A 20-year veteran of the financial industry, Helen Young Hayes has survived a bear market that gutted her funds portfolio in the early 90’s and a horrific plane crash that nearly took her life in 1989. Serving as portfolio manager of the Janus Worldwide and Overseas funds, Helen built and invested a $50 billion franchise in global and international equities. In 2016, she changed course and founded Activate Workforce Solutions to help employers find and keep loyal and engaged employees. Helen is a respected voice and staunch advocate for the overlooked and undervalued workforce.

Episode Transcript

Rusty Rueff: Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. You found us once again, and thanks again for downloading us week after week. Our guest today is a 20 year veteran of the financial industry. Her name is Helen Young Hayes. And she has survived a bear market that gutted her funds portfolio in the early 1990s. And she has survived a horrific plane crash that nearly took her life in 1989. Serving as a portfolio manager of the Janice Worldwide and Overseas Funds, Helen built and invested a $50 billion franchise in global and international equities in 2016. She changed course and founded Activate Workforce Solutions to help employees find and keep loyal and engaged employees. Her Colorado placement firm also connects untapped talent with long term career opportunities. Helen launched the Colorado Inclusive Economy in 2020, a new movement aimed at rebuilding the state's economy. Employers who join the movement commit to hiring and advancing employees of color, developing more supportive workplace cultures and investing in workforce development to create a more diverse and skilled pipeline of talent. Helen is a respected voice and staunch advocate for those who are overlooked and undervalued, and we are honored today to have her join us on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I'm back in the studio with Rusty and William Brothers. Good morning.

Rusty Rueff: Good morning. How are you today? Welcome.

William Norvell: I'm doing great. 2022 is looking good. I'm feeling good today.

Henry Kaestner: You should feel good. You've got this new venture going on, which we're all kinds of fired up about working on social care for businesses, launching your Faith Driven Entrepreneur venture. And so so far enough about watching that. The other thing I'm looking at 2022 that I'm excited about is a new initiative at Faith Driven Entrepreneur has really picked up steam. You know, we've had content communities for a while, we've had conferences, you know, we had the the book that came out which saw the grace of God. Maybe this is what happens when you have Lecrae Right. Your forehead. The book is going really well. And maybe it's a function of the fact that Chip Ingram and J.D. Greer are coauthors on the book. And that helps, too. But that's been fun. But I think more fun than that is the fact that we have these FDE groups, which are groups of our audience, people like you listening in on this that get together in communities of your peers, either in person or virtually to go through an eight week course on what it means to be Faith Driven Entrepreneur going through the marks. We do these video series with Faith and Company where we have, say, seven or 8 minutes of a really powerful, really well-produced story of some of the best veteran entrepreneurs out there. And then there's teaching from JD Greer, and it's a great community group, and we did it because we wanted to respond back to some of the responses we had from some of you about looking for community. And so we created this. And just to give you a sense about how it's grown, next week we have a cohort that starts and we'll have 170 groups around the world so well north and a thousand faith driven entrepreneurs to go through this march and been brought together in community and then from that group then they learn about 12 and Praxis and ocean and convene and some of the other great communities, but a great place for Faith driven entrepreneurs to come together to learn from each other, to pray for each other. And it's been really cool to see the scale of this thing.

William Norvell: It's amazing just to give a portage. Those. I met my co-founder at a Faith Driven Entrepreneur event and then both of us have now gone through a Faith Driven Entrepreneur group and I've had a chance to lead a couple to it's just it's all facilitator led so you will have someone walking through with you and it's a group of entrepreneurs on the journey together and that's amazing. An hour a week for eight weeks. So it's not a huge time commitment. Right. But it's enough to really dig in and make some connections. And the ones I lead, it was really fun to do the feedback afterwards and people just meet people that they needed in their life, whether that's to promote their business or to help their soul. And it's just amazing to see what God does. So if you are an entrepreneur or an aspiring one, I think it's a really great place to start. And that's Henry mentioned it's a starting place. It's awesome.

Rusty Rueff: And we don't stop enough, actually. And thank you, Henry, for having the vision for this ministry. And, you know, you felt called to take Faith Driven Entrepreneur and just plant a seed. And that seed continues to grow. And you know what? You've watered, you know, we're reaping. So thank you so much for all that you're doing.

Henry Kaestner: And so I didn't expect that. And it's probably because it's not deserved. This is something we've done. We've done this over the last five years. Rusty I was with you the morning in Indonesia where we came up with the name Faith Driven Athlete, and we're trying to figure out, you know, what might we call this podcast? And and then we just try to be faithful and obedient since then. And then out of that, we've. And blessed with an incredible ministry staff. Now we've got 24, 25 folks now in offices around the world to promote this. But it's just been this logical extension. And I really start, of course, with the podcast and the feedback that we've gotten from our audience. So this is the you as you listen to this, what can we do to better serve you? How can we connect you with some of the organizations in the ministries where you might be able to go really deep? I mentioned some of those ecosystem partners before that are so outstanding. The Praxis and Ocean and Sea 12 and convene and oversees done so much great work with Trigger in South Africa and Bluefields in Brazil and it's India in Spain and the community in Egypt. I mean, it just list goes on and on and on. Snap's mentioned SNAP. So my good friend David Wells talked about the fact that Auslan is on the move and indeed he is. And it's fun to do this all together. And the other thing about the groups is it has nothing to do with me. It really is not false modesty. It's the fact that 170 volunteers have stood up and said, Hey, this is something we can roll with this, and that's how it's happened. So great to have you all back on the podcast is awesome to have Helen with us. Helen is going to be able to help us bridge the gap between the other ministry that we run and are involved with. Faith Driven Investor She's been a Faith Driven Investor She's actually been a Faith Driven Entrepreneur. I'm excited about her being on the program because it's so much overlap with where Rusty is uniquely gifted and getting at the concept of human resources and human capital. And how do we love our employees? Well, how do we bring folks into the workforce and give people the dignity that comes from working? We're creating the image of God who works 6 to 7 days, and when we work in a spot that uses our talents and in community, we flourish. And that's all about what Helen is doing. Helen, thank you very much for being on the program.

Helen Hayes: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Henry Kaestner: Helen, we'd like to understand an autobiographical flyover of every one of our guests. And the temptation here is to spend maybe too much time. But I want to talk about it because you have this incredible story that really catalyzed a change in you in that you survived a plane crash, which is unbelievable. But talk to us about who you are, where you grew up. Where did faith become a part of your life? And then. Yeah, lead us through that very important event, please.

Helen Hayes: Well, I am the daughter of two scientists. My parents are Chinese immigrants or Chinese immigrants to this country. Their lives and families were uprooted during World War Two in China, where they were born, and both families ended up losing everything and leaving behind everything, including very close family members. And so the war was incredibly wrenching on both my parents and their families. They, however, ended up in the U.S. on borrowed money and on full scholarship. So both my parents ended up getting these. Dad got his own particle physics. Mom got hers and chemical physics. And they started raising a family together. They had five of us kids and sent four of us to Yale. And I have to stop there and say that I really believe that I am the embodiment of the American dream. How many families can in one generation move to a country with no money, having left everything behind to start over, get PhDs and send four out of five kids to Yale? I might add, on financial aid and on scholarship, but nonetheless, sending four out of five kids to Yale, two of us ended up working on Wall Street, one in corporate America. And, you know, getting my family got multiple graduate degrees. So I have to say this.

Henry Kaestner: I have to ask I shouldn't interrupt, but I'm going to. Where did the fifth one go as the University of Delaware agreed? Were they able to achieve that high? Were they able to go to Delaware?

Helen Hayes: So my fifth sibling is probably the smartest of all of us, but she ended up going to the University of Illinois at Urbana and studying architecture, and then she's producing a documentary film. She's gotten a master's in fine arts and documentary filmmaking, and she was not that interested in following in our footsteps to an Ivy League education. So that's a great question. Thanks for asking. And she humbles me daily because she's so gifted and so intelligent. But anyway, so that's a little bit about my family's experience being the daughter of Chinese immigrants. I grew up in a very Asian family, and I like to joke and say that English is my second language, because it really was. We grew up speaking Mandarin. We had a very sort of Asian experience, a very Confucian Chinese experience with a love and a reverence for education and family and community and social order and all of those things that are highly prized in the Chinese culture. We also, though, ended up moving to a small college town in Mississippi, Starkville, Mississippi, in 1965, really at the height of the civil rights movement. And that was incredibly foundational for my own upbringing and for my own interpretation of the world, because Mississippi at that time was deeply, deeply troubled, very segregated, and the experience of African-Americans was one of almost complete social, economic apartheid. We were the first Asian family to move into our small town and had our own experience of being there and on the outside. It wasn't until I left Mississippi when I was 19 years old that race no longer defined who you were, how you were received by the world around you, how you were communicated with the expectations set on you. And so race was at the forefront of both conflict and segregation and a part in this and also, of course, deep, deep, deep roots in injustice. And I grew up in that background with a frustration that something is not quite right with the world, but not knowing that ultimately I would take up the mantle and do something about it or try to do something about it. So that's kind of my story. And I will, you know, fast forward to college where I hoped to learn enough to get ultimately a Ph.D. in economics and following my parents footsteps. I took a slight detour at a Wall Street firm where I was a research analyst analyzing all sorts of companies and industries. And a two year stint turned into a three year analyst stint, turned into a 20 year career on Wall Street, where I had the pleasure of analyzing companies and industries from the bottom up and really feel, again, like the embodiment of the American dream who rises to the top at Wall Street and is able to live that kind? Of a fairy tale sort of transition as an immigrant's daughter. I will. Now, at this point, though, transition, if it's okay to that, that fateful day in 1989. July 19th of 1989, when I was 27 years old and I was on my way to a three day, three city business trip where I was meeting with CEOs and CFOs of large, publicly traded companies so that I could interview them to determine whether they made potential investments for our firm. I was to take off at a very early morning Flight 7 a.m.. On that morning, I got to Denver International Airport and was informed that my early flight had been canceled and I had been placed on the 4 p.m. flight, which unfortunately would have caused me to miss my appointment in Chicago later on that afternoon. So I, I asked the flight representative and a customer service agent to put me on the next flight out to Chicago. And that was the fateful United Flight 232 that I found myself on.

William Norvell: Wow. Wow. What a crazy story. And how did.

Henry Kaestner: You go there? So what was that? What happened? So, I mean, because in the intro I said, I don't wanna spend too much time on it, but to be clear how I spend time on it.

Helen Hayes: Let me know if you need me to spend more time on it or less. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to take a shot at this. The thumbnail sketch is that we departed Denver on this hot summer afternoon and were in the air once, had just been served and was being cleared away when we heard an explosion on board and it sounded to me like a bomb had exploded. The plane dropped in the air, began resuming its flight almost immediately. And the captain came on and said, Ladies and gentlemen, we've just lost our number two engine. But don't worry, we have plenty of power to get to Chicago. Of course, naturally, I hear we've lost an engine. We hear an onboard explosion. And I'm my heart is pounding out of my chest. I was seated fortuitously next to an aerospace engineer who had introduced himself to me when we sat down. And so I said, was that true? And he said, Oh yeah, this is a DC ten. There are three engines normally aboard a DC ten, we've only lost one. So we do have plenty of power to get to Chicago. And so I, I relaxed and I thought this would make a really great story for the office. You know, we've lost a number two engine and how exciting is that? So I started preparing again for my meetings, and yet I ultimately had to put my work away fairly quickly because I felt very nauseous and I felt like the plane was literally going in circles in the sky. So I glanced out the window and I notice where the sun is positioned in the sky out of the window, and realized that we were heading due west towards California, not towards Chicago. And at that moment, the pilot came on and said, Ladies and gentlemen, we will not be making Chicago after all. In fact, we have sustained tail damage to the plane. In fact, we will be making an emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa, in 35 minutes. And then he added, And I'm not going to kid you folks. It's going to be rough. So we were left in silence with this knowledge that we are going to attempt an emergency landing and it's going to be rough. And immediately I closed my eyes and started praying. I didn't know what was wrong with the plane and what in fact was wrong with the plane was that we had lost our number two engine. But as we lost the number two engine, an engine disc sliced through all the hydraulic lines which meet at the back of the plane and. The hydraulic fluid drained out of the hydraulics. And so we had no ability to slow down, stop or to steer. And so we were in an unstoppable, unstoppable plane at 35,000 feet in the air. Well, the pilot, of course, did not realize that we'd lost hydraulic fluid immediately, which is why he assumed we would make it to Chicago. But we were actually caught in a permanent right hand turn. I didn't know any of this. I only knew that we were going to experience a rough landing. And so I closed my eyes and I started praying immediately. And I as I closed my eyes, I could picture the pilot's hands on the controls. And as I saw their hands, I started praying for the pilots, for their hands that God would actually touch and guide their hands, that he would give them wisdom and show them exactly what to do. And I must have prayed for the pilots for 25 or 30 minutes. I just felt that I could see their hands in the cockpit with them. I finished praying for the pilots, and then I prayed for myself. I, I asked the Lord, Father, I ask you to save me today. I know that you can, and I believe that you will. But even if you don't, I know that I'm your daughter. And I know that. Your son has bought me and purchased for me, my daughter Hood and that even if you don't save me today, I know that I'm just going to be with you for the rest of eternity in paradise. And I feel only this loss, this aura, this man of peace. I felt like I was in God's throne room and everything was peaceful and beautiful. My thoughts were interrupted at that time. The pilot came back on and said, Ladies and gentlemen, be prepared to take your brace positions. We will land in 3 minutes. And I was moved out of out of prayer and I became aware of the plane around me, the engine screaming at great speed. I didn't realize that we were moving at a speed that was 50% faster than a landing and that we were descending at a rate that was twice the rate of descent of a normal plane landing. I could hear the engine screaming with great speed. I heard some babies crying throughout the plane and I just prayed, okay, Lord, give us a good landing. Give us a good landing. Well, when we hit the ground, it was with such force that I was immediately thrown almost out of my seat, my seatbelt held, and I was being flung around like a rag in my seat. The sound was deafening. We were crashing around. And then I looked up and saw myself surrounded in flames. We made a somersault and I was upside down and the crashing continued. And then suddenly we slid to a stop and I was left hanging upside down in this plane. There was sizzling and crackling all around me, and I went into automatic pilot, no pun intended. But when is automatic pilot? And just that I needed to drop myself from the ceiling of the plane down to the floor of the plane. And so I did. And as I looked in front of me, there was no plane in front of me. There was no aisle in front of me. There was no exit door to my left. There was only a tangle of wires. And beyond this, tangled wires, daylight. So I stepped through this curtain of electrical wires into the daylight, not realizing at that moment that the plane itself had broken into four pieces. And one of the pieces that had broken away from the others was the part of the plane that was right in front of my seat. So I stepped into the sunlight and spotted a flight attendant who warned us with a great deal of authority that we needed to run away from the plane because it was on fire.

Henry Kaestner: While. So 112 people died.

Helen Hayes: 112 people died, 186 people survived.

Henry Kaestner: That's amazing.

Helen Hayes: Can I tell you a little bit more about this?

Henry Kaestner: Yes. Yes.

Helen Hayes: All right. So I didn't realize, of course, that until many, many days later I had read that we had lost all steering and stopping abilities. But it wasn't until years later that I understood the importance of my prayer. I will tell you, though, that immediately afterwards, even in the hospital that same night as I was roaming the halls, having suffered second degree burns on my face and arms and legs and and pondering why this had happened and how I was going to resolve this and make this part of my life. I realized that I was on that plane for a reason. Even on that first day. And one of the reasons is that the night before I had been praying and feeling actually rather defeated in my faith. I've been praying that the Lord would just take me, all of me, and use me for His kingdom and for his kingdom's work. I just didn't feel like I was really a very sort of compelling or exciting witness for God, and that I wasn't seeing a whole lot of interest in faith by the friends and family around me. And I felt pretty useless to the kingdom. And so the night before I prayed, Lord, anything you want me to do, I just want to be used by you. And I believe actually that having been placed on two earlier flights that day and ultimately placed on this one, this was one of the ways that he was answering my prayer, because he answered my prayers for the pilot's hand in ways that were quite miraculous. It wasn't until 13 years after the plane crash when I met a United pilot, and I shared with him my story about praying for the pilot's hands when he stopped me and he said, Wait, Helen, you know, just explain the mystery of Flight 232. And I said, What do you mean? And he said, You were on that plane and you were praying. And I said, Right. And he said, You don't understand. Tens of thousands of flight simulations have occurred and not one has been able to get to the runway. Not one has been able to even recreate being on the runway. And he said what has always mystified the aviation world is how in the world the pilots could steer that plane. And you see, for the first time in aviation history, the pilots were able to calibrate their hands. They realized they learned in the moment that if they'd gone to the left engine and they got the right engine and the gun, the left engine had begun the right engine that they could, by varying the thrust of the two remaining engines, they could actually pull it out of that prominent right hand turn and steer the plane somewhat well. They decided to shoot for Sioux City, Iowa. But what has mystified the aviation community ever since then is how in the world could they land? Because, as my pilot friend told me, it is humanly impossible to calibrate the hands so that you can actually land the plane. And I realized that I was on the plane to pray the prayer that God answered, which miraculously spared so many people. And so I believe that I'm a walking miracle.

Rusty Rueff: Hey, man. Hey, man. What? What a story. I'm glad we dived into it, too, because there's a God story in there that is very tremendous. Thanks for sharing that.

William Norvell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to move from that story to a next topic, but I will try my best. At the time you mentioned what you were doing and you were a rising star in the investment field and things were were taking off for you and Jane as a I think you'd reached 50 billion or so in assets and and things were up into the right extent. You had this experience in your life now, as so many entrepreneurs probably have, that God put something in may not be quite as dramatic, but God put something in their life to say, Hey, there's another path you could pursue if you're willing. Right. Could you tell us how that experience transformed your career and ultimately where you are today?

Helen Hayes: Right. So I'd say that the first thing the plane crash did for me was it connected me with God's eternal plan and made me feel like not just a useless tool in his ultimate plan, but an integral part of his plan. And in fact, playing such an integral part in his plan that my role is tailor made for me. And it also freed me from the fear of death. It freed me from the fear of what happens if or what could happen if I experienced something calamitous. While I know that God will be with me, I know with assurance where I am headed and I know that I'll be able to experience this peace and his presence no matter the circumstances. And so it really freed me to look for what is that unique role that I have in the kingdom that he has prepared for me in advance. And so what that looked like for me as I played out my career was really looking for more opportunities to glorify him, really embracing the power of prayer, embracing the power of being a mentor and discipling people. But also it sparked in me a hunger for knowing the world, knowing the person that I serve. And how does that play out in my life ultimately? And we hit the bear market of 1999 through 2000, 2003, and my fairytale career came to a screeching halt, came to actually quite a disastrous halt. It was a period in time when those who had this type of investment style that I did, which was a growth style of investing, we just had our heads handed to us on a silver platter and it was very wrenching. It was public. I felt incredibly accountable for my failure towards my investors, and it was wrenching. At the same time, I was praying and asking the Lord, okay, when is it time for me to leave? Because this feels really, really crappy. But I wasn't given the green light to go because I was the most senior person on a team and I had a lot of young people around me and I needed to shepherd them through this tremendous bear market that we had no experience and were unprepared for. And so in 2003, I had been hanging on to this, shepherding people through and shepherding my team through this bear market. And I literally woke up one day and my husband challenged me as to why I should stay. And I didn't tell him anything because an answer didn't come to my mind. And I knew that day was time for me to go. And so I retired in 2003, upon the occasion of us adopting our fifth child, two of our kids are from China. Three of our kids are biological children. And so I was prepared at that time to enjoy a wonderful retirement. I'm not going to tell you about my husband's near-death experience and the time when he spent six months paralyzed and on life support. That's a time for another podcast, but I'll just say that we're a double miracle in my family and that we have really experienced the blessing of the miraculous. I felt compelled in the year 2015 as I was reading the book of Esther, and it was the first time I studied this book. But this was the most impactful time because I've been studying the book. And then all of a sudden, of course, most of our listeners might be familiar with Mordecai, his words to Esther, which were and who knows whether you've come to a royal position for such a time as this. And those words hit me. They grabbed me. In fact, they just seized me and they didn't let me go. And so I was in this vice like grip of these words, and they became a drumbeat in my mind for hours, days turn into weeks, turn into months. And I realized that God was calling me to use my royal position for such a time as this. And I have to say that, you know, such a time as this this was in the year 2015. I really feel like I'd want to distance myself from such a time as this. We have so many troubles, we have so much poverty, we have so much inequity, and we have these swirling forces in our society. And and what can I do to contribute to such a time as this? But this was a clarion call for me. And so I told the Lord, of course, here I am, whatever it is that you're calling me to do, whatever you want me to do, please use me because I'm here. So, you know, I study many of the calls in the Bible and so often people say, here I am, send me Isaiah, for example, which I love. And so I said, Here I am, send me. I didn't know what the Muslim meant, but I knew it would be to move people out of poverty. And one little side note, my husband and I got married right out of college, and one of our enduring values was that we would always care for and love people experiencing poverty because we believe that that is what we're called to do and actually commanded to do. And so I knew that God was calling me to use my royal position to move people out of poverty. And so I prayed about it for a year and then I was given the understanding and the clarity of starting activate work.

Rusty Rueff: So tell us about activate work. What is it? What does it do?

Helen Hayes: Activate work really harnesses the power of business to do what business does best, and that is to create employment and income and wealth and dignity for people. I started Activate because I knew I wanted to help people who are low income earners to move out of poverty and to move out of being underemployed and struggling financially and move them into economic freedom and into their fullest potential, their fullest inherent God given potential. And this was what I really wanted to do. I wanted to end poverty for my fellow Coloradans. And so I knew that business held the key, obviously, to resources, to jobs, to employment. And so I wanted to unleash business owners and business leaders to do what they do best, which is, in my opinion, helping people move to their fullest expression of themselves in the economy to create dignity and wealth and freedom for those who are struggling. And so what we do in a nutshell, is a couple of things. One, we find great talent. We find people, individuals who are humble, hungry and smart, but have lacked maybe the traditional resources, the traditional economic or educational pathways to live out their fullest potential in the workplace, in their professions. And so think of someone who might have experienced generational poverty, whose dad might be a seasonal construction worker, whose mom might have worked as a housekeeper for a local hospital, and a young man might think to himself, Look, the best I can hope for is I want to manage the meat department at my local Safeway. And so this is the type of individual that we are looking to serve immigrants and refugees who might have come to this country with high, high, high credentials and professional experiences. And then they come to this country because they speak a language with a different accent, because their skin color is not the right color, because they lack social capital, they'll end up working at the Amazon warehouse. So these are the type of individuals that I long to bring to economic freedom. And so we find people who are humble, hungry and smart, but who have lacked the opportunity or the pathways that can lead them to economic flourishing. And we bring them to our employer partners who are interested in finding talents that typically are under resourced or are underrepresented in the workforce. And so these are diverse individuals. They tend to be low income earners and they have often simply lacked the chance. And so we make connections with them for full time, full benefit careers. We are only interested in full time, full benefit career path jobs because getting a dead end, low skill, low wage job is unfortunately going to keep someone in perpetual working poor. And so we'll place people with full time, full benefit careers. And the most important thing that we do is not just increasing incomes, but we actually do triple people's incomes won't replace them. Our average placement goes from making 13 to $15000 a year to making $45,000 a year, all with full benefits.

Rusty Rueff: Wow. You know, you mentioned obviously adverse semester. And as I think about the time we're in now, right. Which is, you know, you've had to put your head in the ground if you haven't heard the term great resignation. Right where we now have way more open jobs than we do people to take that work. How is that affecting what you do? Is it a positive?

Helen Hayes: Well, that's a great question. It's both a positive and a negative because so many individuals who are resigning are those who have worked in low skill, low wage industries where there has been little opportunity for advancement, much less economic flourishing and economic freedom, who feel disenfranchized and who are really tired of the same old story. By the way, their jobs and livelihood are being rapidly obsolete in a way, by AI. And so those in service sector jobs for people who are driving or people who are in other jobs that automation can replace. These individuals really need a rapid reskilling and upskilling in order to stay relevant in the economy. And so that is why in May of 2020, we launched our first tuition free training program whereby we not only take people and try to help them achieve their fullest potential by matching them into careers that will. Enable them to earn more than they have been, but earned what they are capable of earning. But now we're providing the training for individuals because we're finding those hard technical skills that are typically not available to low income, under-resourced populations. We're providing them with 21st century rigorous digital skills, and we are catapulting them into the technology industry, which, by the way, has a million person talent shortage and suffers from a talent vacuum, which without expanding the talent pipeline for it, we're going to have a real crisis on our hands. We're looking at doing the same in health care. And so we are about not just helping people achieve their fullest potential by making connections, but also with providing them with those technical skills. And the most important thing that we do is we're about life transformation. And so we coach every placement for 12 months with life skills, with professional skills, with socio emotional skills, and with personal financial skills so that they can be long term successful in their profession, long term successful in the economy, and long term, hopefully live a life of flourishing.

Rusty Rueff: That's great. I'll turn it over to William here in a second to bring us to close because of our time. But I want to ask this one question. As you speak to entrepreneurs who are listening here, what's the message to them that you want them to take away as it relates to, you know, opening up their minds and hearts to a different type of the workforce that they may have not looked at before?

Helen Hayes: Oh, well, I went back many messages into a brief amount of time, but the first message is to really try to understand that those of us who've been blessed with significant tailwinds will call it. I had two parents who had Ph.D. degrees, many of us who grew up in a white majority culture as white majority individuals, for example, or highly educated, etc. We have had tailwinds that many Americans have not experienced. And so I would say that the first thing we need to do is understand our own privilege. The second thing I say that we would need to do is to really understand the life experience of those who live on the margins, and that means proximity. I think that it's easy for us. It was easy for me to live in the right zip code, to work for the right industry, to work in the right company, to insulate myself from people who were experiencing poverty. And so it's much easier to write a check than it is to walk alongside a person and help them experience a transformed life. But I believe that the example of the Good Samaritan calls us to walk alongside a person with relationship with the expectation that I will stay with you until you are brought to wholeness. And that is how I believe that we encounter Christ through the way that we interact with people that He identifies with over and over and over in both the old and the New Testament. And so it is really looking for understanding my own privilege, looking for and understanding the life experience of others, and then wanting to engage in that important work of bringing people to flourishing as part of our gospel work.

William Norvell: Amen. And what a great biblical challenge to leave us with. And you know what our favorite last question is? You know, trying to do exactly that is just to try to work the God's word and to tie those two together and to tie that together across our guests and our listeners. And and what we love to ask is just invite you to maybe share a passage that's been important to you from God's word. It could be something you read this morning. It could be something it's shaped your company. It could be something you've meditated on for a while, like I said. Or sometimes God gives our guests verses for the morning and our listeners need to hear those too. But we would love to invite you to share something that maybe your heart's been moved by. And God's word. Lately.

Helen Hayes: Lately I've been trying to start my day with praise. I think when you're in ministry and you're about trying to transform our economy, trying to transform communities, it's easy to just put your shoulder to the task and try to get to it. But I've been trying to start with praise the Lord on my soul and all that is within me. Praises, Holy Name, Praise the Lord, oh my soul. And forget not all His benefits. Who forgives all your sins, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit? Who crowns you with love and compassion? Who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like an eagle? That's my verse for our listeners.

William Norvell: I meant thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for sharing the story that God's given you. I know it's going to be inspiring to many. And a quick note to will link to a video. You know, Henry mentioned the video series from FDE. A big part of that is our partners at Faith and CO, which I know have done an excellent video on your story. And so if you want to hear more about how in story, please go take a look at that. We'll link to it in the show notes. But you can always find it quicker if you want to by just Google and faith and go and get lost in their videos. Because I know Helen does amazing even though I haven't seen it yet because they're all amazing. All have probably seen half of them and they're just so good. They do such a wonderful job. So thank you for bussiness with your time. Thank you for blessing us with your story. And it sounds like we have part two coming that you teased somewhere in the middle of the episode. So we can stay tuned for that.

Helen Hayes: Thank you for having me.