Bob Zaccheo: Therapy Under The Hood of a Car

Published Nov 14, 2023, 5:01 AM

Realizing that his traditional therapy was failing kids with substance abuse and mental health challenges, Bob Zaccheo was tired of it and so one day he decided to do something wildly different. His Project LIFT now successfully trains over 1,000 troubled teens a year in 11 different trades, while they do therapy in these natural settings, such as "under the hood of a car". They're solving 4 of society's biggest challenges all at once (the skilled trades gap, poverty, mental health, addiction) and there should be a chapter in every region of America.

You got a thousand shirts sitting there to be lined up.

I take my drug dealing kid and I say, look, we're gonna make two dollars on every single shirt that we print out there.

We're gonna print nine hundred shirts an hour.

How much money are you gonna make? And they're like, oh, man, eighteen hundred dollars. You know they're going to profit eighteen hundred dollars. And I'm like, man, that's drug dealing money right there, you know, and just kind of kick it back at them.

Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm a football coach in inner City Memphis. And the last part unintentionally led to an oscar for the film about our football team. It's called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people and nice suits talking big words that nobody understands. On seeing it in Fox, rather an army of normal folks, us you and me just deciding.

Hey, I can help.

That's what Bob's at the voice we just heard has done realizing that traditional therapy was failing kids with substance abuse and mental health challenges.

He was sick of it.

So one day, an average guy, Bob decided, I'm going to do something different. He started Project Lift. It has now grown to training thousands of troubled teens in eleven different trades. Ironically, they do therapy in natural settings rather than sitting on a couch. They get under the hood of the car and they do therapy while the kids are doing things they enjoy. Wait till you hear about the success rate. It's amazing. So let's get started. Right after these brief messages from our general sponsors, Bob zach thank you.

How you doing man, I'm doing well, Bill, Thanks for having me on. This is great.

What kind of name is zachio z A C C H e O? What is what is that?

Greek? What is that? Really?

That's Italian?

My grandmother often used to say, I had to I had to marry an Italian in order to keep the bloodline going. Fortunately, I found a very very awesome Irish lady who really balances me out. So the funny part was introducing her to my grandmother, right, So I told her before and I said, don't don't tell.

Her you're Irish.

That could be that could be a problem.

Could be a deal killer. Are you is your grandparents? Did you grandparents' first immigrants here?

Yeah, they were my my grandfather and my grandmother on my on my dad's side, came through Ellis Island.

Actually, unbelievable. That is very, very very cool.

So would you grow up?

I grew up in South Florida, actually the hometown of u At, Florida, which is on the southeast coast of Florida. My family moved here back in the early seventies. And nevertheless, so my family were, they kind of were in the drywall and aluminum stud you know trade up in New York, and one of my dad's brothers decided to move down here, and they all followed him and eventually kind of settled their little life here in a town that had about eighteen thousand people in it at the time, and now we're right around one hundred and fifty five thousand in our little town of Martin County. My uncle's all tell me the stories about how they, you know, went straight from putting the drywall in the twin tours to kind of the next jobs. We're building the condos out on the island, the Barrier Islands out here in South Florida.

Hey, what something you may not know about me is my undergraduate degrees in psychology.

I did. I learned that I'm watching the movie.

I know why I chose that discipline to study. It's because I was really bad at math. Why did you choose it?

Oh?

You know, interestingly, Bill, Like you know, it was, you know, one of those things. I was one of the first in my family to ever go to college, right, and I had no business being there. And I would absolutely, you know, stand behind that, no matter who's on the phone with.

Me, but.

My family. You know, back in that time, I'm forty six years old.

Back then, it was everybody went to college, period, right, and you had really no choice. So I go to college. I had no direction, I had no idea what I really wanted to do.

And so I had gone.

To play football up at a small Division III school in Philadelphia called Widduring University, really good Division III football team, and we enjoyed, you know, I enjoyed myself doing that. But so here's the reason why I went into psychology. There's no smoking gun on this but I go into it's going into my junior year, right, and again I'm you know, first want to go to college, have no guidance on any of this stuff. You know, probably should have just went for a business degree and kind of went on from their entrepreneurial you know components. But I go in to see my guidance counselors. I was just about to be a junior in college and she said, look, you got to choose a major. And I was like, oh, I didn't really think about that, and she said, well, you need to choose one. I said, well, what will get me out of here.

The fastest there it is?

And she said psychology and I said, well, sign me up for that.

I'll take that. So I kid you not Bill.

That's how I decided on psychology. You know, got into some of the classes, really enjoyed what I was doing, but really the the reality was getting into do the internships and the practicums. I got opportunities to do things that was really in the field, and that's that's really what piqued my interest about psychology.

I actually remember those days as well, and it's it's interesting. I mean, human behavior is interesting, it's often exciting, and heartbreaking as well. But you know, I guess that's what we're here to talk to you about. So you got a graduate degree, and you did that because you realize you really can't do much in therapy with just a bachelor's degree. And then you also, in your infinite wisdom, decided you wanted to work with at risk youth who are struggling with drugs and alcohol. It really easy, uplifting group of kids to work with. Bob, are you out of your mind? I mean, why did you want to work with this particular demographic?

So when I did a practicum in Wilmington, Delaware, and I don't know, I probably told this story before, not to a ton of people, but I typically I try my best to not get emotional about this particular component. But I grew up in an intergenerational poverty family, right, so we didn't have a ton of stuff. You know, my parents loved each other to seem married. Wasn't like I grew up in a divorced home or anything like that. But but I ended up taking an internship in Wilmington, Delaware. And this was back when I was in undergraduate school and my job at the Probation Office the Juvenile Probation office there in Wilmington, Delaware, was to transport kids from you know, Philadelphia. They'd been in a detention center up in the Philadelphia area, and I had to transport them, you know, through some of the inner city projects there. I had never seen it before, Bill, Like, I grew up in South Florida, so I didn't know what a row home was, or kind of a ghetto or.

Any of that stuff. So here I am kind of, you know, transporting back and forth this you know, quintessential white guy, you know, driving back and forth through some ghettos and you know, picking up kids and detention centers and driving them down to Wilmington. And one day I picked up this kid and he was at back of my Car's fourteen years old. Yeah, you must have been six foot four.

Just a great you know from what I could tell, Just a great young man, great conversation.

He's in the back of the.

Car and I'm driving down I ninety five between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware in one of the you know, transport cars for the probation office. And I don't know if you know that area very well or not, but it's like twelve lanes of I ninety five, Like it's a very big highway. I'm driving down that road and I'm having this conversation with this kid back and forth, which was typical i'd have. I'd try my best to talk to him, you know, talk to whoever I was driving with. And all of a sudden, he jumps over the back of the seat of the car and grabs the steering wheel of the car and pulls it to the right and rams us into one of those guardrails.

And he's apparently six foot four to two hundred something pounds, So you didn't have much you.

Could do, no, you know, I was, you know, a minebacker, so it wasn't like I couldn't handle myself. But at the same time, it was like, holy, Honestly, what I thought happened was I thought we got rear ended. Like I thought we got it from behind, you know what I mean. Like I couldn't comprehend what had happened. And he so all of a sudden, we're in this rail or we're in this you know, this concrete bunker right now, no cell phones. It's whatever, nineteen ninety eight or ninety seven, something like that.

And I'm like, holy, which just happened. I you know, Squialdo has stop stop in the middle of the road. This kid jumps out of my out of my car and like leap frogs across every lane of the highway.

Do you remember the arcade game Froger exactly?

If you can, if you can visit this kid doing a Frogger across the north and southbound lanes of I ninety five between Philadelphia and Wilmington. So you know, it takes a little bit of time, but you know, police come and you know, rescue and all that other stuff. And and sure enough, my supervisor shows up to the scene, right and my supervisor says to me, I'll never forget this because it just pissed me off.

He said, He said, what'd you let him run away for?

Right? Sure?

And I had the same reaction you just had, Bill Like, I was like, no, I.

Mean I might have said if you ever tried to catch Froger?

Yeah, right by the way, he was really fast. And how come we aren't thinking of it this way though?

Bill?

Like, because this is this is really the question is what made this kid so scared that he wanted to ram my car into a guardrail? And that was the that was the burning question that I had was and that's what really lit my fire more than any.

Did you find out why he did it?

No?

I think I worked there for about a whole nother three days because they wanted me to fill out all kinds of incident reports and blaming me for the accident and all this other bolt and I you know, you know, bottom line, you know, I'm twenty one years old having been in a you know, horrible, you know, little incident, and I'm also processing my own personal growth right never been exposed to anything like that, And so really what lit.

Me up was I knew at that point I had to go do something about that. Like I don't, I didn't know what it was that I had to do, but I do know that God was calling me to do something greater with my life, using my talents to help people at the highest level I possibly could.

We'll be right back, Bob.

You said you you grew up in a socioeconomically disadvantaged. Although you had a family, you clearly knew what it was like not to to probably have your basic needs met, but not to have a lot of wants satisfied. Did you identify with these kids at all.

You know, looking back on it, I don't know that I was probably caught up in my own selfish, twenty one year old world. But you know, the bottom line was I grew up in what you know, what I term, you know, intergenerational poverty, is that my parents, you know, I'd go home at night and the electricity be off, you know, the mortgage wasn't paid, no food in the fridge, that kind of thing. But my parents loved me. It wasn't like there was not love in the house. You know, my my mom and dad stayed married, there wasn't divorce. My sisters and I had kind of that, like you said, the basic needs of everything that we could want, which is probably why they really wanted me to get out of there, go to college, get out and see something different. But I don't know that it's even appropriate for me to put myself in another person's shoes, especially that kid's shoes, because I don't know what it's like to walk a mile in that kid's shoes. And if I ever tried to convince that kid that I had walked a mile in his shoes, he probably would have called me a liar and told me to get out of the car myself.

And I understand as well as the next guy. There's there's you know, in a situation like that, there's all kinds of differences that can help you feel for a person, but not not say you really get it. But in your case, it's interesting to understand now that you know, there were times that you would come home and the lights were off, and you know what it is to be scared and poor. And and as as a psychologist, you know this better than anybody that's listening to us. Is that, of course there is love in your house. And I hear that, and that's wonderful, but I don't I don't care how much love there is in the house. For an adolescent or a young teen to come home to the lights off, that has an effect. And there is some trauma in that, and and it, in my opinion, does guide where we go from there. Would you not agree with that?

I really would?

I mean, you know, you've got you know, trauma is trauma, and how we receive trauma is you know, different amongst us. All you know, you know, hearing my kids, my own kids complain about, you know, not having whatever the next great thing is, and I you know, you you process it differently through your developmental stage. Here I am forty six years old processing what that must have been like for my dad to have to see that when he came home, you know, and for my mom to have to deal with those things. Which what you know, in generational poverty, whether whether it has to do with not having you know enough, you know, cash assistance or whatever it is that you have going on, is that you know, it's followed by depression, anxiety, stress, attention deaths to hyperactivity is very predominant in that type of setting. And then also the family functional issues and substance use disorders, like all of those things follow suit, you know, and when you when you kind of are predestined in a lot of ways because your parents really don't even know that they're in it, or don't know what it is that they're dealing with, or know how to help you understand what the next step of your life is.

Supposed to be.

Well, how the heck am I supposed to teach that to the next generation? How am I supposed to teach that to my kids? You know, you got to have a pretty considerable amount of self awareness to make it through.

And how are the kids supposed to know anything different when that's all they see coming up.

You know.

And you know what the interesting part was, I think more than anything was the dignity associated with it, right there was There was dignity associated with you know the fact that I could get a free meal at school or you know, I know it's a weird comment to make, but it's the reality is that that's kind of where we found our dignity was you know, hey, the the cash assistance just came in, that was kind of our dignity going to the mailbox.

Here's why all this matters, Tommy. I want to I want to go forward and talk about the amazing things that you and your organization have done. But this program is an army of normal folks, and most importantly is that our listeners are normal folks. And all too often we talk about the amazing things people have done. But I think it's important that we qualify what a normal folk is. And a normal folk is a guy who's the grandson of immigrants, who moves to Florida with his family, who lives in generational poverty, who lived the lights being turned off in their house, and who played football, and who went to school and got an internship at twenty one, and through that process learned that they wanted to be in the psychology field. And a kid plays frog or across an interstate and it makes you interested in what makes them tick. But in your own real experience, you also understand some of what makes them tick because you lived it. And I can't think of a more average guy than that.

Yeah, I just kind of want to cry a little bit, Bill, Like, I haven't really heard my life summarized like that, you know, you know, except for the conversations I have in my head about you know, the components of you know, the reality of people not really understanding what I've been through.

You experienced what you experienced, you grew the way you grew It made you part.

Of who you are.

And now you're psychologists dealing with kids who are poverty at risk, kids who've been in and out of trouble with the law, and you're and briefly, just tell me so that those listening to us can understand it. You're sitting in your desk and you're spending forty five minutes with a kid, and you're trying to build rapport. But it's Phil's feudal yeah.

I mean the reality is, you know, I did have the altruistic views of you know, sitting inside of a clinical office and doing you know, doing treatment with families and teenagers and and so I specialized working with fourteen and nineteen year old teenage boys that were struggling with drugs and alcohol. That was my specialty. And rightfully, so it's what I gravitated to. I understood it. I really enjoyed that part. And it's probably a lot you know, like you were saying, had to do with hey, what could have I done better? Which is, you know, you have the transference components of psychology that you be really careful, right transferring your own emotion onto another person. But you know, one day, just sitting in my office, just very very frustrated with doing treatment inside of that clinical office because you just don't get anywhere. I mean, if you ever you ever asked to sixteen year old boy how they're feeling, you get the one word response, right, it's like good, fine, fine.

You know, and that cool fine f you how about that one?

Yeah, well that's two words, bob.

That is two words. Sorry in Italian though, it's one fungal.

But we can agree that you get a very dismissive tone, short answers, because, let's face it, a sixteen year old boy really isn't interested in telling you about his feelings. A lot of it was judges making them go see Bob, and therapists like Bob basically had fifty minute appointments to change their lives, which is ridiculous and will never work. So Bob said, there's got to be a better way.

So let me kind of, you know, brief you on this story.

So one day I brought a fish and rod to work with me, and I had no intention of doing any treatment with any of the kids I was working with. I just was going to tie a dry fly on the end of a fly fishing rod. Is a plastic bait on a fly fishing rod, and you could you could actually make them.

It's like coming these little kids, you can make them. So I'm sitting there with the first kid.

We tie out this knot, we put it on the end of this fly rod, and I said to the kid, now, and we had no conversation. We didn't talk at all, right, because you don't talk because that's what's happening.

It's like good will hunting in there. So I said, like, hey, how about we bring this rod out to the back.

Of my office. There's a little pond back there. I'll teach you how to cast the rod. The kid's like, great, let's do that. We go to the back and I start teaching him how to cast this fly fishing rod and with this little bait that he made on the end of the rod the end of the pond, and literally before the bait was hitting the water, the kid's telling me all about his you know, promiscuous mom, his drunk dad, and all the anger that he felt. And I was like, okay, that was easy. I got him out of the office and he starts talking right, hands moving their mouth and obviously their their mouths start opening. So what I found was there was nothing unique about taking a kid fishing. But what I did next was really unique. I called a buddy of mine who was an AS certified mechanic and I who was also in recovery, so he understood the processes of substance use disorders. And I said to him, I go, hey, would you teach these kids how to do automotive repair while I do psychotherapy underneath the hood of a car.

And that was thirteen years ago.

So Bob left a job where he's making one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to start this nonprofit, Project Lift, where the first salary he took was thirty one thousand bucks. But Bob couldn't not do this. He felt called to try to save these at risk teens, most of which are sent to him by judges for substance abuse of mental health challenges. And now they're doing therapy alongside a lot more than cars.

So Project you know, this is the thirty second elevator speech on it. Aarilard pitchar is that Project Lift is a mental health and substance abuse program that utilizes the vocational trades as a vehicle into a kid's life, right, because we have to take a look at replacement behaviors in a much different way. Right, That's what that's all cognitive behavioral therapy is. It's replacing behaviors. It's resilience based. So how do I enact resiliency inside of a kid and effectively replaced behavior and nefarious behavior? So when I went in front of a judge and I said, Hey, this is what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be teaching them the trades, and we're going to replacement behavior with automotive repair and carpentry and boat building and welding and all these other you know, anything that we could get our hands on. We build airplanes here now with h VAC programs. We have eleven different trades that we teach. And when I went to them and told actually, we even do metal forging here. So that was a funny one going in front of the judge and saying, hey, we're making knives now with these kids. Thing adjudicated, which was which was a lot of fun, and that actually happened on.

A homemade party.

That was a funny one because we were up doing an appearance with one of the kids doing an update and the judge said, his name's Judge Levin, one of the best judges in the universe. Universe totally got this system and was on board from day one.

He was actually the chief judge at the time.

I'm standing there with one of the kids and the Judge Levin said, so, so how's it going over there project lift and the kid goes, it's awesome, I made a knife. What we know is that if I'm sitting in a clinical session with a kid and having a behavioral session. Emotional or behavioral doesn't matter. And I open up that therapeutic window on that kid and then close it back down with some tools that that kid can go home with so that he can deal with the fact that he's getting the crap kicked out of him, or he's dealing with the lights being off like we talked about earlier, or just dealing with the shortage of assets, or depression, anxiety and stress. Well, the bottom line is those tools are only going to last so long in that kid's toolkit, right, and then eventually they'll disappear.

And what we find is that the original.

Behavior gets worse because the tool, the tools that we were teaching inside that forty five minute session, we're gone now. But instead if we replace it with something that has dignity, hope and promise in the future, right, like twenty eight hundred degree oxya settling torch, like teaching a kid how to how to weld, Like giving them something that ninety nine point nine percent of the rest of the world has no idea how to do right, gives them dignity, It gives them an effective replacement. So instead of being a really great drug dealer, like, oh you know, hey, I'm really good at this. I'm really good salesman. I always say, my drug dealing kids are all they're entrepreneurs. They're the easiest ones to change, right, because all I have to do is just teach them the value of.

Money, about the drugs, it's about the bunny.

It's about the money.

Yeah, it's about the economy. Stupid, it's it is.

And they're incredible entrepreneurs, right, And I I often pitch it like that so that I can get that kid to really see it in a much different way, right. It's I try to tell them like, oh, you know, how much does the average drug dealer make, Especially when we're doing one of our manufacturing components here, you know, one of the things that we have a partnership with with a trust company here in our town, and they we teach them how to build the basic frame room of a trust. And so I'm starting to teach them, you know, the value of Each instructor actually teaches them the value of what you can make on the construction of that trust or T shirt printing or whatever it is.

That we do.

And I always say to the kid, like, hey, how much do you think the average drug dealer makes.

And they're like, man, I'm.

Such and such brings home two grand and I three grand, you know whatever. And I go no, I'm like, they make three dollars and thirteen cents an hour.

And they're like what and take all the risk and they take all the risk, And I said, no, google it, And sure enough, you can google it right, you'll find that the average drug dealer makes about three dollars and thirteen cents per hour.

And I said, and you're the one that goes to jail at night. And I said, now, let's talk about the guy that just built this trust, you know, and what he's taken home per hour and what that looks like. And or we'll do a manufacturing component that has to do with our T shirts. So we print thousands of T shirts a week out of here, out of our social enterprise that we have here at Project Lift, and they, you know, got a thousand shirts sitting there to be lined up. I take my drug dealing kid and I say, look, we're gonna make two dollars on every single shirt that we print out there. We're gonna print nine hundred shirts an hour. How much money are you going to make and they're like, oh, man, eighteen hundred dollars. You know they're going to profit eighteen hundred dollars And I'm like, man, that's drug dealing money right there. Just kind of kick it back at them, and you know, and that's the way O track. Our staff is trained. They're trained with the I love you, I care about you, and I can't wait to see you tomorrow attitude.

Here's the deal.

Yeah, you got Bob who's a psychologist who says this isn't work and catches lightning over a fishing rod, gets a buddy who's a recovering addict to help them in a mechanic shop. And it has grown to how many kids have been through your door?

Now we see about one thousand a year.

On thousand a year, And what is the success rate of the kids that come through your program that that don't I guess is recidivision.

I don't know what the right word is.

What's what's the word your recidivisms?

Right? Is?

You know how many are you know reoffenders are adjudicated. So we've been actually measuring that for thirteen years and we compare that number from juvenile record to adult record, and we compare it every year, every single kid that's been through Project Lift, which is now we're looking at, you know, well well over five thousand kids at this point. Is we compare h that juvenile record to the adult record, and what we found is that seventy two percent of the kids they come through Project Lift never get back into the system.

Again, what is the national average that So you're three times.

Better, three times better.

These are not a thousand kids, These are a thousand of the most challenged kids, right.

You know, eighty seven percent of the of the teens and young adults that come through Project Lift can successfully complete our programs. Ninety three percent successfully complete them drug free, so meaning that only I'll kind of give you the statistics on the back end here too, is nineteen percent of the kids that come to Project Lift on intake, only nineteen percent of them can pass a drug test, right, so the other you know whatever, eighty one percent can't even pass a drug test. And here we are with ninety three percent of them at discharge passing their urine drug testing. You know, scenarios and you know, to me, that's really what it what it boils down to, is clear minded decision making.

We'll be right back, Bob.

I think about the seventy two percent success rate, and I think about all starting with mister Frogger going across the interstate, and you know, from that number one to five thousand, tell me your favorite story. What is what is your favorite success story so far?

Oh man, there's I got so many of them, I'm gonna I have to go with two. The first one met this this young man.

This is going back years ago.

His name was Bruce Thomas and uh, you know roll Enclave out of you know, the you know, kind of western side of our town, and you know, he was the bread winner for the family. Uh you know, he was probably sixteen at the time when I met him.

And I mean it's you know, pretty pretty.

Normal, you know, Hispanic family and uh, you know likely you know, so many different things were happening, right so I know one of the components was his dad had gotten deported and uh, you know, it's right around a time when they were really cracking down on illegal immigrants and all kinds of crazy things were going on. And so I got hold of this kid and his family had been through some pretty significant trauma.

You know, I had an uncle who.

Sure got caught in a chopper and you know, one of those wood choppers and dragged him in, and just just horrible trauma that had gone on in this family's life. And you know, after that, that's kind of how I started seeing him, was because of this trauma. And then you know, shortly after that, his sister was killed in a car accident coming around one of the bends. And at the time, we had kicked off Project Lift with boat building program restoration and boat building, because that's pretty big in our area. And again, you know, when you look at, you know, expanding these programs, you have to see what the communities are doing.

And so we started teaching that.

So we started teaching what's called carbon infusion, right, So it's a technique of vacuum bagging holes of boats so that you can make them nice and smooth and then you can stand them down. And we started teaching Bruce this technique, got him connected with one of our industry partners and kind of cleaned him up a bit, and just in terms of his his life, got him cleaned from drugs and alcoholic right, drug testing all the time.

So he was numbing himself.

I mean, the trauma that kid had gone through. I didn't did not blame him one minute for wanting to numb himself, right sure, and got him clean and sober, got him kind of into the end of that position of you know, feeling loved again and feeling hope and promise.

Taught him how to do this vacuum bagging process.

Now, this vacuum bagging process, it's not a whole lot of people know how to do it, and it's you know, carbon infusion.

You see these big sport fishing vessels that do it.

And we got him a job at a company called American Custom Yachts, one of the largest boat builders in the country. Right, They're they're known for their sport fishing yachts and all this other stuff.

So it must have been.

Two years three years later, you know, after he had graduated, been through, had the job. I hadn't seen him for a little while, and I was just at I was at seven eleven, normal guy, right, normal guy seven eleven, walking through thing, and I hear mister Bob, mister Bob, and I look over and it's Bruce, right. And it took me a second to grab his name, right, because you know, you know how it is with the amount of kids that you see through stuff.

And I was like, oh my god, Bruce, how are you? How are you doing? He's like, he pulls up on his phone.

And shows me a picture of a seventy two foot sport fishing vessel that he just finished vacuum bagging, and he was just like, mister Bob, like this is the great you know. He just was so proud to show me everything that he was doing. Then he pulls up a picture, you know, of his kid and all the things were going on in his life, and I knew that he had had done it now, you know, telling that story it's not like this this big burning bush story of something right. But to me, it was like I had done what I was supposed to do, you know, And that's what was important to me. That moment of seeing this kid who had had never even heard of a vacum came back before in carbon infusion and all this stuff. Now with supporting his family in a way that I was Hike would struggle doing. I mean, it's just an amazing.

Let me move on.

That is.

But that is that is I mean, just think about it. Father deported, uncle killed in the chipper sister killed in a car wreck, sixteen years old, drug and alcohol abuse, supporting a very broken family, whatever was left over left of it, and through this, through this work, you've done it, through the organization. He's got a smile on his face and he has hope and he's clean. I mean, I get it.

That's it was awesome.

And for him to tell me the story, he's he's like, I'm the he said he was the lead on that he I remember him saying I was the lead.

I was the lead, right, you know. And I maybe I'll just tell that one story because it's enough for me.

I know, I want to know the second one.

Now.

Now you got me a little choked up. I want to hear number two.

I got to say probably this one was this story. And you know, we have tons of recent stories, but I like the old ones because it was just me. I mean, you know, I think that's the weird part, is like it was just me and a couple of volunteers at the time. And you know, one of the things that we like to do at Project Lift is we like to give away cars. So we've given away one hundred and fifty five cars now, so we get cars donated to us in our automotive repair program.

We we we.

Repair them and then we have the kids give the cars away to people in the community.

That need cars.

That's awesome.

Well, it helps change their thinking, right it Well.

Yeah, because instead of taking, they're given.

They're given right, And it's a paradigm shift, right, And a lot of times these kids that are giving cars away like this with us every every year, they're given at bigger levels than most of the you know, most of the people in our community give. I mean, you're giving away five six thousand dollars car to a family that's in need. Like it's it's something special. So I wanted to do that right right from the very beginning, I knew we needed to give away something to our We need to teach a kid how to give. And I had this young man named Ray who was working for Project Left. And I say working because I think it's an important delineation, right, it's destigmatize the processes. It's mental health programming. But in their minds, they were coming to work, right, They're coming to work because that's a destigmatization process. So the new local newspaper had caught wind of us given away a car. So they sent over their you know, best reporter, and she comes down and I got this a couple it must have been three or four kids. I was working with at the time, and it was a Toyota four Runner. It was a I don't know, it was a nineteen ninety five Toyota four Runner or something like that.

And the family were given the car to There was like seven the lady had seven kids, right, And I said, look, you gotta stop having kids.

They don't make a big enough car.

Like I don't know how I got to give you two cars, but you don't have anybody old enough to drive. So so I'm standing there with Ray and I got my arm around him and we're all kind of posing for this picture and the kid Ray looks at me and he goes, just just just before the picture is taken, I actually have the picture somewhere.

I gotta find it. But he looks at me and he says, mister Bob, I'm used to stealing.

Cars, not giving them away. That was the moment that I knew we always had to give away cars. So he was fast forward. Ray did really well. He ended up learning welding from us. It's kind of that introduction of welding, and we got him a position at the Pipe Fitters Union down in Palm Beach County. So he did go through an apprentice program and ended up going into the welding you know, field working across the country doing you know, pipes and all kinds of crazy things.

And so anyways, fast forward.

And one of our other kids that came through Project if they're all not successes, but you know, we worked with him for a while. His name was Tyler, and unfortunately he was my dad would have called it like shylock and you know guns right, he would loan guns out and so on, and and we're working with him and trying to figure out how to get him out of that scene and get him clean and get him a job and a career and all that stuff. But unfortunately the street caught up to him and he was shot and killed.

So I I'm.

Sitting right where I was sitting when I heard the news of that, so kind of a little memory just flashed in my brain. And then so anyways, I talked to his mom, and you know, we go out there and we end up doing a I get an opportunity to speak at his funeral and you know, I had some scripture, and you know, there's nothing that can make any of this better, right, it's, you know, the worst thing that can happen. It's your worst day as a as a therapist, it's your worst day as a mentor.

It's nothing good about it.

Right.

So I leave and we're walking down the street and I was with my dad. I brought my dad and my daughters with me, and we're walking out of the out of the church, and up comes from behind comes Ray and he says, hey, man, I just want to say can I can we go out to lunch?

Right? He wanted to go out to lunch. I hadn't seen him in years.

He had been you know, doing his thing out working in the field and the pipe pipe fitters.

Fields and all that stuff.

I said, yeah, I would love to write I wouldn't have recognized him if you had, you know, told me it was him.

Right.

So we go out to go out to eat.

And this was the really the part. Again, these are the moments that that.

They're just the great stories.

And I sat down with him and we ate dinner or ate lunch, and he's telling me about his family and about all the things he was doing, and you know, he said, I would just want to say thank you for for taking me in. At the time, he was a Jamaican immigrant family from that was living out in one of the rural enclaves again of our town. And the check came to the table, and I went to go grab the check, right, because that's what we do, right, is we we do this, We get the check, we take the check, because that's what we do. And he slapped my hand down on the table and grabbed the check and he's like, I got this. And to me, that was one of the single best moments I ever could have imagined. And I wasn't going to steal his blessing. I I you know, I let him pay for the meal because it was something that he really really wanted to do to say thank you, and it was I don't know, it's just it was a moment for me of this major success of this kid that not only did he make something out of his life in a really bad situation because he did come from you talk about generational poverty and raising him sof health, he was he was way down on that pole and for him to come in and just say thank you and grab that check to me was I'll never forget that.

It is a unbelievably satisfied and rewarding thing. It's happened to me as well. When you see a kid who's had almost had been forced to grow up patently selfish to survive, to show as a result of some of the work that he's done self lessness, it is, it is. I feel that story because I've seen it and I understand it.

I should tell you a success story after success for a jobs and and you know, families and families being repaired.

But when you see it at that level in a one on one moment, yeah.

It's very personal.

It changes you.

We'll be right back, Bob.

I'm not a very smart guy, which makes me kind of meat potatoes, and if I've got to boil it down, But if I listen to you, if I understand our conversation, it turns out if you give kids something interesting to do and reward them and allow them to change their addiction from weed to actual dollars, give them a glimpse of what employing those things in their life and as an adult can do for him, it turns out they might be able to find some success in there.

Yeah.

Well, it's more than my you know, we have evidence to support that. It's pretty much a guarantee. You know, when you put an effective replacement behavior in and it's something that has dignity associated with it, that's the key, right you know. I gotta I'd be remiss if I you know, I cannot say that this is all me, you know, number one, I point point to my Lord and Savior like that. I gotta tell you, like, I can't do this without being faced down on the ground. The people that work for these kids every single day, the staff that we work with, they have the same mantra. It is I love you, I care about you, and I cannot wait to see you again tomorrow. And when you have that as your as your first steps in, when you start with love, when you start with just that basic, minimum viable product of love, that's where you see an amazing staff and amazing team come together and change change lives.

That is beautiful stuff. It is absolutely true. I have felt that in my own life. I've seen that my own life. I've been on I've been both the giver and recipient of that.

And it is.

True, and it doesn't You are living proof, Bob that it doesn't take a bunch of money, it doesn't take some special degree. It's just an average guy paying attention to the things around him and finding a place where they can fit in and make a difference. And you, my friend, have answered a question. And for decades, I'm fifty three years old, and I think the question has been asked by the right, the left, Christian, non Christian, every race under the sun. We continue to, decade after decade, ask the question, how do we break the proverbial cycle? And to hear that you are a guy who's found a way to help break that cycle, not only through being creative, not only through Billy being willing to work hard, but by also just showing some genuine human compassion. And you know what, that's something every single body on the face of this planet can do to make their culture and societies better. And that is what it means to be a part of the army of normal folks.

Now, you're right, you know I am.

Yeah.

I watched you watch the documentary, and you know I was. I had so many knee jerks watching what you were doing. And the biggest knee jerk I had, Take the football away, Take the torch away, Take everything out of it. What resonated the most with me was when you'd wrap your arms around those kids and say I love you, and it was like they'd never heard it before.

No, they hadn't. And I'll tell you a story.

You know.

That was your seven year two. I can't remember which player it was, unfortunately, but the kid was having a bad day. He showed up the practice, pissed off, he screwed up a couple times. And I've got a coaching mantra that is, you can beat him up all you want to, as long as you love him up twice as hard as you beat him up. And so I ripped on him pretty good because I hold my players accountable. And boy, I could tell he was angry or was frustrated, he was sad, and so, you know, just tongue in cheek as a joke. I looked at him. I said, man, you need a hug, and he's like a hug. Grown men don't hug, right, And I said, now come here, we're gonna hug. And I mean he turned and he turned from a seventeen year old six foot to two hundred and thirty pound behemoth into a three year old child in the matter of seconds, he melted, and it dawned on me that kids who haven't had a lot of hugs have a long way to go. And if you just show them a little bit of love and you're willing to give to them a little bit of your time, you can change some things. And that is exactly, Bob, what you've done. And I am, I am, I am just in awe of the work you've done. So last question for you, how do we scale this?

Bro?

How do we take your dream? How do we take what you've stumbled across and then been creative with and then built and have such a passion for How How does if we want to break the proverbial chains? How do we how do we scale this? And is it scalable? And is there a way that other people could reach out to you if they want to scale this in their community?

Yeah, you know, I am like that is my the million dollar question. It's the question that I have on my brain. Actually every single day I put together expansion plans and playbooks and you know, you know, leaning on my football days to make sure that everybody understands exactly how this should work. And this is probably the most transparent program you'll ever see in your entire life. Because if we don't teach it to everybody with transparency and fidelity and really, you know, putting the research behind it to make sure that that it is, you know, a viable solution for every municipality or for every county across the country, then we really don't don't have anything, you know. But the bottom line is, you know, my vision and mission and vision on this is that we should be in sixty cities, one hundred and twenty thousand people out of poverty and thirty thousand kids served in the next ten years. Now, that was a big vision to have four or five years ago, and now I see no reason why we really can't see this in every single county across the country because it's a it is a solution that you can bite the tire of. It makes sense, it doesn't. It's not like you you you know, you go to a program and you're and you've got to wait to see what's going on, and you walk in the doors here and it's like every kid has walked into their into their workplace.

Every person is here. It's a shared work environment.

Everybody's treated equally, they're given opportunities that they never would have been able to dream of. But it's all about the path to make that happen in any in any municipality that's across the across the country. You could scale Project Lift the way it is just you know, go in do your development. You have three teams operations, development and finance and administration, you know, components of it. You take those three components and you you intertwine them equally, yoke of them, equally, yoke them, work your development out, Understand where your funding needs to come from. Have an ambassador from every city that wants to do this, because I got to tell you, without an ambassador, you don't excale anywhere. You know, it's very very difficult for Bob Zachio or you know, or for Bill to go into some community somewhere and say, hey, we're going to start this program without having that one person who believes deeply and understands the community, because you can't just force stuff on a community that does does or does not need it. And then you could do it in a lot of different ways. One, you can put the programs you know, you know as they sit. You can't bastardize it. You got to you got to you got to pull the emotional intelligence components together with industry partners to make sure they're all working together, because that's where the disruption is.

Bill.

It's like, if we don't follow industry partners through what it is that they need, Like, for instance, your lumber company, you're you're gonna need I don't. I don't know lumber at all, so I probably shouldn't even speak intelligently. But you've got you've got, you got, you got certain positions that you need filled there. You have a talent acquisition issue going on, you probably have a retention problem. Why are we not teaching emotional intelligence inside of the workplace and why aren't we teaching it to fourteen year olds? So we need to know exactly what it is the lumber company would need in order for us to teach that to a fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen year old so that they'd have more success in the future. They're going to spend ninety percent of their life at your company. It's a career, that's their new family. We better teach them how.

To work well in that environment.

Another way that you can scale project lift is you know, by using already existing foundations.

That are that are running already. You know.

One of the ways we've done it here is, besides just the traditional scaling components are we worked with the Police Athletic League.

So police athletic leagues.

Traditionally don't have strong foundations foundational supports in their environments, so we teach them how to do that, and then we put our operating system inside of different programs like that, so you have your job readiness, employability, mental health components, hands on, high touch vocational training, and then obviously destigmatizing other mental health processes. Here's the process, here's the operating system. Plug and play that right into your system that you have there at the Police Athletic League or Boys and Girls club or a Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and so you can kind of use the uber ride path of the system itself to do that. You even do it with veterans.

I just I just piloted a program built with homeless And I got to tell you, most people, when I say the word, hey, we're working with homeless folks, you're automatically, you know, switched to access to diagnosis schizophrenia and all these other things that are going on.

And I got to tell you it works with them too, with that population as well. You can deep dive this system in just about any plug in play scenario. I choose my mission and vision fourteen and nineteen year olds because we haven't taught them anything.

We need to get them in that position.

So I don't know if that really answered your question, Bill, but I agree with you. I think it should be across the country, not just because I'm the founder of the organization, but because it makes sense.

It works, Bob plug it. How do people find it?

What where do they? What are they?

Google?

Yeah?

Just google project lift dot org U r G h O P R O j E c T l I F T dot O r G. You know, just jump on our website. You'll see everything I talked about is on there.

Again.

Transparency is our number one policy. You can even call my cell phone number if you want is seven seven two three five nine two five five four.

Call me. I hope that you get one hundred thousand calls tomorrow. Buy not that I want you to have to deal with it, but I hope that that people listening us understand the phenomenal work that you and your organization are doing, and and and the success and and and I hope folks see that. You know, you can be a grandson of an immigrant and a son of a sheet rock guy and do amazing things in this country, and Bob or one of them.

I I I have really.

Enjoyed speaking to you about this this evening me too.

I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed this conversation. I've been looking forward to it all week. And and I can't tell you how how much of an honor it is to be on the phone with you and having this awesome discussion about things that I'm just so passionate about. And I could see that in this you know, I get to see the film, and and also you know, one of the conversations that you've had on this but having a conversation with you as a whole new level.

Thank you. Thank you for that.

Bob. I wrote down a bunch of stuff. I don't even know what I said. Everybody, Bob Zachio Project left and Palm City, Florida. It's taken five thousand kids. And I'm not talking about just normal kids. I'm talking about at risk kids who've had drug problems and been in trouble with the law. And the court sent them to Bob, and he's taken five thousand of them and seventy two percent of them have straightened their life out, as compared to twenty seven percent of those kids nationally. It's a guy who's an average guy. He's an army of normal folk making a difference in our world. Bob zachioh thank you, my friend.

Thank you, Bill. I can't think enough awesome time, Bob.

I think we are good to go. Look, I mean there's some production here and some cutting and editing and all of that, but I hope we do a good enough job that a lot of people hear the story because it's not for the production of the show. When I tell you, I genuinely believe what you're doing is freaking phenomenal, Dude. The success rate says it. And you are one by one changing the community. And if we could just get people to see people like you and what you do, we could fix a lot of what ails us. And Dude, you are a part of that army for sure.

Man, I'm humbled and thankful to have had this conversation with you. And do you ever need me how I definitely will. All right, my friends, Thank you for a great evening, guys.

To join an army of normal folks, just go to normal folks dot us. That's right, normalfolks dot us and sign up and become a member of our movement. It only takes committing to doing one new thing this year to help somebody else. And there will be a ton of awesome ideas on this podcast from the folks for featuring. Some of them may resonate with you deeply and others may not at all, and that's okay because we're called to do different things with the different talents that each of us are blessed with. But together with each of us doing what we can, we genuinely can change this country. We'd love to hear what you do. And if there's stories you've heard that you think we must tell, we'll tell them. Write me anytime at Bill atnormalfolks dot us. As you've heard everyone, we're featuring, myself included, we're sharing our direct contact information. We're not just putting on a show, guys. We're hoping to build a real community that's unlike anything America has ever seen. And if you enjoyed this episode, rate it, review it, share it with friends. On social all these things that will help us grow an army of normal folks.

I'm Bill Courtney.

Look forward to seeing you next week.

An Army of Normal Folks

Our country’s problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits talking big wor 
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