 Welcome to INSIGHT, produced in partnership with Lakeland Public Television, serving North Central Minnesota. Today we are chatting with Sandy Hennem, Executive Director of Village of Hope. Sandy has generously agreed to share some of her experience with us. I'd like to thank you Sandy for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Let's talk about Village of Hope. What does Village of Hope do here in this area of the country? Village of Hope is an emergency shelter for families experiencing homelessness. So we provide support services and actually 24-hour emergency shelter for families. And families are kind of defined loosely. So however, our clients identify as a family. We have grandparents raising children, nieces. We have dual parents, single parents. As long as children under 18 are part of the family, we serve them at Village of Hope. So you deliver hope to people who at that moment in time are looking at a path with only barriers, with no hope. And hope is actually the first ingredient that we try to give people because families come to us and they're exactly what you said. They've had so many barriers, they don't trust people, they're exhausted, they've tried everything, they've tried strategies and nothing works. And they're pretty much ready to kind of give up. And so the very first thing we really try to bring back is their sense of hope. Because if you don't have that, it's very hard to continue to get up and go and go and do the things that you need to do for your future. So how do people come to you and what does that initial conversation look like? People come to us in many different ways. We have a lot of people that come to us self-referral. We're a smaller community and so people know about Village of Hope. Maybe they've had a family member or a friend that have gone through a program. And one of the things that I teach when they leave is who can help me with this problem. That's one of those strategies. And so they kind of take that with them and they say, I think Village of Hope can help you with these problems. So you have 15,000 people in the immediate area. Is that your service area? Are you localized in the city of Bemidjin? Pretty much northwestern Minnesota. And so how many people would fall within your service area? Probably 70,000. And it's a considerable geographic range that you're covering. It is. Just to be able to communicate with people is going to be difficult. This is not, very often these are people who don't necessarily have access to telephone communication, cellular communications, and so on. So you have the distance issues. And then you also have these issues of pride and you have the issues of respect and you have the issues of self-sufficiency and trust and all these. So when you have your first conversation, your first conversation is very often not about the specific services that you're providing. The first conversation is really about creating some sort of a communication, some sort of a personal connection. There's three values that we have at Village of Hope. It's respect. And so everything that we do surrounds respect. Respect. And you see the person. You see the person. You listen to the person. And we listen to each other as team members. I mean, we practice respect first with each other. And then the next one is family first. Family first. Keeping the families together, honoring their culture and their family culture. And then the third one is collaboration. Give us some insight of the type of stories that you experience in serving people. And what you learn in the course of your service. I would say, by and large, in this area, because poverty is such a huge factor for us in this area, generational poverty is something that really breeds that homelessness. And talk about the generational piece. What do you mean by generational poverty? Steminal poverty is when you've had at least two or possibly three generations that live in poverty. And so when you are raised in poverty, it's really hard to get out of poverty. And so many of our, I would say the majority of our adults that come to us were homeless as children. It's not a mountain to climb. It's a vertical ascent without a ladder. Exactly. And so you're looking at this and you just don't know where to go. Start. Exactly. So once you have gotten so far as you've established some sort of basis for trust, and now you're ready to talk about some sort of concrete service, you've listened to your client, what type of services do you offer? How do you initially do your intake and what is the first kind of thing that you provide? We have a wide variety of services and it's really based on that environment. We work hard on not re-traumatizing and to making sure that when people come to us, they know that they're in charge, they're in charge of their decisions. We do have rules. When you live in society, you have rules. And re-traumatizing means that you're not taking somebody and just sort of dumping them into an unfamiliar environment and telling them that that's good for them. And just do this, right? I know better. I know better than you. You seize control from somebody who feel like they're losing the control that they've had over their lives and then you make it worse by then imposing certain solutions. Exactly. Right. Instead of listening to what they do. So talk about the different ways that you serve under those circumstances. The first thing we do is we do a tour and so people really get an opportunity to look at their environment. Village of Hope is a unique service in the fact that everybody has their own apartment. So you're not in a big room with many other different people. With bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. You have that opportunity to be a family. And so you're able to go in and close the door. Everybody has their own bathrooms. Everybody has their own bedrooms. So you really have that opportunity. We had a little boy that we were just showing the family to and his eyes got huge and he looked at me and he said, I get my own bed. I mean that's the kind of thing that families don't even have the experience with a little boy having that opportunity to have his own bed. And one of the things that you're doing there, particularly for people who have trans-generationally lived in poverty, is you are basically starting the process of showing how to build that ladder. Strategies. Strategies for building that ladder and the possibilities that might be accessible. And so that's just the start of the process. So once you bring people into that place of safety with all the mixed emotions that people who have accepted this type of support will be feeling, how do you then proceed? We have a two-generational approach at Village of Hope and we use that very specifically because we know that you just can't work with the children or you just can't work with the adults. It really is. If we want to really break that cycle of homelessness, we have to start with the children. So we have something really unique and amazing at Village of Hope called PEACH. And it's physical and emotional awareness for children who are homeless. And on the ground we say for children's health and happiness. And we have a master's program teacher that comes in and spends time with them. They do different kinds of things. A lot of times they do coping strategies. She gives them different kinds of words to use, how to interpret their feelings, a lot of healthy lifestyle kinds of things that they might not have had the opportunity to learn because their parents never had that opportunity to learn. So we start with the children. And so we have a program with that. We also have what's called the Youth Achievement Program where as children they go to school, they brush their teeth. They help their parents with their chores. They have the opportunity to earn tokens. And then they go to the store and they can pick out whatever they want out of these. So we're helping the children kind of get some control over their environment as well. One very often hears the parable of the fish where you don't want to give somebody a fish. You want to teach them to fish. But when someone is hungry and in distress, they don't have time yet to learn how to fish. So you give them a fish and then while they are benefiting from what you have provided, you teach them skills. And that's essentially the work that you're doing. You're doing both simultaneously, neither neglecting the immediate need nor the future learning that is required. Yes, it's a balance. We're putting in a balance. So you approach the children first. The parents are probably focused on the immediate need whereas for the children you can actually deal with the longer term question. Does that inflect at a certain point in which you are then helping the parents in a way that deals with their long term need? Are you helping the parents to learn how to fish? Yes. Absolutely we are. Every morning at nine o'clock you will find every adult at Village of Hope in our main dining room and we are, we're coming to class. And I have the opportunity to teach what's called power hour. And it's not your traditional class where you learn, you learn to fill out a budget or you learn how to interview or they can get those things other places. But we're really teaching people how to think about themselves for the future. What kinds of passions are they thinking about? Just give them that hour to really step back and think what do I want for the future? What kind of job do I want to have? So we talk about the power of positive thinking. We talk about goal setting. We talk about budgeting as it, as it intercepts with poverty and abundance versus the scarcity mindset. And we talk about the power of speaking positively to yourself and other people. And we also do a parenting class, our, our same person that does our peach class comes in and does a support group just for parents in transition. And that has been so popular that we're actually opening it up to other people in the community. So we might have social workers that will call and say, I hear your support group is really powerful. Can my client come? Or we might have people from a judge or the courts might court order somebody to come. And they're not happy when they come. But after the first 10 minutes, they're like, I am so glad I came. This is something that adds value to their life. That's what we want. I want them not only to get a house when they leave, but I want them to experience value, value that they can take with them and use these lessons for a lifetime. Sandy Hennem, thank you so much for sharing the work and the details of the work of Village of Hope. And thank you so much for your insights.