The Leader Mentality
The Leader Mentality
How Echo Helps Veterans Escape Living Without Housing, Work, And Dignity
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A single mistake can feel like a life sentence, especially when addiction, eviction, or a criminal record shuts every door in your face. From Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we sit down with Joey Smoak, CEO of Echo (Eastern Carolina Housing Organization), to talk about what actually helps people climb back into stability and why “just get a job” is often the least informed advice we give.
Joey shares his own recovery story with painful honesty, including the moment he knew he had to change, and how that experience shaped Echo’s culture of peer support and direct accountability. We get into the stigma behind the word “homelessness,” the reality of approaching landlords with tenants who have evictions or felonies, and why restoring dignity matters. Sometimes progress starts with the basics: a safe bed, chef-prepared meals, a haircut, clean presentation, and a case manager who treats you like a person instead of a problem.
We also go deeper into the policy side of supportive housing: HUD and VA funding, compliance, performance data, and the national debate around Housing First versus service participation. Joey explains why a key to an apartment does not automatically solve substance use, mental health, or trauma, and how Echo tries to build a full path from crisis housing to transitional stability to permanent housing and even homeownership.
If you care about veteran homelessness, addiction recovery, nonprofit leadership, or real-world solutions to the housing crisis, this conversation will challenge you in the best way. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs hope or direction, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.
Welcome And Why Service Matters
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Leader Mentality Show with Rob Clemens. It is a beautiful day in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And I love doing this show because I get to meet some people that have hearts of gold sometimes. Sometimes I get to meet people who are just changing the world. And today we have exactly that. But before I get into that, I want to talk about why this is such a great show for me. Most people who know my background, I grew up in the military lifestyle. My father was an Air Force chaplain. You know, we lived everywhere from England over at Milden Hall. If anybody have we got some international viewers here at Leader Mentality, uh, shout out to the England uh side of things, but lived at Fort Bragg for a while. But I lived in that lifestyle, and I know how much passion goes into serving our military, serving our country, and what these guys put on the line every day. And so I'm always proud to say I'm an American and I'm proud of you know the life I grew up in as a young man. And so today we have a gentleman on the show that I think is really helping serve our veterans in a way that's just so powerful.
Echo’s Mission And The Stigma
SPEAKER_00Um, Mr. Joey Smokey is the CEO of Echo, also known as the Eastern Carolina Housing Organization. Joey, welcome to the show, my friend. Thank you. It's good, great to have you. You know, I know you're a busy man. I've heard legends of you, many, many legends. But uh tell me what hey look, we're we're gonna uncover all those today, and uh, but tell me what you've been up to lately.
SPEAKER_01Um, you know, Echo is uh our official name with the federal government is Eastern Carolina Homelessness Organization, which is what we deal with. We changed the the street name or doing business name, even though South Carolina doesn't recognize TBAs anymore to housing because of the stigma that's attached to homelessness and dealing with landlords and businesses, as soon as they hear that word, it's like the door gets slammed shut. Right, right. So that's why, you know, echo Eastern Carolina housing, that's why that name is about of course we do housing, but uh the population that we house are people that aren't experiencing the American dream, is the way I like to put it. Uh I do get emotional too.
SPEAKER_00So Oh, hey, you you know what we call that, Julie. That's uh podcast gold. Yes, he's crying. I love it. No,
Joey’s Addiction Turning Point
SPEAKER_00no, no. Uh I you know and my background, you know, to cover that real quick.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm from Walterboro, South Carolina. That's where I grew up in a family that owned a chain of furniture stores, so was kind of born with a golden spoon in my mouth. And I won't get too much into my story, but I turned that spoonful of gold into a spoonful of a word I'm not gonna say. The opposite of team minus. Right. And um, you know, I I went to Clemson University to go play baseball, ended up getting kicked off the baseball team for uh drug use the dugout during practice, and tried to put me out of school. My granddad and the chairman of the board of trustees were best friends, so I had to move off campus another year and a half, so that went downhill. But when I got there, the substance abuse issue with me, which is which drives the whole thing. Um and uh exactly about 40 days, I'll be 21 years cleaning something. Wow, that's amazing. And that kind of emotional thing. But you know, you got a lot of people, and addiction is a big thing, the opioid epidemic. It's not an opioid epidemic, it's a drug epidemic. It's been that way. The difference is, and I'm really blunt, so it became an epidemic when your EMS workers and coroners are going to gated communities and rich white people are now dying of overdose.
SPEAKER_02So now it's an epidemic.
SPEAKER_01Now all of a sudden, right, right. Now we're paying attention. That's my personal opinion. I don't work for the government, God forbid. I was I worked for them for free for uh several times. I've been a guest of the South Carolina Department of Corrections and uh Federal Department of Corrections. So I'm I'm not ashamed of it. Yeah. I was for a long time, but I'm like, no, you know, did it serve its purpose of me? It got my attention.
SPEAKER_02Sure.
SPEAKER_00Look, can I ask you a question about that? I I feel like so many people, uh and and one of the reasons we do this show at the Leader Mentality Show, you might be at the top of your uh of wherever your cycle is, you might be at the bottom of wherever your cycle is. And sometimes people feel hopeless. They feel like, oh, I made that one mistake, I just can't get over. I I feel like you have a little bit of a triumph story here in the sense that not only did you get over it, you're you're lifting other people up now. But but tell me about you know, kind of what the turning point was for you, because you you know, that's a big deal. I think people need to hear this.
SPEAKER_01I don't know if I can get through it, but um When I was in the Department of Corrections, all drug-related stuff, and I had a visit from my kids. Uh five-year-old daughter, right and a seven-year-old son, that I had to sit on the other side of a concrete picnic table. I got up to hug my daughter. I acquired an extra 30 days in the parking, I couldn't touch my own child. Oh wow. And I'm like, this shit crap. It's never gonna happen again. Wow. Did it? It absolutely did happen. And um and it got to the point so hopeless that I've been, you know, in a fellowship that's anonymous that I can't say by name, which is what saved my life. It brought me into a personal relationship with God. I believed my whole life, but I didn't have a relationship. Oh wow. I didn't trust her. Wow. Believing and depending are two different things. Oh yeah, I agree. So that's what those 12 steps brought me to. And I ended up having to go to a place in a sumpter that I ended up running for 10 years before coming down here and starting Echo to go get cleaner sober. Sit down and have another grown man tell me to sit down and shut up. That's not what's really going on because I played the blame game. My mom's fault, my dad's fault, his fault, based fault, and everything until I could point a finger at everybody else, but I couldn't turn it. Pointed at me. So all of that, it was 28 and a half years of active drug addiction. I had five businesses and five houses in three different states. I had to borrow $500 from my mom to get into that treatment place in some time. Man. So all out the window. Yeah. And Dollar Mountain the last 10 months, $865,000. Wow. Yeah. Cocaine's expensive. Yeah, dog. So you you got so I got it, and anybody I've worked with probably 10,000 alcoholics addicts, there's no difference in the two, because the drugs and alcohol is not the problem. Extreme selfishness is the problem. It's just the ego. And I have never, including myself, seen anybody get clean and sober and change their life that did not do it in a response to their own personal pain. Not your kids, not your parents, not your family. You can't do it until you become, and the guy that wrote the big book of this one fellowship's like, here's the reason all these people have come in and never gotten being able to get clean and sober. They didn't realize they were hopeless. So it was it flip the light switch when you use that term. I get you, I get you. You realize there's no hope anywhere. And it comes down to, okay, I didn't realize God was the only thing I needed. I realized it's the only thing I gotta left.
SPEAKER_00Wow, this is powerful, man.
Accountability Through Confronting Thinking
SPEAKER_00No, it's it's amazing stuff. I I love that you mentioned a word here. I think it's a very important thing. Uh, we talk about accountability, right? So, uh what a lot of people don't realize is as you're going through your journey in life, your personal accountability is often what got us to where we're at. Both the victors and the spoils and all that good stuff, right? You know, it's it, you know, I do something good, I prep, good things happen down the line. I do something bad. I don't think bad things come down the line. The beautiful part is we can always turn it around. For a place like Echo, Joey, um, you know, obviously so powerful, such an important part of your heart. I know a lot of your heart's in this. How do you take people who may not have heard about this accountability mission? What's one of the first things that you know that somebody is either A, about to turn the corner and get accountable, or does this question make sense? I'm trying to find out, like, you're looking at people coming in, and sometimes somebody's like, that guy's about to turn, or that, you know, whoever is about to change over. Um, how do you see that? How do you breathe that in people to understand the power of that?
SPEAKER_01Way I see it is personal experience and that 20 years of working and that recovery world. So that program and that daily way of living and that dependence on God, I'm not going to do this generic higher power stuff. Sure. A lampshade's not going to change anybody's life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so it comes down into so my thinking had to change. And their thinking is gonna have to change. And so, how does someone's thinking change? I don't think there's any way to change anybody's thinking without confronting it. So I'm absolutely, you maybe don't tell the further way we go, I'm a confrontationalist by nature. Okay. I had to be confronted about the way I was living, the accountability part you told me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Somebody had to hold me accountable because I thought I was God. You're wrong, I'm right, you're wrong. You know, and the guy told me, he's like, well, here's how this works. If it ends up being that we're right and you're wrong, you're in trouble. But the worst thing is if you're right, we're wrong, everybody. That's a great point. Yeah. So for that thinking to change my whole way of thinking. So what it's saying is this is in that big book also, it says that means you've got to throw several lifelong conceptions out of the window. Like, I can do everything, I'm not accountable, whatever. I didn't have to throw several out, I had to throw them all out. Yeah. But through my personal experience and working with probably 10,000 people in recovery over 21 years now, it's like it's it's a it's a sixth sense or whatever. You know, and you know, if you're sitting there listening to it, they're blaming this and blaming that, blaming that. I cut them off. And I'm like, I hear you. That's not really what's going on.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01Here's what's going on. And then, you know, motivational interviewing is a tactic and peer support training and all kinds of other training. And what it really is is creative listening. So you listen to that person, what all they're saying, and blame and blame and blame. So they're admitting what's going on, what the problems are. They said, Oh, and you know, you go, well, you identified this. Well, here's some resources. Here's what we could do. Would you be interested in addressing that in this way?
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01So it comes from really the gut feeling of personal, because I've been where they've been. 65% of the employees at Echo have lived experience with homelessness, including myself, the judicial system, uh, substance use, untreated mental illness, or common domestic violence, a combination of all of them. So Echo is kind of built on that foundation. We don't talk at people, we talk to them. So the peer-to-peer-to-peer support thing is a big thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then the ones that maybe don't have the personal lived experience that worked in the field to where you kind of it's like saying you're part of the Lakers because you bought a jersey. You ain't really part of the Lakers, that's trickle-down celebrities. That's fair. That's fair. And you know, so I went to this place, I went through this life-changing thing, and that place where I went was funded by a Hood Continuum Care Homeless Grant, which introduced me to that. So after living there for 14 and a half months, they're like, Would you be consider coming to work here? Well, I knew I still have some more and stuff. I'm like, sure. Oh, yeah. Protective wall of human community. Sure, sure. And um, so I'm like, yeah, and I was, you know, sitting in there and dealing with all this, and I got asked to take over the grant stuff. Because I come from a big for-profit background. Oh, yeah. And and so to cut, make that long story short is somebody did that for me, and that's why I do what I do. Wow. And I'll spend the rest of my somebody, they asked me that one board member said, Well, how long more are you thinking about do this? And I'm like, until I'm in an urn or six feet of dirt on top. I think I would die of boredom. So this is true. I see that. The leadership thing, I'm as unorthodox with that as you possibly can be. I don't believe in micromanaging. I don't believe in looking over somebody's shoulders, like Christina's with us now. I know her. I know what she's capable of doing. She got a proven track every she goes way back with me when I first joined the COC board and put that person in that position and like this is what we want to accomplish. I'll go do that.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah. Well, hey, don't bring them in in the first place if you feel like you've got to watch everything they're doing and tell them what to do, right? It's ineffective to me.
SPEAKER_01I've been to all kinds of management seminars and leadership conferences and all that good. But, you know, I don't know any better way to put it. You have to lead by example.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And stuff doesn't roll uphill, it rolls downhill. So, you know, I went and took this industrial psychologist Tesla and I fell out with family business and lost all mine as farmer's furniture. And I knew Sherwin because he's from Montbird. Sent me to Atlanta, this industrial psychologist. And he asked me these 50 questions. He said we're going to take a 10-minute break. And I'm like, okay. So he starts. I got 50 more for you. He got to the second one. I'm like, stop. He's like, I'm the psychology industrial psychologist here. I was like, I don't care what your title is. You're going to ask me the same 50 questions in a different way, and you think I'm going to give you a different answer. Uh-huh. Yeah. He's like, Well, you might not be a good fit for the organization. And I said, Well, that's fine. I said, I'll call Sherman and tell him that's what you said. He said, We'll have to give him your report. And he said, Let me ask a question. If you can jump six feet, how high do you expect your people to work with you to jump? I said, six and a half. I was joking with him, of course, but I said, People don't, you know, they don't do as they're told. They do as what you inspect them to do. And look at, you know, looking over and providing. So the leadership thing I look at, if there's an issue, I don't look at it as a problem. Granddad instilled it to me. He said, What do you hear when you hear the word problem? I'm like, negative. We have something's going wrong, the world's gonna come to an end. And he's like, No, change it to opportunity. Oh, yeah. You hear that word, that's what that means. 100%. So that's how I look at it. It's just an opportunity for us to get together as a think tank or group or whatever, or me and whoever it is. And like, no, okay, well, there's a workaround for that. There's a way to fix that, but I mean, it's not the end of the world. I mean, nobody's perfect, but that's the leadership style, whether it's textbook, I know it's absolutely not. You know, my old CFO that was my best friend, he said, you're not only the most unorthodox CEO I've ever seen, you're the most unorthodox Christian I've ever seen. Okay. He's like, Do you cuss when you pray? I'm like, sometimes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a personal relationship. I mean, never gotten a text saying, You can say this, you can say that, you can't do that, you can't. That's that's a good point. But so I'm really steeped in that faith, and that's what changed my life. Yeah. No human on earth has the power to change somebody's life. You can provide the resources and a plan and all that kind of stuff, but until they truly get willing and they've gotten to that point of being hopeless, yeah, or even more than this way, they've run out of options. So let's go fills that meal. Let me ask you that. Well, here we are.
SPEAKER_00I want to get I want to get to that then. Let's let's let's go to the root of this. You you talk about sometimes you have to plant a seed. That's kind of what I heard there, you gotta plant a seed. Uh right. With Echo and and you talked about leadership. So one thing I will tell you I believe about leadership, I believe everybody at your organization can be a leader. You know, you got a manager who has to make the decisions, but leaders can be everybody out there. Um when you're bringing in somebody to be a resident at Echo, I'm gonna use the term resident, I don't know if that's the right one. Um, if you feel like you're you're not getting through to a person, I uh that's inevitably gonna happen. What what checklist do you go through for that? I mean, how do you as a in the leadership role try to get to somebody you feel like you're not getting through
Echo’s One-Reason-To-Help Philosophy
SPEAKER_00to?
SPEAKER_01Well, it g it gets frustrating to the case manager that actually works with the clients and so echo my philosophy. The whole organization is built on and always will be. Somebody comes to us and there's ten reasons not to help them, whatever they got, what felonies, rental evictions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Ten reasons not to help them. There's one reason to they need to help. This is where they printed, I said, I don't give a damn about the ten. Let's focus on the one. That one goes away, there's nothing we can do. Wow. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It may take two times, it may take three times, we may get them housed, they may get evicted because when we house them in most of our programs, the lease is between them and the landlord. And our case managers and everybody trying to convince a property owner to sign a one-year lease with somebody with no income, little income, five evictions, two felonies, whatever the case may be, is a very difficult task. So you have to get to landlords that have some humanism and passion. Absolutely. If not, and they're just looking at, oh, they gotta have two and a half, three times the income. Who in Ory County, we serve 13 counties, and then three in North Carolina for veterans, who has that kind of income? The rents have gone up, phenomenal. The incomes, here's the rent, here's the income. You know, yeah. So it's a really tough job, but it it all is driven by the compassion, and like I told you how many of our people have that experience, we've all been in that spot. Somebody reached out that hand, and we're gonna be that hand until we can't be that hand.
SPEAKER_00So there's a lot of legitimacy in a leader who can say that you have been there. Because I think a natural thing, especially if somebody's not being accountable, is to say, oh, you don't know what it's like. You know, you don't know what it's like. So you can indeed say, No, I know what it's like. I've been there, maybe even relate with some of these people. Tell me a misconception that people have about homeless people.
SPEAKER_01They're that way by choice.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Just don't want to do anything. I hear it all the time in council meetings and all that kind of stuff. One particular won't say names. It's like, no, that way we just need to put them in a deputy's car, drive them to Galavancer, hit them with a stick and tell them don't come back. Wow. Yeah. I lost it in that meeting, and all the TV stations were there. I'm like, hey, man, I can't believe you said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In my prior life, before having the experience and having to become hopeless, I told homeless jokes everything you could think of. I was, you know, up here with the family and my own businesses between here, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. And I got a reality check. And then somebody put that handout. So it's um that the big misperception, misconception is, is that most of that way because they choose to be. It's almost like more they equate it to laziness. Show and tell in second grade like Joey, what are you going to even be when we grow up? A drug addict and on the street. No. Not what I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. I think in in general, I I think uh, you know, I I use the equation of, you know, the guy who drops the the pass in the end zone during the Super Bowl. He didn't do it because he wanted to. Sometimes things happen, and and hopefully somebody will be there for you when you need a hand to get back up.
SPEAKER_01One of these leadership things I went to, Lou Holes did it. I'm diehard Clemson painting Blue Holes fans. But he is one of the best motivational speakers ever. Yeah. So he did the analogy about a team, you know, and managing a team as to a fighter pilot flying a jet, a military background. He's like, you could have Maverick himself flying the jet. If the flight plan coordinator, the people that put the weapons on the jet, the fueling, the systems of the jet, the flight plan and then flight coordination, if they don't exist, that supersonic will take him to one site, the site of the crash. Yeah, yeah. Without that, you know, so you've got you've got this person up here, but everybody has to work together and get everybody in the same mentality. You can do it. You know, so that's one of the biggest things I'll spend one. I'll get people in our leadership group that get this um, I won't really say self-esteem, but don't have confidence. It's like, how do you help build that confidence? And I think the way to do that is give them a job and say, here's what we want to accomplish. Now go design to where you think it'll work, but meets regulations and compliance. Let's do that. And if we need to adjust along the way, that's what we'll do.
SPEAKER_00Perfect. So I love that we're talking about jobs. And uh so I want to set this up real quick. I got the opportunity to tour the facility, uh, and this place is amazing. I mean, it's so impressive. In fact, it's almost an optical illusion. You walk through the doors and you think it's gonna be one thing, and you get in there, yeah, and this is amazing. I mean, uh there there was a beautiful little room where somebody had donated a theater kind of a setup for the people to come in and enjoy, which by the way, I'm sure you guys will take donations if that's uh uh, you know, so everybody shout out, go check out Echo. But the other thing is as I was walking through, you know, just seeing the way you guys did it, you wanted to create an environment where people could, you know, really get back on their feet, you know, and and and sometimes getting back on your feet is just getting a shelter over your head and having a a warm meal. Absolutely. But then you talk about the job part of it. Tell me a little bit about that. What does that look like for somebody who comes to the facility?
SPEAKER_01For helping them obtain. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you got a people, you know, a lot of people are unemployed that come to us, majority, or underemployed. Okay.
Misconceptions About Homelessness
SPEAKER_01Which may be a bigger problem than unemployed. You know, like I talked about rents and wages don't match. But so, and it's that same person I was talking to about the the issue with the landlord, with whatever their record or background is. Do they have a skill set? Do they not have a skill set? Have they only worked under the table or whatever the case may be? So they really have no resume, don't know how to do a resume. Yes. And then a lot of them come to us in not the best hygiene shape. You know, it's one of the things about people choose to be in is like they just know getting to go get a job. Okay, I'm living in the woods, or I'm living in a car or an abandoned building. My self-esteem is so high that I'm comfortable walking into some guy or lady's office that runs a business and saying, Will you get me a job? You know, everything so much is now on the computer and online, which I don't like. I won't add-eye contact with the person I'm gonna hire. And getting there, so it's very difficult. So we partner, you know, we work with Goodwill, has their job program, vote rehab. Everybody we can reach out to is community partners because it takes a village for sure. Absolutely. One of the issues is most communities, this one being a big one, people work in silos. We do this, we do this, we do this, we're the best at doing that, we don't need that. And so you don't have a collaborative effort at that point. You got everybody that's the king of everything. Oh, right. But employment is a big thing. It's a real big thing with HUD now, with the HUD funding, not necessarily with the VA. Most of the veterans that we get have some type of VA disability, or we have people at work, we got a partnership with the DAV, State DAV. Our board chair's husband is on the National DAV board. He's their biggest donor. The facility's named after her and him.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And uh is dedicated to his dad, who was a Air Force.
SPEAKER_00Can we say their name on here?
SPEAKER_01Yes. It's Terry and Al Nards Lico. Beautiful, beautiful. And Nar Nardmore comes from Nard from Nard's Lico and Moore is her maiden name. Stick the two together, and that's Nardmore.
SPEAKER_00See, that's where I was wondering. I heard the name, I was like, that didn't sound okay. Gotcha. So that's a conglomeration.
SPEAKER_01He's a disabled compet. Mm-hmm. And Terry was a respiratory therapist by trade, but has a lot of feeling about uh homelessness and addiction. I don't share the personal experience.
SPEAKER_00Oh, no, not at all. But but one thing that you're that you're talking about there. So I feel like for people, if you find yourself and you're in that position where you're thinking, man, I can't get out of this rut. I'm that I think one of the first things is uh I I'd I take this down two angles. I heard uh uh psychologist Jordan Peterson talking one time and he said that sometimes just your very posture can affect the outcome of a of a conversation. You know, if you're slumped over and you look like this, no confidence, and so there's a recommendation of look at your postural flexion, you know, how you're doing it. But I saw a picture, and I and I hope I can talk about some of this stuff. When I had the opportunity to tour the facility, um one of your people uh got a chance to show me a picture of one of your gentlemen. And I believe um what's the the there's a company that partners with you guys and they'll come in and cut hair for uh great clips. Okay, great great clips. So they come in and they'll they'll do free, my understanding is free grooming for your for your people that are attending the facility, which uh is amazing. And the thing that's so powerful about that is they're changing the way that they're presenting themselves. And so she showed me this picture of a gentleman. And if you're ever at home, and this is for the leaders and potential leaders out there, and you're thinking, How do I change? Sometimes it's just the way you you present yourself. So this gentleman he had he was unkempt, his hair was unkempt, his beard was kind of full. Picture one, he's slumped over. Now, after they got done cutting them high and tight, got them back to that military style. His next picture, he's like, you know, smiling, and I thought, man, this man's life changed with a good hair. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01You know, I know the picture you're talking about. He's on top of the world.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, but there is great clips, supercut.
SPEAKER_01I don't want to get it wrong, but I think it's great clip.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But Yeah, it's a life-changing thing for them. Yeah. Some of them haven't had personal grooming like that in years. Right. In years. And it's just it helps bring about in the environment you're talking about. It's a beautiful place. It's well furnished. We got a the chef
Dignity Supports Jobs And Stability
SPEAKER_01that's there is a 28-year combat vet from the Navy, who was a professor at the Culinary Institute at HCC. He left that to come do this for veterans. Nice. So they get three or chef-prepared meals a day, whatever they're eating, and it's just helping bring that sense of self-worth back.
SPEAKER_02Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01And then going to the job thing, the same thing about the way I look, my posture, whatever, and that was kind of the point I was making, is you expect them just to flip a light switch and go out job searching. Yeah. Well, you know, getting them stabilized, which is what that facility does for veterans, you know, getting them stabilized and where they feel like a person again, and you know, and they're removed from the drinking or the drug or whatever or whatever, or a lot of mental, you know, PTSD and a lot of things going on there, and and they've gotten their lives gotten to that point and they serve the country when you're talking about the veteran population. You know, homelessness in the country is a disgrace. Honorably discharged combat vets, homelessness is beyond a disgrace. Absolutely. That's up there again a personal opinion. And and the parlay on top of that, so some of the other programs that we have is 26 of them total. You know, we have programs with crisis housing, that's crisis bridge housing for veterans. Yes, sir. We have several located in Ory County, Sumter County, and Florence County for substance use disorder. Eight of them to be exact. We have several for domestic violence, human trafficking, stalking. HUD's definition of domestic violence is completely different than Department of Justice. They don't have to have a police report where they actually got beaten. Gotcha. If there's a history of it or fear of it, we can remove them from that situation, put them in this temporary transitional crisis house, get them stabilized, help them get a job, get income coming in, whether it's disability income, whatever the case may be, and then get them in that into a one-year lease in their name with a landlord. So we have both angles of it. So we have those programs for domestic violence, human trafficking, unaccompanied youth that are 18 and 24 years old, not accompanied by an adult 25 years old or a parent or whatever. Tons of them out there. It was shocking to me how many. Um substance use and then mental illness. So if there's a gap in services in a population in our 13 county area in South Carolina, and the funding notices come out, I'm focused on that gap. We need to fill that gap. There are no programs for them, there's nothing for them. One I've been uber focused on for years and still fighting with is the autism. At 18 years old, they're out of the system and families don't want nothing to do with them, can't handle them. Is it misdiagnosed the whole time through school? Probably. Oh, yeah. The amount, how many kids that are born, I think male kids is like four out of every ten. And Oregon County was an up, which shocked me.
SPEAKER_02Yes. That's how yeah that's the same.
SPEAKER_01But they don't fit into the federal system anywhere. Kids aging out of foster care, which is what that 18 and 24. We have we got this kinship model. We can get the host family to agree if they want to keep them, even though the state won't pay them anymore, we can pay them up to $500 to $1,000 a month to continue to let them live there. Wow. So we're always looking for things that are different, not just a cookie cutter like a voucher from a housing authority. That's not what we do. And getting in there and dealing with the issues, the core reasons that landed you on the street to start with.
SPEAKER_00I love that. So so tell me a little bit about this funding. Um, you know, because obviously this doesn't come out of the air, right?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00So how do you guys get funded? Uh is it is it grants, is it donations, what's the It's a combination of everything.
SPEAKER_01I built the organization on a federal grant from the VA, the Supportive Services for Veterans and Family. We had Echo is the lead agency, official name is the collaborative applicant. Like when I write all of our applications, I have to write one for the whole 13 county area. And it's date by data, performance measures that you know, numbers don't lie. Here's how they perform. Yeah. So it's grant funded, it's revenue streams. We have a contract with the V8 the facility went through. Those are contracts. There's 20 beds in one program, 20. 20 of the beds require them to be VA service connected, 20 of them don't. It just goes by discharge status, the DD 214.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So we have we acquired a uh community housing development organization that was here called Grand Strand Housing, with nine affordable rental houses and an empty lot. We've acquired that. They decided they didn't it wasn't feasible for them to continue. And then we are developing our own housing. And uh we got some under development now, and then we have the two houses on 12th Avenue that stick out like a sore thumb, donated by board chair, part of it and most of it, that are for women with substance use issues and mental health. Okay. They're right across from Chamber of Commerce, they're beautiful. They're, you know, these houses are over a million dollars a piece, but and you know they have access to clinical services, to therapy, just to sober living and everything. You got 15 beds in one and 12 in the other. And then because of Echo, it's one of our as a program within ECHO, and having the ability to permanently house them. So there's really no recovery treatment places like in the country that can take you from the street or after detox through the initial intensive stuff that's needed for substance use and untreated mental illness to that point where it's more now you're living on your own, just sober living. And then, you know, in a group situation, then you got the ability to get into your own place, and we can provide all that. So it's it's a different model. Yeah. But we just we look for gaps in services and housing, and that's what we write.
SPEAKER_00I you know, I'm glad you you reiterated that because uh I my tip for anybody who's looking at building a business, and I'm usually talking at for-profit. I love that you mentioned the for-profit earlier because you know, obviously that's who so many people think, right? But what do I always tell a new business owner, a prospective business owner? Come up with a new angle, something that's not been served, something that's a gap in the service industry. Everybody wants to copy everybody.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, same old thing, cookie cutter.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But so you can do this in the nonprofit world. You say, who is a group that is not being uh covered in some form or fashion? So that's a powerful lesson, no matter what happens, that people can understand. We need to be looking at where are people not being serviced, whether it's nonprofit, for-profit, whatever, think about what you're doing there. So very cool stuff. You said something a little bit ago that it kind of made me feel like you you're driving down the highway and you got no brake pedal. And I feel like sometimes that's what life is like, you know, for some of these people, it's going so fast, everything's coming at them, they can't even stop. And what you guys are doing is kind of providing a break for them. Let me let me hit the brake, get them in it, slow it down a little bit. And that's getting them in a in a bed, getting them in a facility, give them a warm meal, like we talked about, getting them uh groomed and and things like that. What do you consider to be some of your best success stories over the years? I mean, you've been doing this a long time. Like an individual success story?
SPEAKER_01I w I would relate that as and it relates to the individual clients we served. Echo's been this November will be 12 years. I was the executive director that was not paid. I was still working in Sumter at the recovery place where I got sober and lived in Florence. I came down here eight in the morning until two, drove to Sumter, took on the shift at four, supposedly get off at midnight, sometimes one or two, then drove an hour to Florence to sleep. I did that for over a year. I had two people. We had one grant that managed the database, $128,000
Programs That Fill Real Service Gaps
SPEAKER_01grant, and then got a $30,000 emergency solutions grant to provide some housing from the state of South Carolina. So that was in 2014. So 12 years later, during the pandemic, we doubled in size and grant revenues or revenues each one of those years. We didn't lose people and lay people off. Our stuff just went through the roof. So it it's a dramatic growth in that 12-year period. And uh so the success, as I would relate it, is because the way we do it from a compassion standpoint and humanism, and most of us have been there, and the way we work with the people and dealing with the core issue, just not that you live in a shelter or you live in a tent or whatever, getting a roof over the head is the first issue. But if we don't deal with the core issues of why you got in that situation to start with, we're in a groundhog day or a hamster wheel forever. So you ask me what I'm doing now. The funding regulations have changed from A to Z with the new administration. So what we have been operating under this whole time is a program called Housing First. Put them in the house first and then deal with the issues. Great. But you can't require them to participate. Okay. They could be out there, you know, smoking crack, whatever, untreated male illness, and you can make the resources available. You can go here, you can do this, you can do this, but you don't have to, and we'll just pay you rent for 12 months. Oh wow. Yeah. So I'm a big proponent of the new administration and service participation. If you want us to help you, you've got to help us help you. And one thing you can't do is you can't tell help how to help you. So it's getting that message through. So the success is we've been kind of operating that way for a while. Yeah. You know, you want to help, you're going to have to help yourself. I'm, you know, one of the things in the fellowship where I was in the serenity prayer, and, you know, God will do the things for me that I can't do for myself. But he ain't gonna do a damn thing for me that I'm perfectly capable of doing for myself. Oh, I love that. I I gotta help too. Absolutely. And so now the grants are going to participation, and it's not permanent housing, so 40% of all the federal grants that deal with homelessness are now going to a transitional state where you can have them for two years to deal with those core issues and get them on a path to self-sustainability. The whole goal is for them to eventually own a home, which is what Echo's also working on that. Okay. Sort of like I had a tap model, but a little bit different. So we have it from the emergency to transitional, the permanent, which would be rental, and then the ownership thing. That's you know, full circle, which is my master plan. We got I got a PowerPoint pipeline thing drawn up for it. I like that. But there's nobody outside to do it. Who else is gonna do it? Who's gonna give that person a chance to own a home or to be in a lease that's got four evictions, that's got a felony on the record, whatever the case may be, and it makes works for $10, $12 an hour. Yeah. Where are they stuck? Where are they gonna rent a house in Ori County Myrtle Beach when a one-bedroom, the fair market rent is twelve hundred dollars a month? We used to get those units for $750 furnished. They're $1,400 now.
SPEAKER_00I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Market rent's $1,800.
SPEAKER_00It's almost like that's a whole problem for people who got jobs right now, much less somebody who's just trying to get out there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So the new thing is we're gonna bust our butt for you in dealing with these core issues, but we're gonna have to deal with them or you're gonna keep coming back.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because we won't we don't agree to pay the rent for 12 months out of the year, but in certain programs, most of the rapid rehousing is short to medium term. You know, we work from paying, you know, the rent for three months up front, and then we go, nothing's a cookie cutter. Every case is different, so we're case by case. So down in down in the trenches, so to speak, at the ground level, I hate sitting behind my desk. I would just soon be out there, you know, bringing some donated furniture to the family to see that look on their eye, because normally, without grants don't pay for all that kind of stuff. That's why we need the help of the community in donations and the donation center fundraising. It doesn't pay for that. You give somebody a key to an apartment and the general public expects them, oh, they're no longer a drug addict anymore because they got their own apartment. No, they just got a key to their own private crackhouse. Uh oh. If you don't deal with the issues or whatever the case is, then it's it's a disaster waiting to happen. It's multi-pronged. Yeah, the current president and secretary Secretary Turner is amazing, in my opinion, former NFL player. Yeah. And I heard one of his things on X. I followed him, and somebody was giving him a hard time about you don't need to get a ra rid of housing first, you're violating his civil rights. I'm like, mm, I'm on a lot of national panels. I'm like, no, you're violating my civil rights as a taxpayer. To have a perfectly able person that we put in the house refuses to do anything, get a job with all the help and pay his part, and you're it you're okay with us just paying the rent 12 months a year. I'm not.
SPEAKER_02Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01As a taxpayer. And don't give me this violating somebody's civil rights. There is is housing a right? Yeah, but it has a cost with it. Housing's not free. Absolutely. So how do you pay for that? When our assistance ends, so quite a few end up 30, 60 days later, they're being evicted and right back into the system because whatever reason got them there, we were not allowed to, you know, tell them you gotta participate in something here to deal with this core issue, or this is never gonna stop.
SPEAKER_00How do you make a real change if you actually aren't gonna make a change? I mean, you just give them a check, you know what is that gonna lead to?
SPEAKER_01So it leads to this people confuse in all of our problems because they'll go on the websites or hood or VA and they confuse eligibility with entitlement.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01You might be eligible, it don't mean you're entitled to nothing. That's fair.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so it's like, you know, some things that come along, and you know, we got a there's no thing such thing as a waiting list, they say. They want us to call it a priority list. There's almost 3,000 people on that list right now while I'm sitting here talking to you in our 13 counties that are in a housing crisis. Wow. How much money and how many people and landlords does it take to physically solve that? And will homelessness ever be ended? That's a pie in the sky to anybody that believes that that can happen.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's always gonna be there. People all when they get evicted, what are they? They're homeless. So we have programs that serve eviction too, that we can stay the eviction, you know, by paying the back rent and paying forward a little bit. But then you gotta look at somebody's in a fifteen hundred dollar a month lease with a thousand dollars a month income. Why we're gonna pay for almost five thousand dollars back rent when you go be right back in eviction court 30 days later. Yeah, you might have to do that. So we can rehouse them, look for one that does fit, but they gotta be willing. So the new changes are allowing us, it's gonna create a sense of willingness because if it doesn't, our guideline is you exit them from the program.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01So it's it's an A to Z paradigm shift.
SPEAKER_00You you're just hoping you can make that difference enough.
SPEAKER_01And the way you make it is by treating them like a person and talking to them.
unknownYeah, cool.
SPEAKER_00Joey, this has been really enlightening for me. I hopefully it's been enlightening for the guests today to be able to listen to this, listen to the power of the story. Uh the thing that I thought about as you've talked today, we've talked about some key details, we've talked about accountability, we talked about giving people a chance, we've talked about, you know, changing somebody's life and and you're doing this through your facilities. If someone were to come to you and they said, you know, I want to do this, I want to start a nonprofit, what would you what would your advice be to them?
SPEAKER_01To start a nonprofit, to work the same kind of issues is make sure that you're going to build your infrastructure capacity first, that you can handle if you're going after grant funds. It comes with a lot of compliance and federal regulations, so you got to make sure that your core of your organization as you start it has the capacity to be able to follow and meet compliance and all that. Or, you know, a lot
Funding Rules Shift Beyond Housing First
SPEAKER_01of nonprofits, nonprofits have a stigma with nonprofits too, because a lot of them get in trouble for not dotting I's and crossing T's. So is it is it a wonderful thing? If you're gonna pursue federal grants or some state grants, you pretty much have to be a nonprofit with the 501c3 tax designation with the RS, or you can't apply. A lot of people, I would make sure that if you have properties you won't use for the houses and you own them personally, and that prop property goes into the nonprofit's name, you no longer own it. The nonprofit owns it, which means nobody owns it. Okay. And then setting up your bylaws or your governance charter with your policy and procedures, you need to have a dissolution of assets in there. So if the profit doesn't work and it dissolves, where do those assets go? Because if not, the Secretary of State of South Carolina will take them over and you may have a Coburg milk dairy at your property. They can give it to whoever they want to. So is it a bright, shiny world? It gives you the ability to do the things. And one of the things I'd like to say, nonprofits do make money. It's called program income.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01No individual is allowed to put it in the pocket, it has to go back into your programs to expand or cover debt, you know, gaps and grant funding. Yeah. Because it's, you know, it could be considered income or unrestricted income, whether it's a donation or whatever, but that income coming in, so the difference in a for-profit nonprofit is a tax designation with the IRS. For-profit, you can put in your pocket. Nonprofit, it goes back into the programs, and your mission is what you said you wanted to do. So I would say make sure your mission is very clear, your vision and how to do it, and the core of it with the people that you put into the nonprofit, have the experience or ability to understand regulations with funding and all that. Otherwise, my personal opinion, you could be setting yourself up for disaster and current atmosphere, fraud, waste, and abuse is rampant. It's definitely a real thing. Yeah, yeah. And uh not get yourself caught in that situation.
SPEAKER_00So it sounds like to me there's a lot of legality to it. Yes. You know, like if anybody actually needs the legal ramp, you know, it sounds like you'd be a great resource. And I hear in there, you know, a passion for what that thing is that you want to do. Find that gap, serve it, have a passion for it, because if you don't have a passion for it, you're probably gonna give it up because it's it's it's a lot.
SPEAKER_01Me 60, 70 hours a week.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I go home at night. And here's a key, I think, that you actually hit way early when we first met each other before the show started. And you say you gotta find good people, you know, you have to find people who care, you've got to give them some ability to go do what they do best. And so I I think that's a magical thing. Sounds like you built a great culture over there. Joey, how can uh people find out more about Echo and all you're doing?
SPEAKER_01You can go to our website, which is echousing.org. And so there, you know, all the different programs on there, but especially ones that I was talking to you about, like Nardmore, which is the old Magnolias on 65th Avenue North for veterans. So you can find that under Nardmore in the under Veteran Services section. There's a lot of other veteran services available. Sea Change is the two new houses for women in recovery in those situations. You'll see it under Sea Change. That's what that program's called. All the other programs are Echo. I mean, all of that's echo, it's under the umbrella, you know, and separate, and you know, you got all these like different entities working under one parent organization, supposing. But they're not separate, it's all a part of echo. You know, and go back to something you just said a minute ago. Did I found Echo as it exists now? Yes. Echo today is nothing more, no greater, no less than the sum of the people that work today.
SPEAKER_00Oof, man, that's powerful.
SPEAKER_01Is it all about me? I'd like to say, damn right it's all about me.
SPEAKER_02But no, it's not.
SPEAKER_01It's not. You know, who who in the like I did the fighter pilot and flight crew analogy, it's like, you know, you could be the biggest genius in the world, but you don't have the people working with you to carry out those things. I mean, you're you're like headed right for the scene of the crash.
SPEAKER_00Man, you know what I love about that? That's true of every single great team out there. You know, you can't do it alone, you gotta bring in the right people. Yeah. Well, Joey, very good having you on the show. I appreciate everything you said today and learned a lot and uh learned a lot from touring the facility. I do want to tell all my uh listeners out there, thank you for tuning in. And if you know somebody who's in a crisis, I want you to know that they're not alone. And if you yourself are in a crisis, I also want you to know you're not alone. There's always a brighter day ahead, but sometimes you gotta look at accountability for how you got there and know there's resources out there for you. People who are coming from a spirit of giving and a spirit of love. Don't be embarrassed, go out there, make a better day for yourself. And uh, I think that's a great place for us to sign off. Thank you guys all for listening. We'll see you all next time on the Leader Mentality show for Rob Clemens.
