The Universe Loves Me: Billy Jack Goodwin’s Journey of Service

Today I have with me Billy Jack Goodwin. He is many things, but among them, a program leader for the Port Resources AIM, which is Achieving Independence in Maine, port place in Portland, Maine. You're such an interesting person, Billy Jack, I don't even really know where to start, but first I'll start with thanking you for being here. Thanks for coming to our little island. So I guess I have to set the stage for people who would be like, how did you even meet this guy? Well, I was standing there at one of our Portland art gallery openings looking at a piece on the wall, and you came over and you're like, what do you think of this piece? Do you know if that artist is here? I was like, I have no idea who this person is. He seems super friendly and you and I just kind of struck up a conversation. I learned a little bit more about you, and I was like, wow, you are really connecting to people through your creativity and your love of art. So talk to me about how you ended up in the Portland Art Gallery in the first place. Well, I love art and I love the Portland Art Gallery just in general. I've been a fan of art since I was a child. My mom used to take me to the, we come from Lewiston. I was born in Lewiston, and once a year we would come up for the Sidewalk Art Festival, which was just a big thing for us to come to Portland and go out to eat and then go see all the beautiful art. But as I just love art in all forms, that's spoken word. If it's performance, if it's painting, I just love art. As far as art in Portland, it is always been a part of my life. I've lived in the area for the Portland area for what, 20 years and art has always been a big part of our lives. Me and my wife, we always go to all the first Friday art walks and we just love to meet the artist. : And after COVID everything kind of shrunk down in the arts community a little bit because a lot of studios closed, but I feel like Portland Gallery and Cove Street and Green Hut, these beautiful galleries who have really excellent curators where they can move stuff every month where you feel like everything's fresh and new and fun and clean, and it's just a beautiful place where you can go and just have a night of inspiration and look at this beautiful work and be the artist and that I bring that into my own personal work and my personal life. So I just really enjoy it and enjoy the community. One of the things that you talked about in the pre-work that we ask people to do so that we get a little bit of background is how you are very intentional about trying to keep yourself in a position of essentially being sort of upward. And the word positive gets kind of a bad rap these days. Sometimes it does, yes. But being very intentional about showing up and being positive, and I think this is particularly important for somebody who does the type of work that you do because you've done a lot of nonprofit work 30 years, it's been my whole life, And you're working with very vulnerable populations, but they're populations that they don't need people feeling sorry for them. They need people to show up and be positive and to say, Hey, we're all going to move forward in a really good direction together. So I guess let's start with the nonprofit piece. Why nonprofits? What type of nonprofit focuses have you had foci have you had over the years? Well, I'll start with just, and it's funny, I think I've carried shame with this when I was younger, but the universe loves me. The universe loves me. I have a beautiful relationship with it. I was able to have conversations with the universe and not in a crazy kind of way, but just, I always feel, I always tell people, if you know me, I always talk about, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be here. I always have this feeling since forever that the only way I can explain, it's like a train station and the train is full, and I'm sitting at the train station and the first class is full and the economy's full, and maybe there's even people hanging out and that leaving the station now I'm totally comfortable that this train is leaving the station. And at the last second someone said, oh, we got an extra ticket and someone pushed me. And I entered that train and I entered this world and I really felt happy and grateful my entire life. And it sounds kind of weird to say that, but I was born into, I have a wonderful parents, my mom and dad who are older, they weren't expecting to have me. My brother is 10 years older than me. He's been a therapist for people in college at Williams College in Massachusetts. My sister's a school teacher, and I just was born into a family of love. : The most important thing that they did was teach me how to give and receive love. I think in my 30 years of working with people, I think this is where people struggled the most. And love is a powerful word, and I've seen, especially in my work, twisted in multiple ways. But what it really is, is energy. How can you get energy from people, positive energy? How do I give that out to people? How do I collect it? How do I use that to better my life personally and achieve all the little goals that I have in my life, but also focus it towards helping and uplifting other people? And if I focus on helping and uplifting other people, all these other things in my life just get enhanced and just, I've always had this mentality, and I wish I came up with this by myself, but I was raised in this. : My mother is just, I was raised by a wonderful woman and a wonderful father in a very interesting town of Lewiston, Maine at a very interesting time. And my mom was an emergency room nurse at CMMC for 40 years. She is like, you're the nurse of nurses. She really was. And Lewiston is a beautiful town, the beauty Lou, but is sometimes when I grew up cartoonishly violent and my mom is just a wonderful spiritual woman and a true feminist, not in the way of, she's like a hippie woman or she's just a beautiful spiritual woman who just gave her passion to her work and her life and her family. And when she wasn't doing that, she would give her work and passion to our church and she would give her work and passion to the community of Lewiston. So I just literally grew up seeing this all the time. : She's an amazing woman. We could talk about that a little bit. But also, I grew up in Lewiston, which is a very interesting town. We could do a 10 part series just on the energy that Lewiston pumps out and the history of that town. But my life really circulated around a four block area of Lewiston, which is statistically the poorest area in New England. It's Sabattus Street, Union Street, College Street, just a lot of poverty for years, for generations in that area. In that area is two places. One is Calgary Methodist Church, which was my mother's church, and the next to it was a little tavern called the Blue Goose Tavern, which is a Bates bar, which was my father's church. So I just grew up with this very dichotomy of my father who grew up in Lewiston, very tough descendants of mill workers and railroad workers, and my mother who's just this beautiful spiritual person. : And somehow they met and created this beautiful family. So I was very lucky with that. The church which I grew up in is Calgary Methodist Church. And Lewiston is when I was growing up, it was probably the whole town was probably 75% Catholic and French. We have a beautiful basilica there, very Catholic town and our little Methodist church. And I don't know when I say church or growing up in the church, I think people have ideas about that, maybe negative ideas of just my church experience was beautiful. No one ever hurt me. It was just a community of people from all walks of life who use the power of God and the conduit of the teachings of Jesus to do amazing things in their community. And I knew from a very early age that a call to worship is a call to service. And those two things work hand in hand, and it was just beautiful people doing beautiful work. : By the time I'm 13, 14 years old, I see this, I acknowledge this, these people use the power of God to do wonderful things. But I'm 13, 14, I'm not into Jesus. I don't even listen to my dad, let alone listening to Jesus. So it's so funny, I think I could have gone in multiple directions at that time, and as a teenager I got big very quick. So I was like rewar from the Lord of the Rings, from Game of Throne Thrones. I was just very big, very uncomfortable in my body and very sad when I was a teenage kid. So it's amazing how life works and how if bad influences would've came into my life at that time, I don't know what would've happened, but the universe loves me and good things happened to me. So when I was looking for something, art came into my life as a teenager and my brother, who's 10 years older than me, so he was already off to college by the time I am even having cognitive thoughts, I'm eight years old, nine years old, so I don't have a relationship with him as a child. : We've become friends as I've become an adult. But he made me a mix tape when I was a kid. And my first job, I was working at Quality Market in Lewiston, Maine, 13, 14 years old, stocking beer shells. And I had this tape that my brother from college he sent from me. And on this tape was, this is going to sound like probably the most whitest thing you've ever heard on this podcast, but it was the Grateful Dead. And I just remember listening to it. And I remember for the first time hearing music that would fit who my spirit was. I couldn't have been a goth kid. I'm too big and redhead and smiley to be a goth kid, and I'm not tough enough to love rock and roll music. But that music was so artistically inspiring to me. And once again, once you open up your world to stuff, people will come into that world. : So the people who happen to love that kind of music are very nice spiritual people. And I'm not much of a hallucinogenic or drug user. I really love the spirit of it and the art of it. So just beautiful people started coming to my life and teaching me new things and giving me books and philosophy. And back in those days in the nineties, it wasn't like today where if you really wanted to get into it, you would have to put the effort into learn about philosophy not given to you like YouTube now. And I just, for some reason, it really connected to me. And then my world starts getting bigger and I start meeting more people. And at the same time, my mother, who's just doing amazing work in the community, helped to open a shelter called Norwich House. So a little thing about Lewiston is we have a long history of trauma and sadness that kind of runs through that city. : It just is. And homelessness, back in the nineties, if you were an adult homeless person, you would go to Portland for services in Lewiston, all people would come to Lewiston, like teenage kids. So there's so many rural towns like Buckfield and Turner and Sabaas. So if you're in an abusive situation, you would come to Lewiston because there's a community of homeless people and services. This has always been that way. Lewiston's has been a town of vice forever. It just has been. So there's vice, there's sex trafficking and drugs and things like that. And these kids came into the town. There was a lot of flop houses, there was a lot of empty mills, there was a lot of places them to sleep. So there's just a community of homeless teenage kids. : My mother working at the hospital would just, every night they're dealing with abortions and they're dealing with girls coming in with just horrible situations. So I learned right there, here's a need. Here's a specific group of people who are struggling. So what you do, you create systems to help these people. It's to help create a place called Norwich House. It was in downtown Lewiston, and it was for young girls who wanted to keep their babies and street girls. And it's one of these things where if you are a kid who grows up abused, you don't even know what love is or understand that. So that baby inside your stomach is like they think it's the key to their love and happiness and connection. : But if you're raising that baby or having that baby in a flop house or in a dirty mill, the chances of have some bad happiness very high. So Norwich House is created in the early nineties to give girls an opportunity to go and do this. Once again, I'm just a teenage kid, so I'm not even understanding what my mom is doing. All I know is that because I'm so big and so kind of passive in this shelter situation, I'm the only guy that comes in when they need a refrigerator moved. Here's 16-year-old BJ coming in, move refrigerator and do that kind of stuff. So I'm seeing these girls, I'm meeting these girls, and it's funny because sometimes guys will like, oh, a whole shelter full of teenage girls. But even in that time, I know these aren't girls who I would have a crush on in my science class. : These girls have been through so much already. And in my yoga study I know now, but I didn't know this at the time, but all these young people are just young people with broken root chakras. They have no ability of safety, security, understanding of how to get that, how to lead this. And it was just very eyeopening to me at that time, but not like, oh, I'm going to spend my whole life doing this. But it was already what? I don't realize that all my life, my mom has kind of been training me. So she kind of led us into this. My mom knew when she brought me to that shelter, what I was going to see, she kind of led her hands into the darkness. So we would have an understanding of that. Me and my brother and my sister, all in different times, we had to do volunteering candy striping. : So I don't realize it, but my whole life, I'm almost in training for what my passion's going to be. So I get out of high school, I don't know what I want to do with my life, and I feel this overwhelming passion I want to serve. I just want to serve. I don't know in what capacity, but like I said, my whole life, I just had this wanting to serve. I didn't want to do the military just because I just don't want to hurt anybody. I didn't think I wanted to get into the ministry just because I just didn't have that connection. So it's interesting, I think if I was a kid today, I could see myself being Antifa. I could see myself if a direction, if someone just would've came into my life and put me in the wrong direction, I would've taken all this passion I have and it would've gone the wrong direction. : But it didn't work that way. The universe loves me and it just brought beautiful people into my life. And one of these beautiful people was a man named Bob Row. I don't mean to cry about these things, but I don't talk about very often. But Bob Rowe in my mind is a hero. And a lot of people I'll talk about today are kind of like invisible sons, where they are people in your community that change the lives of thousands of people, but you'll never hear about them. They don't run for political office, they're not trying to make it a money thing. They have a passion to help people too, and they create these beautiful programs. So a man named Bob Rowe, who was really my first mentor is the executive director. He was until 2016 of a program called New Beginnings, which is a beautiful nonprofit in Lewiston, Maine that focuses on helping teenage kids find something, a path in their lives. : And they've been doing this since the 1970s. So when you're raising money or trying to help teenage kids, it's the lowest group that it's almost impossible to find money for people to give money to homeless kids attention, just like, oh, they're kids, or they're just all those damn teenage kids. It's a tremendously hard group to advocate for. I'm sorry, I don't mean to ramble if I'm rambling too much about this, but anyways, at 18 years old or 17 years old, I'm kind of in the mix of what am I going to do with my life? This man, Bob Row came into my life. I was helping to get services at this program. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do, and he brought me into the shelter program. So they have a shelter program that's still there. They have a outreach program that's downtown Lewiston, and they have independent program for kids that afterwards to kind of give them apartments. : And once again, they've been doing this since the 1970s helping this population. They run $20,000 in debt every single year. They hold it together with duct tape. But this program is beautiful. And Bob Row just saw a talent in me and he put me to work at their drop-in center in downtown Lewiston. And at first I kind of was not like a bouncer, but I felt like there's a lot of fights. There's a lot of these kids coming in. It was like a day program. It was open from two to six, and kids can come in, get some food, get some clean clothes, get condoms, whatever they need for their life. And I ran this whole place at 18 years old. I'm literally the same age as these kids. And because I knew the girls at my mom's shelter, all these kids accepted me as somebody who could help them. : And it was just an amazing job and an amazing time in my life. And I kind of knew what I was going to do. And once I got into that, the ball started rolling. Bob kind of helped me become an advocate. So I would go to Augusta, I would advocate for homeless rights by 19, I'm on the board of directors of New Beginnings, the major nonprofit. I'm meeting people, I'm meeting politicians. I'm kind of understanding how the system works at that time. It's the 1990s, bill Clinton is president, and they have a brand new program called AmeriCorps and CCC Vista Program. It is still to this day, one of the greatest programs our government never did. It got shut down and by George Bush and really got hammered a couple of months ago by Trump. But it was a domestic Peace Corps for young people like me who are idealistic and want to go help save the world. : And it was a program well-funded by Bill Clinton where you have programs in states where people go into communities and just help communities and you earn money for college. And so I got accepted to a program called the Blaine House Service Course, that's Maine's version of AmeriCorps run by a beautiful woman named Sandy Goss, who's still doing amazing work in Lewiston Auburn. And the program was revolutionary and juvenile justice where kids would get arrested for drugs, smoking cigarettes or whatever it is, they'd come to the court system and they get, instead of getting sent to the juvenile jail or getting fined for these families who couldn't afford fines in the first place, we were offered them to go into and do volunteer work in the community. So we had a hundred different nonprofits and we would take these young people. So no, we're only in our twenties. : It's a group of 15 of us. Everyone's young, we're all idealistic, we're all having nice uniforms. We had a beautiful van and it was awesome. It was like rock and roll social work. And we would have these kids, these very tough kids that would come in who got busted for stuff. They would come with us, but they would think we're cool because we're young too. And we would go out and we would do amazing stuff in the community. We'd build playgrounds, we would work at horse farms, and we're exposing these kids who got in trouble for smoking and now they feel like they're being punished, but now they're coming and hanging out with all these young people doing positive stuff in their community. It's impactful to them. And then when they finished their time, they came back and they would come and volunteer and become corp volunteers too. : It was just a beautiful way of helping people and just a really exciting part of my life. And it was just awesome. And I had exposure to so many nonprofits at the time. So I'm 23 years old. I accepted to the national program. So it was just the Blaine House program, but even a big national level. And if you were someone who wants to help the community and help the world, this was just such an amazing program. I mean, thousands and thousands of young people, we went all over the country doing amazing stuff, and you're very hard pressed to find anyone in the nonprofit world at a high level who doesn't have AmeriCorps Vista on their resume. It's just there's thousands of us out there who still are out there trying to do the best we can. It was just an amazing program. I really wish it didn't get cut. : Nine 11 really killed it, that program and the war just sliced it all. And then like I said, Trump just kind of killed it a couple months ago, whatever was left of it, the Vista programs that were just doing amazing work in your community. But anyways, I came back from that program and I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I kind of wanted to leave. I was 23 years old, I didn't know if I wanted to stay in the nonprofit world anymore. Not a lot of money living in this world. And so it's funny, I was thinking about going to be a main guide and I was thinking about all these stuff. I was like 23 years old, and I was dating a girl at the time, and she worked at a place called Sperling, which was a big program for kids who are wards of the state. : Mom and dad had drug issues. They come, the state has to take these kids in. They have programs all over the place. They had a job for a residential rec director. I'm like, well, maybe I'll come and I'll do this for the summer and then I'll go get my main guide license and get out of the nonprofit world. And I get this job. And remember for the last six, seven years, I've been working with teenage kids. And even when I was at New Beginnings and AmeriCorps, I'm working with really tough teenage kids. And I come to Sperling and it's all little kids, all like 6, 8, 9. And so I get sent to this first house, and it's in Auburn, Maine. It's called Garfield House. And I drive up and it have this big beautiful house with big beautiful porch. And there's three little kids out there, cute as buttons. : And these house parents, once again, invisible sons of the nonprofit world, these people who come and run these little residential homes for kids, a lot of them are young couples who are like, you'll get free rents and you'll get free car and a free food, but you have to come and work with these children. It's an amazing job. But anyways, so I go to get this job and the first three days of this job, I'm really connecting to this one kid. We'll call him Tommy, his name wasn't Tommy, we'll call him Tommy. And everyone there kept on warning me about this kid. Like, oh, you got to watch over this Tommy kid. He's like, you can really blow up. But the first three days we're, I'm sitting in activities and we're playing, sorry, and football outside. And I'm just thinking, man, this job is easy. : I'll do this for the summer. And one night we're all having dinner and this little kid is having french fries with ketchup and he wants more ketchup. He has a little lisp and he's like, oh, can I have more ketchup? And the house parents like, no, you've had too much ketchup already. And we're all sitting there and this little boy's face like eight years old, like a cover of a cereal box, kind of cute. And he just sits there for a second and you could see something pass over his face and he just takes this table that must have weighed 200 pounds, big oak table, and flipped his table right in front of me. And I am looking around now. Now I'm noticing that everything in this house is heavy dorm room furniture. I'm like, oh. And I'm starting to kind of see what's happening. : The kids who were there, they grab their food and they go into their rooms. The house parents are coolest cucumbers. We called therapeutic holds at the time. The kid, they grabbed the kid, they put him down the ground, he's screaming and yelling and just the words coming out of his mouth are just like a demon. It was crazy. And the house parents go, can you grab his feet and secure him? So I'm doing grabbing his feet. And this boy turns around and he goes, bj, he looks right at me and he goes, are you going to be here tonight to do the sleepover? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, I'm going to slit your up and throat. This is like an 8-year-old little boy. I'm just like, I couldn't believe it. And just as quickly as it s started, it stops and he calms down and he goes in his room and he's just like, oh, I can't wait to see you tomorrow. : We'll play football. And I remember I go outside in the house, parents and it's just wonderful. And I'm only 23. These people are only like 27. And we smoked cigarettes at the time. And I remember I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe what just happened. And these house parents, they could have said anything at this time. They could have said, oh, screw that. These kids were horrible. This place is horrible. They did. They looked right at me and they were like, you have no idea what these children have dealt with and what the worlds they came into. And they sat me down and had all these files. This is before the computers, everything's handwritten. These notes just six years of handwritten therapy notes. And they'd go Read this, just read these. So that night I just flipped through these books and it's still, today, it's unfathomable. : It's unfathomable what these little 8-year-old boy had to go through already in his life. Literally by the time he came out of his mother's womb, the people who were supposed to love him and take care of him did nothing but hurt this little boy. And I just remember sitting there, and I just remember once again, the universe is always talking to me and the universe is like, this is where you need to be. This is where you need to be. And for the next 10 years of my life, we built the greatest residential homes that ever see, I'm tremendously proud of the 10 years we revolutionaries eyes how residential work was done at Sperling from taking teenage boys mainstream them into high school following those kids, creating a continuum of care. So instead of that kid being eight years old and bouncing from program to program, no, he's going to stay at We're going to run right through until he 17 years old, he's going to have the same staff where our goal is to make sure that he is getting into the community and experiencing life as much as he can possibly do. We cannot have these kids going through that. They're victims their whole life. It just, everything kind of opened up and I knew what I wanted to do and we ran beautiful programs and I had beautiful people I worked with. One is Jake Langlois and Allison Langlois who were house parents. Like I said before, these young couple, Jake is now the superintendent of Lewis and School systems, but we just got all these young people as mainstreamed as possible because what's happening at the end of these kids staying in these programs is they turn 18 years old. They've been highly medicated their entire lives. Adderall drugs to keep them sedated, calm, they hit 18 years old and they're literally released into the world. : And if you look at the percentage of people walking the streets of Portland, homelessness in Lewiston, if you look in their backgrounds, most of them are kids who grew up in the system and they get released into the world and they have nothing. If you and me became homeless, I'm sure you have sisters or brothers or cousins or friends who would help you. These people have nothing and they get released into the world. So as I'm running these programs, my mind is always thinking about that, what's next? And it's almost the universe saying, your next art is going to be creating a program to help these kids transition out and create lives for themselves. So because the universe loves me after 10 years of doing that work and cultivating all these beautiful people who we work with that could continue my work and what we built there, it was time to move on. : And I went to Port resources and they offered me the opportunity that I'd been waiting for 15 years and truly what I thought my whole life was building to. And that was to create a program from scratch that had never been created before. And that was Aim Achieving Independence in Maine, which was for a brand new up and coming wave that no one even saw, which was high functioning autism. I remember being in a meeting with clinicians and they brought up the word Asperger's for the first time, and no one knew what it was. A year later, everything we're flooded, flooded with autistic young adults. It's really because of the internet and families kind of finding each other and creating a community. And next thing, it was a flood of them at Spur Wink. We had so many clients and we're doing so many very physical holds that well art, there was beautiful work being done at Syracuse University at the time about autism, and one of the work was about color colors and using colors to soothe. : So the first thing we did at Sperling was change all the colors of all the houses inside interior wise, and it dropped therapeutic holds by 20% in the first month. These were just little things we did. So when I got brought over to Port Resources, they were like, listen, we're having a lot of young autistic people. We want to create a program that we can have young people come in, learn skills and get into the world at that time. Syracuse University is doing beautiful work on this. There's also a wonderful woman named Temple Grandin who is literally the godmother of autism. And both of them, these people are kind of focusing on the same thing is how do we mainstream high functioning autistic people into the community, get them working, get them living statistically. If kids who go to high school have good moms and dads, they have autism, they go to school, they get their high school degrees, and then when their friends go off to college or the workforce, they stay home with mom and dad the rest of their lives. : Statistically, if you're home with mom and dad after the age of 25, there's a good chance you're going to live there for a long time. And then there comes a time when you're 45 and your parents are now sixties or seventies and now they're going to the end of their lives, and now what do you do with this 50-year-old person who's never had a chance to live independently? That was the mindset of what I wanted to create. And we create a great team. We had a great therapist named Colin Copeland who was just really, you have to be a ballsy therapist if you're going to try to think outside the box. We had a wonderful state representative named Donnie Carroll from Brand New Gloucester, who was kind of our money man and kind of our PR guy. And then you had me who kind of created and built the system. : And I remember thinking we weren't going to get anybody. Now our list is we have a three year waiting list at that program. Now we've gotten young people living all over the city, living independent lives. It's just an absolutely beautiful thing to see someone come in scared leaving the nest. They come into this apartment, the six units they share with another roommate, they learn how to bond with other people. They learn just these little skills of going to the grocery stores, trying to find what their talents in the worlds are, creating independence, confidence. And then when they're ready, it's a two year program living in the program, but it could be anywhere from two to five when they're ready to be released, we'll find them apartments and they just like a kid learning how to ride a bike. We're holding that seat until they're ready to let go, and then we let go and they live their lives. : And now we have so many people living in the community now, their friends, the community has built. So now we have so many people kind of living that friends can go over to friend's apartments and hang out. It's just an absolutely beautiful thing to see. And part of the program is I want kids from good households. I want kids who grew up in Sperling and sweeter. I want everyone to have the opportunity to come and just have a chance at independence. And that doesn't mean that every kid is going to be successful.