Michelle: Hi everybody. Thanks, Joelle. Joelle was a huge help with me getting my nonprofit started. So she’s very modest and humble. But anyway, thank you for being here listening to me. This has been a great learning thing for me already this morning. But my story is a little different. I have a non profit and the reason why is I have a son that has special needs. He was born perfectly healthy and progressed just great. At six months old, went to a doctor and had his vaccination and two days later he started having seizures that progressed from having three seizures on that second day to over having 200 for three years that we couldn’t get under control. So unfortunately, he never learned how to walk or talk, never progressed. He was kind of my–even today he’s 18 and he’s more like a nine month old, so he’s able to scoot around and stuff. But it’s been a long journey. And so the first three years were me working in the hospital with him, going to all the doctor appointments and doing all the things that I needed to do as a mother. And fortunately I had a career that was able to help me be there. I was in mortgage lending and so I could work from the room, but a lot of parents don’t have that luxury. So he was about three when he had his last EEG and that came out with 200 seizures that they recorded. I only had pushed a button 20 times, so he was seizing all day long.

At that point I decided to take him off all the medication that he was on. He was on like 20 different medications. I had. My 401k was blown out. I went through that because I had to pay for therapies and I had to pay for alternative medication because I wanted to replenish all the stuff that he was being robbed from with medical, you know, with the normal medication. So yeah, I filed bankruptcy because of it. And it was just a journey. And I was a single mom. His dad left when he was six months old. So at that point we fast forwarded to like 2019. He was actually seizure free. It seemed like for about seven years. It seemed like reset his system. I took him off everything. He wasn’t progressing as fast as we would like him to, but he was progressing.

And then in 2019, he had a breakthrough seizure and we think it’s because he was going through puberty. Then two days later, I had a grand mal seizure at Trader Joe’s downtown out of the blue. Didn’t have any epilepsy, no. No history of it at all. And then about a month later, after having an MRI, I found out I had a brain tumor. And so my first reaction wasn’t what’s going to happen to me? Or even be fearful of if it’s cancerous or non cancerous or what’s going to happen. My only fear was who’s going to take care of Riley? My parents are in their 70s. My oldest son was in the Marines, and my middle son had just started college. So that wasn’t an option, right? So again, parents fears are always the fact that they’re going to outlive their children unless you’re a special needs mother or father, then your fear is, are they going to outlive? Are they going to outlive you? Because who’s going to take care of them if something happens? Right? So the biggest thing is that’s where Riley’s residence was born from, was the fact that I had brain surgery. So that happened on September 19. On December 20, I had brain surgery. And my parents could only watch him for the first four days. And so on the fifth day, I had him back home with me recovering from a major surgery. And during that time, I couldn’t drive. So for. There was three months that I couldn’t drive, because after you have a seizure, you’re not allowed to drive for three months. And then I had my brain surgery, and then you’re not allowed to drive for another month after that.

So by the time I was able to go back to work was the end of January 2020. And then Covid hit, right? Everything shut down. So I didn’t have help. All the caregivers were on unemployment. And so I was like losing my mind. So my thing was, there has to be some place that parents or caregivers can take their loved ones and be taken care of, where they get the medical attention they need, they get the respite care that they deserve a break or if something happens to them, you know, there has to be something. So that’s where this came from. So on the next slide, here’s the need. So there’s 30,000 Idaho heroines right now that are diagnosed or have some type of intellectual and developmental disability.

That’s just the ones that are registered through the state of Idaho that are out of receiving. There’s a whole bunch more when you’re talking about 1 in 36 children now are being diagnosed with autism. They’re not even registered yet because they haven’t even got to that point of getting a diagnosis right now. Evaluations take over a year to get in, to even get Evaluated to find out what level they’re on. So hundreds of them are on waiting list of like two to three years. So Riley’s been on a waiting list to get into a home for three years now. And so right now he’s in a home in Pocatello, and I’ll get to that in a second.

But the biggest problem is just there’s elderly parents now that are aging and they’re like, I can’t take care of my 50 or 60 year old child anymore, like my son or my daughter. I had one lady that lived in Middleton and she came to Argela last year and she was just in tears. She goes, I’m so happy that there’s somewhere I can have my daughter go to. And then unfortunately, she just passed away last Sunday. She had like, she was given about six months to live and she didn’t make it that long. And so now we’re still trying to help her daughter because we’re not built yet. But I mean, these are the things that.

So she didn’t even get to enjoy the last few months of her life because she was so worried about what was going to happen to her daughter, you know, so imagine just that fear of not knowing what to do and then it’s just like you have this paralysis because there’s no help. So that’s the biggest thing is families in crisis. Caregiver turnover is 79.2, and that happens in the first 90 days. So when you’re talking about kids or people that have a hard time adjusting to new environments or new people, and you have that revolving door, parents that have to work, I mean, it’s a nightmare trying to get them into like the normal school systems and stuff if they’re not equipped, that’s also a nightmare.

And so when you have that turnover, I mean, you’re constantly trying to not only get them to understand your child and your household and what they like and don’t like, but you have to have that just the trust, right? Like somebody’s coming into your home alone with your child and they like, Riley’s nonverbal. So like he could never tell me if there was something wrong. I came home many times and the caregiver was asleep on the couch and he’s playing by himself, you know, and it’s just because they’re getting paid $12 an hour, they’re not qualified. There’s no certification program that they have to go through. And so us as parents are going, okay, well how do we make a living and, you know, survive and feed our families when we can’t have caregivers that we trust. Right. So.

And then on top of that, you have families that have a divorce rate of 87%. I mean, and you don’t have time for each other, you know, and a lot of the siblings that are, you know, I tried very hard to have my other boys and lives not change. I had the play dates and I was going to all the football games and all those things, but. But they’re adults now and they still feel they have abandonment issues because I still had to choose Riley time and time again where I couldn’t go camping or I couldn’t go dirt bike riding and all these things. And so with Riley’s residents, if you go to the next slide, we’re going to change that. So what we’re doing is we’re building an IDD development.

And so it’s just going to be like any other development that’s going to be completely secured with gated community. We’re going to have intermediate homes, so that’s going to house 14 people in a home. And so we’ll have separate lots and we’ll have about seven homes on the first project. And then we’re going to have two bedroom cottages that are going to house people that are higher functioning. So if they’re somebody that can like maybe cook for a little bit by themselves, can get themselves ready, but don’t quite want to go into a group home, but need to live with staff, then their staff can live with them on site. And the most beautiful thing here is that we’re going to have therapy and wellness center, aquatic center on site.

So we’ll have a therapy pool, we’ll have all the op, so occupational, physical, speech and art therapy, we’ll have music therapy. And then we’re also going to have the large gardens. We want to have a farm to table concept. And then we’ll be working with local ranchers and farmers here so we can get meat that’s also organic and grass fed and then housing for foster kids with idd. Okay, so this is a huge problem right now. Up until recently, they were staying at Airbnb because they had no permanent housing. Now they’re in hotels because they’re not allowed to stay in Airbnb. So it’s been a huge problem. And what happens to them is that they are a little have more trauma because some families try and take them in and then realize how difficult it is, so they give them back to the system.

So they’ve had a lot more trauma than some of the other people that have been placed in these homes. So what we’re doing is we’re going to have a separate home for them still on site, but then that way when they age out, they’re able to either move into an intimate care facility or they can go into independent living on site too. But what this does is that with our community, everybody’s going to have walking distance access to all their therapies. So when you’re talking about caregivers that don’t, we don’t have enough caregivers, right, because the turnover rate is so high. So if we have everything on site, we don’t have to have additional caregivers to try and take these people out to their therapies.

A lot of people right now don’t get therapy or don’t get taken out into the community because there’s not enough caregivers to be at the home and then also out into the community. So at Riley’s place in Pocatello, he has, I think there’s eight people there. Two of them are siblings from Meridian. They’re 8 and 11. They were severely abused by their father and so the state put him into that home. And there’s no family that goes to visit them. So Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, all those things. Halloween, it’s just whatever the house can do, pizza party or whatever. But there’s nothing of them making them feel special. They see Riley come and go and how much we love them and stuff, and they look at that like, okay, where are my friends? Or where am I? Where’s my family? It’s gonna make me sad.

Sorry. Anyway, and there’s another gal there that’s in her 50s and her mom passed away and her sister’s gonna go see her. So she gets angry because no, she doesn’t get to leave. And so when we go there, she goes, will you please be my friend? And she always wants to take pictures with us and stuff. You guys, the isolation that these people go through is absolutely horrific. I mean, we experienced a little bit during COVID right, when we couldn’t go out and couldn’t be with other people and stuff. Imagine feeling like that all the time and there’s nobody there for you here. We’re going to give them community here. They’re going to have friends. The people that are higher function are going to be able to work at the facility.

So if they want to be a mentor and they want to go into the intercare facilities, there could be somebody that’s going to go take Rally to therapy on Tuesdays and Thursdays, somebody that’s going to go out to the park with them, you know, half game nights, we’re going to have a gymnasium and then we’re also going to have a theater room where we’ll have like worship on Sunday. And so it’s just going to be a huge thing that is just imagine seeing all these people that have this community. Nobody’s isolated, and we want them to progress. Our biggest thing is to give them purpose, to empower them and if they’re able to move back home, because now maybe we’ve got their behavioral under control. Maybe we realize that, hey, they needed an outlet. Their outlet was art.

So you give them art at home and now they’re able to move back home. Art. Or maybe they’re able to move into a more independent living. That’s our goal. Like, we don’t want to keep them sick. We want to give them the best care that we can. So everything that we’re going to do here is a more holistic approach. We understand conventional medicine needs to be in the picture a lot of times as well, but we don’t want that to be the only go to. Right. So I have a lot of doctors, or I should say specialists that want to be a part of this, that do only holistic stuff. So that’s our biggest goal there. So if we go to the next slide, we’ll show you the video now of what it’s going to look like.

This is changing because we’re unveiling it at our gala on the 13th, but this is with the wellness center, and we’re going to have respite care. So respite care will be for people that need to have medical attention and want to check their child in or their loved one. Anybody that wants to just have one week in a month where it’s a stay thing, that every week, one week in a month, we’re going to have a break and we get to take our loved one. There’s. We’ll have that there as well.

There is nothing like this in the United States. So they have developments where they have families that live in a development, but nothing with therapies on site. So this is going to be the first here in the state. But we want to take it around the whole country. It’s so desperately needed. A lot of people here in the state of Idaho are taking the children all the way over to the east coast because somehow have more housing available out there. But with this, we want to do it Here because we want to be able to have everything that they deserve, they should have on site. They shouldn’t have to worry about how they’re going to get there. Respite care, that’s just. It’s not available. I mean, it’s super expensive. A lot of places don’t reimburse them. So that’s a big thing here too.

So our long term housing is going to be all ages. So when children turn 18, they become adults and so they get more benefits. And so companies that have homes like this, intimate care facilities and things like this, they make more money when they’re adults. So anybody that’s under 18, a lot of them don’t take them. Riley was in a house in Twin Falls and they changed their business model because Reshab is more profitable. We’re not doing this to retire. We have a very successful construction company. We’re doing this to help other families. I mean, Riley is taken care of, but our whole goal is to help families not have to go through what went through. When I put him in a home, it was devastating for me. It was a new low that I had never experienced before.

I thought I was going crazy by doing it all by myself and not having a break. And then when I was faced with possibly putting him in a home and I made the decision to do that, I felt guilt, I felt shame. I felt I didn’t deserve to go to the gym or go eat lunch or do anything. And so for six months, I was suicidal. I mean, I lost my identity as a parent. I lost my identity as human being because I’m just like, how could I not take care of my own child? You know? But it’s not that easy. So what we’re going to have is we’re going to have.

The biggest thing is we’re going to have counseling for not only the families in a transition period to work, families can bring their children or their loved one to the facility and start doing activities. So they get used to the facility, get used to having some new friends and stuff. And that way when they come in for respite care, it’s already familiar. When they move them in there, it’s familiar. So it’s an easy transition. And then for our caregivers, we’re going to start with the people in high school. So a lot of my caregivers that we’ve had have been phenomenal and they’ve always worked in the resource room. So they became. They have passion for it. Then they try and make a career out of it and realize very quickly that they can’t because they’re making $12, $13 an hour.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to have a volunteer program from high school age. They can put that on their resume and then they’ll go to college. We’ll have an internship so they can also come and intern at our facility. And then hopefully they make a career out of it. So we’ve created a certification program, which is also a mentorship program. So the certification program, anybody that works on our site has to go through a certification program, but they’re also taught how to be a mentor. So that means, like, how do we raise them up, how do we do the extra thing? How do we make them empower them, you know, give them purpose and not just have them survive. We want them to thrive. So that program’s super important to us. And, and we’re actually going to do that for profit so that we can use that money and have the caregivers get paid more. So all the money at that program makes will go right back to these residents.


So there’s two sides to ours. And I have an investment pitch as well. So if you know anybody that’s looking to invest, I’d be happy to talk to them. But that thing is, that’s going to be really big. Supports entire family. Lowering divorce rate and stress. Creates independence and purpose for residents. And then a model we plan to take links from, like I said, on the next slide. So how you can help sponsor. We have a gala every year and we have a golf tournament. Donate everything helps. A lot of people think that I can’t go to this gala because I don’t have thousands of dollars to bid on auction stuff. You don’t have to have that. I mean, everything counts. Five dollars counts, you know, so what we’re doing now is we’re talking to corporations, and instead of asking the corporation for money, we’re asking, give us an opportunity to talk to your employees and see if they want to donate pre tax. And so if it’s $20 a paycheck, if it’s $5 a paycheck, all that adds up. And that’s more important because then it’s not the company. We’re all trying to recover from a recession, you know, So I understand that if you can’t donate volunteer. It can be grant writing, it can be getting meetings with other people, getting meetings with corporations. I mean, it all looks different. So whatever you’re capable of doing, we would take it advocate. Everybody has a voice.

So if you know anybody that has any kind of interest or has families that would be interested in this, we’d love to talk to them. Spreading the word has been super important to us. Again, just because there’s nothing like this. So, yeah, that’s it. Do you guys have any questions? It’s right there, actually, in the brochure. There’s a thing there. But thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Joelle: Thank you, Michelle. So the gala is actually not this Saturday, but the next Saturday. There’s still time to get tickets to that. It’s going to be actually a really fun time. Along with being just something really meaningful and very purposeful. I’ll actually be there. I’ll live paint. We have a lot of amazing auction items, and I’ll be donating a live painting that I do to that. So, yeah, still time to come and support also. Okay, so we have. We have lunch next. I made lunch for y’ all because it’s really important to me. When I go to conferences. I don’t want to, like, go off and get lunch and then rush back. I want to take time to, like, get to know everybody and talk to everybody. So I made lunch for everybody so we could all be here. Get to know each other.

Talk to the people you didn’t get a chance to talk to. I do need just a couple minutes to set up, but lunch will be ready for you guys soon. So thank you for being here.