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Eric's Podcast
Welcome to Eric's Podcast – a journey through faith, life, and the lessons that shape us. Join Eric as he shares personal stories, reflections, shares insights that inspire hope and encourages. Whether you're navigating life's challenges or seeking motivation this podcast offers a blend of authenticity, inspiration, and thought-provoking conversations.
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Eric's Podcast
S2 #10 How a Simple Bed Can Change a Life
Join us for an inspiring conversation with John David Graham, founder of Good Samaritan Home, who shares his transformative journey from homelessness to helping others rebuild their lives after prison. Through personal anecdotes and impactful strategies, Graham highlights the importance of empathy in understanding the struggles those in difficult situations face. The Good Samaritan Home provides more than just shelter—it offers mentorship, accountability, and a safe space for those eager to change their lives.
In this episode, we also delve into the challenges and initiatives surrounding mental health, especially in a technology-driven world that often isolates us. Graham raises crucial questions about how our modern reliance on digital communication can impact our relationships and mental well-being. With over 24 years of experience, he sheds light on practical methods for encouraging personal responsibility among residents, emphasizing that reintegration is not just about offering support but fostering genuine connection and community.
This episode serves as both a call to action and a reminder that every person deserves a second chance. Whether you're looking to understand the complexities of homelessness and reentry or seeking inspiration to create positive change in your community, this conversation is for you. Tune in, and discover how making simple changes can lead to profound impacts! Don't forget to subscribe and share your thoughts with us!
Eric's Podcast.
Welcome to Eric's Podcast. Dive into conversations about life, family and business with your host Eric. Whether you're looking for practical advice, personal stories or just a little inspiration, eric's got you covered, tuned in every week to join the journey and get ready to elevate your game. Now here's your host, eric.
Speaker 2:Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another episode of the Eric's Podcast. I am your host, Eric, and today I'm joined by John David Graham, who is the founder of Good Samaritan Home, a housing and mentoring program that helps men and women restart their lives after prison. He's also an award-winning author, with over 30 awards for his novel Running as Fast as I Can Don. Thank you so much for being here. How are you doing? What are you up to?
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm working on the sequel to to my novel, so my mind is going in six different directions and of course, there's always technology issues.
Speaker 2:What I really need I need a sixth grader to work with me so I can I can learn this stuff yeah, technology, having technology issues is probably the most frustrating thing, um, and it's also really gives you really kind of shows at least for me how how much I rely on it, which kind of makes me a little bit more frustrated, because it's like, well, I should be able to just do this without technology. But why do I need technology so badly? I think we have grown accustomed to a lot of the tools and stuff that we use now versus, you know, 30 years ago where we didn't, we didn't even have like the iPhone or these tablets and stuff Like you can't actually write on a piece of paper. Now we're just typing on keyboard.
Speaker 3:You're much younger than I, but when I was in college, we had to type our papers. If you make a mistake, you had to retype the whole paper and you had to retype, yeah.
Speaker 3:And then when you go to the library, of course, you check out the book, you take note cards, you write notes down and you annotate where it is. So you have a stack of cards. That's how you transfer data. So when I use a phone right now I could I literally did my doctoral research online and in in the comfort of my own chair, so there's a lot of benefits to technology. Once you get through the gate, it's the gate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it that's where I trip up, once you get through the learning curve, I guess I would say, because there's so much news, I used to be on top of all the new and latest things that would come out, but after having kids and working on starting the company that I'm running now, I have completely lost track. I don't know what's new. I don't know what's new, I don't know. Uh, you know they're the vr glasses, the vr headsets and stuff. I I don't have one, but I've heard that they're pretty cool to use. I've always been curious about, um, what it would be like to actually own one of those things, but at the same time, I don't think I want my kids growing up with, you know, these goggles, everyone's wearing these goggles and no one's actually interacting like, like this anymore there, that there's the key right there.
Speaker 3:I had a podcast interview this morning. We talked about that very thing. Mental health issues, though, and this isolation the generation feels. The generation feels technology has encouraged that, so you can literally live your world on your phone and wonder why you can't communicate, because you, you, you're living in a virtual world. Then you couple that with those glasses and it becomes a literal world to you. That's true. Notice those pictures behind me. That's the, the Chita Mountains on the Mexican border. That's my reality. I go down there and I just hike and what you can hear is nothing.
Speaker 2:You feel oh, that's nice.
Speaker 3:You hear the sound of silence. You are literally 100 miles from any town, are literally a hundred miles from any town and, uh, it is a world that just brings some calmness in a very harried soul that we live in today. Uh after about uh two, two hours of cable news, I could slit my throat or go to West Texas.
Speaker 2:That's good, um, so tell me a little bit about the your, about the your. You mentioned that you're working on your second addition to your book, that you wrote the Running Astax. As I Can, can you tell me a little bit of what's it about and what led you to writing it?
Speaker 3:to rioting it when Good Samaritan Home is about. We founded that 25 years ago to help people who are struggling more than I was. We work with men coming out of prison, but really it's about second chances. But what I found was that people don't listen to data. I can prove to you that re-entry programs are cost-effective for the community. It's $109 a day to put somebody in prison, but if they're in the community working after their sentence, they are earning money, they're spending money, they're paying taxes, they're paying child support and they don't cost us $109 a day. So it's cost effective. But nobody heard that.
Speaker 3:So I wrote a book called Running as Fast as I Can, about somebody like you and me who just struggled finding his niche. He was always running but never catching up to what he called normal people because of birth or poverty or circumstance, wrong choices. I call it everyone's story and the book. I worked on it 10 years because I wanted it to be emotional and personal Not my story, but your story and mine. And the darn thing took off like a rocket when I finally published it. After, I must add, 200 rejections. So that was a lesson in itself, because nobody wanted to read a book by an unknown author about an unknown character that didn't have any politics, and it turns out that everybody wants to read it. So the average book sells less than 250 copies in a lifetime. Running has sold 12,000 copies just this year and it's garnered 30 awards, so obviously it's caught a niche.
Speaker 3:But what happened was people are writing. They're saying well, what happened to Daniel, what happened to the kids? So now I'm writing a sequel called Requiem, and it's the story. There's a character in there who comes from prison. His name is Charles and he spent 20 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit and he becomes a friend and mentor and confidant to Daniel during his own crisis. Well, here we pick up Charles' story. So I'm writing a book as a white man. I'm writing a book now from the viewpoint of a black man. But what I found is that Daniel is no different than Charles. Black and white is no different because their stories are their stories and it's allowed me to see this whole concept of race as it really is. It's a concept. It's not a reality unless we make it a reality. And uh, so we're picking up on the story and it feels so good to be writing again. Gee, uh, publishing is a pain in the ass, but uh, but writing is how long did?
Speaker 2:it take. How long did it take for you to get um your first book, that first one, published?
Speaker 3:well, I was that process, like I. I wrote the first draft in three years and I thought I'm done and I started pushing it out to publishers and to agents all over the country, thinking, thinking, I want to go to New York with it. And I was met with crickets, the sound of silence, because there are so many books published that these agents are just flooded, inundated with queries and they don't have time or the interest with queries and they don't have time or the interest. One of the main points in the book was the event at Kent State in 1970 when four students were shot by the National Guard. Well, that's a real event. I was part of that whole culture then.
Speaker 3:But an agent, some young, hard body, said that can't be true in your book, that's not possible, and that told me volumes about her. So this book it's a Forrest Gump type of story through history, but it deals with the emotions of Daniel Robinson and his family and it's about family abuse, it's about sexual abuse, it's about homelessness, it's about second chances and it's about sexual abuse, it's about homelessness, it's about second chances and it's about love and forgiveness. And uh, so we're going to pick up on that theme now and uh, so I'm researching right now what it was like to live in cleveland in 1955 in a black ghetto, and it's been eye-opening, wow, yeah it's amazing you have to look maps in a whole different, and it's been eye-opening for me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's amazing, you have to look at maps in a whole different way. What was that like in 1955? What's been?
Speaker 2:the most eye-opening thing that you've come across so far.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm early, but what I've found is that there's a real excitement in creating a scene, but here's the problem. There's a real excitement in creating a scene, but here's the problem. I was trained as a journalist so I can get the facts out, I can tell the story, but can I make you feel that story? So that's where the real thing comes in. They're making it emotional. How do I describe Charles going into a room as a 10-year-old boy and feeling what it's like to be a black man or a black boy in Cleveland, in that culture? In 1955, cleveland was a very industrial city, very wealthy for its time, and there was an influx of the migration from the south of black people, and so there was a lot of kickback from the white community, particularly the eastern europeans, and so there's this racial tension that's underlying everything. And the key theme of this particular scene is mama says that.
Speaker 3:Mama says to Charles don't you never trust the white man and you and I can't understand that, but from all my dealings with people coming out of the South, if you don't remember that, you will end up at the end of a rope and that's hard to imagine. But when you see the world through a different perspective, where you and I can walk into a room and assume that we can do certain things. But I've had many people tell me don't make eye contact, don't say that, or you've heard the phrase. I had to have the talk with my son. That means I had to tell him about how to deal with the police for getting picked up while driving black. And again, you and I can't understand that, but this is a part of the black culture that I'm learning about.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's pretty fascinating actually to really get to do all that research to be able to write a really good quality novel. I never really thought about how much research actually goes into something like that. Research actually goes into something like that. But, yeah, that's, I can definitely see how it would pay off in terms of being able to give create a really good quality world and narrative for sure what happens.
Speaker 3:If you don't watch your details, you lose credibility. For example, in the original book running, daniel visits inner city Detroit after the riots and the riots occurred in a certain part of Detroit and I had to follow that with the street names. So I had to take a map and go from street to street to get my details, even though it wasn't a main part of the story. To get my details even though it wasn't a main part of the story. If I had the wrong street or the wrong date, the reader would catch that and it's like a stone you trip over it and they'll never catch you again, but if you're credible, they'll follow you into your story.
Speaker 2:Yeah and they'll look forward to the next one, the sequel.
Speaker 3:That's right. Can you tell me?
Speaker 2:There's a sense of trust. Yeah, exactly, um, can. Can you go into a little bit of a good samaritan and how you got that started and what was the struggles that you came across and trying to start that?
Speaker 3:well, I, I had uh been through what I call a lot of detours in my life. I had had multiple careers I was a truck driver, a fireman, a building contractor, a journalist, I was even a minister at one point, and I just never did well at it because I just didn't feel like I found my niche until I was 53. And I kept running across homeless persons and I didn't know how to handle it. And I remember my own days as being homeless and I, uh I told my wife, let's, let's do something. At this stage in our life where we are, let's try to give back to people who are struggling more than us.
Speaker 3:And so we bought an old, old house that was 150 years old, needed a lot of work, and we committed to fixing that up and using it as a shelter. And I formed a non-profit called Good Samaritan Home and we started doing that, and the Department of Corrections said we have men coming from prison who need temporary shelter. If you will house them, we will help compensate you for the per diem. And so we ended up with a contractual relationship where homeless persons were able to find legitimate, safe housing and we were able to find a stable financial stream a stable financial stream.
Speaker 1:And Good.
Speaker 3:Samaritan went from one house to today. After 24 years, we have 19 houses in the Western Ohio region and we have helped, house and mentor 2,500 men and women coming from prison, and so I found that, yeah, definitely coming from prison, and so I found it.
Speaker 2:I found that, yeah, definitely. How do you? Um, what does the mentoring program look like? How does how, how did, did, did you guys? Is it like a? Did you just come up with it on your own? Did you do any research on what you need, what needs to be done? Did you try a bunch of different things before you landed on like this is the way, this is the structure, we want to do it. How did, how did that form?
Speaker 3:I wish I were that uh plan, that I had everything laid out. Mostly I just jump in and say now, which way is the water flowing and how do I swim? But what happened was, uh, mentoring is not something where you sit down and say we're going to have this class. We partner with the department of correction, the parole department, job and family services, uh, the mental health department. We don't do any of their work, but they don't offer housing. But what?
Speaker 1:I've found.
Speaker 3:What I've found is that men coming from prison, just like you and me, we just want somebody to listen to us. If, particularly if we're down on our luck, we don't want to be preached at, we don't want to be uh, uh, uh, we don't want to be told you have to come to church and then you'll be fine. What we want is I'm hungry and I'm cold, can you help? I just want to hand up. I don't want to hand out, I just want to hand up. I don't want to hand out.
Speaker 3:And so we offer, we ask the question are you hungry? And so we offer a safe place Now. But to do that, that means you have to make your bed in the morning, you have to cook your own food, you have to clean after yourself. In other words, you have to be a responsible housemate. And I call it a pronoun shift, because what got you to prison is saying I, and what will keep you prison is saying we. So, through housekeeping and through being respectful to your roommate, we're, we're mentoring this idea of we, and it's not a class, it's just. I call it the cost of your rent Make your bed. That's good. It's actually a very good lesson, because it shows respect for yourself too, true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Do you think that your own experience with homelessness helped you understand their kind of what they're going through?
Speaker 3:Not even a question. At the time I had a college degree. You would think that you would never have to worry about homelessness. But one wrong decision, an economic downturn, or let's suppose you work for the government right now and your whole agency was shut down and you are now, with a master's degree in economics, homeless or near homeless, but your job and. Or you work for the auto companies and all of a sudden the plant closed down and you lost your job and the only thing available is mcdonald's. So homelessness is not them, it's not those people. It's through a quirk of the economy or a quirk in politics. It could be you and me. And I never forget what it's like to look at the sky and say where am I going to sleep tonight? Because it's going to rain, and that's a frightening feeling, how long would that go on?
Speaker 3:for Now that was limited, I have to admit. But what happened was I met my wife and she was working, she had a house and we started dating and I suddenly said I'm going to get real serious about getting a job. So, and she said, no job, no girlfriend. And she stuck to it and eventually we got married. But when I did meet her, I was homeless at the time, living in my truck, so it wow.
Speaker 2:So like without some good motivation, then it's a life-changing.
Speaker 3:All her friends said don't marry me because they said I was a rake and a rambler. And I said, well, I'm no rake, I am a rambler. So, uh, even her pastor wouldn't marry us wow but how?
Speaker 2:did? How did you? Um, how did you like, what did you do to get out of of sleeping in your car, like, how did? How did that? Did you just do job applications? And that's the regular way, because I've heard that it's that a lot of employers don't necessarily like if you look a certain way or if you are homeless, they want to hire you even if you are qualified for the job. How did how did that experience turn out for you?
Speaker 3:well, maybe part of it. I was in detroit at the time and part of it is that white privilege we're talking about. Uh, detroit's a very divided city and I had, I had a neighbor, my wife had a neighbor who worked for a laundry company and they were looking for drivers and I had been a truck driver. So I, he referred me and I was able to get a job as a route driver for several years and uh, so that that was able to that a job as a route driver for several years, and so that was able to that got. Of course, I had a family and we soon had children. So there are many a day. You, when you have a family, you make decisions that you wouldn't make as a single person. You go to work even though you don't feel like it. You stay with a job even though you think it's not it, you, you, you stay with a job even though you think it's not paying you enough until you find a job.
Speaker 3:But, uh, being quite candid, I always thought that I could do better, and I that's when I decided to work for myself in construction. But the problem is, working for yourself is very difficult. At the end of the day, to make money, you may work hard, but you have to get the jobs. You have to do the jobs, you have to get the payment for the jobs, and it's tough being self-employed and we end up traveling three states trying to make a living, all with my family in tow. Wow, states, trying to make a living, all with my family in tow. So, wow, the, the, the rambling days were not over, but they were just more, uh, more involved, and that's, that's what brought that into Good Samaritan home.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, I see. So that's where the construction and everything played a good role in being able to help build Samaritan's Loan express myself in writing.
Speaker 3:I learned as a truck driver how to manage my schedule. I learned as a contractor how to work with my hands, and all of that came into Good Samaritan Home.
Speaker 2:And now you have. You said 10? 19. Wow, are you still growing? Yes, we're looking at Do you still have plans.
Speaker 3:The thing about rehabilitation is it's not a hug-the-thug program, it's not soft-on-crime program. It's a way of saying that we're willing to offer you a chance, but you have to pick up that chance and run with it. You don't have a place to sleep, you can't get a job. So if I give you a place to sleep and you respond by keeping it clean, I won't charge you a dime for that and you can stay for six months or even a year. But you need to be moving towards your own place and that's where the mentoring comes in. How are you saving your money? Where are you looking for an apartment and little things like?
Speaker 2:how can I help you find a place? And we don't do it for them, but we encourage. That's the mentoring. Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3:So you guys are did you say you are expanding or you have plans to expand. Well, we're running a capacity right now. On any given day, we might have 100 men and women in our houses and we're always getting referrals, so I don't like to turn somebody down. So we're looking for another house or two, just to allow room for growth and, to be candid, every time we've grown it's been a leap of faith, because there's no guarantee. And you're taking on a mortgage, you're taking on utilities, you're taking on maintenance, but I feel that we look at it like a business. We don't want to lose money. We're not here to profit from it, we're here to break even and so far, our truth is, our budget now is, uh, two million dollars a year. So wow, yeah it. It runs efficiently as a business, because we're not trying to run it as a business, we're trying to run it as what we call a ministry, so we're accountable to more than the governor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how did the process go with actually getting your nonprofit status, because I've heard that it can take a really long time to get that, and how was that process for you in trying to start this?
Speaker 3:First thing I had to do was apply to the secretary of State. He had to become a legal nonprofit corporation, a 501c3. But that's fairly easy. The issue is getting the IRS to approve it and that takes about six months if you're lucky. And you have to prove, because everybody is looking for a quick get rich quick scheme.
Speaker 3:Particularly back in the early 2000s, when there was what we call a faith based initiative, president Bush encouraged faith based communities to do services like ours. And what happens was some people are just looking for grants because you have to be a non to get a grant, and so there were a lot of fly by nights and the IRS was scrutinizing us. I say there was a, it was a, it was a colonoscopy, uh, of all my book work and and rightfully so, and it took about a year. But in the process now we are also audited, not just by the IRS, we're audited by my accountant and by the Department of Correction on our performance. So every year they go over all our properties, all our performance schedules, and they even talk to our residents to make sure they feel we're doing a good job and that makes us better. Yeah, and they even talk to our residents to make sure they feel we're doing a good job.
Speaker 2:And that makes us better yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's good to have that kind of feedback loop and accountability too. And the truth is that Ohio is a very progressive state when it comes to rehabilitation, Probably about as far ahead of the curve as any entity I've seen to date.
Speaker 2:I've been privileged to work with them in partnership like this. Al, going back to the nonprofit status and the application, you mentioned grants. Have you ever applied for or have been granted a grant?
Speaker 3:Oh yes, initially we did apply for grants federal grants, state grants, local grants but not that it's bad, it's just a lot of work. A lot of work. It's akin to doing a doctoral thesis. Every time a grant comes due, wow do and wow here, and it may be a 40 page document and they want, they have a certain language for each, each entity requires. And then there are people out there who know how to write them. They may not perform them well, but they can write them well and they're big dogs and they have the money to hire somebody full-time. So I I can't tell you how many times I would spend days and weeks and months on a grant just to be turned on because the competition was so great.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, mr Graham, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. This is great. It was great having you on the show and we'll have to have you back. Thank you, okay.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Eric's podcast. D dive in the conversations about life, family and business with your host, eric. Whether you're looking for practical advice, personal stories or just a little inspiration, eric's got you covered, tuning every week to join the journey and get ready to elevate your game. Now here's your host, eric.
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