Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #34-03: Brian Woodward: Good news in East St Louis

[Music]
Welcome back to Ready Set Sold your host Bryan Vogt. Happy Saturday everyone I am so excited I’ve got a special guest on and just so you know this going to be a recurring role that’s going to be coming back probably every corner going to doing updates on their progress gentlemen I have here is Brian Woodward Brian you there hey Brian thanks yes I’m here I’m ready to roll all right awesome and he is a part of our three development and let us know first what is our three stand for Brian that’s the question we get a lot and I love it when people ask that question our three is a nonprofit and II think Lois that is working on community development initiatives specifically we sold the need of youth employment by creating youth employment opportunities for youth new St. Louis and the 3 R’s and our three stands for revitalizing community respecting dignity and restoring integrity.
Awesome I love that and I know you’ve got some information but you know off air before we get on we were talking some stories and maybe can relate to what we’re you know what we’re talking about what this what this is all about and how people can be of help yeah so I’ll just invite everybody out there that kind of go back in time to the fifties and sixties from East St. Louis was as it was booming this was a place for everybody from around here was getting their Christmas gifts and things along those mornings there’s a 80,000 people here at its peak but now the population is around 25,000 and there’s two things that have happened which our organization has paid attention to oh and those two things are this kind of a rapid dilapidation of homes as the population has moved out some homes have become your like properties are dilapidated our organization comes in.
And we rehab those properties so that they can be living again the second thing that we do with 80,000 people moving down to 25,000 people there’s a loss of businesses and employment opportunities and the youth in East St. Louis are kind of left in the wake of that there’s not a whole lot of opportunities to be had so we have created an opportunity for youth to work with us as we rehab homes anything Lewis the youth are our mission and creating opportunities for them to develop and thrive that that’s what we’re all about and so we’ve a married youth employment with home rehabbing and specifically I know you had some stories that we talked about off air if you could maybe relate one or two of those w fantastic kind of give people understanding you need and just I’m going to throw it out there too is you can make a financial so if you’re listening this show you can tell your friends whatever is you can make a financial contribution.
If you go to our three development dot org not com make $100 $200 to and $50 donation the need is so great and the work they do is fantastic of course you can do less but let’s face it um everyone that’s familiar with this area knows applied to be St. Louis especially the youth and this r3 development is trying to change that into have some great success and I throw it back to you Bryan again tell us some of your success stories sure um I’ll tell you two stories real quick first I want everybody to know that we do not employ only young men sometimes when people think of home rehabbing to think of it’s a man’s world that’s not the case at all we are evenly split between young women and young men and some of our people young men or young women aren’t actually going to end up working with their hands even though we are teaching them a skill but they are because of their exposure to this employment opportunity they are learning all about themselves.
One young woman for example was responsible for recruiting about eight new interns for most recently completed internship which happened over Christmas break so she was developing skill the working world needs and then those are soft skills like recruitment and project management she was leading the team of students to recruit the other students which required marketing and advertising inside school so that’s one of my favorite stories to tell because it’s not just about working with your hands it’s not just about rehabbing homes it’s about building futures as much as it is about building homes.
The second story I can tell you is we’ve reconfigured everything about how we do youth programming a couple years ago and in doing that we really put the impetus of leadership on the students so it’s actually the students who are recruiting other students it started with two young men and in this most recently completed Christmas internship it ended the 17 young men and women all from the same high school anything Lewis Charter that is that you know that’s also again the need is great if you are a builder or if you’re into the building aspect of it construction of some sort by all means go to r3 development org not com go there check it out you know figure out how you can work with someone.
This is a great opportunity but if you can’t do that donate your money again one hundred dollars two hundred hours fifty dollars whatever I always think that you know most times people going out of family going out to the show just to go to the show is fifty dollars so again it’s one of those situations where give what you can but I give as much as you can Brian thank you so much with the being on the show again we’re going to be following through this is going to be a quarterly thing we’ll be talking about the progress of how they’re doing things with that said I’m going to be talking the tip of the week we’ll see you soon.
[Music]