Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: I'm Alex Stone, former military service member and law enforcement officer, now CEO of Echelon Protected Services, one of the fastest growing private security firms on the west coast. And this is ride along, where our guest and I witness firsthand the issues affecting our community.
I believe our proven method of enacting meaningful change through compassion and understanding is the best way to make our streets a safer place and truly achieve security through community.
Alex Stone here. Welcome to the ride along. Today's amazing guest is, well, number one. I'm your host, Alex Stone. Welcome to the ride along. Our amazing guest today is a friend and mentor, John Hollister.
Phenomenal career. He'll get into all that later.
Why don't you tell yourself a little bit about yourselves and then we'll unpack the rest of who you are later.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Well, Alex, it's a pleasure to be here today. And my background, I spent a number of years in high tech at great companies like Digital Equipment Corporation and Yahoo. And then spent a lot of time in the banking industry up here with us bank. And then the last 15 years, probably my most purposeful job is I've been working at a nonprofit or working for nonprofits, helping them selling software and helping them raise money for their causes.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Very important.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. Love that. Love that. So in your background really is sales background?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Would you say?
[00:01:44] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: You can sell anything. This guy can tell anything.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Well, that's why I went to college is I had to get a marketing degree so I could go sell things.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: So you, you originally grew up in California. You're from, you're from northern California. Nor Cal.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: And you probably spent most of your time there. What brought you to Oregon?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: The, well, in 91, the gray skies. The, the, actually what it, what it was, was actually the gray skies because of smog.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: And the, and it was just too crowded and too expensive.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: It is, it is crowded in California.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: I go down there. We're there all the time. You're always golfing at pebble beach, right?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Yeah, once, once in a while we get, we get down there. But the, but in 91, my, my wife and I said, hey, you know, it's too expensive here. Let's move somewhere. And I was in banking at the time and there are banks everywhere. I could go anywhere.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Great.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: So is either Switzerland or Oregon.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: It, well, it was, you know, I couldn't, I don't do humidity and I don't do snow.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: Don't move to Houston.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no Houston, you know, no east coast and Deb is canadian, so we moved a little closer to our family.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: I did not know that.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Well, so John and I are actually friends. We've been friends for a while. And like I said, I look up to him as someone that I want to be like when I grow up. Right. And, well, I'm six eight, so it's.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Tough not to look.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: You know, I'm working on that. I'm working on that. And so, yeah. And so I. I know his wife very well, and I did not know she was canadian. That's so interesting.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: So let's dive in. Right. So the ride along is about what's going on on the streets, and we've been primarily focused about Portland.
You have, not only do you have an amazing background as an executive with tech and banking and all that, but you've been pretty prolific with your, you know, your nonprofit causes. Right. You've served on multiple boards. You're always involved. Every time I, you know, I've. I've seen you in meetings before I met you, heard your name in meetings before I met you. And so you carry a pretty powerful voice when it comes to helping communities become better. So how did you get involved in that?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: What led you to.
We grew up in the suburbs. It was, it was great. And when we became empty nesters, it was too quiet. We were bored.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: So we decided the suburbs can be pretty boring if you're.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: If you're an empty nester.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So we just decided, what are you gonna do?
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Mow your lawn all the time?
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Oh, I said, what?
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Iced tea.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: I hated my lawn. I hated my lawn. I hated it. Because every day I sat, I go, I'm at the mow you in a week.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: I hated it. I hate it. So we move right down to the.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Pearl and beautiful downtown. Beautiful downtown residential area.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: It's the top ten neighborhoods in the country.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah. For years.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all the awards, we wanted to come down here, and what I began seeing, all the stuff that in, when I'm in the suburbs, you read about it, the stuff that's going on in cities. But I started coming down here, and even when it was great in the pearl, I would go a neighborhood or two over, and it wasn't so great.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: And I started seeing a lot of people in need, and I saw, I got involved in a number of activities with the city and began the deep dive of understanding how the city worked. And I got really concerned about the complexity of dealing with the city and how I could understand why, how normal people that weren't, didn't have quite as obsessive a nature as I.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Or the time. Or even the time.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I made time. It's the. I had a full time job. You do.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: You make time.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: But I was working here. I had very, very understanding bosses that let me. They knew my passion, and they really gave me a lot of flexibility to get involved.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: And so one thing about you that I would say is a direct passion of yours is working the solution.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: And so basically, what I hear you saying is you empty nested with your wife, your children, they left the nest. They flew off to college and did beautiful, wonderful things.
You're sitting bored with your wife, and you're thinking, I could be walking to a symphony right now. I could be walking to an opera. I could be at a really cool cafe. You know, let's move down into the city. And so you made that transition. You transitioned during the time when the Pearl district was an amazing neighborhood to live in.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Right. And you saw minor issues back then. Minor issues. Right. And so you thought, maybe I should. Maybe I can help out. I've done some cool things. I've worked for some great companies. I've helped work solutions that were multi billion dollar developmental issues and solutions. Right. Maybe I can offer my expertise and help and serve in a capacity. And as you're doing this over that, what, 1015 year period, the city kind of starts to lose its luster. We both love Portland, Oregon, so we're not talking bad about our city, but, you know, this is something that's more national. It's cyclical. It comes in cycles. Crime started going up.
So explain how that. What you were going through emotionally.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, when I moved down here and I started seeing things, I really, you know, the country's been very good to me, and so it was time for me to give back. And so what I wanted to do is, you know, problems at the federal level, the state level, the city level, all these various levels of things.
And I wanted to make my world small enough that to an impact my work in an area where I felt I could actually make a difference. So that's when I got involved with neighborhood association here in the Pearl District, because I felt like it actually make a difference in the pearl.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And you did, actually.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Well, one of the first things we did, it's the, with all environmental, you know, type things, is we didn't have enough trash cans.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: So me and a couple other people, we. We had this unlandish thing of, let's go raise a quarter million dollars and put in trash cans. And, and we did. And as you go around, there's 150 of them. And what's great when I see them is they have graphic designs on that. It was my wife that did all the.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: And they are, they are beautiful.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Yeah, they're, they're great. They're great.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: They're very artsy. And it kind of pulls into the neighborhood, the culture of the neighborhood. Right. And so that was a very successful program. In fact, I would say that the Pearl district, even today, is still the cleanest neighborhood in the downtown corridor. Right?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: It is, yeah. Right. Actually, today it's getting there. It's almost making some progress back. But there was a, there was a time where it was, in my mind, it was still disgustingly not that way, especially when we didn't have trash cans. My rule. My rule, and we didn't have trash cans. I would see a piece of trash. I would look up. If I could see a trash can, I'd pick it up. If I didn't, I'd leave it there. And I found myself leaving it everywhere. It's because we just didn't have enough trash cans. Now it's different now that we have all these cans. I see. So I pick it up, put it.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Literally on every corner.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They really. Yeah.
So we moved from, moved from trash cans to things started going. And we were looking at the non emergency line at the, at Portland. If you saw something, you saw someone in distress, I would call this non emergency line, and I was on the phone for 45 minutes on hold. And then just based upon the resources of the police, they weren't able to send something out. Send somebody out. So I go, that's just not right. That's not right. And the security and the thing that got me the most probably got me started was the car break ins on the street.
It's, the people would come down from all over the Portland metro area to the pearl. They would go buy their things and they'd put it in their car. They'd go have lunch or dinner, and they'd come back and everything was gone. And that was then they never came back. And I go, that's not right. So this kind of gets to where, how I, how I met you.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Is the. About four or five years ago, I said, I go, you know, we got to do something. We got, we got to find a partner in the security industry to work with us. And I went through and I interviewed about ten different, actually, exactly ten different security companies. Trying to find. Trying to find the fit. And I learned it a lot.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: I remember I got called into your big office.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: In your room. And you had, I mean, you probably had five or six whiteboards and then on top of that, you had the distance. The paper.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: I have a lot of flip chart. Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: It was diagram with a product, basically. Essentially, if you were. If it was a SAs company, it had been a product map. Well, a developmental product map of where, like the next five years. And it was pretty impressive. And I walked in, I thought I had no idea what this meeting was about.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Well, and it would. You. You say that some people might think it's like a scene out of a beautiful mind. Yeah, it was.
But what we were doing, and I learned this new term is a lot of security companies are observing report.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: And what I realized that meant is they do nothing.
Yeah.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: That function, if you actually. You can observe and report anything you want. And that's not actually a security function according to the department of public safety here in Oregon.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Unless you're actually going to take a security measure and actually do something to secure a person, place or thing that is considered security, but just watching something and observing it, kind of like. Like a fire watch. Doing a fire watch and observing crime and calling someone about it, that you don't even need a license to do that. It's. Right.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: And this is the majority of security. And.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Well, and it was. And it was. It was shocking. And then I found some on the other side that that came from very, very much of a.
Almost. They had a military type of approach, and I felt that was a little too aggressive and didn't feel like that was a match. And then when I met you and I heard your story, and it's security through community started to hear how your methodology was about relationship building.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: And then I remember going out with you and Reid. This must be four years ago.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: That was such a long time ago.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: And we walked the streets. And so here I am walking the streets with two people that have weapons.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Firearms. Yeah.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: We're confronts firearms. And so I wanted to see how the, how the people on the streets responded to that, and it was amazing how they did. And I'll never forget, the lady that you knew who came up said, oh, Alex, I've got another load of laundry, can you help me? And you said, listen, this afternoon I can come back. And then she said, oh, Charlie's down the street again, selling meth and threatening to kill everyone. And so you had a relationship and you were able to get intel from the street through the relationships that you built.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: And I go, that's what we need. That's what we need.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: And we're not just there to protect, you know, some wealthy person's property. We're actually there to protect those who are suffering on the streets as well.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Well. And if you really look at it, is they are the most vulnerable. They're the ones in the most trouble. They're the ones that need security the most.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Yep. They're drug addicted. You have all, you know, they're very, very vulnerable, especially, you know, ten years ago, only 5% of the population here in Portland was, you know, considered female. Right. But now you have upwards to 20%. And, you know, on the streets, if you're. If you're a female, you're more likely to be trafficked, you're more likely to suffer assault, sexual assault, these types of things. And, you know, you have to really think about that when you're doing your job. And these companies that just walk around and drive around and they don't make any contact with anybody. They're just waiting for a crime to occur in front of them so that they can call 911 and be on hold for 20 to 40 minutes.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: It doesn't. You're not really in solving anything. And so we were not interested in doing that.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Well, and here was. Here was still the. Yeah, so I met. This is a good fit. But there was still a problem. It just didn't.
It didn't read well in something like the Willamette week. It's Pearl district, armed and ready to go. It's the. Even though you are community first, you're a security company.
And that was just. There was just not a good perception of a security company coming in and owning a neighborhood.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: And so that often we get, you know, private security often gets mislabeled. Private policing.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: And a lot of people on. On really just the general population. I wouldn't even say it's ideological. It's just a lack of understanding. Most people don't understand that the power of policing comes from the government.
Only the government has the ability to police. The build. The ability to police is the ability to legally violate someone's rights, to suspend their right. Right of freedom of movement, of freedom of speech, these types of things. To suspend that right in order to conduct an investigation or to affect an arrest. And it's very rare that private security, of course, is something completely different. Private security exists in order to protect people's rights. So, like, let's say you want to congregate, or maybe you want to do a strike. You want to protest, and you want to have private security there to protect you. Right? Or maybe you're a film crew for a news agency and you want to go down to a very unsafe area, and you want to record crimes that are occurring, but you want someone to protect you while you're doing that. The freedom of the press. That's why, you know, private security really exists to protect people's civil liberties and civil rights. And private. Private policing is not private security. In fact, private security, when private security is done well through the lens of civil liberties and civil rights, it actually. It actually stops private policing from occurring. Private policing is when the government grants its authority to violate rights to a private entity, giving a private entity the ability to police. This is very similar to, like, Disney World or Disneyland. Like, why would you want a theme.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Park to have police officers and the general public so much information out there? It's private security. Private policing, it's synonymous. And the fact that the. And here, really, if we just want to cut to the chase on the big issue is I don't want people carrying firearms out here.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: And that's really what it comes down to.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: What it comes down to.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: And I'm anti. I'm anti gun. I understand it's a constitutional right, but why would we hire people?
You know, why would we hire people to carry guns? That's really what it came down to. Right?
[00:17:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And so here's what. Here's what I. Here's what I learned. And we wanted to be able to make this in a.
In a simple enough format for everyone to grasp. And the distinction is that a private or a security company. Private security company cannot take their gun out of their holster unless there is a life threatening situation to them or another human being.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Correct. It'd be a crime.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: It's a crime.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: It's called brandishing.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: And if you point your firearm, that you'd be illegally pointing your firearm if.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Somebody can't do that. And so that is illegal. And so why wouldn't we want to have people on the street that if they see a life threatening situation, that they couldn't help the person that was threatened? And so that's the difference, because this is not like the cop show on tv where they're going around every corner with the light on their gun. You can't do that.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: You can't do that. And this isn't like some type of protest in the sixties where people would carry firearms or this isn't like this isn't a militia thing either. This isn't just some random people carrying guns, you know, for the purpose of showing off their firearms. You know, people ask me all the time, why do you have to carry firearms? And I said, honestly, the. This.
The crime is so bad. My. My guards are scared. Like they. They want the ability to be able to defend themselves. I mean, just two or three weeks ago, I had a guard who witnessed a gentleman getting shot in the head. And he was. The gentleman was only about five or 6ft from the vehicle that my guard was in. It was in a gang assassination that occurred in one of our neighborhoods. And if that person had turned the gun on my guard, wanting to kill the witness, I could not sleep at night knowing that I would have put someone in a situation where they couldn't have defended themselves against gun violence.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and the thing is that the key is, as I understand this is what I've learned from you, is it's all about the training. And so it is the.
If you see a guard out there who is carrying a firearm, you can feel very, very secure that that person is a lot better trained than someone that's walking around on observe and report.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And so it's the. And what I liked about the full range of everything with, with echelon was it's totally relationship based all the way through, unbelievably successful on de escalation. And. But then if it got to the point where for some reason it wasn't able to be de escalated, then you also had the ability, the citizen's ability to make a citizen's arrest.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Or walk away.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: We were not the police. We don't. We're not private policing. We don't have a duty to act. Really. At the end of the day, I'm here to protect someone's rights or liberties. And all I'm really asking that person to do is to exercise their rights and liberties without intruding upon my clients rights and liberties.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: To live in a free society where we can all benefit from each other's actions. Right. That's all security really wants. We don't want. I don't really want someone to go to jail. If I. If I. If I was trying to get someone into a shelter, which we do all the time.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: And drugs dropped out of their, you know, tent.
Not just possession level, let's say distribution level drugs. Let's say they had 20 hits of fentanyl, ten hits of heroin, all lined up, all ready in a syringe so obviously, this person. Cash dropped out and two cell phones. Perfect probable cause for a cop.
Let's say I saw that as a security guard. My solution is people first. Not. Not. I have a criminal, and in law enforcement, you. I have a criminal mandate. I have to protect and serve. I see that as a police officer, and I think, okay, well, I really wanted to get this guy into a shelter, but now I have probable cause. This person could sell those drugs. I need to arrest this person and put them in jail.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: As a security guard, I'm thinking, man, if I can. If I can get this person into a shelter or into detox, and I can change their life, if they. If they will choose personal transformation today, and I can be a part of that, this person won't sell drugs anymore.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: And it really is that. It's that difference. It's a people first initiative and putting the community, building community and engaging community in order to create a safe or secure environment.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: One part of my background that is actually fairly relevant in this island, I just recently celebrated 37 years of sobriety from drugs and alcohol.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: It's awesome, bro.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So I know the pull of addiction, and I know that how many people struggle with that, and, you know, just over the years, so many newcomers that are come in and struggle and do it, and to be able to watch people change in front of you is magical.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: So here we are. We got this security company relationship. It sounds all good, but it just doesn't work. It doesn't work for how it goes in the press.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: So unpalatable.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I put in the two hard file. Cause I didn't know how to make this thing too hard.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: And people use that file a lot.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of my biggest files.
The what I.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Excuses are lies, by the way.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Yes. Oh, yes.
What I saw, though, was something I was doing on my own and something you were doing that I didn't even know you were doing. Washington. How do we get a more humanitarian front to this whole thing?
[00:23:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: And so I got involved with a group that was very much in the going out, day in, day out, every day, going to the tents.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: Yeah. You were getting people into shelter every day.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: That's what really impressed me about you, is that when I heard about you, I was like, wait, wait. This is a former. Like, I mean, I'm not trying to boost your ego here, but you did some really cool things. Right. And you have enough money to where you don't need to be going out dealing with people that are overdosing on fentanyl. You can be out playing golf at Pebble Beach. I mean, and I was like, out of all the people I deal with, you know, because I deal with a lot of people of means, you were the one of the few that went out there and actually were getting people into shelters every day.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: And that's. Well, and I kind of, you know, that's my kind of my obsessive nature was I wanted to understand what the work was like.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: And so I did it for a number of months. And going out there every day, and the.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Every day you were out there every day.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: And the conclusion I got was we made a. We made a huge impact.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: But I knew that, okay, it was not sustainable. And what I wanted to do was find an organization that did what I was doing. But we just paid them, and we paid them to do this work. And now I needed to fundraise to how to be able to do that.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: That's so funny, because I was in the same situation. I had owned the security company for about five years, echelon. And my guards, we were doing community first. We had our totes, and we know we were giving out stuff and helping people and hooking them up with all these other organizations. And I got to a point where my ratepayers started, you know, pushing back on me a little bit. And they said, hey, I had a window broken last night.
And I was like, okay. And they go, well, I understand that your guard was helping this homeless person getting to a shelter because it was 17 degrees and snowpocalypse a couple years ago. Right. I understand that it was snowpocalypse and that you were trying to save someone's life, but someone broke a window at my garage.
Why aren't you. Why aren't y'all patrolling? You're not a humanitarian organization. And so I started around the same time. I was asking myself, I have to find an organization that will do direct services when my guard finds someone, you know, because we're contacting hundreds of homeless a day, when my guards find people that are like, you know what? I'm. I want to get off the streets right now. I need to be able to call someone that can show up and triage them, get them the service they need. Right. Treat them like a human and work with them until that solution is complete and the person's off the street.
And so we're both looking for that same organization.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And as we start, before I even engage with you, it's the.
I had heard that you were starting this. And I had one situation where it was a single woman who had a pit bull, and she was a victim of domestic violence.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: God, this is a long time ago.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: I forgot, and I don't know what to do with her. And I have.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: Living in a tent on a sidewalk, pit bull.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: And so we call, and I get ahold of Spencer, love Spencer. And so spencer is there. All of a sudden, Nate takara from the fire department shows up, and Mike silva also. We have all these people and resources with this one person, and spencer stayed there for 6 hours and got the person we got down there, how much they could carry, and he put them in a woman's shelter for domestic violence that allowed pets.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: The one of very. Only, like, two shelters.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know what that resource is, and I can thumb through the.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: You can't find it. Oh, you'll never find.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's. It's a. They're actually in the street with God, but they are.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: It's a great guy.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah. They're number 178.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: But let me ask you a question. If you're going to hike, if you're going to go to another country and you're going to go on a fantastic journey, a voyage, do you want, as a guide, a book, or do you want a Sherpa?
Do you want a guide that's actually going to guide you on this very difficult journey that's gonna hold your hand, help you until you want to pack? They're gonna be there with you the whole journey, or do you wanna. Do you want a piece of literature?
[00:28:09] Speaker B: Well. And so I went into this thinking that, my God, the guide is my bible. And I was set. So I went. I saw this person. I saw what their needs were. I opened up to the right, to the section, and I started calling numbers, and I go, hey, listen, I got something. No, we don't do that. Oh, actually, can you refer me to someone? Well, I'm not sure. I called five or six different numbers. I got the exact same answer because I didn't fit in their box. And I said, my God, I am sober.
How is someone on the street who's in tremendous trauma, how are they going to navigate this? And I go, they're not.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: They're not. If they have a cell phone, yeah.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: They're not going to. They're not going to navigate it. So when I met Spencer, and then I go, and then we start talking, and then I. It starts coming back to life. Is that the. And your organization loving one another?
And loving one another. The humanitarian first approach for all these situations now coupled with the private security.
And really, let's go back. We've got the general public who is so frustrated and really almost to the lost hope thing. It's why I'm not gonna. Why do I report this? Why do I call? Because no one's gonna come.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: And so they've got no hope. And so to be able to work with you and come up with a process to where we have a hotline for participating.
Members of the community can call a hotline. They don't have to walk over seemingly dead bodies anymore. They can call and say, listen, I'm so and so. I'm at 12th in Everett, and there's someone lying. I'm not sure if they're dead or alive. They can continue walking and being a citizen and know that there's going to be someone there in less than 15 minutes.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: That's right.
Spencer arrives.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: Spencer's. Yeah.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: We get everyone engaged. We were able to help this lovely lady and her pit bull get into a shelter. And you're thinking to yourself, we need to do this. This is something. This has to be something that we can do as a community. Right.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: It's the missing link.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: It is.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: It's the missing link.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: It's the one thing that isn't actually happening on the streets.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Well, it. So here's, here's the misconception, I think, of the public is, of course it's happening on the street. We have first response.
We have these five dedicated nonprofits that are doing outrage.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Portland Street Response Project. Respond. We have all these organizations.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: So here's, here's the, here's the thing that I found out is the county, in their infinite wisdom, is giving good money, millions of dollars, to ten different organizations that all have ten employees. And their territory is Portland.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: There's no coordination of effort.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Nope.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: And what they're doing is they're checking the box is, I've got to go see that person once a month. That's the requirement.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: I go see them once a month, and 80% of the time, the person no longer there. So their files closed.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: But it's not about doing it once a month. It's about doing it every single day. Because as I've learned, as I, as I learned personally, is I would go the first three times they told me to, in colorful terms, to leave.
But I would say, okay, my name's John. I'll see you tomorrow. Don't bother. And I would come back tomorrow on the third day they would talk to me because no one comes back. Three days.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Yeah. They're like, well, this person actually cares. Yeah, yeah. Who is this person?
[00:31:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And the, hey, you got some garbage out here. Do you mind if I pick it up? Clean up your spot a little bit? And then you say, oh, by the way, there's a couple sounds. I can't really tell this person, would you mind coming out just, just so I don't take the wrong thing? Boom, the door opens, it's back to the sales. It was, I had a good cold call approach.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah, you did.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: And so that was it. And then I learned from you is the bottle of water and a couple of cigarettes for, I don't smoke. My wife's going, why are you carrying cigarettes around?
Because that was the conversation deal. I had another guy who was just slumped over. They totally ignored me. And I said, hey, listen, I got $2 here if you'll talk to me. And boom, he just perked up. And I talked to him. I found out what was going on and I was able to get a hold of a resource to help this guy.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: And so it was how to make these, how to make these contacts. So had to be done. And to, back to what I was saying is to be able to have a number where people can call the citizens, to be the eyes in the streets out there, for them to be able to call and know someone is going to, the right resource is going to come. It might be, it might be humanitarian, it might be a security issue, but the person doesn't have to call two different numbers or five different numbers and all these various things. They call one number that's triaged by the dispatcher and they send out the right resource and it gets there and they're able to assess a situation, help them to, to move them along from point a to b. You're not going to, you're not going to move someone from on the street into a three bedroom apartment with a family and two cars.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: And no, the solution is never housing first. And I know that. Gosh, wouldn't that be great? I mean, wouldn't it be great if that was the solution? If we could just give everyone a home like Oprah? Like we're on Oprah, pull the golden ticket. Oh, my gosh, you got a free home. But the reality is there are people on the streets right now in Portland that actually don't want to live in Portland. They want to go back to their tribe in South Dakota, or they want to go back to their home in Alaska, or they want to reconcile with their wife back in Florida. And probably 20% to 20% of the people that we engage on a daily basis, they don't want a house in Portland. They actually ended up here for another reason. They were traveling from another place, and they ran out of money. They became drug addicted. They just got stuck here. And so assuming that every person's goal is a house, rather than getting back to a faith group, getting back to their family member, getting into a shelter, or maybe even detox, right? And so what we do is a people first initiative. We meet people and we say, you're the most important thing right now. What do you need to get better? Oh, you need to reconcile with your wife. We had a call where this gentleman was going into a large retail location and stealing hundreds of stuff a day. I got a call, and we went over there. One of, or actually the director of our Portland office, Mariah, went over there and said, and she goes, how much time do I have? I said, take the entire day. Take the whole day. Just find out what's going on with this guy. She went over there and said, hey, man, what's going on? Like, we. Everyone knows who you are. You're going around, you know, robbing everybody. Like, what's going on? He goes, you know, I don't even know why I'm homeless. I got into a fight with my wife a year ago in Florida.
Huge, huge fight. And I just walked out and got on a bus, and I ended up here.
And. And my, you know, the director of the Portland said, can we call your wife?
He goes, I don't think she'll want to talk to me.
And Mariah goes, well, let's give it a try. We got the wife on the phone, and Bo boom, 10 seconds in, they're both crying.
Mariah witnesses them reconcile their marriage over the cell phone or FaceTime, right? And the next day, we have him on a train back to Florida.
And that guy didn't need housing. He needed to reconcile his marriage.
Do you understand I'm saying? And so for people up in these big offices and these big bureaus and with all this money, for them to just assume that they know everything about everyone who's on the street, it's kind of condescending. And, you know, you really got to get out there and meet people and ask someone, what do you need? Like, who are you? And what's going on?
[00:36:27] Speaker B: You know, it's the desire of being able to put someone in a box.
And what I've learned. And what I think it's starting to come out more and more, is everyone has their own trauma. And what I like about what you guys do is you gotta meet them where they are. It's not which box you fit in. Let's understand their situation. And one thing that is universal, as I just say, it's not universal, is I asked everyone I saw on the street, I go, let me ask you one question.
Are you living your dream?
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: And nobody answered. Yes. That's whether. That's whether they want to move somewhere else or whatever. Right there on the street as they're there. No one's living there. No, they didn't put that on second grade. God, I can't wait to grow up and be homeless on the street.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: And so whatever that first step is to move them. I remember I talked to a guy one night and said, I go, hey, what do you need? And he just laughingly says, oh, I need a bus ticket back up to Spokane.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: And I go, and I learned, I go, well, I can do that. And he goes, what? You know, it's the.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: I'll do that right now.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: And I. And it was at night. So I said, if you're here at 10:00 tomorrow morning, I will arrange, I'll get you in touch with the right resource, and we'll get you a bus ticket. Boom. 10:00 in the morning, he was there, which, which is probably about a 25% chance he was going to be there. He was there. And Spencer got him on a bus, and he's back going up there. And what I like about the way you do it is you don't just send them up to Spokane. No, you talk to somebody in Spokane, it says, hey, man, this guy's coming. This, this is, this is coming. Will you, will you be there? Will you pick him up?
[00:38:13] Speaker A: Will you, who are you? Who is this person to you?
Are you emotionally available? And do you have a place to allow them to live? Yeah, we don't send people to nowhere.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: Because that's where they're already there.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: They already are.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Yeah. We don't, we don't want syndrome somewhere, nowhere else. Yeah. And the, you know, so much of this, people sending a one way tickets.
[00:38:34] Speaker A: To Hawaii or, you know, as a nonprofit, we did this 170. No, last month, 184 times.
We were able to change someone's life by contacting them, finding out who they are, understanding what they needed, directing them to the right resource, and then following through.
[00:38:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: And we only have two people on the street doing this. Right. And 184 times. And in a month.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And they don't do that in the first time they meet them.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: No, no, no. You have to build.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: It's the, you know, it's. It's a rolling. It's a rolling cycle of people that, on that day, once they. I'm. Oh, my God. I finally got someone on my side.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: Who. You know, it's the. You're not feeding them every meal. You're not doing this. Everything of.
Of the water, of the. You need a meal or this. It's all part of the building relationship.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: Type thing to be able to trust them. When will these. When will this person. And you just don't. You don't give up on anybody. When will this person be ready to move from point a where they are, to point b?
[00:39:46] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: And the. And that's. That's all I think we can do. It's the. Once we move them to point b, then we've got to rely on the other resources. We can't do everything. We can't.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: No. That's where the county and the city has done a great job. There are actually really great programs that when you work at people. First program, and you're meeting people where they live and you're finally getting them ready, once you direct them to the resource, the success rates usually above 85%.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: And these types of programs.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Get them. Get them right. Gotta get this.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: You got to get them there and.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: You got to get them assessed because they're giving them all. If you give a, you know, an addicted person with mental health issues. Mental health issues. A house. When you give them a house, that does not solve their problem.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: No.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Yeah. It's there.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: They need. They need community to become drug free and then need treatment to deal with the mental illness.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: I mean, and without those steps, at least in place at the same time, the success rate is very. It's minimal.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, not to go too far into my things, but the, you know, 37 years of sobriety, I also had some mental health issues. We had. I had bipolar. And for a long time, that was misdiagnosed. And it was until it was considerably into my sobriety that I got properly diagnosed and was able to take medication to help curb that. And it didn't do the work for me in recovery, but it put my mind in a much better place for me to be able to do the work.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: That's amazing.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And it's the. I was. I was actually, before I got on this medication I was taking antidepressant that they said, oh, my God, that's actually the worst antidepressant.
And I'm not ashamed to talk about it. Shouldn't be, but there's so many people have that stigma. Oh, I don't want to be high on antidepressant. I don't want to do this. All this. I have no, you know, it just. Yeah, I mean, it's balanced my brain chemistry.
[00:41:53] Speaker A: It's awesome.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:54] Speaker A: Love it. So, John, we're going to continue this conversation, but we're going to continue this conversation on the road.
[00:42:03] Speaker B: Let's get out on the road.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: You ready for the ride? Are you ready to meet up with Bach and hit the streets and absolutely. Make a difference in someone's life?
[00:42:11] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: Because you and I, you know, we're not the type of people that just sit down at a desk.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Stare at a computer screen.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Yeah, this is, this has been nice, but.
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Exactly. So how about we take this to the streets? We're gonna contact some folks on the street and see if someone's ready for some change.
[00:42:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I love it.
[00:42:29] Speaker A: All right, we're going to catch you on the streets on the ride along.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Okay. All right, man.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Love it.
