Life Is Not a Sprint, It’s a Marathon. Keep Running!

JOHN DAVID GRAHAM is the founder of Good Samaritan Home, a housing / mentoring program helping men and women restart their lives after prison. Prior to that, he was a door-to-door salesman, children’s home counselor, substitute school teacher, truck driver, fireman, building contractor, minister and journalist. Sometimes the road home takes many twists and turns, requiring the necessary time and experience to develop what he calls the “calloused hands and tender heart” needed to write this story.

He gives all the credit for the success of Good Samaritan Home, and the completion of his novel, to Kathy, his wife of forty-seven years. “She has given me the strength to go on whenever the going seemed impossible. She has been, and will always be, my best friend.”

John has just completed a fiction book titled Running As Fast As I Can that follows the life of Daniel Robinson as he struggles to overcome generations of poverty, neglect, and abuse that have left him totally incapable of the life, and love, he desperately wants.

John is a member of the San Antonio Writers’ Guild and the Writers’ League of Texas.

He is the author of an academic book, Citizen Circle: A Mentoring Model for Rehabilitating Ex-offenders in Darke County, Ohio, that documents the positive impact that mentoring ex-offenders has on the community.

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou. I’m the founder and president of a nonprofit called SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where we help leaders build synergy in their work with clarity of a vision. You know where you’re going, so let’s be good at telling people about it and inspiring people. Inspiring people, that’s what we’re about today. John Graham is my guest. So John, we’re gonna talk about life as a marathon and how we keep going today, but before we do that, tell people a little bit about yourself and why you’re doing this important work.

John Graham:
Well, let’s just say that my life took many detours to get where I am today. I’m 77 and I went through a series of careers looking for where I fit. I was a door-to-door salesman. I was a truck driver. I was a building contractor. I was a fireman. I was a journalist. I was even a minister at one point. And at 53, after all these, I’m very polite when I say detours, my wife and I decided maybe we could help other people who are struggling as much as we’ve struggled all these years. So we opened our home as a shelter. And we did that when I was 53 years old. And since then, we have grown from one house helping just one person to now we have 21 houses helping as many as 100 people on any given day. And over the past 25 years, we’ve helped, we focus on men and women coming from prison. We have helped house and mentor 2,500 people restart their lives. And it’s all because we started saying, we all need a second chance.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. So let’s focus on, you started with an idea. Now, it takes more than an idea to make things happen. So what were the challenges and what were the decisions you and your wife made to make this so successful?

John Graham:
Well, obviously, the first challenge is always money, because I I had been a minister, but I’d been what I call a poor minister, meaning that I just wasn’t as politically motivated as it often takes to be in most church structures. So that’s why we went into the street. But when you go into the street and say, would you like me to help you, particularly if you’re coming from prison, There’s all sorts of political blowback on that. And so the neighbors started passing petitions. There were calls to the city council. There were ordinances passed trying to shut us down. There were threats. At one point, I even had police protection going into meetings. And we ended up suing the city three different times over the next seven years to maintain what we now called Good Samaritan Home, which was our nonprofit. And we prevailed. But here’s the thing. It wasn’t the legal prevailing that mattered. It was the fact that we were able to win over the neighbors one at a time by basically being a good neighbor with our house and our resident. And even in winter, we would make sure we cleaned not just our sidewalks, but everybody’s sidewalk. So it’s not what we said we were doing. It’s what they saw we were doing. To be candid, we barely survived financially those early years because, you know, who wants to donate to a controversial work that’s helping people coming out of prison? And my wife was working and we lived off her salary and I had no salary for five years until we were asked, because of my volunteer work, if we would contract with the Ohio Department of Correction because they desperately needed stable housing for people coming back from prison. And we had the stable housing and no income. So they paid us a per diem. And since that time, we’ve grown, as I said, from one house to 21 houses. And now our annual budget is $2 million a year.

Hugh Ballou:
That is amazing. You know, in Napoleon Hill’s work, he talks about the story of the guy who sold the coal mine, and he sold it, gave up, and the person who bought it went three more feet and struck the mother load. And so I think Thomas Edison said, most people give up just before they were going to succeed. We have challenging work in the in the in the not profit such a funny word and our charities or our for benefit our For purpose work not for profit. We have many challenges You had more than most of us have so how did you continue to? Encourage yourself to keep going with all of those obstacles and

John Graham:
Well, obviously ours is, it’s not a religious organization, but it’s faith-based, meaning that my faith motivates me. My wife’s faith motivates her to do unto others the way we want to be treated. And so we don’t say, are you going to church or are you saved or any of the religious jargon. What we say is, are you hungry? How can I help you on your level? And I think that’s the key to a successful nonprofit, especially a faith based nonprofit, is that you have to ask what is the need in the community and how can I meet that need? What can I do? And my faith motivates me to do that, but I don’t have to ask you to share that. I simply share my table with you. That’s the language that I think hungry people understand. And it made a difference in the community now, because I like to joke about it, because I say that when we started, everybody waved at me with one finger, but now they use their whole hand.

Hugh Ballou:
That is progress and you know, it doesn’t seem to have dampened your spirit and This isn’t a religious show either. We don’t take a position but as a Christian, you know, there’s principles in the book We read that exactly what you did, you know, Jesus said are you hungry? Let’s feed you so there are very strong principles and what you’re doing and

John Graham:
I think what it came down to for me was, I came down to one Bible verse that says, how can you say you love God if you don’t love your neighbor? Because you see your neighbor, you don’t see God. So for me, to love God means to help my neighbor, period. It’s a very, very simple doctrine.

Hugh Ballou:
And you don’t need a church to do that.

John Graham:
No, not at all. In fact, I feel more comfortable in a prison than I do in a church board meeting.

Hugh Ballou:
A true but sad statement, you know, I served, I served mainline churches for 40 years as music director. So, you know, you are ground zero. I was, but you’re ground zero too. So the difference, tell us some stories, the difference that this program has made in the lives of those prisoners.

John Graham:
Well, think of it this way. When you get out of prison, you’re an outcast already because you committed a social offense. The community likes to think that you don’t belong anymore. And those people, and race comes into that always too, because we tend to say the other person is never me and people who look like me. But it, ironically, What the drug epidemic did was it told people that the other people is your daughter, your son, and many times it’s you. 80% of what we deal with is either drug or alcohol related issues that led to prison. So when somebody is released from prison, if they have no family, nowhere to go, and they obviously don’t have a job, and if you don’t have a place to stay, you can’t get a job. So what we offered was a safe place where you can stay for free for up to three months and longer if needed. But we hold you accountable to use your time to be looking for work. And the way we hold you accountable is by housekeeping. When you get up in the morning, you clean your crib because that shows that you’re responsible to make a difference in your own life. And I call it a pronoun shift. Instead of saying I, because that’s what got you to prison, I want, I need, we say we keep a clean house because our roommate needs you to clean your room. And it shows respect for your roommate. So it’s a shift from I to we. That to me is the key to rehabilitation. And so I can’t see in your head, but I can see your bed. if you know what I mean.

Hugh Ballou:
I love it. I love it. So your statement is not about what we say, but what we do. Something like that that you said. Yeah. It’s just living out your beliefs. And so starting this, you’ve had some really big challenges. But you said the neighbors went from waving one finger to many fingers. They also, you made friends with the neighbors. So much of what we do in nonprofit work, we think money’s going to fix everything. We think just if we had this when fundamentally, if we build relationships, it will attract more of what we. Not what we need, but what we are in the words of author James Allen. We don’t attract what we need, but what we are. So you manifested things probably just sensing your character because of the strength of your character and the conviction of your work. Talk a little bit about how you were able to build those relationships with people who were not your friends.

John Graham:
Part of it goes back to all those detours where I made career missteps. And I spent most of my time going from job to job, from state to state. And what you learn is internal fortitude. You learn to depend on yourself. You learn to roll with the setbacks. And I’ll be quite candid, when it got really hostile, at times, We weren’t sure if we were going to get out of the town hall meetings in one piece. But there was a calmness that came over me because it’s like Dr. King said, if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for, he’s not fit to live. And that doesn’t mean you’re trying to get into a situation that’s dangerous. It just means you’re willing to make hard choices. And I think that’s the essence of being in a nonprofit, because the nature of it is it’s contrary to capitalism, because you’re not trying to make money. You’re trying to lose money in a nonprofit. Your investment is in people, not in your shareholders. And so there was a calmness that came over me during those hard times that I could, knowing that I could walk down the street and feel the animosity. I like to say, and I mean this very carefully, that it was the closest thing to being a minority, to being a black man in a white town, that I could ever experience as a white man. Because I felt that people rejected me simply for who I was and what I was doing. And I learned to understand what it means to be a minority as much as I can. I found there’s a great clarity when you’re under stress and making those hard decisions. Without getting into politics, I’ve heard some politicians say that they’re afraid to make these decisions because the pressure is so great. That’s exactly when you need to make the hard decisions. When it’s so great that you have to do it, you have to make that hard decision so that others will know what you believe and who you are.

Hugh Ballou:
I think that statement is not limited to politicians. It’s probably a lot of leaders that ought to be making principled statements.

John Graham:
I had a pastor tell me that he couldn’t support what we were doing because he had to serve both the critics and the supporters in his church. And he said he had to ride the fence. And I told him that riding the fence can be very dangerous to your manhood if you’re not careful.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. Wow. I read the Daily Epistle from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who really gets down to the topics. This week, he’s talking about how we arm ourselves against others who are different. And how do we come to a common table? And you’re actually living out that paradigm. You’re bringing people to the common place, may not be a meal, but a common place where you have something in common. And I think you’ve created a pathway for people who don’t have it anywhere else. Am I hearing you right?

John Graham:
I would say they’re outcasts among the outcasts because they come out of prison. That’s one level of being outcast, but then they’re homeless. That’s a second level. And particularly if you’ve committed an offense that’s socially unacceptable, I’ll be very candid here. We committed to never asking what somebody did as a crime. We simply said, are you hungry? And so 60%, if not more, of our residents have committed some degree of sexual offense. And we have simply said, where you’ve been and what you’ve done is not ours to judge, because the state has already done that. If you want to turn your life around, we’re here to help you do that. But here are the rules. Here’s the pathway you have to go. And so that made our program even more difficult for some people because it was socially Not more than acceptable unacceptable it was offensive And those are the lepers that I consider That if jesus were here today, this is exactly where he would be the lepers You’re right. I’m not jesus. I am not jesus But it’s a good model Yeah

Hugh Ballou:
It’s a good model and you learn, you listen, you read, you’ve interpreted. So meeting people where they are and giving, helping them bear responsibility for their own actions. You know, if some programs want to rescue people and do things for them, which really doesn’t help them. So your stance is so healthy. I’m so glad you’re on here telling the story today. So talk about, pick one person, not by name, Just John Doe, you know, what’s the story of a person who went through your program and how have they been successful and stayed out of trouble?

John Graham:
Well, I’ll use a euphemism. Jimmy was mentally unstable, schizophrenic. So he was in and out of hospitals, in and out of jail all of his life. He struggled. In fact, he was so disruptive that the mental health agency banned him from their office. So he was 67 years old, and he was a former veteran from years ago. And the VA hospital called us and said, it’s January. We found him in his truck freezing to death. Can you take him in? So we took in Jimmy when he was 67, and he stayed a week, two weeks, a month, a year. He stayed 14 years in our house. until eventually he died of cancer. But what he said was at the end of his life, this was the only home I ever had. And he was a curmudgeon on any given day, but you could see him mellowing because he felt like he had a safe place. And the only thing he looked forward to in his daily routine was smoking a cigarette on the front porch. And Jimmy, even at one point, said, I love you guys. And that was a major, major statement on his part.

Hugh Ballou:
That must warm your heart. Now, you have a book. Now, we’ve been remiss at not talking about our topic today. What’s this marathon thing and keeping going? Talk about that a minute.

John Graham:
Well, what I found is that there are some of us who come from a place where we don’t know the rules. We don’t know where the race is being run. We can’t even find the starting line. Maybe we were born in poverty, or maybe we were born in a home where it was just survival. Or in my case, I call it strangers living in the same house. We basically grew up alone. not without, there wasn’t alcoholic abuse, there wasn’t sexual abuse, there was indifference. We were survivors. And so I ended up saying, I don’t know where the race is and all my friends seem to be going so fast ahead of me. And then I realized that I’m not alone. So many people feel like they’re left behind. And when you look at Facebook and you see all these, what I call hard bodies, people who look so handsome and so well kept and so successful. And we talk about Mark Zuckerberg who made his fortune by the time he was at Harvard, he made millions of dollars and he’s a billionaire today. Why can’t I be successful like Mark Zuckerberg? Because I love to play computer games. And I realized that most people don’t know how to be successful because they’ve never been taught. And so what I call it running so far behind because we have a limp. And I found that in my own life and I definitely found it in the life of my residents. So what I decided to do was tell that story. So I would go into meetings and talk like this and I would give data. And you could see people start to fall asleep because data immediately puts you to sleep because it’s not real. But I mentioned Jimmy and suddenly people pick up. So what I decided to do was tell a story about second chances, but tell it in a way that readers who’d never been to prison, but maybe who had made mistakes, maybe they could identify with it. And so I started writing when I was 65 years old and I sat down and typed and typed and typed and I typed for the next 10 years until finally I had the story that I felt told the second chance story that I wanted. And it was rejected by 200 agents in New York. Again and again and again, because again, I didn’t have the connections. I didn’t have the college connections. I didn’t have the social connections. I didn’t have the money. And so I was rejected. And I began to think that maybe it’s not a good story. But then we did what you said before. We tried to dig the extra three feet. And we sent the resume out for one more time to Don Quixote Press, an outsider press for outsider writers telling an outsider story. And out of that came Running As Fast As I Can. And in the year that it’s been published, it has garnered 38 literary awards and sold 17,000 copies. And if you compare it to John Grisham, that’s not a lot, but most books across the board only sell 250 copies in their lifetime. Most books don’t sell. And what I looked at on Amazon, where it’s found, I looked at the reader reviews that have people who have read it and said, here’s what I found in your book. Here’s what I felt in your book. And again and again and again, hundreds of reviews said the same thing. I identified with Daniel. I felt Daniel’s story. I cried with Daniel. I loved the journey with Daniel. And that to me was how I was able to get people to understand Second Chances because they lived it through Daniel. So I felt like if I die today, at least I feel like I’ve done my best effort. I’ve kept running. And in fact, I’m even working on the sequel now because so many people are asking for it. So I’m very, very optimistic that there is a real hunger for this message of second chance and hope in our very contentious and angry social environment right now. It’s a perfect time for this story.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, you know, we, we paved the way as nonprofit leaders to stay out of the fray, bring which exactly what you say to communities. It’s a focus. It’s a caring, it’s building relationships around the values that we support and not getting distracted, but all this, this other. You’re so wise in that. That’s so great. So here, let me show, uh, there’s, there’s people on the, on the podcast that can’t see this, but if you’re listening on the podcast. Um, you can go to good Samaritan. What’s the link, uh, John good Samaritan home.org. And so that’s just the first house, but that’s just a basic information house. And then there’s, there’s also your personal website, um, which is, um, John, it’s got your, your, your three names there, isn’t it?

John Graham:
Yeah. Yeah. JohnDavidGraham.com. that will link you to all my writings. And now the thing about that house was interesting because that house was 150 years old and badly deteriorated. And we used the house with my remodeling skills. We remodeled that as a model to the neighborhood of a changed house can be a model for a changed life. And that’s why you see the old house originally and you see the remodeled version of it. And it, it, it looks like it’s original did in 1879. And, uh, so that became our talking point through all the conflict. So people could see a changed life in this house.

Hugh Ballou:
Restoring broken houses and broken lives. You have an about us tab. You have our staff tab. There’s your good looking picture. Yeah.

John Graham:
How we got that’s when I, before I got old.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah. Hey, we got a lot of life. There’s a before and after. So if you’re listening to the podcast, good Samaritan home.org is you’ll find that. And then I also have in the, in the podcast platform, I’ll have the link for, for John David Graham.com and you’ll find his book there on ways to get ahold of him. So what, what message do you want to leave people with today?

John Graham:
I would say that you may not have had the career detours that I had, you may not have had the failures, but I think inside all of us, all of us feel like we’re behind somebody else for one reason or another. I think no matter how secure somebody appears, we all have a basic insecurity of wanting to be accepted and needed. And that’s what I think, if I can encourage people to remember that no matter what you’ve done, As long as you keep running, keep trying, you can still reach your goal. Now, I didn’t reach my publishing goal until I was 75 years old, but now it’s given me a whole new vision of what’s possible. That’s why we started the sequel, because there’s a hunger for this message of second chances. So if I can get one, I would encourage you to get one too, if you need it.

Hugh Ballou:
John Graham, you’ve been an inspiration to me, and I’m sure a whole lot more people today. Thank you for being our guest today on the nonprofit exchange.

John Graham:
Oh, my pleasure. You made my afternoon. Thank you so much.