Frederick Riley: The People Who Hold Us Up

0:00We all have that person in our lives who seems to be connected to everyone. You can be intentional about your network, but still being human. In order to build strong connections with others, you really have to be strongly connected with yourself. I believe that meaning from networking has been the single greatest contributor to my good luck. You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. Fred, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. I'm so glad we were able to do this. To kick things off, you've written that you were 11 years old when you met your father for the first time. Yeah. Take us back there. What did that moment feel like? Yeah. I have to tell you the whole story. It was when welfare was returned back to the States. The State of Michigan were suing fathers. My mother had to tell the State of Michigan who our dad was.

1:02They sued him. We had a blood test. I remember the moment when we walked through the doors to get the blood test. I think I remember what my brother and I were wearing. I remember it was a summer day. I remember how white and sterile the room was. And I remember walking in the room and my father looking at my brother and I and breaking out in tears. I remember it distinctly because his nose turned red. And he was boohooing. And my mother, she's not one of those like deep mothers who's going to tell you what's going to happen and why you're going to this place. So we just went because she told us to. And so my mother is angry at him. She's yelling and she's screaming at him. And then several months later after the results come back, he comes to pick us up. Forced to go meet our siblings because we had four sisters and we had cousins. We had aunts. We had grandparents. We get to my dad's house and my stepmother. She opens the door and she looks at me and she looks at my brother and then a organ in the living room. And she looks at me and says, I hear you know how to play the piano. Can you play some songs?

2:02And I'm like, yeah. And so I'm playing and I could hear her in the back just reading him over because she was so angry with him. And we didn't know what to make of that. I don't even know if we knew the weight of it. But then we got to meet the rest of our family and we got to meet cousins and we met our grandparents. And it morphed into this beautiful relationship that I share with my dad. But I also share with those siblings and uncles and aunts. But that moment for me meant so many different things. It was the moment in which I feel like as we are living in society where people don't feel seen. It was the first moment that I felt seen. One of my aunts who passed away a couple of years ago, I'm Patricia. Was the first person in the world to see me to tell me I was really special to tell me I was important to tell me I could be somebody in the world. And so meeting my father connected a whole lot of dots for me. But I remember the moment of meeting him in the rest of the family just a lot of confusion early on because we didn't know what to expect until this was like a combustion of things. Well, two things strike me about that. First, it's hard for most people to imagine not knowing their father until they're 11 years old.

3:05I mean, you take that very granted. But it's also how vividly you can describe that day, you know, how impressionable it was. You can picture what the room was like and what the smells were and the warmth and everything else. So what an amazing moment. You also described food insecurities and eviction notices and power shutoffs. What did that instability feel like as a child? Yeah. If you are always anticipating something to go wrong, that pit that you have in your stomach where you can sense it. But imagine living most of your childhood like that. If you knock on my door really early in the morning, really loud, it takes me right back to childhood. I don't know if we got the same person who did this all across the city, but there is this man who worked for the friend of the court in Saginaw, Michigan. His job was to hand out eviction notices. And this guy would knock on the door at about 630 in the morning. And it's the loudest knock you could hear. I would jump out of the bed. I know the neighbors heard it, so the embarrassment of it. But those things shake my Java and it really has driven me into how I operate to this day.

4:09But I'll tell you the one thing that I also remember about food insecurity, eviction notices, power shutoffs, was the power of community and the power of our family and how we rallied together to support one another. Church members, neighbors, folks who would run power courts from their home to ours to help us stay warm in the winter. And so although I feel like I spit most of my childhood with a pit in my stomach waiting on the shoe to drop on the next thing, I also remember these moments of grace, these moments of sharing, these moments of caring. And those moments I've also pulled into adulthood as well. Yeah, that is a striking way to kind of think of things. When you were in that state as a child, did you think that things would break right eventually? Did you think that this is an adversity that you might have to endure through? How did you think about that? Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you. The way that I grew up and some of the things that we experienced, I always thought they were a little weird and dysfunctional.

5:10And I remember making a vow to myself throughout my childhood that if I could change things for myself and for the people around me that I would work hard to do that. And I think I've made good on that promise and I've worked hard for a lot of things. But I also feel like grace and God and the universe have helped to propel me to this place. Absolutely. Statistically, the odds weren't in your favor. Why do you think that you and your brothers thrived instead of becoming just another data point? Oh, my mother. My mother, although we were in the middle of a lot of dysfunction, my mother raised us way differently than a lot of my peers. I distinctly remember my mother telling my brother and I that she would kill us before she would allow the streets to have us. And although I don't think she would actually have done this, I do believe that that respect or the reverence we had for her was their respect that we felt like she was due for her sacrifices that she made for us. And so while all my friends were outside in the morning playing and riding their bikes in the summertime,

6:11my brother and I did homework from 9 until 11 or 9 until noon. She made us learn all the math, all the science, all the reading and language arts that we would need for the next grade. She would make us do that the summer before. She made sure we did chores. My mother raised us with structure and that same structure that we were raised with carries me through. And this impression that we could learn new things and see new things as something that I do every day. So I'm always listening to a book, reading a book, reading a paper. I believe it's iron, sharpening iron, but my mother was the driving force behind us driving. An amazing woman. What did she understand about raising two black boys that the research would later confirm? Like what was she onto? And clearly there are other mothers that sort of exhibit the same patterns. What was that? It's something that would be helpful for people to understand. Well, I always say that my mother could have written no child left behind or some of the legislation into summer reading loss and all these other things. You know, my mother grew up in a small town and she saw people coming or not living up to their full potential.

7:15And she did not want that from our brother and I. And so what she didn't feel like she could offer us at home, she found in the way of mentors. And so I had a lot of examples of what manhood could be, what it meant to be a professional, what it meant to help work in a world and do stuff for a society. Because although my mother gave us a structure at home, she also realized that we were missing some things. And so we were in Boy Scouts. We were in mentoring programs. All of those things that we couldn't get at home, she made a real concerted effort to help to make sure we got it out in public somewhere else. This is really good book that I read once and it's called unequal childhoods and it's talking about the development journey of kids from higher income zip codes and lower income zip codes. And it's talking about concerted cultivation over the natural maturation process. And I feel like we had an equal balance of both where my mother wrote out a schedule and planned events and had a real rubric for all the things that she wanted us to do. But there was also a part of the natural maturation process that my brother and I experienced as well.

8:16Those two married together and my mother's threats to kill us is the real equation that I think helped us to be successful. It almost doesn't matter socioeconomically. The values that a parent has, if they can have high expectations coupled with strong support, that's a winning combination. And it's harder obviously in the situation that your mother was in raising you. But those are kind of the magic ingredients for getting the best out of your children. Yeah, it totally is, you know, those values, those things that I grew up doing. We're really, in my opinion, always counter-cultural to the neighborhood that we grew up in. Most nights, Monday through Thursday, we had dinner at home at a table. We would sit down at a table with a knife and a fork and my mother would ask questions about the day we talk about stuff that we ran into the newspaper. My mother really behaved in a way that was really outside of the scope of what we saw around us. And I think, although it was harder, I knew we lived in a rough neighborhood. I knew we didn't have a lot, but my mother had this dignity and still has this dignity about her that carries me through life.

9:22And until I operate and have always operated in a way that was really counter to what the map or the guide outside showed was around us. What is your peers at the time kind of think of your upbringing? And when you said that we read the paper and discussed it and when they saw the collar shirt boys coming down the street. Was it hard? You know, peer pressure is tough. Well, let me take this. Number one, my name is Frederick. And my mother made people call me Frederick. My brother's name is Patrick. And she made people call him Patrick. And we lived in the projects. And we were collared shirts from preschool all the way into we finished elementary school. The bus driver called us the collar boys. And so the nickname stuck. But I will tell you, it wasn't cool. People, they teased us. We were nerds. We were dorks. I didn't fight against it, but my brother did because he wanted to be a little cooler. But I will also tell you that those same people who teased us also had admiration and respect for us. I wrote an essay and a showed up in the paper. They didn't publicly say, like, that's a good job that you did. But if I saw somebody one on one, they're like, yeah, man, you're doing a good job.

10:22I'm proud of you. And so I wasn't the coolest kid in the world. But I never shied away from who I was. So it's been ingrained to be for some time. I've always had a high sense of self. And that sense of self has allowed me not to really care what my peers think. Yeah. For what I understand, you know, as a child, you didn't idolize athletes. You idolized a principal, a pastor, and a boy scout leader. Yeah. Why was that? Because of where I grew up, the elementary school that I went to had two fathers. And I remember these two men distinctly because they were the only two fathers who were in the homes of any of the kids that I knew. It was Mr. Reeves and Gary Hall. And Gary Hall was the basketball coach. And I remember the Reeves family. And so there weren't a lot of examples around me of who you could become. Listen, I wasn't ever going to be a sports star and have never really been in the sports. Music has never been my thing. And so if I saw a black man in a suit, I would like, oh my God, why do you wear a suit? And so my dream one day was to have a job where I could wear a suit to work.

11:23And Lewis Skipper, my elementary school principal wore these gray suits. And I remember they were gray. And he would walk through our elementary school with this black fraternity, the Omega's. He'd walk through our elementary school with this paddle. And I even moved out of his way when he walked through the building. He commanded respects. Yeah. Commended respect. He drove a great Mercedes. This was, I'd never seen anybody drive a car like that. And I just thought he was a smooth swab guy by Boy Scout troop leader. He had a great job. He worked in a medical field. His wife had an amazing job. She was an HR professional for General Motors. And he had two sons, a house with what looked like a white picket fence. And he was like, embody what it looked like to be in the American dream. And he volunteered. He was a Boy Scout troop leader to a bunch of goofy young kids. And very rarely got ruffled by us and all our goofy banter. There were places we had Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. But in Saginaw, Michigan, there's a Reverend Roosevelt Austin Boulevard. He is one of the most important people I had ever met. I was a junior usher.

12:23And I can distinctly remember fighting to be the usher by his door on youth usher day. Because I wanted him to walk out of his study. And I wanted him to put his hand on my head and said, hello, my son. And when he would do that, it made me feel like I had changed the world. When he spoke, people listened. When he gave direction, people followed. And I wanted him to be the president to be came to our church as a means to get his endorsement to run for president. Bill Clinton had been there. I was at an event a couple months back. And I met Jim Blanchard, the former governor of Michigan. And he said to me, did you ever know Roosevelt Austin? He's the reason why I got elected governor of Michigan. I thought Reverend Austin just embodied what it meant to be an important person in the world. And the fact that he knew who I was, he knew my name, made me feel like I was somebody important. And so I idolized him. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to speak like him. But I feel like in some ways I've made him and Louis Skipper and Mr. Brewer proud at the life that I've charted out for myself because of their example.

13:25That is an amazing story. So if I were to ask you who got you here, is it your mother? Is it those three men? Is it something bigger? Like how do you think about that? I stand on the shoulders of so many other people. There are about a hundred people who are holding me up to this place where I am. I think about my elementary school teacher Sharon Smith. When I was leaving the sixth grade, she told me that I was smart and you need to go be pushed harder. You're going to fill out this application to this gifted and talented program. I'll pay the fees. I'll even take you to over there to take the test. You need this type of prodding to do what you're going to do next. She helped me fill out the application, paid for the test, and drove me there to take the test and waited in the parking lot. I got into that program and it was a global studies program that I was in from seventh grade to my senior year of high school. It opened me up to a whole different world. And researching so fishing on my own, finding information, being in a class where we were having so crowded conversations, modeled conversations, and classes with people who were way smarter than me or people from different parts of the city.

14:25I feel like I could mesh in almost any world because of that. I got to college and met a whole group of people just like me. I was standing on the shoulders of professors who told me I wasn't that smart. And I needed to study harder and be better. I sat on the shoulders of friends. My high school English teacher Sharon Floyd, who knew for me college wasn't just a right of passage, but it was a real critical milestone and a step that I needed to chart the course that I was in life. And so she would send me letters when I was in college with 50 bucks stuff inside because she knew I needed that to stay on the journey. So I could never just charge this up to one person. I can charge this up to so many people, but I feel like the higher I go, I'm being pushed up by so many people who loved me, who thought enough of me, who pushed me, who told me I could do better. And that's how I ended up here. Oh, that's beautiful. Just the gratitude in that in preparation for this interview, I tried just to go through the same exercise in five or ten minutes because I saw your stories about Lewis Skipper and Robert Brewer and Reverend Austin. And I thought to myself, you know, in my childhood, who shaped me and the same type of thing happened.

15:28I started writing that list and the list gets longer and longer and longer. And the people on that list, they probably have no idea that they had that deep of an impact on me, but many years later, I'm writing their name down because they went out of their way to help me. They were just a positive role model. Maybe it wasn't even direct, but it was someone who I aspired to be like in life and it's good to have that gratitude. Yeah, I am definitely held up much higher by those people, the whole city of people who loved me to where I am right now. Terrific. So kind of fast-forwarding. You built some mentoring programs at the YAMCA, I think in Kyokia, is that right? Yes, yes. Okay. So I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, so I grew up across the river from that. So I've got a little bit of context to that chapter in your life. Tell me a little bit about that. I guess there was a summer where four boys died. Was that in Kyokia? Yeah. You know, it was my last summer there before taking a job in Chicago. I loved that job. I got to be an executive director of a YMCA. I got to do some cool stuff in the community. But I would light up in the evenings when it was time for our mentoring program to start.

16:30Brother to brother program. A bunch of volunteers. And we were just working with young men. Some of them were there because they wanted to care and adult relationship. Others discane because I let them play basketball. And they didn't have to pay the drop-in fee and I would buy pizza. So over the course of about three, almost four years, I'd worked with a group of young men. We had gone on college tours. We'd meet on Mondays. We'd do life skill classes. And one summer. The summer that I was preparing to leave to take a role in Chicago, I had four young men died. One of them died on his way driving to college that we had taken him to on a college tour. Another kid died in some senseless violence. The other two died in senseless violence. That was one of those things where I was like, I don't even know if I'm cut out to do work like this. Because the emotional toil of losing those young kids, those like beautiful souls who would have turned out to be great adults, just really sat with me and sat with me in such a deep place of reflection.

17:30Because I still live by the mantra to whom much is given, much is required. And so I beat myself up wondering, had I not done enough? Could I have done more? And what was my role and what blame that I have for losing the four lives that we lost that summer? It's tough. And it's also when you lose four lives like that, you start to feel like who's next? Who's next? It's a really unnerving feeling. Yeah. So I've done some online mentoring in a couple of other programs during COVID, but I haven't really stepped my foot into the mentoring world again because it devastated me. Yeah. You wrote ones that you take on responsibility for youth development. What do you do? You never take it off. No, you still carry on that front. Yeah. I feel like young people in the positive trajectory is going to always be a part of every portfolio that I'm in. And so I'm thinking critically right now about young people in this loneliness epidemic. Young people who need social interactions and more relational skills, modeled, trained, or taught to them right now. But I also have a godson who I helped to raise whose terms 25 in a couple of weeks

18:33and is in the Peace Corps in Fiji. And I was just there this past September visiting him. And I am totally sunken into his development. And I feel like we helped to make an amazing choice for him to go up to the Peace Corps. He matured so much in the year that I dropped him off at the airport to when I went to see him. And so I'm really thinking about how national service can play a part in the development of young people. But if you really believe that young people are a future and you want a future for this country, I think youth development should be a part of everybody's portfolio. And so it'll always be a part of mine because I've taken on the mantle. I know what it's like for brains development. I know the science behind that. Thanks to Bella Motte who worked for the YMC at the USA who kept pushing us to put brain development in our work. And so I recognize that if we want to fair just an equitable society, it has to include work with young people. It just has to. Just a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor, connect the dots. It used to be that your product was what differentiated you from competitors. Now it's also how well you can unlock the power of your network.

19:34Connect the dots, uses relationship AI to map out your network, get instant insights, and see exactly who knows the decision makers you've been trying to reach. I've tried it and it's wild how many warm connections I discovered. No more blind prospecting, just starting conversations with people who already trust you. Visit ctd.ai to learn more and set up a free strategy session. You've got such a rich narrative to your life when we've came along. Did it feel like a career move or did it feel like a culmination? I feel like every job that I've taken on has felt like a culmination or one of those like next steps because I've learned this. I worked for the Metro Atlanta YMCA. I worked for a mayorial organization. I worked in the St. Louis area. I worked in Chicago in the wise national office. Then I was doing local work at a high level as chief advancement officer at the Cincinnati YMCA.

20:34And so this role that I'm in right now, we built like a culmination or groundswell of all of those roles in one. And so it felt like a right of passage to take this role. Like I had done everything I did to be prepared for it. And now I feel like I've had to muster all of the strength of all those jobs to do the work that I do every day now. So for those who aren't familiar with, we maybe tell them a little bit about how it got started. Maybe your first interview into this project. Yeah, so David Brooks, the former New York Times author, now a presidential scholar at Yale and a columnist for the Atlantic, was writing about doom and gloom and was like, I'd like to do a little bit more than highlight the big cultural issue. I want to highlight the solvers of this. And so in our first iteration of work, David traveled around the country to big cities, small towns, forgotten about Midwestern communities and hamlets like the one I grew up in in Saginaw, Michigan. But before they got there, they would access a set of questions. Who do you trust? Who shows up for people? And who's the leader in your community?

21:37And so they heard these stories of everyday people, people who were creating mentoring programs for LGBTQ youth and rural communities, people who were helping their neighbors by vacant lots to turn them into parks, people who were the real leaders in their neighborhoods and corralling people, they were the trusted people. And so David came back and said, these people are already out there. How about we now do something to support them? And so when they hired me back in March of 2020, it was right before COVID. And certainly after we got an email saying, we're going to practice working from home two years later. I was in a condo in the Northwest DC figure out how to work from home. But David really had this idea that there should be some way to support these people, fund their work, provide them with tools and resources so they can go deeper, and then take those stories and inspire other people to dig in. And so our work is really built upon the premise that trust is low in our community. It's doing the link, it's dying. And that trust is the only way that we can do things together and solve things together. And so we all better be working on how we build our nation's trust.

22:40And David says cultured shifts happens when a group of people find a different way to live and everybody else models it. But this different way to live has been how we've always lived. We've worked together, we've supported one another, we've been in community together. And so our work is reminding people of that, showing people how to do that, funding projects that help people to do that, to create this ground swell of people in neighborhoods around the country, who are their trusted leaders, who are the weavers in their community, and helping them to deepen their impact so that we can grow the spirit of people who are doing that type of work in their communities. My first interview with David, it wasn't a traditional interview. I think I had eight interviews and then I met with David shortly after the last one. And we talked for about 30 minutes about his book, The Second Mountain. And I think I told him I thought he was wrong about a part of it. It's like, what might it tell if he's wrong? I'd better appreciate that. I said, you highlighted the stories of people who've gone through some great tragedy and decided to weave community together. And then there are people who have gone through some great triumph. They've gotten to the end of their journey with careers and they've decided to weave community

23:41because they're looking for a place to belong or for some substance after work. But there are a group of people who just like Beyonce, they wake up like this. And they're weavers. You know, they're people like my grandmother who would cook for her 10 kids, but would also leave an extra plate because she knew somebody would come by meeting a warm meal. And so we have to create a space for those people who just wake up and are already weaving communities together and they deserve a nod in your book as well. He actually agreed with me and thought I was right. So I guess I didn't do a bad job. He hired me and for the last six years I've been helping him take his squishy idea and turn it into a movement of people around the country. Hopefully he's also putting out a second edition of second mountain that has your revised edits in it. I hope so. I'll give him some editor notes for it. So yeah, David Brooks is one of my absolute favorites. And as you say, he talks about polarization and loneliness. And when you talk about the communities that you're saving is America losing some of what saved you? Yeah. Let me first say this. I don't think that I'm saving any communities. I think there are people already working in those communities.

24:43We're just giving it a name. What I will say is I don't think that we're losing it. I think in every community I've gone to, I found a bright spot. I found a person who is the meter of the dough and they are just like meeting this dough for their neighborhood, their city, their town. And so what I believe is that although the media says that we've lost hope, although the pundits say that trust is low, every community I go to the same people who've helped to propel me are still weaving in communities and they're people waiting on the sideline right now. And so a big part of our purpose is to teach people to remind people and to get people who are waiting on the sideline. So you can have more people doing this because we hope to ship the narrative of yes, they'll always be doing gluing. But there's some real positive things that are happening right now as well. We have not all the way lost hope. That's good to hear. It's really refreshing because the media does focus on tragedy and fear. That's what sells newspapers. And so to hear your first hand accounts and the fact that you're shining a light on these weavers to tell those stories and inspire others is really important.

25:47Thank you. Just for our listeners, what is the difference between volunteering and weaving? Yeah, so I think volunteering is great. I want to make sure I say that the people who are in the volunteer space sometimes get upset with me because I say you should weave. But I think volunteering and weaving are in the same car, but I think weaving goes a step further. I think volunteering in a lot of ways has become a little transactional where we're measuring numbers. The number of meals served the number of people who come hours, but I would want us to measure the number of relationships that we make. How this opportunity is mutual where we both have something to add to receive and to give at the same time and that we do this work in a community on the ground face to face. And weaving has those attributes. Volunteering has some of those attributes, but in some frameworks, it's gotten off course. I really think volunteering is one of the best tools we have right now in our country to bring people together to springboard relationships to get beyond the politics or these polarizing things and to focus on the stuff that we share together.

26:50I want you to think about people being in the military together. My brother was in the Marines for almost 20 years and he served in Afghanistan and Iraq and he has come home with some of the scars from those wars. But he also talks about the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the getting to know people from different parts of the country who he never would have met or thought he had anything in common together, yet they served together. And so if you can get people to serve together to work together and not volunteer, I think we have a greater chance of bringing people back together in our country. That's amazing. I wonder what it means for corporate America. I worked at Salesforce for 11 years and they had an incredible 111 model where 1% of employees time went towards volunteering. And I had a friend Brian Breckenridge and I would almost call him a weaver because he was the type of guy who would walk around the office floor and say, we've got a volunteer event this afternoon. Let's get out into the community and do our part and the camaraderie and the lifelong friends that came out of that hour or two after work was incredibly impactful.

27:50What advice would you have to companies that want to have a philanthropic purpose, getting involved, build trust in our communities? What would you recommend? I would say keep doing what you're doing, doing volunteer events, but to go a step further and to submit this in communities, I want you to think about a kaboom site. And if you build a playground with kaboom, that is really great. Think about all the beers you're going to have afterwards, all the fun you're going to have while you're doing it. Think about the kids on the swings, but wouldn't it be better if those same people who built the slides and the swings went back and mentored the kids in the program or they held a youth group or they participated in the summer program ran by those same people. Would it be great that instead of doing a volunteer day, we did some repetitious activity every Thursday for an hour together as a corporation versus a one-time one-day event. And so to really submit relationships, the reason why your weaver as Salesforce was able to connect and build the friendships with you all is because he did it all the time.

28:50It was repetitious. You'd look at your watch and say, oh, it's two o'clock, it's Thursday. He comes down the hallway and service has to be one of those things where you're immersed in it. If you think about any relationship, it takes a series of interactions, of dates, of getting to know of all these things before the relationship gels together. If we think of our communities in that way, then it has to take some repetitious connection moments and service together for the relationships to be knitted together. That makes sense. So if you dropped into any zip code in America, what three ingredients would you look forward to know whether or not boys will thrive in that environment? Yeah. Oh, that's a tough one because it's tough out here right now for boys. If you look at the stats on boys, but I would say probably a couple of things. Care and adult relationships really matter. And so the type of programs that you're offering that has male leaders are important because it helps to build identity development. And identity development is the ability to see who you will one day become through your eyes by looking at somebody else or talking to somebody else.

29:52So that's really important. So I think that's two things. The third thing is like, and so that means schools need more male teachers, more male administrators and the lives of young people at our early age. I think a place that gets young people out of bedrooms, playing video games active in community, volunteering, doing service together, playing sports, all of part of the equation as well. And our super important in a time in which we say boys are lonelier than ever. Those three things I think are super important and will create the conditions for boys to thrive. But I'm not an expert on this. I'm on the board for the American Institute of Boys and Man, Richard Reeves and the team there are far better experts on this than I am. So how are you striving to build more weavers? Like I saw the map that you have of the entire country. You can zoom into every zip code. How is trust engineered? How do we do that at scale? Yeah, I don't know if we can do it at scale. I think what we can do is that we can teach new skills. We have a learning center with a bunch of trainings on there. One of them is we're building next is David's book, how to know a person. We have an online community where we bring people together around the country. We're hoping that you're inspired. If you get our newsletter or hear some of the publications or some of the things that we offer.

31:01But we also have a real active plan to go into local communities. And so when I first launched this work, we used Baltimore as one of our incubators and we launched a weaver award project where we funded micro grants to everyday people who were showing up in their community, but it was driven by people in Baltimore who did the selection process. We then launched a similar project and a rural community looks for a North Carolina with the same tenants. And a couple of years ago, we launched another project in a suburban rural adjacent community, Northwest Arkansas. About a year and a half ago, we got a phenomenal gift from the lily endowment of almost $25 million. I always tell people who are listening, we're giving most of that money away. I'm giving away 86% of that money to local community groups. YMCA's United Ways Community Foundations training them on our skills and our methods and then giving them a quarter of a million dollars to launch we work in their community. It allows us to highlight and amplify more weavers faster, but it also allows us to get the word out that trust is an issue, local people can solve it and then scale them up to enhance the work that's happening in their community around the country.

32:12Yeah, your life has been stitched together by people who have showed up. How do you show up for others? And maybe there's a lesson from David's book and the new training, how to know a person. Yeah, the work that I get to do, I embody it. If you walk through our office with me, you know, there is an award for the person who knows and talks to the most people that work and engages the most people, I probably get it. I am a person who quickly builds relationship, quickly figures out how to bring people in and that's in my work life, my personal life. I talk to people on the train and build relationships. I'm like that annoying person that's on an airplane that talks while we're in the air and everybody's trying to sleep because I've started a conversation with somebody who's sitting next to me. That type of thing just ingrained in me, but I show up for people. One of the things that I believe staunchly is that people do this work, humans do this work. And so I have to allow humans to be humans. And so I'm an equal and a just person when it comes to that. Listen, I'm the favorite uncle of favorite brother.

33:12My parents will tell you probably off the record that I'm their favorite child. I feel like this work that I do, this public persona that I have, it's like all real, it's who I am. And it shows and how all the relationships around me all come together. Well, I've achieved favorite status with my dog, but I think it's more I'm the one that that walks it and such. So I'm impressed. So what lessons about relationships? Have you learned the hard way? Yeah, over the years, I've lived in six different cities and in all of those cities, I consider them to be home because of the relationships and the people who showed up for me, but it takes a lot of work to maintain a lot of relationships with a lot of people. And I think over the years, the hardest lesson I've learned about relationships, this might be a little bit of a deep one is that you have to be honest and kind and just to yourself. My therapist once told me it's hard to live in a place in a world where people are so mean to me. And I go, yeah, there he goes, you're so mean to yourself, stop saying those bad things. But back in 2013, salivant in Chicago had just moved there, taken on a really big job with the YMCA. My life was in shambles privately, but publicly you couldn't tell. I was about 420 pounds overweight, unhappy, and I moved to Chicago with all of my things, but I left them in boxes because my plan was to end my life.

34:34And I didn't want my mother to pack up my things and identify my body and plan a funeral. So I was going to do our favor by taking out one of the steps. I was gay, closeted, unhappy, and just didn't feel like this public success that I was having that my family could accept my private life. And so I planned out the day that was going to happen and woke up that morning and one of my dearest and favorite fraternity brothers called me on the phone that morning. And we always texted, we never talked on the phone, but this day he said he had this inkling that he had to call me. And he called me and asked, are you okay? I had a dream. Something's going on. Tell me what's up. Ended up telling him he helped me to get some help, but that hard lesson was actually a beautiful lesson that has morphed me into a better person because I'm nicer and I'm honest with myself. But that sheer act of being open and honest about who I am to myself, but also to the people around me has allowed me to even bring more to the table to the other relationships that I'm in with other people because of it.

35:36It spared me. I'm still here and I'm still able to be everybody's favorite because of that hard lesson that I had to learn. So I try to be better to myself every day. It's a heavy story to hear and I'm glad you were able to push on through to the other side because you know the world is lucky to have you here and thank you continuing on your mission and bringing joy to people's lives. Thank you. Yeah. And it's important when you are able to share that story with others. There are people that have those feelings and it feels like they've got the weight of the world on them and to know that there is an outcome where you can get through it. And people will accept you and love you and you have a lot more to give to the world. That's an important message to champion. Yeah. I believe it wholeheartedly. I agree. Yeah. A couple of final questions. Let's talk a little bit about pain at Ford. If a 12 year old version of you were listening to this episode, what would you tell him? It's so crazy because I've done like EDMR therapy and I can see that 12 year old me. I can see his eyes. And I think what I would say to 12 year old me is that it gets so much better. Stay the course.

36:41Life is like walking through a maze blindfolded and the only way you can get through is by the claps of the people on the other side to direct you to the exit. And so open your ears, put your hands in front of you so you can feel but listen to the claps. The claps will guide you through. So same clips will help you guide other people through. And so as you're thinking about you at 12, remember to harness all the scrapes that you'll get from those bushes because you'll be able to tell the story and you'll be able to guide another group of 12 year olds through that same maze one day. That's beautiful. Who are you trying to become now? You know, who's your next Lewis Skipper? Yeah, there's so many people who I take stuff from now. The CEO of the Aspen Institute, Dr. Dan Porterfield, who is just such a benevolent leader and a good guy. David Brooks is one of my Lewis skippers. I friends who are some of my Lewis skippers, Edmund and Chuck, my parents as they are aging and I have beautiful relationships with they are now my Lewis skippers.

37:45I also think about younger people, my God son, my nieces and nephews, who teach me something new each and every time I believe that everybody in the world has something to offer. We just have to get quiet and turn our ego off and you can learn something from everybody. And so over the course of my life, I think I've been able to be successful is because my ego is here, but I also try to turn it off so that I can hear and receive from other people. Fred, one more question. A lot of the success that people have is around building their network. It is about finding mentors that they can pattern themselves after people they can go to for advice. But networking has a different meeting when you're a kid growing up in a community where the mentors are few and far between. What advice would you give to somebody in that world? I mean, you've gone from the Aspen Institute, which is kind of the ultimate network with thought leaders from around the world. What advice would you give upon reflection? You know, upon reflection, when I think about networking, I think about normal people and how I can continue to be my normal self and being community with other normal people.

38:54I've had some of the most beautiful moments with some of the world's most important people and for a second, not even knowing who they were because I was there just because I thought they were giving a good talk and I wanted to go up afterwards, or I was sitting next to them and I mentioned how much I liked their shoes and it is morphed into something else. And so what I would say to young people or people who are trying to figure out how to do that in a place where they don't see a lot of people like that is to treat everybody as if they have something to offer. There's a line in the poem, if that says, if all men count with you, but none too much, and I take that with me every day. I think everybody is important from a person collecting the trash that I say hello and I'll ask how their day is going to the person who's running the company. I try to treat them all the same and give them all the same type of reverence and that type of action will come off as normal and human and I don't think I've sought out relationships with people they just happen organically. Everybody has a story you just have to ask the question and listen and ask the next question and that's how relationships are formed.

40:00All right, anything else, Frederick, you want to leave me with Jamie? Thank you so much for the time. I think the one thing that I often leave every room with is a challenge to everybody who's listening is that there's three things that we can do right now to make people feel more human. One of them is really easy and shallow when they walk outside and I see Jamie, I see you walking next to me. I'm going to make eye contact with you and I'm going to say good morning. It's going to make you feel human. It's going to make you feel alive and it's going to be contagious and you're going to do it to the person who you walk next to next. The second thing that you can do is cross a threshold, meaning find a neighbor that you don't know, knock on the door, have a cup of coffee or glass of wine, get to know them. It's important in communities for us to know who we're living amongst. The third thing is to find some volunteer, some service opportunity is the quickest way to get cemented in a community and to get to know people and to get connected to a cause. Those three things actually can make people to go from feeling like they're inside and along to feeling like they're part of something bigger than them. And so that's what I like to leave the listeners with.

41:00I love those three simple steps, things that everybody can put into action. Fred, thank you for your inspiring story. It means a lot to people to hear what you've been through and how you're trying to make our communities stronger and shine a light on the people to do the hard work, the weavers. Jamie, thank you so much for the opportunity to share my story. I actually don't know or think I've done anything important, but I appreciate I hope the world thinks so. I'm just a humble person from Saginaw, Michigan, who's learned and done a few things and I hope it inspires somebody else to go do something. It certainly does. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We really appreciate your time today. For more stories like this one, visit who got me here.com. On the website, you'll find our networking masterclass, bites, highest lessons and a spot to nominate guests that you think we should have on the show. If this content inspires you, we would greatly appreciate it if you left a rating or review on your favorite podcast app.

42:00Who got me here as a production of Jamie Granny and now it's here. I'm your host, Jamie Granny and our producer is Alexis Bramdow. Thanks for being here today and we'll see you soon.