Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Victory Show.
Hey victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is your first time joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books. And I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business owners, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own bestselling books as well. And in that journey, I discovered a really fascinating pattern. There's a lot of businesses that hit revenue plateaus, usually around a million dollars, and they struggle to break through it. So on this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their businesses to new heights so that you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business. Starting now.
Now, today's guest, he's not just leading an organization, he's leading a movement for real, sustainable community transformation. JW Fry is the Chief Executive Officer of Rebuilding Together East Bay Network. And under his leadership, the organization has scaled rapidly, bringing millions of dollars in new funding into programs that tackle affordable housing, workforce development, education, and the social determinants of health. In just the last year, the Network secured a $250,000 grant from Alameda county to build affordable ADUs for low income residents. And they also landed a groundbreaking million and a half dollar equity electrification award, creating real solutions at the intersection of housing sustainability and economic mobility. Now, JW is also the force behind initiatives like the Just Transition pilot program with the city of Berkeley, providing green energy upgrades to income quality residents. And the thing I'm most excited to talk about, the big Skills program, which is a hands on construction training project that's addressing both the housing shortage and the skills gap at the same time. So through coalition building, visionary partnerships and the relentless focus on holistic community development, JW is proving that change isn't just possible. It's happening right now and you and I can actually be part of it. So jw, thank you so much for being here. Excited for our conversation today.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks Travis. I'm really looking forward to it. Let's.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: All right, so we're going to get in here, but we're going to dive into this good stuff first. But I, I always love everybody's journey.
And your journey was, was a bit interesting because normally they go, oh, you're in real estate development, you're doing all this crazy stuff. You're probably, you know, one of those kids that grew up with a trust fund and was in development your whole life, but you actually coming out of college, got into the entertainment industry.
Yeah, in a way. In a way. Let's talk about that a little bit.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. So the, the. My. When I, when I. And I. I kind of told you my have a background. My father was a, a management consultant and outside of New York City and my mother was a social worker who really worked with.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: That is a mix.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Rural families. And I like to think that I kind of came together and my path is really reflective of both of them.
And when I was younger they both passed away a few years apart, used hospice care.
And so in 2009, I started out on this long 8,000 mile solo self supported bicycle journey from the Key West, Florida to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska at the Arctic Shelf.
I went house to house and hospice to hospice. And I talked to people about their whole lives and just sat with them and tried to show the world that, you know, that six months, because that's how long it took is the beginning of a journey, not the end of one. So I really saw.
But what I also learned was I saw so many different communities, so many different needs at this intersection, at the social determinants of health angle. So that, that was, it was just so impactful to me. And so the first thing that it really did was gave me a passion for storytelling which I was able to do in the entertainment industry. But this idea of community development stayed with me. So even while in entertainment, I was still leveraging some of the funds from the, you know, my, my percentage of the merch sales and farading it away and then started with buying very distressed properties and then rehabilitating them as community assets.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: So I'm just almost taking a step back there because you just kind of glossed over the fact that you did an 8,000 mile bike trip.
How did you hear about somebody doing that? Or you just said, you know what, I'm gonna ride from the southern point of America all the way to the northernmost part. Like how did, how did that come about?
[00:05:08] Speaker B: That came about? Well a. I think it's, you know, if you're, if you're young enough and just kind of foolish, the idea of riding a bicycle. You know, at that point I didn't even know how long it was from the bottom of the continent to the top.
Just felt like it just felt right, I guess I would say. And then I thought, well, how do you do this and what does it mean to, to, to raise money and awareness and funds and advocate for a Non for profit. So I just had to, I just decided one night that I was going to do it and I was like, well, I got to learn how to ride a bicycle because it wasn't like I was a bicycling enthusiast and I have to learn how to run a non for profit and I have to learn about this community benefit system.
And then I just, then as now, it really comes from a conceptual narrative based framing.
And the idea was that this is a six month solo and self supported journey that can show how much one person living this intentional action every day can do to affect a vast network of people heralding the history of the hospice volunteers over the last hundred years doing that work and especially the hospice nurses. And then conversely, when a vast network of people each just do their own little part, how much impact they can make on one person's life. And I, and I thought, well, what if I do this as a volunteer and I give away 100% of the proceeds as I go and just trust that, that, that the network will carry me through to the end. I can give a beautiful and convincing, you know, I guess proof of, proof of the metaphor of what hospice is. And then it, it kind of just unrolled from there.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Wow, so you're in the Bay Area now. Is that where you ended up settling? Especially as you came out of this and started to get into. So you're developing properties here.
Where does the idea to come in and start helping manage entertainers fall into that process?
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Actually it's funny because I get up to Alaska and I look at the Arctic Ocean and I wait for the couple of days to get picked up and go down and I'm thinking to myself, this is so beautiful. I'm glad I never have to see it again. I don't want to see a bike again. I don't want to see.
I just spent the last, you know, better part of two months of that six months was it in the wilderness in, you know, Alaska, Canadian Rockies, in the Yukon and like it was, you know, for somebody who up into that point, like roughing it meant, you know, Starbucks being at a heavy cream and you know, having just spent the last two months in the woods, I thought I'm never coming back to Alaska again.
But the world had other plans and I, a very close, basically sister of mine who was raised with me but then moved to Alaska, my godson was born. A year later I go back up.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: As you're standing there on that shelf going, I'm never going to come here again. God was like oh, this is going to be so much fun.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: The choreography of the universe had me step back there a little bit later and I, I ended up meeting a. And I was, you know, after having told the story and doing speaking engagements following the ride, you know, across the country, mostly in the US Talking about end of life care and, and all of that and the need for it and the benefits of it. I, I just love the storytelling aspect of that. So the video production and you know, the speech writing, the commercials and that sort of thing, the messaging and then I just continued to work on that messaging and because I was, you know, just a young guy starting out, you know, it doesn't, you know, pay very well to be a copywriter and you know, and a public speaker.
And so I would take all different sorts of jobs and that included helping on the lyric side of hip hop and soul and you know, rock music, anybody that would have me. And so that, that led to the entertainment development and then I, there happened to be up in Alaska when I was there, close friend of mine was doing reality television and then there were also credits going back for feature filmmaking in Alaska at the time.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: And oh yeah, the text, yeah the tax.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: So, so they needed people to score, to pa to field produce all this different content. And I met, I met a guy who was a songwriter and you know, just a local bar band hero but he was super talented and so I, I worked with him to co write some scores for feature films that were being going on up there and, and then a couple of those took off and then the, his local bar band became a mid major touring band, you know, in the US and Japan and other places. And I just, I just, I just kind of went on for the ride. So yeah, so I was up, I was actually back and forth between California and Alaska depending on which production company I was and then, and then the tours that started, you know, a couple few years after that. So that's, that's how I was up there. And then my, my, my now wife was after she got her MBA in Boston, was flying out to the west coast to start working at a tech company and she, she, she, she made a 14 day solo backpacking trip out of, in Alaska, happened across paths with her, fell madly in love and yeah, and then I was, we were long distance for years until the pandemic and then I was on this side of the, the wall when the curtain came down.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: All right, wow, there's so many, so much to unpack there. But you mentioned something earlier where when you were Managing bands and musicians and.
But then you, in that process you started to pick up community centers and rehab them.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Where did that idea come from?
[00:11:56] Speaker B: It came from. So it came from need. Basically. There was the two things that I always look at and we'll get into it when we start to think about like methodology for growing and scaling resilient companies.
For me, it's always been, and I didn't have it as a set modality at the time, but it's, it's grown into a very specific and conscientious look at you and a network of coalition partners and mapping assets between you and potential, you know, partners as well as customers. You know, especially in the, in the community development space where you're, where your, your main customers are public agencies or program funding and, and then just mapping the assets and then finding a way where you map somebody else's assets onto what you need and vice versa or triangulate between a couple of different partners and then seeing how you can take the, the assets that you have either in people or resources and then grow the capacity of them working in concert. And so, and to meet needs. And so yeah, there's a, in rural Alaska, just like there is in rural Appalachia and some other key areas that are still very much third world villages in the United States. Like realize that the third world is in North America, but it is in Alaska Native communities as well as Appalachia and some other reserved lands.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Well, you get on some of the Native American reservations. Yeah. For still got dirt floors.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, and imagine, it's probably not too hard to imagine those same dirt floors and a lack of insulation in a place that gets 40 below zero and is pitch black for half the year. And you'll, you know, you'll, you won't be just imagining things. You'll be visualizing the way that people are living in flying communities even to today and Alaska Native communities.
And then you just see just a, you know, just really a, a lack of follow through and sophistication with bringing together people who like, you might have somebody that could do the building. You might have somebody that could put down the amount of money you need. You might have somebody that, you know, can work with a, you know, a private foundation or a public grant and write it, but they're not working in concert and they're not, you know, you know, bought into a singular vision.
And so that's what I was doing. In addition to the television and then later, almost exclusively music production and business management, I saw where music Gatherings and events could bring together cities, tourism, leverage things partners like Alaska Airlines and the NBC affiliates out there. And by bringing those, all those groups together, we were able to do things like create a singing competition that also taught and onboarded and platformed diverse singers performers.
And you wouldn't, you wouldn't think about it, but the both in there were three seasons of that. It was like the Voice but for Alaska.
In those three seasons we had the Tiny Desk, the 2019 Tiny Desk winner for NPR semi finalist season.
Yeah. And then somebody that didn't even make the top three, Emma Watson became Miss usa.
And so it's like there's so much talent and those particular, you know, the television show drove tens of thousands of people to events to develop a downtown core. And so how you can get these knock on benefits that, that is really centered around the assets that you have and developing them, platforming them, giving them the opportunity to really scale up your impact.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Wow.
All right, so this is interesting because you're experience with real estate development completely unrelated to this. You're doing these things on the side anyway and then you, you get into the management and then because your mom's a social worker, you have a lens to community needs, especially in rural stuff and these things open up to you. Like it's just, I always love the fact of like how your, your, your unique background and experience gives you this lens to see things completely uniquely blending two things together that most people probably wouldn' or thought. Right. Property development with community giving back. Right. And property giving and, and community enrichment. Right. So, so obviously then this is 2019, you know, then we have, then we have the big, the big stoppage.
I guess that's a good way to, for the thing to call it for now. How did that like what happened from during that period of time besides it forcing you to have to then go spend more time with your, your girlfriend?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Yeah, actually at this time I've been married now by 2020, I've been married three or four years.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Oh, so you were doing long distance marriage too?
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Also doing long distance marriage. All right, so it was 10 days together and 20 days off is how we kind of, that's how we, how we as.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: That was very Hollywood of you.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm glad that, that I made it through. We didn't have to consciously un.
But yeah, so, so I was flying back and forth and then I was on this side. I, I was in the Bay Area at the time when the, when the pandemic stuff was announced in March of 2020.
And then, you know, like everybody else, I was stuck in a house and, you know, all the income that was mostly live. Live music events or, you know, or, you know, space rentals and concerts and events at the community centers that.
That I taken my meager allowances and put into that was gone in a, you know, snap of a finger. And I was in California and all of the stimulus money went through your state unemployment, so I couldn't even get that money. So I was just like, oh, no, this is terrible. And I'm living with my. With my wife. And I just felt so.
I felt like such a loser because I wasn't making anybody. And I was basically a kept man for those first couple of months. And I took it on my ego a little bit. But then I stopped whining and moping and I was like, well, I get to go and work on some of my projects. You know, I think some people, you know, it shuts down and they're like, oh, well, now I can do my passion, you know, like learn to play the guitar or whatever. In mine, it was instead of playing the guitar, because that's what I was doing, you know, writing and producing music.
I was like, what about the community development thoughts and ideas and papers and policies that I wanted to do? Because my education is in public policy and public service.
And so I. So I did. So I started working on a policy paper, recommendation paper, and I was doing some analysis basically of retail lease rates in neighborhoods that were either within or adjacent to formerly redlined areas showing.
And I was just really looking at the investment in. And the building of wealth through housing and how that affected the.
A small and medium business community adjacent to those areas.
And I came across rebuilding together. They were thinking of maybe shutting down, but they also had a lot of insight because it's an agency that does repair and renovation.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: For how long they had they been running when you came in?
[00:20:22] Speaker B: Running for 25 years.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: So they'd been around for a while.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Been around for a while. For the majority of that time, they were all volunteered. Network of wow of contractors and union people and just handy, you know, like ex lawyers who still love to tinker that would go around and every year, you know, fix 10, 20 homes up for people for no money. And they would just come out and crack open, you know, some brewskis afterwards and all have pizza and beer and fix up some homes and do it again next year in April. So that's what they used to be, the agency was. And it had grown up a little bit to be More of a build all the year round. And they had one government contract, but that was in peril and they didn't know, they were thinking they might have to close down, you know, both due to the pandemic and also just, it was starting to peter out. They weren't able to make that transition over into a paid professional staff.
And.
But then they said, hey, would you mind, if you want to, you can not only have this information that you want for your research paper, you can do your research with us and, and you can run this agency. And I said, yeah, sure.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: I love it. Sure. All right, so what was that first year like then taking. So you're, you're in this an agency now that they're like, we've got one month of, of of cash to get us through year over year. We're, we're underwater. Yeah, good luck.
So how do, how do you go from that to. Let's walk through that first year. What was, what were, what were when you came into that, like, what was the vision that you set, knowing that that's where you were at?
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Well, the, the, the vision was, was pretty straightforward. I, I kind of spoke to you a little bit about what at this time is more of an operational methodology that I had seen work and had experienced it working not just for me, but for other companies and investment groups. So a lot of the work that I had done as my advocation, you know, the community development side and real estate development was really about looking at the needs of industry and setting that against the community needs and then finding where there's unrealized value creation that is not, that is not being, you know, either expressed or, you know, getting, getting that ROI for, you know, those partners. And so I just, I pitched the board of directors, this board of directors as well as the National Rebuilding together national in D.C. on an idea of doing an asset scan, which I, you know, for the first, I put in about 70 hours a week, you know, night and day over the week.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: Part time job.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I did, I did about 70 hours a week for the first 20, 20 months or so. So there's that. So just know that there's a huge amount of just willing it too.
It can't be understated, but the expense of, you know, oversimplifying, basically we just looked and I just looked. What are all the things that this agency has accomplished?
Broke those down to first principles. Specifically, what are the building blocks? What are the exact activities that you did? What are the assets that you have? What is the skill level of the network that you have. And then I just put that basically into a very simple four column matrix and then went around to every elected officials campaign website, every comp plan. And this was before we had AI.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Manual.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: It was manual. So I basically became chat GPT at the time where I would go for runs or exercise at 3x speed. I converted everything into PDF and listened to it at like 2x speed.
And I'd listen to it a time or two and then read it and then put everybody like overlaid, every elected official, all new policies that were coming out of the state, HUD guidances and all of that. And then I just mapped it. I mapped it where we had assets that weren't, you know, being, you know, expressed in the community.
You know, these, these basically un.
The best way I can describe it is when you go in and you fix a home. There's a bunch of, there's a bunch of services that are being provided and a bunch of things that are being done but aren't being capitalized on. And so for instance, it all started with working with Samuel Merritt University because they are occupational therapy and registered nurse programs need clinical hours.
So for home health training hours in the field, they need to be able to go into people's homes.
Well, you can't go into people's homes a when it's in Covid times unless you're a first responder, which students aren't first responders because they're in education.
So what we were able to do is we were able to go in and make home assessments of folks because these were safety fixes that were being made. So it was a first responder. So I was able to bootstrap their program because now they have, you know, a couple hundred nurses and occupational therapists that need their clinical hours.
And so by looking at just the assessments that you make before you do the fixes, I realized there was a platform to then plug in. And then that was our first healthcare dollars and that was like 60 or $70,000. So it got us out of the hole within months of being there. And so I just map that across, you know, elected officials and all of that. And I do casework for all your elected officials, make sure that they, you know, you can show value and show their, you know, their constituency the value. And then who's the first person they call when they have a large thing to do or if later on you're trying to launch a large, you know, three county workforce development education thing. It's good to have, you know, one of the first schools be the one that's. Has the governor's daughter starting her freshman year there, stuff like that.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Oh, that's fantastic.
Wow. I mean what a.
First off though, you know, there's so few people, I think that would go about that in the strategic way that you did.
Like even just thinking of going. Let me start going through all the elected officials websites and seeing what their causes are and, and then mapping all that stuff together. You were, you, you, you, you, you're like a, a business sailor killer where he had all the little strings into the, you know, all coming into the community development and Gavin Newsom's heads and they're all going in here. That.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: That'S literally exactly.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: That is a, that is a bad, that's a bad analogy. But like that's. I just see the board on your wall and again like I said from a business perspective, I don't know of too many people that, that would do that. So that was, I mean, you know that, that's pretty innovative right there. So let's, let's talk a little bit about the two big things you guys are working on, which is the just Transition program and the big skills program.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll start with the just Transition pilot program because going into 2020, that was also, if some of us may remember, there was a bit of an election, a US election that happened that year.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Allegedly. There was.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Allegedly. And so the, the election going into it, I, my, my, my partner Preeti, I had mentioned, went into tech. Well, she went into clean energy technology and there was a 32 page policy report paper called Clean Energy for Biden, which then became a standalone agency called Clean Energy for America. In those policy papers I knew would be the bedrock of the policy that was later to turn into the Inflation Reduction act spending as well as some of the other build back better infrastructure.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: It was all part of that original 32 document. 32 page document. Wow.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's 32. Each one of those is like 100 pages long. But they're policy explainers.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: So I now, I did not go and read all of those and commit them all to memory. What I did was I went in and started looking at the executive summaries of each of those and see where they mapped on to residential decarb just to you know, pick a focus right off the bat and then started going out and using traditional home repair scopes of work basically and saw where there was overlap and so already starting to do decarbonization energy efficiency weatherization jobs out of existing funding. So That I knew that when this larger tranche of funding, they were going to, they were going to scramble to find home repair companies in the residential space to do retrofit versus new build, and they were going to need the technicians themselves to do the work. So Starting in about 2021, I just made a very concerted effort to, you know, make sure that all of our projects and programs continue to interface with the state sustainability departments of the various jurisdictions so that we could be both a technical supporter of as well as an implementer for when those funds came available. And, and then. Yeah, and then it happened, you know, so City of Berkeley was one of them. But then also the Jobs first, you know, which is a big workforce development tranche of money from the Governor Newsom's administration.
It's, it's all from the same people writing the clean energy for Biden. Are the same people writing the stuff for Jobs first or the same people writing for the PUC workforce, the, you know, equitable pathways.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: So then I, then I just. That's what we did. So right now we're, we're in the, you know, we're doing about a million to $2 million a year in equity electrification and hundreds of people to go directly into those jobs. And that's either completely just starting from your last two years of high school into a little bit at a junior college, and then you're in industry and also retraining contractors that are out there right now, especially small and minority contractors, into how to interface with the government. So we basically built this roadmap of exactly how you go out there. Here's the paperwork. It's not scary. And then did all of our requests for proposals for subcontractors where you onboard and by doing the work, you actually learn how to kind of fish for yourself in the, in the, in the equity electrification space.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: Well, I mean, what a fantastic thing, though. I just look at the, you know, I know for, for so long.
Excuse me. You know, our generation came up was like college, college, college, college. Right. It's just kind of beating your head. But we're to this point now where, I mean, if you're 18 and you don't like school, like you can go to a year and a half of training and come right into a fantastic career that's going to have some very sustainable longevity.
I mean, what a, what a way, what a way to get started, you.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Know, and realistically, it's the college experience for me and I love to learn. Huge nerd. I still read paper books like the Background, you know, the, the kids watching at home might even not know what they are. But, and I love it and I love education, but if I looked at it from a strictly cost benefit analysis perspective, there's not, there's not any four year degree that's going to put you in a better position financially to provide for yourself, to, to be able to, to have real economic security throughout your life from a four year education. There's very little, most especially the amount.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Of money you spend to get to that point.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: That's what I mean. That's the, that, that's, that's precisely what I mean. Roi wise, like put in, you know, 60, 80, 100, $200,000 depending on the institution and you're, you're not going to be in much more of a competitive advantage of anybody else that's already in that industry.
And with the rise of, you know, the, the, this next generation of technological advance, I just don't know how even how many, you know, CS degrees are going to get you into a program as being a junior designer or.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, just like again, right, like you look at it going, and, and I'm, this could be a bad analogy because like right now America's having a doctor shortage, so we need doctors. But when you look at the path for a doctor, right, four years of college, four years of medical school, four to eight years of residency, right? So you're looking minimum 12 years from when you graduate high school and somebody else goes, you know what? I'm going to go into H Vac, A year and a half of training. And now the doctor's getting started 12 years from now with $250,000 of debt and you now have had 12 years of a career of making 80, 100, 120,000 a year.
Right. You know, it's just such like, you look at that going, boy, wow, that's, it's just such a, and we're in a whole new arena because of this stuff. So it's just, it's, yeah, it's, it's fascinating to see. And so the fact that there's, you know, your group and recognizing that this need and then putting all of these resources together to, to define exactly what we were saying, right. It's not just the skills, but it's also, you need the practice and you need the, you know, some instances, you need the clinical hours, right? Where do we get those? And the fact that you're providing those. So how did, how did that then, how did the big skills program did that come out? Of the just Transition pilot program or was these things kind of launching at the same time?
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Yeah, there are all these things are kind of launching at the same time. It's really great to be talking to you now. It's also great to be talking to you now as somebody who's, you know, doing multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue. Not the case back then.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Far cry from the negative, negative hole.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: And I had it. Well, and it's also too, to, you know, to anybody out there listening, the.
You're going, if you're, if you want a return and you want to create something and you're convicted in the fact that it's not there, that the white space is there, if there is truly a white space and no one's done it already, means no one's going to do it, means that even just you seeing it is going to be very unintuitive and it will seem either scammy or ridiculous or using to anybody that you're trying to talk to about it. And in fairness, you will be confusing.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: And, you know, because you're still trying to figure it out. You haven't figured out where the kinks are yet.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And you have to kind of like, like five years ago, four years ago, I'm selling well, you know, there's, you know, if Biden gets elected, there's going to be, you know, infrastructure spending and, you know, and then if you look, if you, if you play that forward, you know, electrification is actually about H Vac. It's not even about electricians. So you have to really look at H Vac, short, like, and you're saying all this stuff at the same time as you're saying, like, there's a, you know, a crisis with housing and, you know, you're going to come off kind of wild. But now looking back on it, you really are pushing all these things forward at the same time. And it's not that going back into our initial part of the conversation, it's about a coalition because you're never going to be able to convince Joe Public, one elected official, that all of this stuff is going to happen and then it's going to benefit them in a way that they could never have imagined because it's so. There's so many knock on and carry on benefits from these other activities.
So what I would say is, yes, it was all developed in concert, but you're developing it on parallel tracks where each one of the partners, each one of the beneficiaries of whatever product or service that is coming out you don't ask them to envision or sign on to or partner with the giant vision.
You talk to the schools about what they need with teacher shortage, and you say, this program will provide you a teacher. You don't tell them that you're gonna convert the local public school into a factory and build modular houses that then put the backyards of people's homes, because that's a bridge too far. You know, they never heard about any of that. So you just talk to the schools about teacher shortage and you say, we have a program that will provide an additional $25,000 just for an instructor and to train them and to keep them in, you know, working for your school. And I will also hire an additional four teacher's assistants for my people to come in. And then they're like, great, you know, where do we sign? And they still complain, but you do that down, like five down lot.
You know, you talk to the homeowner about, hey, we'll do these repairs, we'll, we'll, we'll, and then we'll do electrification. Because you, you know, they, you don't, they don't even want, nobody wants to hear you're taking their gas stove, but everybody wants to hear that you're repainting the house and swapping out all the windows.
So you do the windows, you say how much this is saving. We could save more if we do high energy, high efficiency appliances.
And if you go all electric, which does include the stove, which I know you don't like, we can do solar and battery backup and you'll pay nothing for energy. And then you make, and you just, you start with that. So that's, that's how I would say is that. Yes. The methodology is to, don't ask anybody to do too much differently than they're already doing now.
And then make sure that if you do that well, you can count on 80 or 90% efficiency of them to continue to produce what they're already producing. And so you can count on that as an output and then use that as an input to the next thing that's working in parallel.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: I love it. Wow. So what's the next five years look like for your organization? Where are you guys headed?
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Yeah, so right now we have eight sites, including two large logistical hubs, and we're working with both the California Trades Councils, the different regional councils, as well as the overseeing body, and that's on the union side, as well as our California Building Industry association on the non union side, which is that in and of itself is the Biggest coup of ever. Because it's the only program or project that's shared by the non union and union contractors doing building in the state of California.
And so we've convened them over these different sites. The goal is, is that we'll have at least four sites in each one of the nine Barrie area counties within the next, within the next three years.
And then to go from Northern California and then mirror it down in Southern California starting in San Diego county and then going Los Angeles and then growing towards that we will be able to have upwards of about 225 sites. And when I say sites I mean and if it's not been made clear, the program that we do not only trains H Vacs, electricians and carpenters, all the skilled building and finishing trades, it also provides education to emerging developers. So city planners, civil engineers, architects as well as developers both with the curriculum. It is also producing at the junior college and high school level 2 units per year of affordable factory built modular ADUs which we are then placing into the backyards of low income adults and faith based lands. So we have like a 16 unit small home development for a faith based institution right now in Livermore that's being built at the College of Marin campus in Nevada.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: That's remarkable.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So the idea would be that we have in the next five years up to a capacity of providing hundreds of units of affordable housing for only completely all in sighted and everything only less than $130,000 for a unit of affordable housing goes to lifting low income community centers and individuals out of poverty and tens of thousands of students and hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of early career construction professionals.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: So someone's listening to this conversation. They're reading this chapter in the book. What, how, how do they, and they want to, you know, either they want to consult with you or they want to get involved in what you're doing. How do they find you? How do they get involved?
[00:43:36] Speaker B: Yeah, the, the easiest way to, is just to go to www.rtebn.org or put Rebuilding together East Bay Network in and then just reach right out to any of our staff or agencies. And we have a really great communications between us and other networked and affiliated organizations throughout the region. So it's not, you know, we're all very easy to get a hold of, you know and if you want in the show notes I can, I can put my deputy director's email in and she a lot of the calls and make sure whether it's, it's, it's my help that's that's, that's needed or, you know, it's, it's oftentimes depending on who, who you are and how you want to engage.
I'm probably the least now, you know.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: The way it should be, though, if you're running a good team.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, the team is. And that's another thing, too, as far as just where we're at right now. Yeah, it was my vision and there was not a chance in hell that it's going to be done without the team that we have on staff. And then that's it. That's its own whole story of growing, engaging and pouring in to these other human beings and, and watching that light come on and, and, and then everybody starting to align towards this, this, this common goal.
That's, that's, that's, that's the.
For me, I don't. I don't get to go and build the houses with the kids. I wish I could. That would be amazing. But, you know, I don't get to do much of.
Much of anything, really. Hands on. And so it's really. It only goes as far as this staff can take it.
[00:45:32] Speaker A: I love it. Jw, this has been fantastic. I love the work that you're doing. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to chat with us.
[00:45:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it was amazing. Thank you so much for having me, Travis.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: You're welcome. Cheers.
