TRANSCRIPT:
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Brian Mavis (00:05.902)
All right, everybody. It’s good to have you here today. We are joined by one of our own with AKB, Nanette Kirsch. Nanette is the executive director of marketing and communications for us. Prior to coming to AKB, Nanette was primarily working in tech marketing with startups. And then she joined us in 2021 and has been really instrumental in helping us.
grow our reach and helping with foster -friendly communities initiative. Nanette lives in Raleigh, North Carolina and is a mom to four young adult children, two of whom that she and her husband adopted from Korea. Nanette, I know you love to talk about yourself, so why don’t you take a moment and share a little bit more from the heart of what I just did in a brief introduction.
Travis (00:53.514)
Ha ha.
Nanette Kirsch (01:01.169)
Yes, sure I do love to talk about myself. So it’s kind of funny because the background that you have today, Brian, is kind of my first encounter with AKB. I got really energized about the organization when I listened to a podcast actually a couple of years ago where they talked about if every orphan deserves a home, deserves a family and loved the work that AKB was doing and it kind of led to a year long conversation between you and I.
Brian Mavis (01:17.454)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (01:27.153)
talking about what you were doing, trying to figure out where I might be able to plug in. And I did not anticipate then that I’d be here today that would have traded in my tech marketing career to work on recruiting families. And I have never looked back. I love it.
Brian Mavis (01:45.038)
Yeah, when Nanette reached out, I was one, super impressed, but we were also in a place where we weren’t really ready to hire someone. So she always thinks I played hard to get. And that wasn’t the reason I really wanted her to join our team. I was like, we’re broke.
Travis (02:02.665)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Nanette Kirsch (02:05.265)
I was picking up from that.
Travis (02:10.406)
I’m like,
Nanette Kirsch (02:15.377)
I was like, you just played it so well.
Brian Mavis (02:15.502)
So I’m not as cool as she thinks I was. Fortunately, yes, she was driven by her own mission in life and was, we don’t need to get into the details, but was willing to reduce what she would normally make in order to join this team and help.
Travis (02:21.513)
Just don’t have money.
Nanette Kirsch (02:21.521)
That is the truth. It was.
Brian Mavis (02:44.526)
help kids who need families. So grateful for her heart.
Travis (02:49.002)
Yeah. Really happy to have you on today. So that’s a great segue into kind of what we’re going to talk about next and have you kind of share with us in a net of, so your background is Brian said was primarily in tech marketing. How has that experience helped you in leading the marketing strategy now at the nonprofit America’s Kids Belong? Some differences, some of your perceptions around that.
Nanette Kirsch (03:10.929)
Yeah, I was thinking about that a lot. It is kind of interesting. I think one of the things was that there really was a building opportunity similar to a startup. Only I had the privilege to walk into a really powerful platform. Like there was a strong national social media platform, a lot of recognition and respect for the AKB brand. And so that was nice, but we hadn’t really built a marketing capability. And so looking at…
In my SaaS marketing background, a lot of the work you do is to get people into your funnel and help move them through to a decision about a software subscription. In this case, we’re asking people to invest their lives to do something a lot harder to foster or to adopt a child into their family forever. And so really taking, I think, a learning posture and trying to understand what are the steps in that journey? What are the obstacles that people run into? And so applying a lot of the same questions that I learned to ask.
in for -profit sector marketing to something a lot more personal for people. And just cultivating the empathy, I had to really learn how to write differently, because I tended to write B2B feature benefits kind of messaging, and this is a lot more complex. So I think that stepping stone, kind of working with you, Travis, and Brian, and the rest of the AKB team, who were really fortunate, so many are actually living that mission, to kind of understand their journeys and use that experience.
to build into the experience that we’re, I think, making great progress to create for people through our own marketing outreach has been really interesting.
Brian Mavis (04:46.318)
So then that you said something that I think is just key when a highlight is that in your prior work over the decades, a lot of what you were marketing was a product or service to a business that said, this thing will make your work better, easier, it’ll make you more profitable. And then you had to switch to, we’re asking you to do something that’ll make your life harder.
Travis (05:12.779)
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Nanette Kirsch (05:12.977)
No kidding, that’s such a good point, Brian. Yes.
Travis (05:16.266)
Ha ha.
Brian Mavis (05:16.334)
We’re asking you to do something extremely challenging, which really is part of the reason we created Foster Friendly. This podcast is called Foster Friendly and we cover a lot of topics, but today we’re specifically talking about foster friendly community. It was a bit of an evolution. Why don’t you share with our audience a bit of why you’re doing this?
We felt like this foster friendly community was a critical idea.
Nanette Kirsch (05:54.225)
I told you it was going to be challenging doing a podcast with you because when I explain things in the market, I always quote you. So Brian Mavis always says, not everybody is called to foster or adopt, but we’re all called to do something. And it is a small population. There’s only about 200 ,000 licensed foster homes and it’s a hard walk. And so part of it was how do we invite more people into the mission? What are ways that people can get involved, even if foster care and adoption aren’t something that they can take on.
And so when I joined, you all already had the Foster Friendly app, which had business discounts and some churches on it who offered things like wraparound teams or support group ministries. But it wasn’t as vibrant because one of the things that also is true from my previous background is a piece of technology alone isn’t ever going to solve a problem. It is what you put behind it. It’s the cultural change that has to happen with it.
Brian Mavis (06:45.774)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (06:50.033)
that’s necessary for it to really deliver the value. You need a champion. You need someone who’s going to embrace it. And so from my perspective of how do we get more people into this game and what are some ways that we can help this app take life, it needs to live it at a community level that when you look nationally and say there’s 400 ,000 kids in the U .S. foster care system, that feels like an overwhelming problem. And
Travis (07:17.514)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (07:17.681)
me as one person, I don’t think I can impact that. But if you tell me in my community, there’s a hundred kids in foster care, I can much more easily feel empowered to impact that. And I think the app was sort of the genesis of starting some other on -ramps to bring every stakeholder group in the community together that everybody can do something. And Brian, I know a lot of your work previously had been at a state level with kind of a similar…
Travis (07:24.394)
Hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (07:43.505)
that one of AKB’s strengths coming in was that they knew how to bring a lot of disparate groups together to have collective impact.
Brian Mavis (07:50.666)
Yeah, and with that, we were looking at kind of three, dividing the United States into three sectors, so three slices of this pie. And we felt like we had good inroads into the government side, whether it was child welfare specifically, or it was elected officials. We…
also felt like we had a good inroads into the faith community, how to elevate the work that they’re doing or activate them. And the place that we were trying to crack this nut and struggling a bit was in the market space, in the business community, which is the largest space in the United States and also the least active. And the business community, you have a lot of business leaders, owners, managers who care about social issues.
but there were a couple of problems we were trying to overcome. One was the business community does not think about foster care. It is not on their radar. They tend to think when they think of social issues, they think of homelessness or addiction or mental health. Those are kind of the top three, I think. And they don’t think of foster care, which is a pipeline to those three issues and a few others. The other issue was that businesses…
Travis (09:05.292)
Hmm.
Brian Mavis (09:12.558)
typically thought, well, in order for my business to make a difference, there’s only two options, write a check or close down my business for a day and go volunteer somewhere. And so what the nut we were trying to crack was what if their business could be part of the solution? And so this is the idea that we were trying to solve. And I feel like we’ve, I think we’ve cracked a nut. So, so,
Travis (09:24.147)
Hmm.
Brian Mavis (09:42.638)
Once you riff off that a little bit, Nanette, just take whatever I just said and expand on it.
Nanette Kirsch (09:49.329)
Yeah, I think finding a way, I love the idea that businesses don’t have to stop what they’re doing to have social impact. And I think the other piece that’s powerful is that I think it has the ability to change hearts and minds within that organization as an employer. So it comes to mind and you can add to this Travis, because you spoke with him, but Nicholas Kelly comes to mind who is a young guy that we know in Georgia, who’s a foster dad in his 20s as a single dad.
Brian Mavis (09:55.982)
Mm -hmm.
Travis (10:08.171)
Hmm. Hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (10:19.089)
And he owns a tavern, a local restaurant business. And so not only does he offer a discount to families, which is really helpful to a family with extra kids in the house to say, hey, we can get a discount on our meal. But every family that comes in, he’s taught his employees about foster care. He said, let me know so he can come and welcome them. He offers to pray with them. And he cares a lot about creating an impact and really helping them feel connected. And so.
Travis (10:37.579)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (10:45.809)
I think one of the things that we really believe at AKB is that it isn’t about just the discount. Like, yes, that’s helpful. And it’s great to be able to take your kids to the zoo and give them experiences they wouldn’t have. But it’s also that being a foster parent is, like you said, it’s a lot of extra work. It can be super isolating. And if you feel like your community sees and values you the same way we do other first responders, policemen, and military, and we say, this is important to the wellbeing of our community.
Travis (10:51.211)
Right.
Nanette Kirsch (11:13.841)
then you’re really able to make a difference and I think help foster families stay in the game long.
Travis (11:19.692)
Yeah, I love that. And that that bears out across sort of a lot of people’s experiences. It’s that idea that I, as a foster parent to be seen has intrinsic value that, you know, supersedes. I mean, the practical discounts are important, but those are the things that really keep you going because you feel like you’re not alone in that community. And yeah, I really love that. So.
Brian Mavis (11:43.982)
So then back on the tech side of things, then Foster Friendly is trying to, maybe one way to put it is make social work more social, and that is using technology to get more people into the place. So talk a little bit more about the app, the technology.
how that helps facilitate a more relational component to this work.
Nanette Kirsch (12:19.281)
I think that’s been the most exciting thing to me as we’ve leaned into this foster -friendly communities notion is we used to lead with the app, which is like a mistake every tech marketer makes, right? And I fell for it again as like, hey, we’ve got this great app and it’s got discounts. And that’s really not what it is. It’s we’ve got this great community and now we have a way to connect everybody in the community. So there were foster closets doing work and it was word of mouth. Like you had to tell Travis who told me.
Brian Mavis (12:27.214)
Yes.
Nanette Kirsch (12:45.393)
and you’re trying to suss out in your spare time while taking care of kids who have a lot of needs, what resources are available to you. Now all you have to do is download an app to your phone and everything in your community is there. So you have the visual reinforcement that all of these organizations, churches, nonprofits, businesses, see and care about what I’m doing and they stand with me. And I have practical ways to actually connect with those and access those that don’t take a lot of extra time and energy. And I think that’s super powerful.
Brian Mavis (13:14.51)
So I want to just, I think right now I just realized, I think maybe the three of us, we have the curse of knowledge and we’re assuming some stuff. So let’s go back to say to the audience, hey, look on your phone, go to your apps, and there’s an app called Foster Friendly. Nanette, walk through, like you just did an example of other nonprofits that can go into the space. Tell our listeners, if you go to this app,
Nanette Kirsch (13:29.521)
Yeah.
Brian Mavis (13:44.238)
Here’s what you can expect to see and how it’s helpful.
Nanette Kirsch (13:48.785)
That’s a great point. So in the communities where we’re active, you will find entertainment options that foster families really appreciate. Part of what they want to do when they’re caring for a child is give them experiences they might not have otherwise. So zoos, museums, any kind of family entertainment is on there. Events, if there’s a festival or something going on locally, those events are available so you can take advantage of those as a family.
restaurant discounts and anything food related obviously is always popular. So there’s a lot of BOGO offers and things designed for kids. And then there’s some really creative interesting things like hair salons, photography, ways to make a child feel special and maybe give them things they’ve never had, a birthday party, a professional photography sitting, and even being part of a family portrait, right? Actually having that belonging.
and a family. And then on the faith community side, you’ll find local churches who are offering anything from kids nights out that are trauma aware. And Brian, I’ll let you expand a little more on the trauma awareness side. Support groups for foster and adoptive families because it is hard and it’s helpful to be able to talk to other people who can offer empathy. And wraparound teams, which I think we’ve seen a lot of success with. We’re a group of people in a church.
will wrap around a member of their congregation or a member of their community when they’re actively fostering and work with that family to understand what their needs are. Maybe it is people to help drive kids to after school activities or someone to watch their other kids when they have a visitation, somebody to mow the lawn or help bring groceries, things that are just hard to do when you’re in a new placement. Those teams make a huge difference because that early placement time, that early period is really critical. And then,
Travis (15:23.948)
Hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (15:39.537)
As we talked about nonprofits and people who are already helping are connected through the app, so it’s just a way to make them available. One other thing that we’re offering as well or resources and we’re continually expanding. What are the books, the films, the agencies and organizations that might be able to be resources for you to continue to expand your knowledge to gain trauma information to deal with parenting challenges and things of that nature. So there’s a lot there and we rely on the parents to to nominate businesses nominate.
offers and things that they think would be a good addition to the app. So it is very user driven in how it’s growing.
Brian Mavis (16:16.014)
Yeah, so, so then maybe like to take the other side. So we’re speaking to the foster families who are utilizing this. There’s another audience and that’s kind of the providers. It’s the, it’s the churches, it’s the businesses, it’s the city that has public services that do things. It’s kind of the things where there’s special events. So let’s, let’s focus on that side. So it’s the, it’s the,
Travis (16:16.172)
Hmm.
Brian Mavis (16:45.422)
People who say, I do care about this issue, my heart and head has been turned towards these kids, but we can’t foster, we can’t adopt, we wanna do something. So give some examples of what churches can do.
Nanette Kirsch (17:06.193)
Well, I think churches are probably in some of the best position to have a direct impact on family sustainability because they can be hands and feet. They can actually show up for families in material ways. So I think the kids’ nights out are one of the things that make a huge difference, right? So we have quite a few faith communities that offer those on a quarterly basis, either on their own or they partner with other faith communities in their area and do trauma awareness training.
Brian Mavis (17:21.23)
Yeah, that’s huge.
Nanette Kirsch (17:34.097)
with their volunteers and staff who are going to be working that, which is just really equipping people to respond in a healthy way to behaviors and actions of kids who have had a lot of trauma and understand why they’re acting the way they are and just how to deescalate the situation, which is a real comfort to parents. Otherwise, it’s hard to get a night out, hard to get some respite. So I think that’s a really valuable one. I think just seeing, understanding who are the people in your congregation who are currently serving in that capacity.
Travis (17:42.381)
Hmm.
Travis (18:00.909)
Hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (18:03.217)
and recognizing them and asking what they need and finding ways as a faith community to respond to that. And then I think it’s also great community outreach that churches are always looking for ways to impact the community to better the places where they’re living and serving and support groups. And obviously the kids nights out don’t have to be limited to that. And the wraparound teams that we talked about a little bit are always to say, we’re gonna show up for you and support what you’re doing and help.
Travis (18:12.749)
Yeah.
Nanette Kirsch (18:31.441)
lighten your load in some material way.
Travis (18:32.813)
Hmm.
Brian Mavis (18:34.894)
Yeah, we talk about having foster friendly churches. And so our qualifications for that, we used to go into churches and say, here’s two dozen different ideas that you can do and the smorgasbord and it either was, it seemed to be either overwhelming and they did nothing or they picked a thing that wasn’t really that helpful and moving the needle. And so we narrowed it down to three best practices.
Travis (18:44.141)
Ahem.
Nanette Kirsch (18:54.801)
Hmm.
Brian Mavis (19:03.214)
One being that the children and youth workers are trauma trained. They’re not experts, but they at least have the lenses to see and recognize trauma behavior. Secondly is that the church has an ongoing ministry like the couple you just described in that. And we have resources, but we also point to other organizations that are helping churches with stuff that they do. And the third thing was that the church teach on it once a year minimally in what we call a meaningful way.
Travis (19:09.133)
Mm -hmm.
Brian Mavis (19:33.006)
And we kind of leave that a little bit ambiguous to let the church decide how they want to do that. The other thing that if you’re, if you are listening and you are, you have influence in your church, the church is another great place besides doing that to let business leaders, business managers know about this opportunity in their community. And so, you know, for example, we connected with a church and they just did a
Nanette Kirsch (19:33.009)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (19:50.857)
Yeah.
Brian Mavis (20:02.574)
brief plug for this and got over 100 businesses to sign up to be foster friendly in their community. So the church has a tremendous platform to help help a community be be foster friendly.
Nanette Kirsch (20:06.065)
Yes.
Nanette Kirsch (20:18.225)
Hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (20:23.025)
Well, that goes back to what you were saying before too, that there just isn’t a high level of awareness of foster care in general. And from a business perspective, even a thought about how they might be able to impact that in a positive way. So it’s a great place to start is to activate businesses that already have some commitment to faith, commitment to serving, and help them connect the dots that in what you do, you can actually make a difference in a pretty simple way.
Travis (20:45.065)
Hmm. And I, you know, interviewing some churches from America’s Kids Belong who’ve worked with us, have gotten some of the trauma training in our foster friendly faith communities. I’ve gotten some feedback to things even like that they’ll say, they’ve had foster families say, this is the first service I was actually even able to sit through because there’s a culture and people are equipped to understand that, Hey, when Jimmy’s kind of freaking out, it’s okay. He’s going to the back. We’ve got people to be there with him.
Brian Mavis (21:07.054)
Mm -hmm.
Travis (21:14.19)
I mean, if we can’t, and I think the mentality is like, if we can’t take care of our own in that congregation, I mean, now we’re looking to go to Africa to help people. I mean, come on here, something isn’t really making sense. And you’re also seeing too, some of these churches, by doing that internally in their walls, they’re attracting people coming to the church because they’re hearing how much they’re caring for their people.
Nanette Kirsch (21:37.745)
I think one, yeah.
Brian Mavis (21:37.774)
So Nanette, I’m sorry. Go ahead, did you want to respond to that? Okay. I guess the question I have in my mind is really how does a community look different? Either before and after or one community versus another, one that’s foster friendly and one that’s not. What would…
Nanette Kirsch (21:45.617)
I was going to have a finger.
Brian Mavis (22:06.19)
what would it feel like? What would the lived experience be like for foster families, maybe kinship families, and for the children especially? Like what’s the difference gonna be?
Nanette Kirsch (22:14.353)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (22:19.793)
Isn’t that what I think as we evolved this idea in the organization, I think that’s what got us all so excited about this notion is our mission is to dramatically improve the experiences and outcomes for kids in foster care. And that’s deep work. That isn’t something that happens because you give kids backpacks. It takes a lot of time and a lot of commitment. One of the analogies I was thinking of, and that’s where I was starting to go with what Travis said, is you think about a child that’s had trauma and I can…
make a parallel to coming home with a newborn. You’ve not experienced that before and you feel completely underwater. And what traditionally has helped a family get through that is extended family and having grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins all come around that family and pour into that child. As a community, kids in foster care need to belong to, and they belong to our communities. They belong to the families that take care of them and they belong to their bio families and they need to feel a part of that. And so when we all say,
Brian Mavis (22:55.662)
Mm -hmm.
Brian Mavis (23:06.382)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (23:18.961)
We’re going to pour into these kids. And we believe as a community that when our children flourish, our community flourishes. And if anyone in our community is hindered in being able to do that, we all lose. And I think when we embrace that sense of connectedness to those children as part of our future and the flourishing of our own community, that that’s really powerful. And if you can do something simple, if all of us can do a simple thing, maybe we can’t foster per se.
Maybe we can, because a lot of times I think people think it’s harder than it is, that there are, you can have pets, you can have other kids. There’s a lot of, right, perceptions people have of what obstacles might be there. But if you can offer a discount in your business, if you can encourage your faith community to step up and do a thing to support families, if you can get other nonprofits, whether they directly support foster care or not, to think about how they might be able to support foster care or support families that are providing foster care.
Brian Mavis (23:52.942)
Yeah.
Brian Mavis (24:07.79)
.
Nanette Kirsch (24:15.633)
it becomes wholly different. I think you can feel the difference. One of our mayors in Atworth, Georgia talked about it’s another way to care for vulnerable people that communities want to do that. Elected officials want to understand who’s not thriving, who’s not able to be their best in the community and help bring them along. And as you talked about and written about extensively, Brian, if you can affect kids while they’re still in foster care and help them thrive, you’re going to avoid a whole lot of things down the road downstream.
Travis (24:24.909)
Mm -hmm.
Travis (24:30.637)
Right.
Travis (24:46.957)
Yeah, I was going to add to like, I love what you said, how it brings people together for the cause, a just cause that needs our eyes and attention. But also, even if you zoom out even further, think about like in the U S right now, we’re so polarized, disconnected, what actually even any more brings us together. I think Brian, you’ve talked about tornadoes, natural disasters outside of natural disasters. And this is an invisible, as you’ve mentioned, sort of social crisis.
It is this way foster care gives us a way to actually need one another. Foster parents then need faith communities who need businesses. Businesses can now kind of have new relationships connecting to them. So it’s this also way that it’s just the whole society becomes weaved together and needing one another.
Nanette Kirsch (25:32.209)
Mm -hmm.
Brian Mavis (25:36.494)
So Nanette, as we’re heading to close on this, I’m thinking about the listener right now and they’re looking at their app and there’s nothing around. Their town is not foster friendly. There’s no little pin marks around them. The closest thing is 500 miles away. For those people who are saying, I want to bring foster friendly to my community.
more than just interested in this site. Like I’m passionate and I’m the kind of person who gets things done. What do they do? What’s their next step?
Nanette Kirsch (26:16.913)
One option is to reach out to Brian and talk to him for a year.
Brian Mavis (26:19.306)
That’s an option.
Nanette Kirsch (26:22.961)
That’s the approach, it’s the approach. But actually, if you go to our website, americaskidsbelong .org, we have a web contact form throughout the site where you can check, I want to start a foster -friendly community where I live. We are working actively to develop a very consistent process that would guide folks who are interested in how to coalesce the resources they need in their community and actually work in a cohort with other communities.
Travis (26:23.021)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Nanette Kirsch (26:51.921)
We’re hoping to launch those every May, which is foster care awareness month, and every December, which is national adoption awareness month. And did I say, I said December. Thank you, November. And so you can get in one of those cohorts and there is no super strict timeline, but there are milestones of here’s the things that you need to move to the next step. So simply filling out that form will get you in our system.
Brian Mavis (26:59.822)
November.
Nanette Kirsch (27:18.513)
We also are doing a series of webinars that start this July in October. There’s one specific to supporting foster families that will take a close look at foster -friendly communities, have some of our current community leaders talk about the strategies that they’ve used to bring this to their community. But I think the important thing is that bringing the app alone wouldn’t be enough. You could just bring the app, get a few businesses signed up, and you won’t have changed anything. But you also can be…
a voice in your community to bring together the players in your community. And it isn’t that hard to do. Like you said, you get a church who’s willing to make an appeal to the business members. You find a chamber of commerce or a rotary club or others who are willing to activate around this as their issue. And you can very quickly get to a point where you’ve got a good foundation to start to make lasting change, sustainable change in your community.
Brian Mavis (27:56.878)
Mm -hmm.
Brian Mavis (28:14.062)
Great, well Nanette, thank you so much for joining us today. I want the audience to know that Nanette has been a gift to AKB, a gift to me. Great heart, great brain. Also just really kind and mature. And so thank you for being on the team and thank you for helping just a lot of people who are on this journey and this is kind of their first, they’re taking their first steps, they’re on ramp.
and helping guide people in a way so that they’re making progress and they’re not taking missteps along the way. So, so grateful for your guidance to so many people.
Nanette Kirsch (28:58.065)
grateful to be here. I think as a closing thought, one thing that I just wanted to offer is the core appeal. AKB was built on the power of story that our original program of Bible Long Project was really capturing the stories of kids in foster care and letting them share their stories to connect them with families. And Travis and I and working with you, Brian, we’ve all had the privilege of really leaning into some of these stories in foster care. And when you have the opportunity,
Travis (29:06.701)
Hmm.
Travis (29:15.309)
Yeah.
Nanette Kirsch (29:26.545)
to touch the heart of a child in need or you are able to facilitate that, it’s endlessly rewarding. And one of the things I love most about working at AKB is no one on our team ever gets tired of a great story. Like every win for a kid they celebrate and it is such motivation to continue. And I think that would be my message to listeners is, is it hard? Yes. And is there a lot of hurt? Yes, but it’s so worth it because they’re kids and they’re still growing and they have an opportunity.
Travis (29:33.581)
Hmm.
Travis (29:40.204)
You’re right.
Nanette Kirsch (29:55.409)
and you have an opportunity to play a part along the way. So how could you not do something?
Brian Mavis (30:00.878)
Man, that is so true. And I was at an event a couple of days ago and heard some new stories that I hadn’t heard before about kids and from the I Belong Project shoots. And they made those stories made me cry. I was like, gosh, here I am. I still have, in spite of being in this space and being well aware of the hardships and lots of stories.
Travis (30:01.836)
Hehehe.
Travis (30:15.916)
Hmm.
Brian Mavis (30:29.486)
they still, gosh, these kids’ stories are so tough and so tender that they can take an adult heart and soften it.
Nanette Kirsch (30:32.529)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (30:39.697)
Mm -hmm.
Travis (30:40.302)
How true is that? There was a great line by someone that said, he who tells the best story shapes the culture. And I love what you kind of are ending with here because when I think of foster care, it’s for many people, it’s this invisible, largely invisible space few know about, or the narrative that exists is so negative. The brokenness of the system, child welfare’s difficulties. You’re stepping in and leading us in that, in marketing, in a way that’s trying to shift the narrative and actually make.
Nanette Kirsch (30:59.633)
Mm -hmm.
Travis (31:09.901)
these stories front and center and be actually places of inspiration, not places of disf – another story about foster care that’s so disheartening. So, and I’ve just seen that too. I want to echo what Brian said. I’m just like, you’re bringing such talent and heart to that.
Brian Mavis (31:13.774)
Hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (31:15.249)
Mm -hmm.
Nanette Kirsch (31:24.817)
nice thank you well it was fun to chat with you all.
Brian Mavis (31:26.542)
Thanks, Bennett. All right. Okay, now we know you’re watching your grandson. And so we want to make sure that he’s being attended to. So we’ll sign off. All right. Thank you.
Nanette Kirsch (31:39.153)
That’s right. I’m gonna call it a wrap.
Travis (31:45.037)
We’ll see ya.