Kirk Brown With HANDY, Inc.

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in South Florida. It’s time for South Florida Business Radio now. Here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of South Florida Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Diaz Trade Law, your customs expert today on South Florida Business Radio, we have Kirk Brown with Handy. Welcome, Kirk.

Kirk Brown: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to Tell us about Handy. How are you serving, folks?

Kirk Brown: I’m Handy is a nonprofit that was established in 1985 to serve foster care, relative care and homeless youth in our community. We are basically here to fill the gaps of services for normalcy for young people. We provide workforce development, youth development, mental health services and educational transitional services to young people who are victims of abuse, neglect and abandonment. We serve 1200 young people for year. And basically, we, you know, 9 to 5% of our young people graduate high school, 78% finish a post-secondary experience. But we’re very proud to say 100% of our young people are happy to partner with us in communities of need.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your back story? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Kirk Brown: Well, social work chose me. I was finished college on my way to law school and basically saw homeless youth and decided, you know, in a wonderful lived experience that I may have a solution within me to impart into the world because I grew up in those situations as a youth and, you know, God blesses you with knowledge and wisdom and opportunity and abilities. And I just decided that maybe I have an answer within me that could solve that problem.

Lee Kantor: So is this version of the answer what it was when you first started.

Kirk Brown: This version of the answer? No. It’s morphed. It’s morphed because our clients have more team. The people we serve, the communities that we’re in poverty has always had a dynamic of leaving scars on communities that are long lived and therefore will take a longer period to solve.

Lee Kantor: Are you finding right now is a good climate for some escape velocity to get beyond that kind of spiral that happens, like you mentioned?

Kirk Brown: Yeah, there is. There’s a lot of self-awareness at a macro level within communities to say we cannot continue to do the status quo of the haves and the have nots. We have to reach into our communities, look at our social services sector, and empower social services sector to build stronger, more, you know, enthusiastic and self actualized communities.

Lee Kantor: Now, are you finding that corporations are more open to participating in a way that maybe historically they haven’t been in, that there’s almost a trend towards some sort of I know one organization is called Conscious Capitalism, where it’s trying to elevate capitalism and be more empathetic to not just their shareholders as their constituents or their employees as their constituents, but also the community. As a constituent.

Kirk Brown: I think we all have a shared equity in the conduit called trauma at this time. I think the corporate community and before now individuals were able to drive around a concept of trauma. Right. But the entire world went through what I would say, two and a half years of constant repeated trauma as a result of COVID. And so we saw a social shift before COVID as it relates to corporations becoming more socially involved in the mechanisms of social work to say, yes, we can do a greater job, we can have greater input, we could add our brain trust to improve the lives of people in fractured communities. But I think everyone gets it now. Before, you would have to take maybe 25 minutes to explain and the aftereffects of trauma. I think everyone gets the after effects of trauma now because we’ve all lived a macro level of trauma existing through COVID.

Lee Kantor: Now, what are you have any advice for business owners at all kind of stages of their their kind of life cycle regarding how to exhibit good social leadership? What are some kind of baby steps organizations can be doing to really help alleviate some of that trauma you speak of?

Kirk Brown: I think it starts with three basic, you know, premise and approaches. I think the first is establishing a human connection with the people that work for you and with you, You know, designating collaborations within the workforce. There’s no soloist and getting a task done and really having open. Transparent, empathetic communication patterns with your team. It’s real simple, you know? How are you doing today? Just as a passer by conversation are or how are you doing today and really looking in the person’s face when you say it, Look at their affect. Look at their response. Challenge your management and your executive teams to use their intuition to kind of like really become self aware about the people that they’re leading just from the income point of who you’re lead in. So in social work currently, I would say I know what my staff makes financially because we are the payee. And so taking a macro look at what does that life does or can afford in economic climate of the community that you’re in is very important for you to be able to have the human connection and the human communication strategies with the individual right. What are their challenges based on what they make? What are their challenges based on who they are in the community that they’re in? I’ll give you a basic example. I have 34% Haitian staff at this moment. I know their their homeland is in turmoil at this moment. So to pretend like they’re not coming in to the work environment with those wounds makes makes me a very distant leader. You know, having those conversations, how were you doing today? How is your family as your extended family in Haiti? How are you guys coping? You know, that that, to me shows that you care. And that’s what social leadership is about.

Lee Kantor: So the first community and organization could work in is their own and work within their own people, their own people’s families and the and the people that are most important to them. So that’s the starting point you find.

Kirk Brown: Yeah, that is a starting point. Make your make your employee your first customer.

Lee Kantor: So when you do that, you’re improving the culture of your organization. You’re showing your people you care. You probably you probably have some stats and research that supports that. This level of empathy and care for your own employees leads to more productivity and a better outcome.

Kirk Brown: Yes. The I think the professional workforce term for that is principle based management. And on the principle based management, you find a lot of transformation happens when humility and knowledge is imparted onto the individual. With empathy, it leads to self-actualization. And self-actualization is our highest data point of really someone being productive in a work environment.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Kirk Brown: Support. Of course, we’re a nonprofit and we serve young people ages 10 to 25, all along the spectrum of transition from middle to high to postsecondary to placement into employment. And so as a nonprofit and a nonprofit CEO, the first thing I have to ask is please financially support your nonprofits and your community that’s doing the ground level work to correct trauma in your community. And secondly, partnership. We we have found unique ways to partner with our corporate partners, whether it’s a sponsorship or provide employment for our young people or volunteerism for our young people. We’re very big on meeting the corporate partner or the corporate world where they are in their ability to give.

Lee Kantor: Can you share an example of how you work with maybe a large corporate partner?

Kirk Brown: Okay. So for example, Brand Smart approached us and said, how can we help with Christmas and how can we help with our holidays? And we literally tomorrow we are hosting they are having 100 of our young people shop at Bryant Smart at $150. But we have also turned it into a volunteer activity and a money management activity with the brand smart employees that will be shopping with our young people. And because we also have a relationship with the FBI and Broward Sheriff’s Office, we’re including FBI personnel and the sheriff’s office in the shopping experience to build communities. So now we have four different industries in one store serving a life of one youth, breaking down a lot of community barriers.

Lee Kantor: And this is a situation that these companies that you partner with, they don’t have to have an answer of how to do it. You’ll help them or you’ll work together and brainstorm together on how to connect all these different parties together to create a real robust, meaningful sponsorship and something that’ll create a win win win all the way around.

Kirk Brown: Yes, that is our job. We already social interpreters of hope, and so you don’t have to come to us with an answer. You just have to come to us with a desire.

Lee Kantor: And then the size companies, I mean, brand smarts, a large organization. Do you work with small like startups as well, or is it primarily kind of the bigger brands?

Kirk Brown: So we have some no, we have small and medium sized companies that partner with us daily. We have individuals who have their employees here tutoring our young people in the afternoon and Algebra two, we have small, medium, medium sized employers who host a cookout here once every other month to expose our young people to industry. And we expose our young people to eight different industries per year, eight high demand industries. And basically we have everything from roofers to electricians to construction to manufacture and hospitality industries, no matter the size coming in to impart their knowledge of their industry to young people who do not know their industries exist in their backyards.

Lee Kantor: So you’ll work with companies of all sizes. There’s always something to do and some need to be met.

Kirk Brown: Yes, we fit the need to help. Basically, if they come with a desire to help young people see a future, move towards the future and to live their future, then we’re we’re the nonprofit for you. We will figure it out together.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have a story you can share regarding maybe a child that went through the program or one of your programs that was able to escape?

Kirk Brown: So we have a lot of those stories.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, you don’t have to name their name specifically, but maybe tell their story of how how they got to you and then where they when they left you, where where they went.

Kirk Brown: So we do have a young man that comes to mind, literally came to our program as junior year of high school family. All of his family was incarcerated for the murder of a family member. And he had, you know, the the streets were trying to direct him in the path of his predecessors. Right. Of his family structure. And basically, this young man, we surrounded him with our 67 services, our life coach, and a plan navigated him to Broward College. And what is individual, what is independent plan and his education plan. You started with Broward College, by the way. Broward College makes it significantly affordable for a young person to achieve a college education in Broward County. So he attended Broward College and transitioned to another four year institution, received his degree, and one of our mentors that comes alongside our young people in our community gave him his job offer on his graduation day. And so that young man is currently a junior executive at this firm, which is a large firm that serves the Southeast United States at this time. And he comes back here on a weekly basis to talk to our young people about it’s possible, you know, it’s really possible to achieve the goals that we would consolidate our thoughts and our efforts on.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, it’s amazing when you have that laser focus on really helping and serving what what can happen. It’s just it’s probably every day you’re probably just so proud. And to see the impact you’re making from that initial thought, you know, to where it is today, it must be very rewarding for you.

Kirk Brown: It is rewarding because I work with lived experience individuals. 80% of our staff has been the kid or has resided in a family that experience a trauma that we’re seeking to seek and to answer as an agency. And so I talk about lived experience a lot because lived experience separates the vigor and the desire to answer the phone at 1 a.m. in the morning for a homeless kid, if you’ve been a homeless kid or you were in a family with a homeless kid, that phone call, you know what that phone calls I want at 1 a.m. in the morning means. And so 80% of our team here, including myself or our products, have lived experience in the communities that we’re seeking to serve. And so we take it quite seriously.

Lee Kantor: How do you, as a leader, keep the morale and the energy up and not feel overwhelmed by the task at hand?

Kirk Brown: Admire the greatness of why we’re here. Always focus people back on the why and the why. Is is this beautiful? You know, I have a team that, you know, gets upset when we only hit 90% on a success ratio, because to them, that 10% means, you know, there is someone who is suffering. And so it’s easy to match the why and the desire and motivate the team from a place of humility. I think humility is important. And, you know, social leadership, you have to have a level of humility and approachability where your team can come into your office and say, okay, we’re trying this and it’s not working. I think we should do it this way. And you should not be tied to the genius. You know, you should be able to say we’re all the genius because we all have lived experience. And those diamonds that we could impart into a mechanism that at the end of the day can shift the trajectory of a life.

Lee Kantor: Right. But I can see when they’re so immersed in the task at hand, when you you know, that 10% when you said 90% they’re frustrated with because that that 10% that they didn’t achieve is a human being that they know personally. And so it stings that much more.

Kirk Brown: And that is that is that is resilience, right? That is that that resilience of. Okay. But we can get it. We can we have another day to do it again. And so the lived experience people always focus on, we can get over whatever the challenge is. And I also equate social work to other industries when I talk to my team, right? Car companies come out with a new model every year. And so we have to come out with a brand new model every year or we’re not really we’re not really thinking. And so our goal is to think of this as an industry, treated like an industry so that the finished product has a level of transformation and innovation to it that our clients will get excited about it.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, right. You have to be adapting and changing as fast as the people around you are.

Kirk Brown: Yeah. And you have to have the courage to fail.

Lee Kantor: Right? Fail fast and move forward. Just keep. I don’t even look at it as failing. It’s learning.

Kirk Brown: Yep. Who said that? Who said we’re going to fail first? What’s that? Jobs.

Lee Kantor: Fail forward fast, I think is in the startup community. That’s what they’re always trying to do.

Kirk Brown: Fail forward fast. Yes. And so it takes a lot of courage to do it. But that’s why you hire courageous people.

Lee Kantor: Right? But you need to be led by somebody who really can motivate them and inspire them, which it seems like you’re doing a great job at.

Kirk Brown: So thank you.

Lee Kantor: Now, for the folks out there that want to connect with Handy, and I know you’re in search of those local social superheroes, whether they’re volunteers, whether they’re companies, whether they’re enterprise level companies. What’s the website? What’s the coordinates to connect with you to either volunteer, financially support or do anything to help you achieve your goals?

Kirk Brown: Ww dot handy inc dot org. H a, n d. Y and c dot org.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff, van. Is there a social like? Are you in social media as well? I know that’s the website.

Kirk Brown: Where we are on all social media. We’re on Facebook or on LinkedIn. We’re on Instagram. We’re on all the social media platforms. And once you get to our website, it should lead you to all our social media handles.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, Kirk, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Kirk Brown: Thank you. And Lee, if I could impart to your listening audience, it is not for you to figure out exactly what you want to do to help another human being. That’s why we exist. We can figure it out together, right?

Lee Kantor: You just have to have the desire to help. And then Kirk and his team will. We’ll take it from there. Good stuff. Well, thank you again, Kirk. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on South Florida Business Radio.