 Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou School Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about inspiration, welcoming adversity, and building a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is the founder and CEO of Women in Need. She is Mary Scott Lau, and today we are going Beyond Empowering Women. Hey, Mary, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Good morning, Rusty. I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Mary, it's super incredible the impact that you and your team is making here in our Hawaii community. It's unbelievable, actually, and it's so great that you founded this incredible organization, but Mary, can I first ask you if you can share a little bit about your mom and the struggles that she had? Absolutely. Growing up, I lived in a house with a mother that was an alcoholic. At that time, of course, many years ago, they didn't really know how to deal with that disease. You know, AA had just started. There was very limited resources, and it was really a struggle for her. And she also had mental health problems too. I'm sure today she'd be dual diagnosed, but back then they didn't know what that was. So I watched her my whole life struggling just to maintain normality. And by the time I was 16, I went into foster care for two years until I turned 18. I was like an epitome of a friend of mine and her mother, so that was great. But my poor mother continued to struggle. She was just an alcoholic and could not get out of it. And so I moved to Hawaii when I was 19, and at 21 she ended up committing suicide, which was not her first time. She had tried many times before. And I realized then, right then, at a young age, I didn't even know it that I was going to start something like this, that there has to be other people out there I mean, I didn't know anybody who had another mother that was an alcoholic or anything like that. So I didn't realize that that was a problem all over the place. And as I got older, my younger brother was afflicted with the same alcoholism and started into drugs very young. In fact, when I was 21, I took custody of him and he was 16. And so for, well, 15. So for three years I struggled with having to raise him, and it was really hard because he had the same drug abuse tendencies and alcoholism. And he unfortunately ended up dying at 37 of a drug overdose. So I've been around it my whole life. I just didn't realize what an impact it made on me because I was strong enough to carry on in my life and go to many different careers and do many different things. But now I really have the opportunity to help people not have to struggle with it and get well and lead a normal life. And that's one of the biggest reasons why I started women in need. Mary, thank you for sharing that about your mom and your brother. And you have two biological children. And tell me about the infant that you adopted on the day he was born. Well, first of all, I have three wonderful sons. I include him as my son also. And I always want a girl. So after my two biological sons, I was single raising them. And my older one was out of the house. He was 27. My youngest one was 14. And I decided I'm going to adopt a baby girl. So I put the word out to everybody that I knew. And I said, you know, if anybody wants an open adoption, I am here. I want to make sure that the child is well loved, that knows that biological parents has a relationship with them if he can or she can. And so I mean, I was so excited to have a little baby girl that I could do her nails and do makeup. And I was always on a football field or a basketball court. And now I could get to do fun stuff. Well, I met a gal when I was doing a makeovers and a health fair at the women's prison who approached me. And she said that I know you're interested in adopting. And I said, I am. And we talked a little bit. And she said, well, would it be all right if it was a boy? And I said, of course, you know, God gives you what God gives you. And then she said, OK, would it be all right if he's half black? And I'm like, sure. So on the day he was born, she was incarcerated. And she had had a few close calls that they had called me and said she's going into labor. And when I got there, she was at fault. So she went back to the prison. So on the day she did go into labor was Thanksgiving Day. And I'll never forget it was going to be 17 years this Thanksgiving. And it was that. And if anybody remembers that was the time we were having earthquake. And we had two earthquakes right back to back. That's the last earthquake I ever remember. And it happened during that time. So I tell them all the time, you were born during an earthquake. Everything moved because you were born. Man, that's amazing. You're such an incredible person, Mary. So unfortunately, he. I'm so happy to know you. I mean, it's the impact that you make with your family and everybody around you. And Mary, can you share about the reason what really compelled you to start women in need? Well, I was in actually radio and television for 15 years before I started this. And one day I was at a seroptimist luncheon. And there was a gal there from the Mary Jane Center. A young gal. And she got up and she said, you know, I really wish that someone would come in and teach us how to, you know, talk and act like adults because people look down on us because we're young and we're pregnant and we have babies. I thought, well, geez, I could do that with my hands tied back. I mean, I had modeled for several years. I had done modeling. I'm like, okay, I can go and do that. And so I went into this. And at the same time, there was another person there from the Woodwood Spouse View Shelter. And she said, yeah, we would like somebody like that too who would come to our place. I'm like, well, okay. So anyway, I volunteered for both of them on my lunch hour. And I really realized when I went in, I'd never been in an abuse shelter before. I'd never been in a spouse shelter before. I never knew what abuse was. Never knew anybody that was abused. And I was just an eye opener. So first I went to the Mary Jane Center with these cute little young girls giving birth with no family or support, except for the people at the organization. And I thought, there's gotta be some more help for these girls. I mean, what happened to them that they started out like this and have no support and nobody to go to? So that was one of the first things I said, I've got to do something. And then I went to the spouse shelter and just the simple thing of teaching them how to apply makeup or skincare was just thrilling to them because they'd never done anything for themselves. They were abused. And so from there, I got to completely educated on abuse, on child abuse, I mean, on domestic violence. And I realized that all of these people had something in common. They were from dysfunctional families. They were from abuse of families or they were suffering abuse for a significant other. They were homeless. They had no place to go for whatever, for various reasons. The majority of the older women had been incarcerated, which I had never even knew somebody incarcerated. And most all of them were suffering from some substance abuse or alcoholism. And so those four things seem to be married to each other. And I thought, I'm gonna get as educated as I can and try to help as many people gain the self-esteem and the tools that they need to go on and live great lives. I mean, this is horrible. These are intelligent, wonderful women. And so that's what started women in need. And that was, it'll be 27 years, it was 27 years in July that I started it. I had no idea what I was doing. I got together a board of directors and we made up all our bylaws and we started from there. And I remember the first grant that I wrote because I didn't even know how to run a grant was for Wilcox Foundation. And I put in for $500. And they thought I had made a mistake and left off a zero. But when I got that $500, I could not believe it. I was like, oh my gosh, somebody really believes in what I'm doing. And so from there, I just started volunteering into different places and different organizations that needed my help. And it just boomeranged, it just grew and grew and grew. Yeah, Mary, when you're with the children making a big positive impact, how does that make you feel? Oh, it makes me feel like everything goes full circle. And I'm so excited to help children because that's where it starts. They're innocent and they're so fresh and they're so young and they pick up everything. They learn everything from everyone, negative or positive. And I feel that we can make such a positive, great impact in their lives and help them to have that self-esteem and that positive feeling going forward so they can become young adults and safe and happy people. And Mary, you also do women's painting classes to really help the women. Tell me about the painting classes that you offer. You know, we have a wellness center here at Women in Need and I think that's very important because there are so many creative outlets for people that really help them express themselves and grow and heal. And one of them is painting. I don't know how to paint, but we have a fabulous person that's in our organization that self-taught herself. She can paint and she can teach other people to paint. She even taught me and I had paid stick people, but we have beautiful paintings that they painted. I can show you one right now. It's, oh, it's stuck out. Well, no, I hear it goes. There's one right now, what are the girls painted for me? And it's just, it's wonderful, you know? They love it, they love to make it for us, and they put up on our walls, it's great. It's such a great outlet. And they never knew they had this kind of creativity and it's wonderful. We do that, we do it at least twice a month. Now, Mary, I know the title of your organization is Women in Need, but do you also help women or do you also help men and boys? You know, that's funny you asked Rusty because 10 years ago, everyone came to me and said, why don't you help men? Why can't there be a men in need? I'm like, well, listen, Women in Need was made all these many years ago and it's got an acronym of women and we can't change it now. So yes, we do help men and we do help boys, definitely. We're not just located here on Oahu, we're also on Kauai, which we have a very big population over there too. And we have men's classes and women's classes and substance abuse and domestic violence. And Mary, tell me about your staff. It was so awesome when I was able to go to your Pearl City offices and really meet a lot of your staff. Tell me what makes them special. Well, I'll tell you what makes them special, Rusty, is first of all, they love what they're doing. They're so passionate about helping other people just like I am. And you know what? I don't care how good they are on computers. I don't care how educated they are, except a lot of them all have big degrees and do they care about people? That's the most important thing. They care about people. They help them. They walk with them. They help them with any way they can. I mean, our staff, I want to say goes above and beyond and they love it. They absolutely love it. They love to come to work. They have no problems working on the weekends. They're creative. They get time off when they need it. And of course we all need self-care, which we're very big on that, but they're really a happy bunch of people. And that goes right down to the clients. When they're in our office, they can feel that too. And when they're instructing a class, they can feel that warmth coming from them. And we have men on our staff also who are just as caring and just as loving and they're wonderful, wonderful people. I'm really happy to be working with them. Well, Mary, you are so right because like you said, I mean, they're so caring. They're so genuine. They have empathy. I mean, and they have so much positive energy. And Mary, John Maurer, the CEO of Island Energy Services did a big book donation to your organization to help inspire your staff and your clients. Can you tell me about how great that day was when John Maurer and I were with you and your staff? Well, I will forever be grateful to John Maurer for that contribution. It was amazing because your books, Rusty, are so powerful. And why it was such a great day that day is one of our staff members was really having a struggle with her 20-year-old son. And she was really having a hard time reaching out to him and getting through to him. It was just going through some personal problems. And that book just really touched her and really helped her. And she had to read it to her son because he wouldn't read it. But she really, really was inspired by it, which I know many people are. I know that I was, I love the books. I was most inspired by your chapter on when you find your true purpose. Because I knew when I found my true purpose and I had done many things before. And that is really something to all, we all look forward to it. We all want to have in life to find our true purpose. What are we here for? What are we really here for? And I feel that you're not here to help another person. What are you here for? So I think that was a special day that we'll always remember. Our whole staff will remember that. And mostly because now we have the chance to give those gifts and those wonderful things to our clients. So we're saving them for next month when we do our graduation. And you and John were so wonderful to sign all of them. And we're gonna give each one a copy and they're gonna be so thrilled with it. Oh, I absolutely love hearing that, Mary. And Mary, I wanna ask you one more thing about the books. You know that I talk a lot about mindset and mental toughness. And what you guys are doing, you're trying to help your clients with their mindset. You're trying to build their self-confidence and their self-esteem. What are your thoughts about that? Well, first of all, that is the most important thing in life is to keep their self-confidence and self-esteem. And that's exactly what you talk about in your books, which is so powerful. It's retraining their thinking, basically. You are good, you are kind, you are wonderful, you are strong, you can do it. Because when they think they can, they will. If they think they can't, they won't. And every single person can. You know, I take women out of prison monthly, at least three to four, that are walking out those gates with nothing. And I see the fear in their eyes, and the look in their eyes of, where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do? Well, we have houses. We put them in our houses because they're homeless. We put them in our classes. We get them back on their feet. We help them with SSI or food stamps, whatever they need. And we get them moving in the right direction of having something to look forward to. Making themselves feel like they're worthy. They can do this. They don't have to go back to the streets. They don't have to go back to substance abuse. They don't have to go back to abusive relationships. But that's hard. It's hard to change that mentality. We have to really work with them day after day after day. It doesn't happen overnight. Many times it's generational. It can go on for years. I mean, their family was in it. Their family before that. Everybody around them is in it. And they're used to that. I mean, that is their way of life. And it almost becomes easier for them to live like that than to go be successful. So we find it a challenge just to change their mindset, to turn their mindset back to, look what you can accomplish day by day. So one of the things that we use is, we use gratitude. We have gratitude journals and we use them every day. And we work with them every day to be grateful for what you have. You're not incarcerated anymore. You're not homeless. You have a roof over your head. You have all the food you want to eat. You have great friends. You have tons of support and that helps them. You know, we're not just a nine to five business. I mean, many times people are afraid or alone or want to run in the evening or on the weekends. And one thing that we were talking a long time ago is don't give out your cell number. Well, everybody gives out their cell number. All of us do. Because we want to connect with our clients. We don't want them to think that after five o'clock, we're not going to talk to them because we are. We want to help them. We're here to help. When we, when they're successful and they move on and we see everything they've done, we're so proud of them and we feel so happy for them. That's why we do it. That's exactly why we do it. Excuse me. Mary, when, like you said, when let's say some women are coming out of prison, they all, they all want to have a second chance, right? In life. Yes. And do you, do you feel like they learned from that mistake that they had committed and then they just really want to improve themselves? You know, I do not believe in women being incarcerated, first of all. I think it's, it's really bad because 95% of the women that are incarcerated are in there for nonviolent crimes. So when you have them in a non-gender specific program, which is what the women's prison really is, it's not very gender specific. It's very hard for them to grow or learn. They get really, they get really stagnant. But when they come out of prison, they want to learn. They want to be better. They want to do, they don't want to go back there. So as long as their mentality is, I don't want to go back there, then we can help them. But if they do, if they do get, you know, normalized in there and they get like, okay, this is, you know, easy, I can do this, then we have a problem. But, you know, once they see where they can go and what they can do, it's wonderful, the light goes on. And yes, they all want second chances and third chances and fourth chances because we all make mistakes. And a lot of theirs is not their fault. They have been, like I said, generational. They've been set up for failure and we want to set them up for success. Mary, I want to ask you about the services and how do you help people that are victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse? What do you guys actually do to help them? You know, that's really hard because everybody's story is different. And everybody's story is exactly what they want to tell you, which is usually scratching the surface. So you have to really, they have, first of all, they have to be able to trust you. They will talk to people that they trust, period. They will open up to people that they trust. You know, all domestic violence victims, which I found out very early on and I couldn't believe it, was they all feel that somehow they deserved it. They did something wrong. And that is not the case. They don't realize they need to have therapy, especially the people that have been sexually abused. I mean, that sticks with you forever and they need to get really deep therapy to let it go. And there is great therapists out there. We have two mental health counselors on our team already that are just wonderful. It's really a long journey. And another thing that I really feel strongly about that we don't have enough help for is mental health because a lot of our clients, and it's the thing nowadays that everybody's dual diagnosed. One is a mental health problem, one is this helps us abuse problem. Well, there is not enough mental health places for them to go. I mean, we take out some women that are severely mentally impaired and there's no place for them to go. They can go to the hospital because they're not crazy enough. And then they come to us and they can't really be self-sufficient because they can't take their medication on time. They don't have the boundaries that we have to provide them. I mean, our programs are very structured, but we can't administer anything with mental health when it comes to medication and things like that. So we need a lot more programs that deal with mental health and their challenges. I really believe that substitute use now, they're all got mental health problems because there's so much stuff that the drugs do to you, it just completely screws you up. So I just feel that we really need to research that more and we need to get into more services and it needs to be easily, regularly available to people that need it. That's my next passion. Yeah, I'm sure, Mary. And Mary, tell me about how you're helping families and just parenting assistance. I mean, because they all have different issues, but you're helping just to help them move forward, right? Yes, yes, we are. And you know, because it affects the whole family, that's the thing. The whole family is involved in the whole fraud. They've all gone through the registry and now they're all gonna get well together and all of them are affected. So yes, many of our women take back children that have been in foster care because they couldn't take care of them. Many of our women, you know, get pregnant and they don't know who the father is and we have to help them learn how to be parents and what their options are. Some do give up her adoption, most of them keep them. So when they do decide to keep their children and they are young children, we wanna help them, give them the tools that they need to do positive things and to make their child's life better. Unfortunately, we become parents who parented us of the same people that parented us. So if that was the right way, we have to learn all over again differently what the right way is. And a lot of us, you know, when we do outings and things with our women, because we do all the time, we bring our own children too. So they have a role model to watch out, to watch after them. They can see how we treat our children so they will do the same to theirs. And I think that's really important because I don't think people learn very much from just being told what to do or how to do it. You have to show them. You have to show them compassion. You have to show them love. You have to show them the way to discipline the right way. So, you know, we're really fortunate to have that room to do that and that space to do that. You know, I'm just really thankful. You're so right about showing them. I mean, when they see an example, I mean, that speaks more than what words can say, obviously. And Mary, you touched on it a little earlier about substance abuse. What do you do to really try to help your clients that are, you know, really need help with substance abuse? Well, you know, there's so many different angles that people look at substance abuse at. They look at it as, okay, you get addicted. You try something, now you're heavily addicted to it. And then we have other ways of looking at it, saying, well, it's genetic. Your mother was, your father was, it was in your family, it's gonna run in you. And then you have a third way of saying, third, people say, well, you don't care. You don't care about anything else, but your stuff, you're just very, you know, you don't care. You're very selfish. And then other people still look at it as, and this is what I look at it as, that covering up substance abuse, that abuse that you do with drugs or alcohol comes from something that happened to you. You may not even know what it is, but it was something in your past, something that you have to work through, something that you have to work through and take care of and get rid of. You know, the older we get, the more we realize how small things impacted us when we were young that we didn't even know. But now that we're looking back, we go, wow, that did impact us. That really did make a change. Why do I think that way? Why do I feel that way? And so what we do in our classes, of course, they're evidence-based programs that we use for substance abuse classes. What we do with that is we do things that will take them back, like we do a life chain of where they started and who was in their life and what they did and how that impacted them. We go back to people that they really looked up to and people that they admired and people that they trusted and people that they trusted and heard them and how it was not their fault. So we have to go through a lot of different layers to get to what really is going on for them to have enough courage and self-esteem to move away from that. Maybe to forgive somebody that they have left. You know, they had pulled a grudge with for years or the number one thing especially with addicts is they like to blame everyone. And they through enough programming get over that. They stop blaming everyone and realize that this is their individual problem and they have to work on themselves because yes, you did have a bad family. Yes, you may have been in a bad relationship. Yes, you might have lost something very important to you but that does not give you the right to now destroy your life and everybody else's. So they have to, that's a learning process and they do learn and they do go on to become counselors. They become counselors and they become, you know members of society that moves and shakes and changes the whole thing and we love that. Mary, I want everyone to really support your organization, Women in Need. What you're doing to help our Hawaii community is absolutely phenomenal and I want to thank you for taking time to join me on my show today. Thank you, Rusty, it's my pleasure. Anytime we can get the word out that there is help out there, we certainly want to and it's been a wonderful experience meeting you and I hope to become closer to you. Definitely. Thank you, Mary. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKomori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Mary and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.