Philanthropy Today
Philanthropy Today
Thrive! on the GMCF Community Hour Show Episode - 214
Thrive, a relatively new nonprofit organization, works to break cycles of poverty by building community support systems, increasing financial stability, and teaching essential parenting skills to families who would otherwise feel isolated and overwhelmed.
• Founded by Jamie Morris Hardeman in response to patterns observed at CASA, where families in the foster care system often lacked financial stability, support networks, and parenting skills
• Meets weekly on Thursday nights with approximately 50 participants including volunteers, families, and children
• Takes a multi-generational approach to address poverty by working with parents and children simultaneously
• Uses science-based stress reduction techniques including mindfulness, journaling, and doodling, which can cut cortisol levels in half
• Success stories include participants attending college, completing vocational training, securing better jobs, and becoming Habitat homeowners
• Volunteers are crucial to the program, working with adults, teenagers, or younger children depending on their interests
• First United Methodist Church provides their fellowship hall for meetings, which include shared meals and programming
To learn more or volunteer, visit thriveflinthills.com or email directorthriveflinthills@gmail.com.
Philanthropy Today is brought to you by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation. In this episode we feature a recently broadcast segment of the GMCF Community Hour, as heard on NewsRadio KMAN. Welcome back to the GMCF Community Hour. It is Monday. We do the show every Monday morning at 10, 10.07, you know to be a little bit more precise about it, but we have the great opportunity to visit with a lot of nonprofits and talk about some of the things that they do, the impacts that they make on the community, at least what their goals are. One of those organizations is a fairly new one. It's called Thrive and the executive director of Thrive is Jamie Morris Hardiman, who's well known in the community for being someone who has thrown herself into a lot of different roles, as a city commissioner and as a county commissioner and CASA in years past, but now she's the executive director of Thrive and it's always a pleasure to visit with Jamie Morris Hardeman. Good morning.
Speaker 2:Good morning Dave.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you've got a lot going on, it sounds like here with Thrive and many other things. So let's just talk a little bit about Thrive and for the newcomers to the show, what Thrive is.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I helped the found Thrive a few years ago in response to what I was seeing at CASA in the families that we were serving. So the families that we served at CASA primarily had three things in common they were struggling financially. So most of the families we see at CASA are in financial poverty. We saw a lot of families who lacked a support system.
Speaker 2:That was kind of a universal feature of people who ended up with kids in the foster care system was no support and they oftentimes lacked parenting skills and usually that was because they grew up in a home where they had not learned how to be an effective parent. And so Thrive was founded in response to that with the idea of let's create an organization that can work with families long term and help people to build their support systems, increase their financial stability and learn some skills. So the idea behind Thrive really is to bring people together in community to help people be able to dream and set goals and actually work to achieve those goals. So it's been a real eye-opening experience to see how just this group that meets once a week and hangs out together can really help people make significant changes in their lives.
Speaker 1:How many people do you work with on a regular basis?
Speaker 2:So on average we meet on Thursday nights. On average Thursday night we have about 50 people there.
Speaker 2:So we have people from the community who've come as volunteers, who want to just walk alongside people who are struggling. We have families, so we have a lot of kids that we work with, and that multi-generational approach to me so we have a lot of kids that we work with and that's that multi-generational approach to me is a really important piece of breaking that cycle of poverty. If we can work with kids, we really have the opportunity to build skills, get them focused on education and then move them to a place where hopefully, they will not have the same struggles their parents had.
Speaker 1:You know you talk about the education aspect and there's more to it because it is an emotional thing strain on many people when you talk about the finances and the challenges that they face. What kind of components do you have in dealing with the emotional aspect of the work that you do within your educational process?
Speaker 2:And that is something we learned very early on was that people come to us in survival mode, so our brains are wired that if things are difficult or stressful, we disconnect the thinking part of our brain and we go into reactive mode, and so it's imagine like your Wi-Fi goes out you have the information still there, but you can't access it. And so we spend a lot of time at Thrive talking about attachment, feeling safe, seen and soothed so that you can be secure. We spend a lot of time working on things like mindfulness and journaling.
Speaker 2:Rhythmic, repetitive motion has been shown to significantly decrease stress, so something like doodling for 15 minutes actually cuts your cortisol or your stress hormone levels in half. So there's some really great science now around how we can help people to reduce stress and what it actually does, all the way down to the level of your DNA. So this is me being my geeky science background, my education's in science and so I get really excited when I can think about how can we impact people's stress levels in a way that improves their cellular health, and so that's what I think that we're doing at Thrive is is we've got the big picture. We're trying to help get people out of survival mode and into a mode where they can be learning and curious. But we're also trying to help people learn skills that help them to improve their cellular health you talk about doodling.
Speaker 1:I don't remember last time I picked up a pencil yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's this really great book that came out last year called your brain on art, and yes, since we were just talking about the museum of art and light, it shows that even going to view art 15 to 20 minutes of viewing art reduces your cortisol levels significantly. But doodling? So what they did was they took people's saliva and they looked at their cortisol levels and they had people doodle for 15 minutes and it cut their cortisol levels in half, just to doodle. So writing does the same thing. It's anything that's rhythmic, repetitive motion, music, making music, listening to music All of those things are really important for our bodies to reduce stress.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I think that people need to work on is penmanship.
Speaker 2:That's a great opportunity to do that, isn't it? Oh my gosh. Yes, need to work on is penmanship.
Speaker 1:That's a great opportunity to do that, isn't it? Nobody writes anymore. I know, I know. When was the last time you just sat down and wrote a letter? Of course, for you it would be different, I suppose, because you're doing a lot of thank yous. I like to send mail. I like to get mail.
Speaker 2:So I send a lot of mail and so, yes, writing is something that people just don't do. Cursive.
Speaker 1:Let alone write it.
Speaker 2:No, they definitely can't write it Do they know what it is. They recognize it, but they're like I can't read that.
Speaker 1:I remember how painstaking it was just to stay within the lines.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, yes, yes.
Speaker 1:The little big chief tablets that we had to learn on had that spacing for us? Oh, but how? How far back can we date us here in the show? Yeah, so tell me a little bit about the structure of Thrive, because I know you used the word volunteer and you are an executive director, which denotes that you are staff. Is there other staff that's involved with the effort?
Speaker 2:There is. So between three people, we are one full-time person. We have Susan Wendland who does our youth programming. She's a retired educator, 33 years in education here in USD 383. And then Misty Lemoine is our coach, so she works with the adults. So we've got an adult person and a youth person and we meet regularly, generally speaking, once a week on Thursday nights. We have a meal, because we think that that's an important part of community is eating together. So we have a meal and then we have programming following that.
Speaker 2:For the summer we're just going to meet on the first and third Thursdays of the month. We're taking a little bit of a break. Summer is a hard time for people. Their schedules are busy, so we are just getting together twice a month for the summer, but come fall we'll be back to every Thursday night. The Methodist Church First Nation Methodist Church lets us use their fellowship hall, so we're really grateful for that space Perfect for being able to serve lots of people food. We have lots of community members who donate meals for us, so that's a real way that people can get involved and then people just come. We ask our volunteers to come twice a month and spend time as mentors, but also gives them a chance to work on their own goals. So if you are someone who wants to set a goal, you want to learn a new skill, thrive would be a great place to come and have support as you work on that new goal, no matter where you are in your life.
Speaker 1:Well, you can also grow as a volunteer or as a member of the staff, in so many different ways, and so you know everything that we strive to do. Whenever we volunteer, we're not just giving time, but we're also expanding our own abilities, and that's something that a lot of people, I think, sometimes take for granted.
Speaker 2:I think that's true. Volunteerism is significantly down following the pandemic nationwide. I mean, this is a problem across the country, but people just don't want to leave their homes. Right, They've worked all day, they go home. They don't want to go back out again and do something. But you can make such a difference in the community and in your own life. I mean, when I think about when I started volunteering with CASA 27 years ago, I was a young, dumb Johnson County kid who had no idea what was going on in the world and had no understanding of abuse and neglect or poverty or any of these issues. And boy, my life has changed so significantly because of the volunteer positions I've had in my life. So I'm very grateful for that.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about the process that's involved in becoming a volunteer member through Thrive. You have a website, you go through, pick up the phone, call. What's the best thing to do?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So our website's thriveflinhillscom. Encourage people to go there. You're welcome to give us a phone call. There's email addresses on there as well, so just encourage people to reach out and let us know that you have some interest in joining us. We're happy to meet with people to talk about what we do and what it would look like for you as a volunteer.
Speaker 2:One of our more exciting things we're doing right now is we have a lot of youth that have been involved with our program for some time, that have come with their parents, who are teenagers, so high school students now and we have a whole group of teens with some really great adult volunteers Jim Armer and Darius is leading that charge. So Jim's a retired principal from our district and he and Gavin Larios are kind of leading the charge on this teen group of trying to help these kids set and achieve goals around their education, but also just life skills. So if you like working with teenagers, we'd love to have you in that capacity. If you'd prefer to work with adults, and then we need volunteers to work with our younger youth as well. So if you're a person who loves to work with kids, we'd love to have you in that capacity as well.
Speaker 1:How do you gauge your success at Thrive?
Speaker 2:So we do quarterly evaluations of all of our participants, volunteers, everybody, everybody who's there gets a quarterly evaluation to look at the four core areas that we focus on, which are physical health, mental health, financial stability and healthy relationships or support system, and so we really focus in on those areas. But to me, success is today we have one of our former participants who is starting college, going back to school. We have someone who just finished up at Bellas Academy. We have two people who just finished their freshman year at K-State. We've got a couple people who've gone to the technical college and earned their CNAs and are making more money at their jobs, you know. So it's, there's tangible pieces to it, and I can say success is helping someone to get back to school.
Speaker 2:Success is having we have four Habitat homeowners through Thrive Right. Success is helping someone find a home. But there's also the piece of success is people have built community. When people come to us, oftentimes on those surveys they'll say they have zero people they could count on. You know, if your tire blew out on the side of the road and you had to call someone for help, how many people could you call? Dave? You know my list would probably be in the hundreds and I bet yours would too that you could call someone who would come to help you. Most of the people we work have zero, and so my goal is, by the time they leave us, they can identify five to six people who they could call on if they were in trouble, and I think that building community is such a powerful piece of what Thrive does.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, how can people find out more?
Speaker 2:Encourage you to go to our website, thriveflinthillscom, learn more about what we're doing, and we'd love to have you come visit us on a Thursday night and we'd be happy to give you some information about that. My email is directorthriveflinhills at gmailcom.
Speaker 2:So encourage people to email me if you want to, but we would love to give you more information about what we're doing. I think we are significantly changing lives, even though it's small. It's a small number of people that we're changing their lives, but the ripple effect of that through generations is going to be significant.
Speaker 1:And you can be part of that. You make an impact on one person. You're definitely making progress.
Speaker 2:One person at a time, 100%.
Speaker 1:The website again thriveflathealscom the executive director, jamie Morris Hardeman. Always fun to visit with you and thank you again for all the wonderful work you do, not only with Thrive but throughout our community.
Speaker 2:You are so very welcome, Dave. Thank you for everything you do to make sure people know about what's going on.
Speaker 1:It's part of the gig.
Speaker 2:I know and I'm so glad you do it.
Speaker 1:And have fun doing it as well.
Speaker 2:That's the best.
Speaker 1:Next segment Flint Hill Summer Fun Camp. This is always a joy for us to visit about and we're going to be visiting with the camp director here in just a couple of moments. This is the GMCF Community Hour here on News Radio KMAN. No-transcript.