 Hi, everybody. Yes, you are in the right presentation. I promise. Oh, I got some feedback. Let's try to fix it. There we go. So my name is Tex. I am the president for Guardians of the Shoulder in San Antonio. I realize that probably wasn't what you were expecting. In a conversation about child abuse, a burly, kind of ugly biker. A little bit about myself real quick, just so we knock some stuff out of the way. I'm not a professional in child care. I'm not a certified counselor. I'm not a certified really anything. I'm a victim when I was 13 years old. I was sexually abused and raped by a gentleman that I trusted. That is where my experience comes from. That comes from how we take a child from a victim to a victor. And the process that it looks like within our organization. And hopefully we inspire y'all in a way that you understand that you don't have to be part of a grand plan to make a difference in a child to apply the principles that we've learned today with recognizing the signs of child abuse, sexual, physical, emotional, neglect. But you can apply these locally. And the local application is what matters the most. Taking these steps and applying them just in your neighborhood, on your street with your next door neighbor, make a difference. So we're going to go ahead and go to the presentation and get started on this. And I hope y'all enjoy the ride. Are we live with the presentation? Is my PowerPoint up? Your PowerPoint is not up. We're going to have to get your PowerPoint up. It went down in the storm. It's not up. So go up to pull it in. Pull the. Probably should share the screen. That might help. Yes. All right. OK, now we're sharing the screen. There we go. All right. So as I said, I'm guarding the Children of San Antonio. So obviously, who are we? Guardians of the Children is a nonprofit 501c3 motorcycle organization. We've been around since 2006. So we just celebrated 14 years in existence. As of today, what started in San Antonio 14 years ago, we now have 55 chapters spread across 18 states in the United States. 14 of those chapters reside in Texas alone. And then we have seven international chapters in Canada. So we've taken a very local idea, a very local purpose. And we've grown on it to an amazing level. It's truly awesome to see this organization thrive. But why do we exist? I think that's a more revelant question as opposed to how big our organization is, but why are we here? So the mission of Guardians of the Children is to recognize and react to the signs of child abuse, to educate others to do the same, to provide strength and stability to families in crisis, and to answer the call and use child or teen for courage to move forward. And we provide support through the process and protection when necessary. I do like to emphasize this one key aspect. When I say protection, we are not a vigilante motorcycle. What I mean is we do not go after the people who do harm. We are what we call a pro-victim organization. We are there for the child and the child alone. If it comes down to a perpetrator is bothering a child during the process of going to court, our organization will step in and provide a physical defensive barrier to make sure that that child knows they're safe and secure and protected. We do this in a variety of ways. Everything from we've camped out in front of houses to we go within the court and make sure that that child knows they have a strong support system in court. There's a lot of different avenues that we take in providing this, but it is imperative that for me, I emphasize, we are not there to hurt or harm the perpetrator. We are there to make sure that the child sees justice in court one day. Now, that is not a picture of our founder. That is a picture of Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke is famous for saying several things, but one of the things that we love specifically is, he said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. We've adapted that in a slightly different way to apply to guardians of the children and it's our credence, it's our motto. Don't let your silence drown out their cries. We feel that the application of this is very prudent on us as human beings. If we stand by and idly do nothing while child abuse grows, while it intensifies, even during this epidemic that we're in with lockdown and quarantine, if we do nothing, then we've given evil the win. So the silence of children oftentimes is what is equated to child abuse because most kids don't make an outcry. Most kids don't say anything. And if they do, they say it to one person one time. And if they're believed, that's great. Oftentimes, oh, that's the sad reality is some kids aren't believed, it's thrown off. So we have a standing rule in our organization that if a child discloses to us anything at any time, we 100% believe them. So how do we actually do this? How do we not let our silence drown out our cries? Our organization focuses on two aspects. One is direct involvement with the afflicted families and the children and the other is education of the public. We believe very strongly in doing what we can as bikers to educate others that if we can take a stand for child abuse and we can begin this education process that surely you can too. I mean, we're bikers, we're rough and tough and we ride fast and make a lot of noise but we stand for something and we do something about it. A few years ago, we ran across a phone call we got from a coworker, one of our members who said that he witnessed his child abuse happening and all this stuff and he saw the mom beating the son parking lot and all this and we asked, well, what did you do? He said, well, I called you guys. Well, that doesn't solve the problem. So we found that most and what we discovered is most of the people don't know what to do when they see or suspect child abuse. And I know we've covered a few of these things already so some of these I'll be brief on some I'll linger on but in terms of our organization we started a very, very specific campaign and we call it the see something do something campaign and we, this is actually a copy of our business card that we hand out. We have a little business card that we hand out to people because it's convenient, fits in a purse, fits everywhere and we tell people on the backside of it which I'll show you in a second what you can do if you see your suspect child abuse and this is very San Antonio specific because obviously we're in San Antonio but on the backside we give them and these things can be transcended to other areas. So I know we have a lot of people all across Texas and even in other countries right now but the first step is always call 911. That is the most critical step that we find that you can take in solving this issue or addressing or getting that child help is calling 911 and talking to an operator directly. Second thing you can say something. You can speak up, you can say, hey, stop. Hey, hold on a minute, that's not right. Hey, what are you doing? Hey, are you okay? You can even ask the child directly are you okay? I a few years back ran across a father and son in a fish fight and I yelled really loudly he got their attention and I asked the son, come here. Come with me and he came with me and I told him that you need to stay right there for a minute and I took the kid inside my house I was actually in my front yard and I sat him down and I said, are you okay? We call the police and begin to handle it from there. If you can stop the abuse in a safe fashion to yourself stop the abuse sometimes just yelling something or letting that person know that you see the abuse is enough to make that person stop moving forward with whatever they're doing but this also applies because sometimes the abuse you don't see it. We see the signs of it and for the 800 people that are watching this I'm assuming there's several parents on here you know when something's off with your child's best friend when they're a ray of sunshine every time they come over and they're happy to look and then they're coming over and there seems sad down depressed or when they stop coming over or when you hear your child talking about they're being weird or they're acting upset or they're mad and they don't know why you all of us parents have this innate ability to know when something's off with another child and some of you have seen it even at bus stops where you see a kid wearing the same dish shovel clothes every day or that you have that great 4.0 student suddenly becoming a D student and struggling in school overnight where they go from happy and cheerful and kind of boisterous to now they're quiet, shy and angry. So stopping the abuse doesn't just mean in physical format of when you recognize and you see something happening but it also means when you believe there's something going on that you suspect something. If you happen to be in the vicinity where you can take photos and videos that's absolutely imperative to do so because that helps with the investigation but also notes. Note take what you saw, what you see, what you suspect what you saw before the abuse and what you've seen after the changes these all help investigators determine where to start pinpointing it and whether there's validation to it. Report the abuse with detail. Those notes will become imperative with that because when you call that abuse in there's going to be questions of why do you think this? What led you to believe this? What do you know about the child? What did they look like? What vehicle were they in? What was the child wearing? Were there any other children? Were there any other parents? Were there any other adults? What was the license plate make model? There's going to be a lot of questions that they're going to ask so the more notes you take about everything around that situation the better it helps. In Texas you can also call the Texas Abuse Hotline that is a direct phone number anywhere. Those reports all get filed and they can be pulled up locally down to the local level and then there's online as well you can file that texasabusehotline.org and if you're local as well you can call the local CAC which in San Antonio happens to be Child Safe. It is an amazing organization. I love Child Safe and I love Voices and I may have forgotten to say this at the beginning but I truly am grateful that Voices has given my organization, our organization this opportunity to speak on what it is we do with children and how we can impact them. So thank you guys very much for this wonderful opportunity even if we're just a bunch of bikers. And sadly the last time we did a presentation with Voices we were in person and it's great because like I told Cathy this morning I said I'm not as effective when I can't threaten to rob you if you don't pay attention. So I'm just trusting that everyone's watching diligently today and I wouldn't really rob you. It's a voluntary donation. All right, so moving on, the facts and I know our first presenter Dr. Passoon covered this amazingly. I'm just gonna briefly go over this as this kind of just relates to our organization's intent and drive. So on average one in 10 children are abused by the time they're 18 and that is a variety of all three categories of physical, sexual or neglect slash emotional. And this average is based on the idea of confirmed cases. So confirmed and unconfirmed in Texas State's guideline is a confirmed case of child abuse means that they had enough evidence to move forward with the case. Unconfirmed cases means that they were unable to determine the validity of the case. So sadly there's obviously not as many confirmed as there is unconfirmed. But the way I always have viewed it within this my organization is confirmed and unconfirmed still means a child made an outcry that abuse was happening. So the average confirmed cases of child abuse is one in 10 children by the time you're 18. In Texas over the course of 10 years there's been $2.8 million outcries, outcries and child abuse. It means 2.8 million children have spoken up over the course of 10 years and said, something's happening with me, please help. That boils down to 767 per day. In our little county alone of San Antonio Bear County we average 24,000 per year of confirmed and unconfirmed. That makes our county the third worst on average in the state of Texas. The only two counties we trail after are Dallas County and Harris County, Houston. On average, that means we're down to 66 per day and Bear County are abused. And that to me is hard. Hard to stomach that today there's 66 kids that are gonna be abused. To give you an idea, the total population of kids in Texas in 2019 estimated for the 2020 census is 7.5 million. 2.8 million of 7.5 million kids have spoken up. Now, I don't do this as a job at Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 on the CPA, but that 2.8 million of 7.5 over 10 years, that's more than one in 10. That's a lot more than one in 10. And so there's this overwhelming cry for help from children and just Texas alone and all across the United States. In the United States, a report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds. Every 10 seconds, so in one minute's time that I've spent talking about this particular slide, six kids reported child abuse. Six, that breaks my heart because there's so many kids that need help. And what I wanna inspire all of you today is to step up to that plate. Step up to that plate because you can make a difference in a child's life. So we're gonna stop here for a second. Now, normally at this point in time, when I'm doing a live presentation, I would actually have audience members stand for various parts. But since we're doing digitally, I'm gonna give you an encapsulated idea. With the 800 participants watching right now, 800. There was a study done and they asked the question of adults. They said, were you either sexually, emotionally, or physically abused as a child? And so they stratified all these findings and they found out that 30% of an adult population says that they were emotionally or neglectful abuse when they were a child. So out of 800 participants right now, that's 240 of y'all statistically suffered emotional or neglect abuse as a child. The study further classified this abuse and went down into physical abuse and they found that 20%, roughly 20% of adults said that they were physically abused as a child between the age of 18. So in 800 participants, that's 160 people are sitting here watching this that statistically have suffered physical abuse. They went even further with the sexual abuse and they found that 10%, roughly 10% of an adult population states that until they were 18, they suffered some form of sexual abuse. So out of 800, that's 80. That's 480 total out of 800 participants that statistically have suffered some abuse. And while that number may change geographically and whatnot, what I always try and get everyone to understand when they're sitting here is over half of any room you're in, statistically, of adults over half suffered abuse as a child. So there is this huge, huge opportunity to start curbing that. There's a, there's something called a marrying effect that says 10% of child abusers, 10% of children that are abused become child abusers. So of 480, and these are only reported cases of child abuse that are confirmed, you know, trial. So of this 480 potential, that's 48 potential abusers down the road as they continue to grow up, just on a statistical average, not trying to say anything about anybody watching this presentation now. But if we begin to address and start taking a stand against and helping these kids work through these issues and quit being victims and transition them to a victor status, that marrying effect drops off the face of the earth because they're no longer victims. They've transcended that victim mentality and now become a victor of this situation. What we tell our kids all the time is you are not defined by your past, but you are defined by your future. What future you want is up to you. So real quick, I wanna cover one thing that I think is imperative for Texas. And I know Dr. Kasun, you covered this. It's something I feel is worth repeating. In Texas, reporting child abuse, you are required to report child abuse if you suspect abuse or neglect. And failure to report is a criminal offense. Section 261, 101 of the Texas Family Code. Now, I'd like to point out that this law says suspect. It doesn't say you know. It doesn't say you're 100% sure. One thing that CPS case workers have told us time and time again when we've interacted with them is they are amazed at people's responses because it's always the same responses, number one. I thought something was going on. And so I know there's some people even here thinking the same thing, that they think something's going on with their son's friend down the street, their daughter's friend down the street, the neighbors and their children. Something's off, something's different and they suspect something but no one makes a call. And I tell people this all the time that I would rather make a call 99 times and be wrong 99 times, make that call that 100th time and be right than to make no calls because that had been wrong 99 times. Make the call, be wrong. It's not against the law. In fact, you are protected if you make a report provide good information and good faith. So as long as you are making that call and good faith that you are not purposely trying to intentionally mislead officers that you genuinely suspect something, you are protected by law. So, but you're obviously not protected if you report your own abuse or intentionally file a false police report. Now there's some additional guidelines to 261 which I know is relate to some of the people in this room. And it's very specific to caretakers, childcare workers, professionals required to report no later than the 48th hour after first suspecting child abuse and neglect. That's not Monday I saw this when he came into the daycare facility and I wondered and then Tuesday got worse and then Wednesday it seemed a little harder and Thursday I noticed more bruising and then Friday I made the call. That call should have been made Monday or Wednesday at the latest according to the law. You're required to make that call. And I honestly think 48 hours is too long. If I suspect child abuse and anywhere I'm at, whether I even see it in a restaurant I'm calling right then and there. I'm making sure that that child gets the help they need as fast as possible. I even once made a phone call sitting in a restaurant eating tacos. And I saw something that occurred at a family table that I thought shouldn't have happened. And I thought it was very suspect and I called the local PD and they came and I sat there and ate my tacos and watched them talk to the family, pull the child away and talk to the child. And I felt okay, somebody's involved. We don't have to make a Facebook post about it and make an Instagram post and share the horrible stories that we see and go all those poor kids don't just share something, do something. Let's not be a keyboard warrior in this society. Let's be a society that stepped up and started changing things. Now, professionals, you cannot delegate this responsibility. This means which you cannot go to your superior, your daycare manager and say, hey, you know, little Tommy, I've noticed some bruises. Maybe we need to call CPS to investigate and look into this. No, and how do your manager make that call? It's up to you to make the call because you're the one directly involved. You're the one that witnesses everything. And it's also advised to not wait until all facts are gathered if you suspect abuse. And what that means is don't take time away from making that report to go, well, let me talk to sister and let me do a drive-by and let me interview the child at the daycare facility to make sure they're okay. Just make the report. On average, it takes CPS seven days depending upon the classification of the abuse to respond. So at a minimum, you're seven days out. Now, if you make that call and then you continue to get information and you continue to see things that become more pervasive that make it seem this child needs help now, immediately, you can call CPS back and say, hey, I've noticed bruising now starting to occur. I've noticed more things and they can escalate it to what they call a tier one, which it gets a 24 hour response to the call as opposed to a seven day. So obviously delaying your report can result in more serious harm to the child. And of course, as I've stated, report even in doubt. Even in doubt, make the report. Who cares if you're wrong? As it was pointed out earlier in one of the question and answers, CPS doesn't divulge who makes that call. If your neighbors come to you and say, hey, I know you called CPS, they're just fishing. You can claim ignorance. But quite honestly, if I had someone come up to me and tell me, hey, I know you called CPS and I'd be like, you damn right I did. So when you file a report, some helpful tips for filing a report. Give information that helps locate the child. Try to describe the children's clothing. Try to get a picture, a description of car, model, make. The more information you have, the better. Just saying, hey, I saw this mom in the Walmart parking lot beating her child and they got in their car and drove away, isn't gonna help narrow the search down. You need to give them a little more. What's the making model of the vehicle? What's the last three of the license plate? First three of the license plate. Law enforcement can do a license plate lookup based on partials and they can help find that child. Report what you know about the child. This is incredibly important because in a house where there's siblings, and we've seen this where only one child is being abused when CPS has done an investigation, if they don't have enough detail on what that child looks like, the child that gets presented is the one that's not being abused. And so CPS does their little investigation, talks to that child and finds, oh, this kid's perfectly fine, but they never talked to the blonde hair child that was reported on. They talked to the brown hair child. So make sure when you talk to CPS, you're giving as clear a description of the child as possible, height, rough age, length of hair, color of hair. If you're close enough, color of eyes even. Child's name, if you happen to know it, but the more details you give, help them locate that child, help them know which child they're talking to. And then report what you know about the event. Take the time to try and soak it in when you're writing the notes down. I always tell people when they're making a report, before you make that phone call, get a pen and paper out and write everything down. It'll help you organize your thoughts and get that mumble jumble in your head of the situation and take the emotional frustration out of it and the emotional pain. It'll help you put it down on paper in a logical format where then when you're talking, you can go, this is what happened, then I saw this and then this. The more detailed you are, the more organized you are, the better CPS can make their interaction. And then of course, call 911. Call the police non-emergency line. And lastly, call the DFPS hotline. And I got about 15 more minutes. I already know where I'm at. Edmund Burke said this, another great quote if he said, nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. I'm gonna say that again. Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. Don't make the mistake of thinking that your one act, your one push doesn't make a huge impact or can't make a difference. So what happens after? So what happens after all the calls, after all the interventions, after CPS gets involved and then where do we fit in? What do guardians do? First and foremost, real quick, I'll cover our admission process. All of our members are Central Registry checked. We check a Central Registry annually as well as a criminal background check. And we have a one year process for admission to full membership. So we try and be very protective of our organization or our entrance. And then I think the number one question I get sometimes from other CACs and counselors who work with us, why motorcycles? What is the big deal with using motorcycle? Because there's a lot of organizations like ChildSafe, Voices and other organizations that don't use motorcycles. Why do you guys use motorcycles? Well, it's quite honestly full disclosure of their fun. I love riding a motorcycle and the promotion of family and the motorcycle culture is a big deal. The motorcycle culture is big on family involvement and family feeling, you know. I've got a lot of people I call brother and sister that I don't share blood or patch with because we are such a tight knit family in our community. And for kids, there's this huge appeal factor. Kids love motorcycles. It's the most amazing thing. I can pull up to a gas station anywhere and kids wave at me. I mean, granted, mom and dad are like, come on Timmy, you know, scary bikers, let's go away. And the kids are like, hey, hi. Kids love bikes and they don't see the danger that most bikers present which quite honestly, most bikers aren't dangerous at all. They're really nice guys. And then there's a whole another side called Method Acting which I'll cover in our next moment because Method Acting, for those of you who are familiar with Method Acting is when somebody takes on a role and not just in that moment, not just when they're on scene, but they also take it off screen. They're also, you know, when they're in their trailer, they're still that character. They're still living that moment. So we interact directly with kids. Our first step is what we call an adoption. The adoption is where we induct a child into our family. It's an induction ceremony. By doing this, this is where our Method Acting comes in because we give kids the opportunity to be a badass to say it that way. We have about 50-some members and motorcycles that show up at any adoption that we do. We have a bunch of safeguards that we implement for our kids to be safe. But the big key that we do here is we get the kids involved and let them know that there's a whole bunch of people that care about them, that love them, that are there for them no matter what, and that believe them. We never ask our kids about what happened to them. We never talk about their abuse with them. We are just there to let them know, we know you went through something and we're here to support you. And there's a lot of ways you can do this, not just in, you know, obviously our organization, but there's different organizations wherever you may be, especially in Texas, that offer opportunities for you to be directly involved in helping kids, there's big brother, big sister, there's CASA, there's Boysville Volunteer Opportunities, which is a foster home center. There's a lot of different avenues out there in your community. If you just take a look for opportunities, you'll find them. So we meet as a group, we discuss what we're gonna do for the adoption, we discuss the child's road name, every child gets a road name, it's awesome. And we discuss how that child wants to be greeted. One of the most important things is we don't cog every child. When we actually are interviewing the child and the family, we ask amongst other things, you know, what road name do you want? But we also ask them, how do you want to be greeted? I've had everything from, I had to do a peer away, peer case, curtsy, thank you, my wife. I had to do a curtsy, I've had to do cat noises, I've had to do fist bumps and waves, I had to dance once, I had to do the clock woe, which I still don't quite remember what that is. But we give the kids the power first to know that they're in control of their body. They get to determine how they want to be greeted. And the most important thing we give them is this vest. This little vest that says little guardian of the children on the back of it. This is where method acting comes in for us with these kids. That moment that child puts on a vest, that child changes because that child now suddenly feels like a badass, like a biker, and they get that opportunity to just feel empowered knowing that they're part of this group of guys and girls that just are there to love and protect them. And the names they pick out are truly amazing. We'll go through a few of them in a second. But then of course we always tell them in order to be a biker, you gotta go for a motorcycle ride. So every child, and I don't think we've had one kid turn us down in 14 years, every child has gotten on a bike and gone for their first motorcycle ride. And some of them have been before, but the majority of the kids that we work with never ridden a bike. And so we get this great opportunity where we get to take these kids on their first motorcycle ride. And what's really neat is when we first roll up as this large, noisy group, the children are always a little like, oh my gosh, shy, because there's all these bikes, all these people. But by the end of it, when they're on that motorcycle, you can't see it because we make sure all the pictures hide their faces. But behind every one of those helmets that a kid is wearing is this big cheesy grin because they're loving every minute of it. They're loving, and I don't think it's just the motorcycle that they love. I think it's the fact that they love that a bunch of people believe them and support them. And that's what makes a difference for them. After the ride is done, there's one thing we do give them that's very special, but I'm gonna skip ahead. Outside of the adoption, once they're in organization, we do several events throughout the year with them. All these events are designed around fun with them. At the top left is our Easter event. We had one of our members as the Easter money. We've taken them to the San Antonio Rampage Ice Hockey game, we do a back to school drive for all of them. We do games with them, we've taken them bowling. We even had one of them appear on Ken's Five with us to talk about how she is now an advocate, which I'll talk more about later. So we try and engage these children in a way that they now feel like they're a kid again. Because what we've seen with children is most of the time they get abused, they never leave that mentality because one, they think they're the only one. But two, they feel like they can't be a kid again because now they've dealt with this big adult issue. So what we drive is that one, you're not alone. Look at all these kids around you. They've all been abused. But two, we're gonna go have some fun. We're just gonna be kids and have a good time. We go to trampoline parks, we've gone to pool, we've had pool parties for them. We do whatever we can to make sure they feel like a kid again, which from what I've experienced is the most important aspect of helping a child heal is giving them their piece of childhood back to where they're not an adult anymore dealing with an adult issue. But they're back to being a child again. Now, one of the things we give all of our kids, only our kids have them, is the bear. I love this guy. I have mine with me here today. We affectionately call him cut, but our kids get to name them whatever they want. We present this bear to them, but before we present it to each child, we all give it a hug. And obviously with Corona and COVID-19 right now, quarantine right now, we haven't done that. Free quarantine, we'd pass it around, every member would hug it and we'd tell the child the bear's filled with love. If you ever need to be reminded of how much we love you, just remember us hugging this bear. Now, what's really neat is, it's a stuffed animal and these kids have taken to this bear like nobody's business. It's amazing, over 14 years watching what this bear has done. Because I still have adults that were kids in our organization at one point that still have this bear. And they still periodically send me pictures of this bear doing activities, which is truly cool. And I even have some of the kids who send pictures of the bear doing activities. This bear has been to places I have never been. He's been to Cocoa Beach, which I apparently, I really want to go. He's been sick before. He's gone to lakes and camping. He's been on a John Deere. He's gone to school. Most recently during quarantine, we got a picture from one family of all four of their bears, all having a party together and playing UNO. So these kids have really began to personalize this bear. And we get calls every now and then to go and fill this bear up and to visit with the child again. And when there's not an event going on and we gladly obliged by that. I mentioned that I talked about our little guardians. I worked with a lot of these kids directly with my members. This organization, these kids are truly amazing. And these are a fraction of the kids that we have worked with. But I'm going to talk specifically about two of them. My first one I want to talk about is Tink. Tink when we first met Tink was absolutely terrified of sleeping in the dark. She slept with her night light on, her hall light on, her bathroom light on, her bedroom light on. There could be no shadows in her room at all. If there was any dark room at night that she could see from her bedroom, that light had to be on, including the whole bathroom light on. That was about a month into her working with our organization and her being involved, that her liaison gave her a night light that projected our image up on the wall. And it was about another month later that Tink gleefully reported to her liaison that she was now sleeping with just our night light and the hall light on. She had transitioned because she began to feel safe. When kids feel safe, they're so quick and so resilient and overcoming their fear and overcoming their pain. And then we had about another month go by and Tink called her liaison and said, hey, I don't need my night light anymore. I'm sleeping with all the lights off. Ah, man, I just got to see a big burly biker get all emotional. And she wanted to give her night light to another kid that needed to be reminded of our image at night when they were sleeping. And three and a half, four months time, we went from being completely afraid of the dark to now she's not afraid of the dark and she wants to give what was once her security to another child to help them feel secure. That's the power of taking a kid out of the victim hood of making them feel safe, of giving them courage, of giving them protection, giving them the support is they bounce so quicker, so, so quick back. When another child named Shadow Angel, Shadow Angel is truly an inspiration to all of us. So when we first met Shadow Angel, she couldn't be touched. Shadow Angel's trigger was physical contact. If you padded her on the shoulder, other than her mother was the only one to touch her, but so when we greeted her and we asked how she wanted to be greeted, it was a peace sign, just a peace sign. And so that was fine, we gave her a peace sign, we were fine with that. And as she began to trust us and feel safe again, she began to give us high fives. And I was the first person at one of our events that she came up and she put her arm around me and gave me this big old side hug and said, hey, Tex, wow. All right, I'm going broke today. So we have a rule in our organization where whenever you get choked up in a speech, you owe $5 to the kitty. So I'm like up to 20 now. So Shadow Angel took it a step further though. Not only did she overcome her fear of physical touch to where she felt comfortable giving side hugs, but she came to us one day and said, I wanna do more, I wanna help. And so we talked with her about it and she began actually helping at the events instead of being a participant child at an event. She was a child that was helping at our events. So she was helping out the abused children. Shadow Angel took it a step further as I pointed out a few slides back. She went on Ken's Five, a great day I say with us and talked about why she was involved in this organization as an advocate, which is ultimately for us is the third stage that we all sit in right now, where we went from victim, we overcame our situation, became a victor, but now we're advocates. And that's where Shadow Angel at 15 years of age became an advocate for child abuse. I didn't become an advocate until I was 22. I know I look young, but I'm really 36. I didn't start this process until I was 22. And Shadow Angel seven years ahead of me, I jokingly talked to her and tell her, well, I might as well just step down as president and just go ahead and give it to you because you're a lot farther along than I am. And I know these names are a little weird, but I did say that the kids choose their names and we let them choose their names. And so some of them are quite interesting. As you can see, we have a variety of names that come from different backgrounds in different areas and different influences. I think one of my favorite ones that'll pop up in a minute is Nightmare. When we asked Nightmare why she wanted to go by Nightmare, that's gonna pop up right next to Xena. She said, well, he was my Nightmare when I was going through this, but now I wanna be his Nightmare. And this all started, guys, just because some bikers got together and decided, let's go help some kids. And so I wanna leave with this before I start answering some questions. If you want more information on us, you can feel free to email, phone call. Our webpage is right there, geocsatx.com or on Facebook. We have a dedicated phone line. We have a general email that goes to our board of directors. If you wanna email me personally, you can email me at presidents at geocsatx.com. I'd be glad to talk about anything that we can do. If you believe that there's a case or a child that you know that we can get involved in, we do have a barrier for entry in our organization to protect ourselves, that there has to be a police report on file. If there's a police report on file, then the abuse trust is validated. The hardest thing we get is cases that don't have police reports on file because oftentimes those seem to be custody battle issues and we kind of stay away from that. So if you want any more information, please go to our webpage, find us on Facebook, feel free to message us on Facebook, give us a call, give us a text. I'm good for anything. I'd be glad to discuss this at any time with anybody, anywhere. All right. Ah, oh, 11 questions. Top vote is mine. Who's excited about the final presentation? All right. How can we contact to be a part of it? Yeah, go to our webpage or you can give us a call directly. What are the requirements to join regarding to the children? Excellent question. So we do not require a motorcycle. We have a level of a membership, what we call supporters, who go through the same training and same worker that we put our membership through. You have to be 18 over 18, pass the criminal background check, pass the central registry and we conduct an interview before we give you admission with our membership coordinator. We do this to several different things. One, we gotta make sure that you're good with kids because that's what our organization's based on is handling kids. The second thing that we're also looking for is stability in your life. We've had some people join our organization and go through the cycle ups and downs. That's why it takes a year for membership because we wanna make sure that that person is stable enough to handle being a child's direct contact when they need help. So how do you take referrals? So most of our referrals come directly from ChildSafe. We get them from the DA's office directly. We've got them from Casa, St. PJ's homes. Any child advocacy center, we've even gotten personal phone calls from a mom or a dad who says, hey, my child's going through this. We file a police report. They have court in four months, can y'all help? And we most certainly can't. So we can take referrals any way possible. The only requirement that we have is making sure that there's a police report on file. Next question. What steps did you take during your journey to become a victor? Honestly, I took a lot of hard ones. I dived in drugs. I dived in alcohol, gang activity. Late night hooligans sneaking out of my parents' house, getting busted by my overly protective Catholic mother quite often. It wasn't until I actually found that there was people like me. As a child, I grew up thinking boys don't get sexually assaulted. That's just not a thing. And then I found out that it was a thing, that boys are victims just like I was. And once I began to identify that there were other male victims out there just like me, I really began to realize that bad things happen. But on my walk with and coming to know Christ at 21-ish, I realized that what the devil intended for harm got intended for good. So the devil intended to break me with the abuse I went through. But God said that I can take that and I can use it for my kingdom. So I took what I went through and I've now turned it for the past 14 years into making, yeah, 14 years. 14 years into making a difference in other children's lives. Because now when I talk to a kid and I say, look, I know what you're going through, I'm not speaking false, I'm speaking very true on it. How to connect students to your group. Holly, I guess I would depend upon in what method you were thinking. We generally don't do a lot of school presentations. Schools sometimes have frowned upon our message, believe it or not, because the message that I want to give schools and what I want to talk about is a little more graphic than this. I want to talk about what does abuse look like? What are the different types of abuse out there? And I get told I need to censor that when they screen my presentation. So we've had a difficult time getting through a school system to understand that if you don't talk about these things, it doesn't mean they're going away, they're going to happen. As far as individual students wanting to volunteer or work with us, that's a little separate. Feel free to reach out to me. We do have some volunteer activities that pop up. This year has been a little challenging because of quarantine, but we do have the availability outside of once all this is done to where we can involve high schoolers and even younger in some of our volunteer activities. Linda, not a question, but a statement, I love it. Yes. So at the live presentation, we allowed everyone there to hug this wonderful bear, but obviously this situation is a little different. How do we contact to become a part of it? I think I already answered that, but feel free to reach out to us on our Facebook page. We, if you go to our website, we have our membership coordinators email posted under Contact Us and you can directly email her and ask her and she will send you the required paperwork that we have as well as set up a time to meet with you. Not as easy as it seems. I fully understand that Debra, while I've not been involved in other childcare directly, I can understand the challenge in childcare and my heart goes out to you and my hat's off to you because you're the ones on the front lines. How can we get a bear? You can't. Yeah, you can't. That is a strictly goes to our abused children only. We've had that question by numerous people, even people wanting to throw buttloads of money at us and mind you, we're fully funded by the public, we're a nonprofit, so we don't have a large grants from the government or anything like that, but our bear is strictly for our children because that is something very special to them. And what we tell them too is this bear, this particular bear we've had now for quite a while. And so we always tell our kids, if you see anyone with this bear, you know they've gone through the same thing you have been and you don't got to talk about it, but you just know. And we actually had a story of one of our kids talk about, she ran into another adult at a supermarket who happened to be carrying our bear and no words were spoken. They just looked at each other and they both just knew. So unfortunately, you can't, I'm sorry. No, there is not a chapter in Corpus Christi, unfortunately. Well, I think that's about it, guys. Kathy, I'm sorry I went over, but the floor is yours. Hang in there for just a second. We'll get Kathy on the screen. Kathy, she's coming in. Hey, okay. There you go. You're always wonderful. Just, I can't tell you how grateful we are all the time for you and for all of your fellow bikers. If this were not a quarantine time, they come together all the time. You would see a huge group of guardians together, supporting each other. But this is a very different situation. I wanna thank all of our presenters. You are all wonderful. You're always willing to step up and do whatever you can to help kids. Thank you also to Charlotte Ann and Susan from Nowcast for some of us who are really, really anxious about this whole virtual thing with high tech. You make it easy. Thank everyone who's here. We will be doing this. Please check with us. Please feel free to, on the questionnaire afterwards, suggest anything you would like. We are just learning, but thank you for your patience as we try to handle all of this different way of doing things. That's all I have. And if you have any questions, email us and we'll be happy to try to figure out what you need. Thank you.