked at other programs or is this, have you ever thought this is, um, this, this model could be improved. I know you have big dreams about how it can be enlarged, but is there anything other people that you other programs because you've done so well at this that you've said, Hey, you know, I'm watching those people if only they would understand. So have you gone to speak to other recovery programs, have other recovery problems come to visit you? Yeah,
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, we don't have it all figured out. And in fact, I just got off a leadership meeting with my team and the message was like, you're here because I expect you to make mistakes in your work. We're learning. Our job is to always be on the bleeding edge of how we can improve and how we can serve better and how we can get more educated in the work that we're doing and improve what we offer and offer it to more women. Um, but we have been recognized for the work that we are doing. We were invited to the white house a couple of years ago, alongside Facebook, Google, Amazon, Walgreens, red cross, and little tiny on shattered to be recognized for our creative and effective work in fighting the opioid crisis. Um, we got to speak to the surgeon general and the heads of health and human services, um, really sharing the work that we're doing and why we believe it's working, what the pieces of our model and how we think that can be translated to other places. But even in those conversations, learning all the time from other people. One of my biggest inspirations is Becca Stevens from this'll farms in Nashville. And many, many years ago, I heard her say, how can you say that you love somebody if you don't care about their economic wellbeing. And I think that launched in my mind many years ago and just became a catalyst for the work that I'm doing now. So we're constantly learning and also constantly sharing what we have learned to help other services.
Speaker 5:So I would imagine during the pandemic, you like everyone else either had to rethink your business model a little bit, or maybe took on other responsibilities. What happened, I guess almost a year? Well, it's not quite a year ago, but back in March, let's say,
Speaker 4:Yeah. Wow. Uh, let's see. I think it was March 18th when the governor said that non essential businesses had to reduce staffing by 25%. And so I sat at my dining room table and I made a plan about who was going to work from home and how we could shift the workload and what we were going to do. And then on the 19th, he said, non-essential businesses can only be staffed at 50%. And I literally pushed the plan up and started over. And then Friday morning he said, uh, Nope, you have to only be staffed at 25%. That was 8:00 AM rebuilding by 11:00 AM. He said, Nope, all not essential businesses are closed. And at that point I was like, I don't, I don't, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? But he also said that there was a need for personal protective equipment. And so really led by the women on my team within 24 hours, we shifted to making masks. We partnered with a physician from Vassar brothers medical center. Uh, by Saturday morning, we were up and running on producing masks for our community. We donated all the masks that we made for three and a half months until we were able to reopen as our normal day to day business. So we donated 9,000 masks to over 240 caregiving, hospitals, jails, uh, retirement homes and nursing centers in the Hudson Valley community. So we were really proud of that. Um, but at the time, of course, our bread and butter is making a product. And while we're a nonprofit, we take donations, our product sales account for about 70% of our total revenue. Uh, so I told the team that I was committed to employing them for as long as I could. I knew that this was the most emotionally and economically vulnerable population that sending people in recovery home to sit on their couch for who knows how long was a terrible idea. Um, but I didn't know if we were gonna make another sense that year. And so I told them that we would just, if worst case scenario, I could get everybody to December. And I felt like that gave me enough of a runway. And I have enough of a network that I could place them in other jobs if I had to. But I put the cry out to the community to say, these women deserve employment. They deserve hope and a chance they deserve to be cared for. And the community truly responded and supported our employees so that they could make and donate everything that they were making. Um, the other thing I think that's pretty incredible. And I mentioned this at the very beginning when you asked, how I was doing is, um, March 26. So right after we switched our entire production and business model, my dad unexpectedly passed away. And so I was out of the office trying to figure out what to do through that take care of my mom. And then my father's mom got sick and I had to care for her. And so I was out a lot and had a lot of other responsibilities on my shoulders. And I'm telling you what a team of women who within the last on average two years were addicted, homeless, incarcerated, abused, rebuilt a new business from the ground up. They stepped up into leadership, they served the community. One of them said, thank you for trusting us with such a noble task, the incredible story to watch what they did.
Speaker 5:Um, the, okay, so we pivot they, but then you come back. So here's what I think I need you to do because the, the difficulty of trying to describe how special these handbags are is that this is audio, right? So if you were gonna sort of take a moment to try to say, you know, look it starts with, or each one I think starts with, uh, the repurpose materials. So there's something special in the material itself for the person that is seeking the bat. Do I have that? Right? And then, and then, so then take me through it and help, help me try to visualize something in an audio format.
Speaker 4:Right, right. Um, you know, I think most people's perception, you say you're a social enterprise and they think, Oh, people are just buying their products because they really want to help your patient. We're actually the opposite. Most people buy our product because it's really beautiful and really well done and really high quality. And then they find out there's a social mission behind it. So we make all of our bags out of reclaimed upcycling materials. Best we can tell we're saving North of about 3000 pounds of fabric a year out of mostly the Hudson Valley based system. Uh, so we're using things like manufacturing scrap. We use uniforms that the West point cadets are discarding when they graduate. A lot of that was going to an incinerator. Uh, we use that for Broadway shows, uh, reclaimed vinyl from company down in Tarrytown,
Speaker 1:Ultra fabrics that provides to the hospitality industry. So anything that you see in a restaurant or hotel that you think is leather probably is the high-end vinyl from ultra fabric. So it's a really high-end materials and really well-made bags. So we partner with Marist college, a lot on our design practices and, um, the structural integrity of the product, the efficiency of the way that we manufacture them. And we do everything from totes to really gorgeous handbags or clutches or wristlets. We do men's bags and do wallets for men. We do, um, like travel bags or laptop bags and the retired us army battle uniform. We do toiletry kits like to say, well, it's more manly then it's the trick is made up of a retired army battle uniform. Um, just some really beautiful things. Uh, we also have a custom line where, like I talked about my grandfather's suede coat, we take family heirloom and we'll turn that into a gorgeous bag. Occasionally we to pillows too. But, um, just really beautiful bags made from anything from a wedding gown to, uh, we've used Scottish health heirloom kilts from a family that belonged to a great-grandmother. We have used school uniforms, really amazing. Your kids' sports uniforms, a lot of things that you're just never going to get rid of leather coats. Um, one of everybody says, what's the strangest thing you've made a backyard. Well, one day I walked into the office and on our custom shelves, there was a pair of old running shoes. And I said to the team, and they said, Oh, they belong to somebody whose father he passed away. And, uh, you know, these weren't really special. The kids wouldn't have a toiletry kit.
Speaker 6:I think we can do that. They're like, Oh no, no, don't worry.
Speaker 1:And they did. They took the upper piece off the shoe. It took it off the sole reconfigured it until really gorgeous toiletry kit for one of the songs. It was just amazing. And there's something really interesting that happens through that process. Uh, here's an example. There were two women that their father was in the Navy and he had, uh, died in an accident, a boating accident when they were, I believe three and seven, they were young. In any case, they had one of his Navy uniforms that they brought in for us to make a really gorgeous handbag out of his uniform. But in the process of working through that design with their team, they started to tell stories about their father and the whole time it was like, well, I never heard that story about him. I didn't know that about him. I didn't remember that. And that happens all the time that, that tactile experience of handling a piece of your family history, re-imagining with our team, how you might configure that into something new and beautiful and useful just on earth, these stories and moments for family, that's pretty fun to participate. So we do that both virtually you can do a virtual appointment and mail us, uh, your heirloom piece, or you can do that. One-on-one with our designers.
Speaker 5:Wow. So they partner with you in the design and they get to say, wait, could you do a little bit of this or a little bit of that? And they add to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for example, often when we make, if you maybe lost a spouse or something, and we'll make a bag out of maybe a husband's leather coat, we like to keep a pocket maybe on the back of the handbag that maybe your phone can drop in there, but you can still put your hand where your loved one's hand was.
Speaker 5:So it seems not even a pandemic can slow you down. Um, so tell me a bit about your vision. You know, if, if this is it, if, if the world was good to you and you could take this model and you could scale it up, what would you, what would unsheltered look like?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, first of all, I think our statistics speak to the validity of our model, that we've had a hundred percent success rate for our employees continuing to choose sobriety. Um, we've been able to get all of them within a year out of transitional living into their own home or apartment. And we made it through 2020, not only with not a single relapse on our team. Um, but with the investment of the community, our sales went up in 2020, our, our revenue, both in donations and sales went up in 2020. So for us to have growth last year really spoke to us about how much our community cares about our work and cares about our women and identifies with the mission of unsheltered. I want to do more of it. Uh, our, our only limitation is the space that we need to function. We are in about 2000 square feet right now. We have 10 of us, several of us are working from home, uh, in order. I mean, we were, we were kept before this happened in our ability to hire more women, um, trying to stay six feet apart and still do that gets even harder. So I'm trying to, we've taken machines to people's houses, we've offloaded some of the work to other sites, but the only thing holding us back right now is more space and the investment to make that happen. And it breaks my heart to see the, um, to know that we have a waiting list of people that want to work for us. And I tell them now I had a woman a few years ago that we hired Brenda, who, uh, had lived in Los Angeles and spent all of her, um, 35 years of her adult life, um, incarcerated and using, and homeless and prostituting. And when she completed her 10 week training program and I offered her full time employment, she, she teared up when I offered it to her gratefully and then turned around and started to walk back to her space on the production floor. And she got halfway through and she stopped and she just started sobbing. And she said, I'm never going to have to sleep behind the trash can. Again, I'm never going to have to sell my body in order to eat again. And to know that like, that's what we're solving. And yet to know that I have women that that's probably their next best alternative save for me, offering them employment, breaks my heart to know that I literally don't have physical space for them. So step one is getting the funding and building. We have our eye on one right now. Um, so seeking the funding to be able to move into a larger space, to expand the number of people that we're serving. And then the big long dream is we have a model that's working and it's not limited to making handbags. We can build in the process that we have into other skillsets. So I would love to open a coffee shop or a daycare center or a women's mechanic shop, or you name it. Um, but what's really special about our work is it's not just making handbags, but 10% to 10% of their work time every week is dedicated to ongoing personal professional development. So we are not only paying for things like therapeutic counseling. We're paying them for an hour of their time to go and get that in, invest in their own wellness. We do lunch and learns every week with our community where people are coming in and teaching topics from heart health to creative writing, to how to use your phone, to take great photographs to you, name it, um, really just investing in that holistic wellness of the individual so much so that, like I said, we're paying them for four hours a week just for their personal professional spiritual development.
Speaker 5:Um, so it would be a larger building, more staff. Uh, how has, how has your marketing right now? Is there more that could be done? I mean, I know of on chattered because I'm in the Hudson Valley, but, um, is what would be the next step and promote?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is a great question. Um, that was another thing the pandemic shifted up until the end of last February 84% of our sales were face-to-face. We have a walk-in boutique and Hopewell junction. We're still open right now. Um,
Speaker 5:I was in Duchess County in the Hudson Valley, just for some of our listeners.
Speaker 1:Yep. Not too far from Fishkill. Uh, we did a ton of events around the country. So we were a sponsored vendor by country living magazine in their vendor fairs around the country. Uh, so 84% came from face-to-face sales now, greater than that is online sales. So now we have all the other things we had to address last year. Like everybody else, we had to become a digital business, which means we need social ads, digital marketing, Google ads, um, that's investment. And, you know, sometimes that feels disconnected from the work that we're doing, but it's through those investments in things like social ads and Google ads that drive the revenue for the product. And that revenue turns into jobs for women like Brenda, who spent many of her days slipping behind a trash can and selling her body.
Speaker 5:So it seems like there there's actually, there's two pipelines going on here. There's the pipeline of helping women through recovery. And then there's the pipeline of the products. Those women are making to be marketed sold in order to help reinvest in on shattered and continue to provide this, um, uh, environment for women to, uh, prosper. It is a, uh, for those who have worked in the recovery world, it is an incredible feat what you're trying to do here at Kelly, because the, the, you know, as you mentioned, the relapse rate in general is somewhere around 80%. And so if there is this period where you can actually, um, provide a window and add, no, no one has 100% all the time, at least while they're with you, that's sort of phenomenal success rate. Um, but no one can, uh, there are so many things that can go wrong. The collective environment of what is necessary in order to help people stay sober, whether it's from drugs or from alcohol. And they're usually coming from environments that most people barely can imagine.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That was me. I had no idea, no idea what people survive.
Speaker 5:What else would you want people to know about an on shattered? You know, so we've talked about how it came, you know, your background being an IBM engineer, which I can't think of a more disconnected, uh, uh, transition like, gee, I'll go to IBM, I'll be an engineer. And then I'm going to run a recovery program. Women's tan bags, the transition for you personally let alone the people that you have helped along the way. Um, what else should people know about on chatter?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, first it seems obvious that there is a huge disconnect there, but what I bring that I think is valuable and makes us succeed is that I'm very good at seeing patterns. And I think that has helped us
Speaker 4:Iterate and grow. And zero in on what's really effective about our business and organizational model is that as an engineer, I'm primed to see patterns of success. And so that's what I'm always using to constantly tweak and refine, um, the organization at large, but also to tailor the, the, the opportunity and the pathway of possibility for the individual. And so I spent a lot of time really trying to know them to understand their strengths and motivation, and to place them in a role where they can thrive and succeed. So it's everybody for the most part starts by sowing, but women in recovery pretty much run our whole organization. They do the whole backend of the website. They do all of our production management and fulfillment and shipping systems. They run our boutique there, they design the product, they handle our external relationships. So it's that bigger pathway that I'm trying to create for them to really succeed in a career, not just learn how to sell, right. And it's because I can see pattern in the way that they communicate in the way that they use a words that tells me how they think about the world. Um, what types of things they tend to succeed at gives me a way of making them really successful.
Speaker 5:I want us to stay with that just for a couple of minutes here, because this is a show about how do we get from the combination of a pandemic economic disruption, social unrest, to a better place. And the pivot that, you know, became such a overused word in 2020, but the pivot you made, you know, talking about yourself and your own experience is something that we're going to need a lot of people to do, whether they're, it doesn't matter what field they're in education technology. We are going to need a lot of creativity. And it's funny, the Hudson Valley has a whole history of its relationship with IBM and, you know, many people tell the story of how IBM was much larger and then it downsize. Then it left, you know, cities like Poughkeepsie and Kingston in significant, um, uh, decline. Um, and yet you were a current IBM or who saw something very different in the world and went for it. What would you tell, uh, someone in college right now who is struggling to say, I don't know what to do. My world just got completely up-ended and yet you, you did something truly remarkable in the sense of how you move from the safety of say a large employer that you had an established career with and set up, I'll take a chance. And we need to that entrepreneurial spirit. In your case, you invested that spirit in the notion of helping people in recovery, but what would you tell college students? Because that, that the essence of what you did is something that is critical, that we instill in people all over the place in many sectors coming out of the pandemic.
Speaker 4:Um, I think as much as my passion is creating opportunity and success for women who are in recovery, I'm just as passionate about changing people's minds in the same way that mine was changed. Um, before I had that encounter with Emily and the women who shared their stories at my church that night, if you would asked me if I would have hired somebody in recovery, I probably would've told you no, because I was just so uneducated. I mean, I, I just had a lot of very wrong assumptions. Um, and so part of my passion is changing people's mind in the same way that my mind has been changed, that this is the most tenacious, creative problem solving, committed, incredible group of people that I have ever worked with in my lifetime. Um, there's a quote I heard recently that said that talent lives everywhere, but opportunity doesn't and, and overlooking an entire population because poor, poor opportunity in their life led to poor choice led to poor outcome. The talent is still there. In fact, it's been exercised, maybe it's not in the right context, but if that can be redirected. Um, in fact, the surgeon general himself has a brother who struggled with addiction and incarceration. Um, but he, one of the things we learned from him was that people in recovery are actually the most reliable workforce because the rhythm and the community of work is so important to their recovery, that they miss fewer days of work than any other population. And I find that to be true. I mean, I have to force my team to take the sick days and vacation, and you certainly would not expect that. Um, the other thing I would say to a college students is, uh, well, I guess first at that point is that your passion of a business of building a product of whatever doesn't have to be separate from serving people who need an opportunity. Those can be the same thing. Um, and also a quote by Cornell West that I love it never forget that justice
Speaker 1:Is what love looks like in public. And so just treating people and employees and family and friends and the stranger who's in line of you and in front of you at the grocery store. And just the people that we're encountering. You want to have justice start with the guy who's driving you crazy. Cause he cut you off in the parking lot, right? Looks like love
Speaker 5:Kelly Lynn guard. I'm going to give you the final word there and thank you so much for spending some time with, uh, patterns and paradigms. It's a truly remarkable story and thank you for what you do
Speaker 1:Well, thank you. I'm honored to be able to share it. And I just want to encourage people to check out our website at unsheltered, that org, uh, we're just about to publish our annual report with all kinds of great stories and for the past year. So I'll sign up, you can go to our website, you'll get a little pop up for our email list as well. And to follow us on social media on shattered and why on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. So you can hear our stories and see our latest, amazing products.
Speaker 5:And if people are, were so moved other than to just purchase or get involved in the actual acquisition of a handbag, is there other ways that they can support or contribute to on shatter? Do you accept donations?
Speaker 1:We absolutely do. You can donate at unsheltered.org/donate. That is huge for us to help us grow and create more jobs. So we're always grateful for that financial support as well.
Speaker 5:Thanks Kelly. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to patterns and paradigms the pattern podcast. For more information about this episode, visit our website pattern for progress.org forward slash podcast.
Speaker 7:[inaudible].