Pivotal People
Join us in conversations with inspiring, wise and kind guests. Their insights and experiences motivate us to find purpose, contentment and peace in every life situation. Our guests include authors, artists, leaders, coaches, pastors, business people and speakers who are making a difference in the world. Listen in and learn from their wisdom to improve your life each day.
Pivotal People
Grit and Mercy: Missy Young’s Mission to Restore Hope Behind Prison Walls
We trace Missy Young’s path from tech leader to prison advocate through grief, faith, and a mother’s fight for dignity and restoration. Her plan blends therapy, education, and jobs to help people heal inside and return ready to work and belong.
• how ambiguous loss reframes incarceration through a mother’s eyes
• why compassion and accountability can exist together
• the cost of indifference and conditions inside prisons
• prevention through mentoring at-risk youth and foster care
• three tiers of action: before, during, after prison
• private prisons, policy, and public will
• Grit and Mercy’s model: therapy, education, neurofeedback, hiring
• practical on-ramps for volunteers, donors, and employers
• faith foundations in Matthew 25 and Luke 6
• finding purpose and hope that sustains sobriety
Follow Missy on Instagram at missybyte and visit missyyoung.com
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Learn more at StephanieNelson.com
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I'd like to welcome Missy Young to the Pivotal People Podcast. And I am really excited about this one because I met Missy a little over four years ago at a writer's workshop. Bob Goff had a writer's workshop. You've heard the story before. If you've listened to the podcast, I just went there really because I wanted to meet Bob Goff. I had no intention of being a writer or anything. I was retired. And before the workshop started, I was sitting with a group of women and I was talking to Missy. And Missy, by the way, is a big deal. She was a chief information officer for a big company, for a startup that ended up having a very successful sale. She was a professional national speaker, a professional coach, very, very kind person. And as I was talking to her, she said, um, have you considered doing Bob's coaching program? I'm sorry, I didn't even know he had a coaching program, but I'll be honest, I was retired. I wasn't really looking to be coached on anything. And she said, you know what, you should just do it. If you can, if you have the time, you should do it. You'll just be amazed at what could come out of it. And I'm just gonna thank you, Missy, because I did it. And it just so changed my life. I got this podcast. I have interviewed 130 fascinating people. I have read their books. I have learned so much. I hope the listeners have learned. It is truly one of the things I am most grateful for in my life. And if I had just and what if I hadn't talked to Missy? You know, Bob wasn't telling people about his coaching program. He wasn't advertising. So, you know, I think God has a plan. I was supposed to sit next to you that day, whatever. And here you are on the podcast.
SPEAKER_00:So thank you very much. Oh, you're so welcome. I'm glad I could be a pivotal moment in that in that time in your life.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, you were my pivotal person. Yes. And what's cool is so Missy, I just told you, she was chief information officer for a company called Switch. And she spoke nationally about how women particularly could incorporate their faith into the workplace. That was really her message. And maybe people overall could incorporate their faith into the workplace. And she was brave and she wasn't shy about that message. That can be a message that, you know, isn't appealing to a lot of people, but she was speaking boldly about it because speaking boldly was her mantra. That was four years ago. And I sort of watched Missy, and I'm gonna let her tell the rest of the story. She had a number of unexpected things happen to her. And as a result, she is doing something really so wonderful and so compelling right now. I heard her interviewed on a podcast about what she's doing right now, and I thought I have to get her on my podcast. And she was nice enough to say yes. So, Missy, I'm gonna turn it over to you and let you kind of fill us in on your story, and then let's get to your message.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your podcast. It's such a joy to see you again. And to tell my story, it really just, you know, the pandemic, you know, 2020, I remember thinking this is the hardest thing I've ever been through. And then 2021 and 2022 sort of said, Hold my beer, watch this. My life just completely fell apart in in uh 21-22. My mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which I'm sure you know is the worst kind. And so helping her get through that and watching her suffer. And then my stepdad, who was her caregiver, unexpectedly died for no, we still don't know why. He just died, he was fine, but all of a sudden died. So my brother and I start trying to take care of my mother, and then my oldest son accidentally shot and killed his best friend and was arrested. And now he's facing trial. And then I go to put my mother in hospice and I get the phone call that I also had cancer at the same time as my mother. So it was just one massive life-changing event after another, just on top of each other. I'm very grateful that I had the support of a fantastic Christian therapist all the way through the journey. I'm so glad that I had started seeing her right before all of this happened. If you don't have a therapist, I advise everyone listening to get one. We all have trauma, we all have baggage that we could deal with better. Once my mother passed, then I began my cancer treatment. And afterwards, I went up to a cabin in the woods in Utah and just kind of sat there for a month on the back porch, just bewildered and devastated and traumatized. And I just sat there with my Bible and I watched the birds and the deer and I listened to the wind and the treetops and really for the first time in my life, actually rested. You know, I'd never really rested. I didn't even understand what rest was. You know, when you build a multi-billion dollar company from the ground up, you just rest is not a thing in my vocabulary. And I think we can all agree that family vacations are not rest. Oh yeah. Right? You got to go here and go there and do this and you know, experience that, and it's not really rest. So that rest really helped me to cling to God in ways that I never had before and to really hear from him as to how much he loved me. Oh man, just remembering that time. It was so precious, so precious. But then God started me on this journey with people who are incarcerated. We had to get through our son's sentencing. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison with no possibility of parole. We just passed the four-year mark yesterday. We have 12 more years to go. It's very difficult, it's very hard. Things like at Christmas time when I go to hang up his stocking, he's not there. He's not dead, but he's gone from our lives for a while. And, you know, I don't try to compare it to what the family of uh the guy who died, Adam, what they must be feeling. I that's I don't ever try to compare it to that, but it is horrific in its own way. And my therapist says there's a term for it, it's called ambiguous loss. When you lose someone who isn't dead. Imagine a parent whose child is missing. You've lost them, but they're not necessarily dead. Or the flip side might be Alzheimer's, where you're caring for a parent who is physically present but mentally gone. You've lost them, but they're still there. So this loss without closure and knowing there was a term for it made me feel less crazy. Because I was really having a hard time wrapping my brain around how I felt. But I started to notice that every time I saw someone's mugshot on the internet, on TV, wherever, all I could think of was my own son. All I could think of was that was somebody's baby. That was once an innocent child. And a bunch of bad things happened to that child to lead them down the path that they went down. My own son, Dakota, I became his mom when he was eight years old. I adopted him. And he came with a lot of trauma. He came with a lot of childhood trauma that manifested as addictions in his teen years. And, you know, during COVID, we had convinced him to go into treatment. So he'd been in treatment for a year and was doing really well. And then he and his best friend went off the wagon together. And in a real short time, that accident happened because they were at a party and doing drugs and drinking and started playing around with a gun, and the worst thing happened. So it was an accident, but it was a highly avoidable accident. He didn't mean to do it, but he did it. And now he is paying the consequences, which has to happen. But knowing his story makes me wonder what are the other stories that I don't know. You know, I had a friend when we were discussing her issues with God, she said, Well, I just don't see how it's fair that a convicted murderer on his deathbed could all of a sudden say he believes in Jesus and then get forgiven and go to heaven. How is that fair? And I said, Okay, well, let's talk about a specific convicted murderer. Do you, do you mean my son? And she goes, No, no, no, no, not him. I said, Well, why not him? He is a convicted murderer. And she said, Well, I know his story. I said, Aha. It was like a light bulb went off in my head. I said, Because you know his story, you're willing to extend him some mercy and some compassion. What makes you think that every other person behind bars doesn't also have a story? One of the guys I mentor in prison tells me that all of his earliest memories are of his mother cooking meth. And so he grew up in meth houses and she would tell him, Oh, don't worry, honey, we'll stay here until the walls turn brown and then we'll move somewhere else. And so from birth to age eight, the first eight years of his life, the most formative years, he lived in meth houses, smoke, smelling all of that, breathing that in, or being around those kinds of people who were, you know, totally active in their addictions. And then at age eight, she got arrested and sent to prison. And he was put into a group home where he was repeatedly molested. And so I ask you, what other choice did he have? Of course he ended up in prison. Of course that's where he landed. There was never a healthy adult to come alongside of him and take him by the hand and say, you know what, let's get life figured out for you. Let's get you somewhere safe and stable. Let's let's help you out. No, no one ever did. And so now he's in prison. He's been branded by society as a criminal and a felon and a lost cause and all of those things. And I and I just went, no, that's not what God had in mind for this child.
SPEAKER_01:So And this is where your faith comes through loud and clear. Like I've read, Missy has some wonderful, wonderful writings on her social media pages. And I put a box around what you just said. There was never a healthy adult in his life to guide him or protect him. And then you talk about how in Matthew 25, Jesus talks about visiting people in prison. And as I was reading all your writing, Missy, you know, you talked about, you know, every incarcerated person was someone's baby at one time. My personal experience with issues that we can be judgy about. You know, someone's lifestyle, you know, they're incarcerated, maybe they're, you know, sexual preference or whatever, whatever. When it's a distant and doesn't touch my life, well, gosh, it's easy to be judgy about that. But whenever I see that issue, these are like air quotes, that issue through the eyes of a mother, a friend of mine who was a mother of a person who's experiencing that, uh-huh, it's no longer an issue. It's a person who needs compassion, mercy, grace, love. This is what Jesus was talking about. He demonstrated it through his whole life. He kept gravitating towards the people who were being judged back then. So the reason I got so excited about uh Missy coming on the podcast was because there's such an opportunity for all of us to maybe be a healthy adult in someone's life who is incarcerated. And you know what's gonna happen. It's gonna change us. You keep talking about the and you know, people can be accountable, we can hold people accountable for the crimes, and we can hold out hope and healing for restoration. One of the things you said that really jumped out at me was the fact that people will be coming back into our communities. 90% of incarcerated individuals will be going back into their communities. How do we want them to come back? Do we want them to come back even worse than they went in, which can easily happen in that environment, or do we want them to come out restored and healed? So that's the big gap, Missy, for me. Like, could we get Missy on for her, first of all, to give some color to this issue, help me see it through a mother's eyes, and second of all, to help us understand what practically can people do to get involved to make a difference? And tell her you have some great stories like San Quentin is a wonderful example.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a that's something that Bob Goff is up to, which I think is phenomenal. He's teaching classes at San Quentin to uh help the inmates learn how to write their stories. And once he's collected them all, he's gonna publish them in a book, which I think is awesome. That is a uniquely Bob Goff thing that he could do something like that. You know, I went with him to San Quentin. Uh, it was my first visit to a prison. It was before my son had been sentenced, and I had not visited him there there yet at the prison. And it was overwhelming for me to be there. San Quentin is a it's there were 3,500 inmates, and 600 of them are on death row. It was just one prison. We didn't go, we're not allowed to go to that part of the prison. But they showed us the dungeons where these these dark, dank, damp holes with rusty pipes up in the ceiling, and they said they would handcuff inmates up above over the pipes, like both hands over the pipe, and they would basically hang from there while the guards would beat them. And they said, Well, we don't use these anymore. And I said, Oh, okay, good, but what when did you stop using them? They were like, I think 1987, and I was like, that what? I was expecting you to say like the 1700s, you know, not just a couple decades ago. Yeah. So prisons are are really hard places, and no mother wants their child in a place like that. And when we visit Dakota, you know, he's doing really well considering where he is. But every time we leave and the door clanks shut behind me, it's hard. It's hard to leave your child there. But you know, back to when I saw started seeing mugshots and all I could see was my own son, I realized over time that that's what God sees when He when you believe in Jesus, when God looks at us, He sees only His Son. He doesn't see everything we've ever done that was bad. He sees Christ in us. And and I and I'm so grateful that God helped me to have that insight so that I could look at these precious human beings the way that he looks at them. He grieves for their brokenness. We should also, you know, when Jesus hung on the cross between the two criminals, one of the criminals said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said, Today you will be with me in paradise. He didn't ask him what he had done. He didn't ask him why he was on a cross too. He didn't say, Oh, did you get baptized yet? Oh, have you been confirmed? Oh, have you done all of these other things? No. Oh, you expressed belief in me, you're coming with me. Which I just love. And the other reason why Jesus could do that is because he knew he was paying for that criminal's sin in that very moment. And he was paying for mine, and he was paying for yours, and he was paying for everybody behind bars. And so, how can you help? Well, there's a few things you can do. There's there's really three levels. Help somebody like that kid who never had a healthy adult. Find organizations who are working with youth and foster care or kids who have been abused, or the Boys and Girls Club, but come alongside those kids, be that healthy adult in their lives who helps them to get on the right path. Don't let them end up in prison. Don't let them go down that road. That's the first one.
SPEAKER_01:So I hadn't thought of that. Getting involved in organizations with possibly at-risk youth to help prevent this from ever happening.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Great. Yes. Stop the cycle before it continues all the way down to prison. Get involved. So that's one tier. The second tier is while they are in prison. Find your local church, find an organization that does work with inmates. And I highly recommend if that's the path you want to go down, you need to have had some therapy yourself. I would never send someone who's on fire into a burning building to save other people who are on fire. So, for instance, if you are in the middle of a messy divorce, prison ministry is probably not your thing. Because when you go in there, you are working with highly traumatized individuals. And some of them have severe mental illnesses. I myself have had a little over a thousand hours of therapy in the past four years. And so when I go in there and they trauma dump all over me, I'm not taking it home. I'm not letting it stress me out because it's very easy to do that if you haven't done that kind of work on yourself. Very good point. But that's a high, like if you if you feel like that's for you, do it because very few people do. I feel like the the church with a capital C, the church as a whole, tends to ignore Matthew 25, where Jesus said, when you visit someone in prison, you visit me because it's uncomfortable. And we have our own judgmental ideas about what people in prison deserve, quote unquote. So the third tier is after they get out, hire them. If you are in a position to hire people, give somebody with a record a chance. What we have going on in this country is the largest swath of legal discrimination still alive today. People with criminal records are continually discriminated against for the rest of their lives, even though they did their time, they paid the price, they were punished according to our laws, and they fulfilled the letter of the law right up until, you know, they did everything they were supposed to do. But once they have that record hanging over their head, it's hard for them to get work. It's hard for them even to get an apartment complex to rent to them. And so if they can't find work, if they can't find a place to live, what else are they going to do but go back to crime? And it could be my house next, it could be your house next. We have to provide a path for restoration for them instead of continually discriminating against them. And and sometimes judges even make that hard. Have you ever heard of a judge giving a sentence to someone of a year and a day? You ever heard of that? That happens occasionally. What the judge is doing is stripping that person of their gun rights for the rest of their life. Because if you get convicted of a felony that is any over one year of punishment, you lose your gun rights. If you get convicted of a misdemeanor with up to 18 months or more of punishment, you lose your gun rights for the rest of your life. So somebody at age 18 who has a marijuana conviction that they got 18 months or more, even if they it was a suspended sentence and they didn't have to do any time, they can no longer own a gun for the rest of their lives. There's no path to restoration. There's no path, okay, you've you haven't been in trouble in 20 years. Fill out this application and you can apply to get your gun rights back. No, you if you want to do that, you have to go all the way to the governor of the state to ask for a pardon. And even if you get a pardon, that doesn't automatically restore your gun rights. Are all prisons overcrowded? What's our No, not all prisons are overcrowded. Some are, some aren't. The more pressing thing is the conditions inside some of the prisons. Uh, for instance, several of the prisons in Arizona have no air conditioning. So in Yuma, for instance, one of the hottest places on earth, it can get to 120 degrees inside the prison during a hot summer day. And I and I just go, that's barbaric. It's barbaric. And so there was funding recently approved in Arizona for that prison to retrofit their buildings with air conditioning, but it takes a while. Construction takes time. And in the news articles where it says this is going to happen, the comments that people in the general public make are so disheartening. Things like, well, I guess they shouldn't have committed crime. Prison's not supposed to be fun. What do we care? They're just animals anyway.
SPEAKER_01:And that goes back to the seeing the issue through a mother's eyes. And also, if if if we're not that compassionate, let's be practical and say, well, 90% of them are going to be members of our community. I'm curious when you talk about supporting people who are currently incarcerated, are there programs that people can plug in to do, you know, are there I know that there are Bible studies in prisons. Are there any optional health and wellness programs offered to prisoners? I'm thinking about, you know, exercise. I'm thinking about uh mindfulness, yoga. I mean, are there any kinds of things that people can plug their skill set in to support people, or is that not a thing? I don't even know.
SPEAKER_00:The answer is sometimes. It depends on the prison, it depends on the warden, it depends on the Department of Corrections that runs that state. It's a toss-up. And it also depends on is it run by a for-profit corporation? There are companies out there, Core Civic, GO, whose revenues last year were$2 billion each, two billion with a B off of the backs of inmates. And so all of their they're publicly traded. So all of their decisions are made based on the stock price and not necessarily on the welfare of the inmates.
SPEAKER_01:That is something I just learned today when I was researching for this. I had no idea that there were prisons that were privately managed.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yes. And most of the ICE facilities right now are managed by these for-profit companies. They are getting paid, they are making a profit off of housing all of these people who are going to be deported. And so I happen to know one of the guys because he was in one of my classes at the jail. And after he got out of jail, he was immediately turned over to ICE because there was an ice hold on him. And so he says that they are prosecuting him for coming into the country illegally when he was 12. He will do four years in prison there, and then they will deport him. So for four years, Core Civic will be paid, will be profiting off of his imprisonment before. I mean, they're not just gonna, they don't just deport you. They keep you here and get the money and then deport you.
SPEAKER_01:Well, who's paying the private corporations? The government. Yes, correct. Okay. What percentage? Now I'm just really curious. Any idea of what percentage of the prison system is managed by the government or privately?
SPEAKER_00:That's a good question. And I don't I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you that America spends$88 billion a year on running prisons as a whole. And so when these people get out, because 90% of them are going to get out, as we said, and they come back to your community, if they don't have a path to restoration, if they don't, if they can't get a good job and pay taxes and stay out of crime and stay sober and all those things, then they will continue to keep our communities unsafe. And they will continue to cost us taxpayers money. And so, just from a practical perspective, like even if someone has no empathy or sympathy for incarcerated people, just the practical economical side of it and the safety of the community side of it, we should be very invested in helping all of these folks. Now, another reason why a lot of politicians don't necessarily care is because a lot of them can't vote. So that's why there's a whole lot more attention being paid to people getting deported than there is to the conditions inside the prison. Recently, there was a politician who showed up at a nice facility with a camera crew demanding to be let in so he could assess the situation of the deportees that were being held there. And of course, they wouldn't let him in. It's private property, you know. They were going, no, you don't have an appointment. We don't, you know, that's not how this works. So he turned to the camera crew. It was a publicity stunt. You know, they're not letting me in. And I don't, I can't assess their their state, you know, how they're being treated. And I'm like, well, why aren't you showing up at all the other prisons? Why do you only care about this one? Right? I mean, you're not you're not caring about the American citizens who are being incarcerated, who are incarcerated and being poorly treated. It's it's very important. People listening to this.
SPEAKER_01:People listening to this, I would imagine, as I'm listening, it's frustrating. It's frustrating. And you're like, okay, I didn't think about the political angle of it.$88 billion, you said, Missy, is being spent on this for I think what we could say overall was probably sub-adequate care. 100%. I'm not, you know, I think I personally believe that people's well-being has a lot to do with what they eat, their exercise, their spiritual connection. There are so many things that we could probably do to support people. I don't know. I don't know to what degree that's available. But$88 billion says something. How would you recommend that people take a position or maybe try to help that? Is there a way we can help that? Other, other than how do we even know how a candidate would fall out on this issue? It's not even as if you can vote around this issue.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's tough. You can, it's it's really a state issue typically, unless it's a federal prison. So there's federal prisons and there are state prisons. So if it's a state prison, that department of corrections for that state, the the state's legislature and governor really have are have the say in how the money is spent. But you have to imagine that if the legislature has a has a choice between, let's say they have, you know,$100 million to spend on something, they're probably gonna spend it on education, they're gonna spend it on improving the roads, they're gonna spend it on economic development, because those things get them votes, they make the state better, they're not gonna divert that money to prisons. Why would we help the convicts?
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:You know, so it really means that the people have to make this an issue, you know, and and that's when I go back to where is the church? Where is the church on this issue? You know, if all the largest churches in my state all got together as a voting block and said this matters to us, we would be able to move the needle. So, but I haven't seen that be a thing ever, because a lot of pastors and for good reasons are fairly terrified to wade into political waters. And I get it. There's a there's a place for it, and there's there's a place where you don't do that. But with issues like this, when it comes to how do we, as God's people, as the church, take care of the least of these, when you do this for the least of these, you do it to me, Jesus said. That is one way in which we can make change. But it takes some some strong leaders in the Christian community to marshal that uh that strength together.
SPEAKER_01:And that's just bigger than I am, Missy. But what's not bigger than I am is me saying, okay, Stephanie, can you carve out some time in your life to give some of that time and love to an incarcerated person or a youth who's at risk? Or if you don't have the time, are there organizations you can donate money to to help facilitate that? For example, I went on Missy's website, which led me to a link to a women's prison that she works with, which led me to a link of an organization that supports that women's prison, which showed me that they are providing Christmas presents for families of incarcerated people. Okay. That's right. You're talking about guy behind bars. Yes. That is something I can do. We can all do that tomorrow. We might not be able to fix the whole issue, but we can love a child's heart. Okay. Yes. And that, you know, I don't know that God's calling me to move mountains, but He is calling me to love someone. And Missy's kind of showing me that it doesn't have to be that hard to love someone if I look at it as individual people and I look at the end and I say, okay, and these organizations, frankly, have made it easy for me. I don't know. I don't know if, you know, my I saw I Googled my there is a prison that's near our house. And so I Googled it and I found it, and I found actually, Missy, that it used to be managed privately and some bad things happened. And so then the government took it over. They're now shutting the prison down and they're moving people into other prisons. But just that quick little Google search taught me something about okay, you know what? Our government did step in when it made sense and said, no, this isn't, it wasn't about finances. It was about people not being treated correctly.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I'll tell you something, just this is a little thing, but it but it hurts me so much as a mom. Every time we visit Dakota, you know, we're in the visitor's room for it's like a big lobby kind of area with tables and chairs and vending machines, and you eat out of the vending machines all day because there's no other food. And he is always so excited to get a salad out of the vending machine. And I look at that salad and go, I don't want a vending machine salad. But he is so excited to get a vending machine salad because it's the only time he gets fresh vegetables.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00:Is when we visit, because the food is so bad. Here you have a company running that prison whose revenues were$2 billion last year and they don't pay for adequate food for the inmates. Why? Because it it cuts into their profits.
SPEAKER_01:They can get away with it.
SPEAKER_00:And and we allow it because the you know, the general public does not care what happens to people behind bars. And in my opinion, we are all criminals. We just haven't all been caught. And how do I know that? One illustration is every bar and restaurant in town, in any town, is full of cars all evening long until the restaurant or bar closes and then all the cars go away. You cannot tell me that all of those cars were driven by 100% sober people.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Have you ever worked for tips? Did you report 100% of your tips every single time to the IRS? Of course not, but illegal. You know, there's there's lots of ways in which we we go, ah, it's fine. You know, it's not that big of a deal, right? Right. We just haven't all been caught. So I always say you're one stupid decision away from being behind bars right with them.
SPEAKER_01:Especially people under the age of 25 where your prefrontal cortex, your good decision making isn't fully developed yet. That's right.
SPEAKER_00:There's a young girl in the prison that I work with, she's a minor, she's 17. When she was 14, she and another girl got in a fight, and the other girl died from her injuries. And the judge gave this 14 year old girl 20 to 50 years behind bars. Wow. It is an absolute travesty. And you know, when you get to know this girl, you find out she she has a lot of trauma in her childhood. Before the fight happened, she was considering suicide. You know, none of those. Things were taken into account. They just locked her up. And technically, you know, people go, Yeah, lock her up, throw away the key. Key doesn't get thrown away. She will get out eventually. And if we don't step in and help her, she will be highly traumatized. She will be unable to stay sober, unable to find a job, unable to hold down a job. I mean, I look at my son, who's going to hire him with a second degree murder conviction hanging over his head if I don't do something. So I am doing something. I'm forming a nonprofit called Grit and Mercy. And it will bring education and therapy directly into the prisons all over the country. I'm working with educational institutions going, hey, you all figured out how to do remote learning during COVID. What is stopping you from bringing every single degree program that you offer straight into the prisons? Now, the other part of that is I don't believe that education alone is the key because I could help someone get three PhDs, but if they haven't healed from their trauma, they're still going to go smoke crack or drink alcohol, whatever it is their crutches. So we got to heal, we have to help them heal as well. So bring therapy in. So while they're getting their education, they will also get weekly therapy from a dedicated therapist that comes into the prison just to work with them. It's paid for by the project. And so they will also have to go to AA if addiction is part of their thing, as often as it's offered in the prison, and they have to do neurofeedback three times a week, which is an absolutely incredible modality that has helped a lot of people break free of their addictions. And they will have to be drug tested every two weeks. So when they get close to finishing their degree or the certificate program, whatever it is when they're getting out, I will be pounding the pavement, going to potential employers saying, hey, I've got a candidate who's about to get this four-year degree that would be really beneficial to your company. But also they've had four years of weekly therapy, four years of neurofeedback, four years of AA, four years of clean drug testing. I want you to commit to hire them. So the grit part is what the inmates are going to have to have to get through this program because it's not a handout. It's a lot going to be a lot of work for them. They're going to have to do the work of therapy and do the work of education. And then the mercy part is the community welcoming them back in, embracing them back into good job, paying taxes, staying sober, not having to go back to crime, breaking that cycle. And so it will be for people in prison and for people who have been in prison.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh. That is so amazing. I am sitting here thinking, when I met you four and a half years ago, she's, you know, chief information officer of this big company. She didn't know the company was going to be sold. She was pursuing her path of speaking to people about business and faith and business. I said to her before we started this podcast, Missy, I think she thought that was her path. She probably thought she was going to be doing that for the next 10 or 20 years. I think God was preparing her with all of that unbelievable training to be able to do this. Because I just heard you describe that program. And I thought, I bet there aren't many programs like this in the country. There's nothing. There's nothing I could find. So God needed you to pull you in. So I'm listening to this thinking, uh, I want to get involved in that. I want to know more about that. I want to, I bet people listening are saying, hey, is there something I can do? Because it's just the whole idea of this holistic approach to number one, getting people healed, you know, with and then number two, that we have an employment problem. We have plenty of people who might not want to do certain jobs and an inmate might be willing to do, you know, the entry-level job that maybe is boring, or maybe the manual job. I mean, to give someone who really is desperate for a job and has proven that they have the grit by doing this whole program, I would think that person would actually have a higher rate of success as an employee.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the way I'm looking at it is what are you, what are you passionate about? What are the gifts and skills and talents that God's given you? Because everybody has them. And so a lot of inmates, when they're getting out of prison, they're like, well, you can go be a commercial truck driver, you can work in construction. Those are really the only people who are going to hire you. I disagree. I don't believe that that's true. There, those are the only people who are going to hire you if you haven't demonstrated that you can do the work to change yourself. But if you can do the work to change, and then you have someone like me going out and representing you on behalf of the entire inmate community to the community at large saying, No, we are going to change this together. We're going to fix this. And I will have a fund in in within my nonprofit to help some of them get their teeth fixed. Because you know what that does to you to have your teeth, to have your smile restored, the self-confidence that that gives you. You know, if your teeth are bad, you know, it's it's hard. You want to hide it and you speak in a way that hides it because you're self-conscious. Let's fix that. What are the hurdles? Let's fix them. You know, this is why God has put me in this position is to connect people like you and everybody else who wants to help, because I know that there are dentists and orthopedic surgeons out there in the church sitting there on Sunday going, What does God want me to do with my life? The same is true for the inmates. What does God want them to do with their lives? I talked to one guy in my class who got out. He goes, Well, I guess I'm gonna be a truck driver. And I said, Richard, do you want to be a truck driver? He goes, No. I said, Well, what do you want to do? He goes, Well, I, you know, it sounds weird, but you know, I'd really like to help people. I said, Okay, help them by doing what? He goes, Well, I, you know, and he was like nervous to say it, like to speak it aloud. He goes, I think I'd really like to be a therapist. And I was like, then let's do that. And so he fought for funding to get uh to be able to go to school, and he is now going to school to become a therapist.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that's great.
SPEAKER_00:And he's got hope. Yes, he has hope. You know, he he's excited about his future. You know, I said, Richard, if that's right, I said, if you become a therapist, that's that's you using everything that you've been through as street cred to help other people like you who are trying to figure out how do they do what you did. You become a truck driver and it's not something you want to do. How do you think that's gonna work out for you with your efforts to stay sober? He goes, not well. Good point. So this is the point going, no, every one of these people behind bars was designed by God with gifts and talents, just like me, just like you. Let's figure out what those are and let's enable them to do the work that God has for them to do in their lives. What better way could I spend the next 50 years of my life than doing that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm sitting here smiling because I'm like, okay, guys, do you see why I wanted to have her on the podcast? And I really think she's just beginning. You're just beginning, Missy. Oh, yeah, I'm just getting started. This is gonna be so fun to watch, and I'm looking forward to now. I'm tracking with it. I'll have all this in the show notes, but I don't think people go to show notes. So I want you guys to follow her on Instagram. She has really good posts and really good conversations. One of her posts went viral. It sure did. 50,000 likes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're up to 3.5 million views and interactions. It's crazy. Wow. Wow. But what's really insane is when I go and look at the insight, over 14,000 people have saved the post. Oh, wow. And I and I just go, okay, wow, that's and here's what have you ever been to dinner with someone who's sort of rude or abusive to the wait staff, you immediately know that person has never waited on a table in their life, right? They've never been in a position of service or they would never treat the waiter like that. And I think it's the same in some ways when it comes to people who are incarcerated. If you, if it has not touched you, if it you have not experienced that with a family member yourself, it's very easy to judge yourself as morally superior. You know, but Christian forgiveness is not moral leniency. Justice must still be carried out, but we can offer and extend the same forgiveness and mercy and grace that has been given to us. If we are truly grateful for what Jesus did for us on the cross, then we should not be okay with someone dying in prison without being saved as a punishment. It should matter to us that these people find Jesus before they die. And so if that means getting involved when they're kids, right? Intervening, you've got youth aging out of foster care, kids who've been in foster care their whole childhood and are aging out, meaning no one's ever adopted them. What do you think that does to their self-worth? They're very at risk. Get involved with them, right? Show them that someone does care. It doesn't mean you have to adopt them, but get involved in their lives, help. And there's definitely organizations out there. Olive Crest is one that works with youth who are aging out of foster care that really at risk kids. Boys and Girls Club is another great place. There's so many. But just look, just look and see what's available in your community. But if we are truly grateful for what Jesus did for us, even though we don't deserve it, we need to be extending that same mercy, grace, and compassion because Luke chapter six says, you must be merciful just as your father is merciful.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:It doesn't, and God said, you know, Jesus said the greatest commandments were to love God and love other people. He didn't say only love other people who haven't committed crime. I mean, come on.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So so as uh as Bob Goff always says, I don't try to be like me, try to be like Jesus. I'm trying to be like Jesus. Read the red letters, that's what grounds us. The whole idea of, you know, he said not just to love other people, but he also said love your enemies. You know, I mean, it's it's a pretty big, broad sweep, including people who are incarcerated. And I think that it's not just what's holding people back, it's not just being judgy, it's just being ignorant. And so I want to thank you for bringing us this information so we are not as ignorant of this topic. You've given us lots of good resources, lots of good ideas. I'm gonna put them in the show notes. If you want to follow Missy, which you do, it's missy byte at Instagram. So Missy and then Byte B-Y-T-E. I think that's a play on your former career. Um, missyyoung.com is her website. That'll give you everything you need. You're gonna be inspired by what she writes, and it's real simple, and she does reels. We're gonna be doing a lot of reels of this podcast. So you're gonna get a lot of her information. But I just want to thank you, Missy, for not just coming on the podcast, but for doing what you're doing.
SPEAKER_00:No, thanks. It's a it's a privilege to know that I'm I'm exactly where God wants me to be and that I'm doing what he wants me to do. Do nothing without him.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's beautiful. And I will uh look forward to tracking and seeing all that you're doing. Thanks, Stephanie.
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