welcome to inspired i'm patty trench back to her so and me and i created the show as a way for people to tell their stories as an avenue for people to share their stories of adversity of and power of discovery and of inspiration we can together because we felt very inspired about each other's lives and the people around us we decided to capture people that inspired us and spier other people and the community and we had with us today the founder and c e o of grace in the mud quite an inspiration and amazing inspiration with her it's one of her best friends and best mentors m what grace in the mud is all about how i became inspired actually vision for this program many years ago in the dream and i saw a vision of a gender balance well opportunity future peer community in twenty fifteen we had the ground running and put together a fully immersive enrichment program for young girls ages nine ten and eleven or let's say tweens or pre adolescent going through or approaching one of the most to mulch it's times in developmentally for young girls  with the intention of inspiring passions and teaching to perseverance finding those passions that might drive that part of the skill the valuable skill of perseverance and  is passion and perseverance it was great the kind of stuff that gets you through the hard stuff in life and make that practical applicable and occur in a curriculum if you live in a home where  think about what your passions are so so that's what the program likes to address and and explore and mike you're here you have worked closely together and your background a thing or think right my background is in nursing actually on the almost eleven kids my mother had so twin boys when i was nine and another set when i was eleven so i grew up as almost prettify it as a caregiver putting myself through school and i was a psych major actually and you know went to nursing to do psych but wound up in critical care nursing so i worked in all the big shot hospitals downtown fill in kept going to school and while i was in school got interested in managed care case management early ninety's and right now i have a business which is called life span care management and what we do is act as a slash care coordinator to enable people to have a successful outcome as they encounter health issues and health care system all along the way i've always been interested in what makes health it what is that his participants that were successfully losing weight and then they would get to a certain point they would drop out so he decided to interview these people that were dropouts one on one and he had a little questionnaire and one of the questions was how old were you during your first say such sexual experience and one day he misspoke and he said how much  the time of your first success sexual experience and the woman said she started to cry and said i was forty pounds and it was with my father this socked him he had never heard of that you know and but get within a week another instance came up like that so he revised this questionnaire a found that on interviewing almost sixty percent of the people that were obese the girls answer so it's the answer in that if you were not attractive you weren't going to be assaulted or he hooked up with somebody from the centers for disease control that helped him formulate the adverse childhood experience questionnaire it's ten questions and looks to determine whether the you know as a child were physically sexually or mostly be used was there abuse going on in your family was there substance abuse or mental health in the family with somebody in it was there abandonment by death or or divorce and was there someone in the family that was incarcerated out of that he found that again the sixty percent number pops up in a normative population that have mostly physical such or emotional abuse now within that it will not last five years the human genome project and all the research that's been done about around that has enabled us to understand the link between chronic disease and adverse childhood experience so think of your genetic makeup as a blossom or rather a bud a flower bud if six bows to noxious stimuli over a period of time that bud is not going to blossom normally it's going to be distorted so that's the link between grace in the mud and r and what she's doing is the answer to to that experience so how are you addressing that i know that you speak so highly of mike and i can see why but how is it that your address and what how are you girls such that there is a very specific it shows a specific correlation to adult onset in women of mental health disorders and inflammatory disease in particular before the age of eighteen when you look at a blood that was blossoming so as it was a teacher for very many years and behavior consult and i had the privilege of being in people's homes physicians working inside of classrooms and i saw this incredible opportunity in this very privileged environment to help protect that bud and almost like  lotus flower that blooms and murky waters you know every day comes the morning and through the mud america blossoms to its fullest potential so we look at these little girls who are nine ten eleven we have already stressed out waste just the thought of having an adolescent girl raises the stress and in the healthiest a family in the best case scenario  so at this very vulnerable time how could we put together a program that would have the girls excited to participate and that we could look at developing these passions or giving them an experience an opportunity for diverse passions and have that be kind of self driven you know and motivate them intrinsically and then as a community support them support their parents the physicians over the past in particular twenty years through an education process has become so egregious and will support so so i came up with  questions most and out of the thirty that i did the initial screening with so one started with my i don't really know what i want to be but i never met my dad and i know was that he's an auto mechanic so i want to learn about aut had eighty five community members right off the chute out there helping and they couldn't get out from under the hood they were changing fuses they wanted to know how they wanted to learn about the com freshen and while it started with this team the seed of and i mean my dad i want to be able to talk to him about what he does don't really know what i want to do everyone else as a group collectively agreed to just show up doesn't have to be your dream and aspiration show up and i'll tell you it was tough standing under that tarp in one hundred degree weather in the summer they were affected and and the people who came to instruct them we had  force retired air force personnel couldn't believe the people that interest in my community alone was so rich filled with people who wanted to help and i didn't have a way either through maybe vetting processes for the schools you know we have such a culture of fear so the greater design was would be to build something lasting within a community with respect to all of the parts and have them it's incredible what your dad got two little girls within that age range and i see how impressionable and insightful and amazing they are and i and then you want to protect them and yeah it's incredible so that was really real big a concern mine from the beginning a fear of my own to put this on the map because essentially i was going to say hey right here i have nine ten eleven year old girls every day from the  so you know i did a whole lot of research and in making sure that we had all of the the stays in place all of those things that would create a safe environment and the biggest piece of that was volunteer training  you know you could you can go through a vetting process and that's only half of the work you can be the best intended person and have not really the awareness or supports to understand what is really appropriate in this environment with these children you know we need to be mindful and respectful by they're our future we need to protect them now that connection that link that you have with my i it's my understanding that he found to you as axelrod right i see this you know focusing on that that age group with this type of program as a perfect solution not a complex solution but a perfect solution to addressing how are you going to mitigate the risk factors that these children are going through at that age so a a boy that has a childhood experience that when adverse child experience and what what that translates to is chronic toxic stress so it's not the stress so much but your response but boys have to star storm and so this is the they don't respond to the stress or as much as a girl does all right so that's why women have twice the incidence of order munni diseases and other chronic illness as men do now a lot of men you know in that fifteen to twenty five the start is is a negative factor because then we have head injuries and spinal injuries or fall off the back of pickup trucks and getting in fights but women don't do that ok but they last longer but then they have this these the sable ing diseases so eighty percent of what we spend on health care in the u s is is addressing chronic disease but there is no cure for chronic disease so if we can address the cause factor the root cause of chronic disease early on and address it in such a way that you build resilience with these children so that they can recognise and co successfully with the stressors the stresses of life then you're not only going to enable them to be more productive citizens happier citizens but you're going to lower your actual health care costs down the road which is a big issue right now so i think what you're doing is really beautiful and i know that to come to this point where you've created this amazing organization you must have had some experiences in life to prompt you to create this i know you have a degree in special education and you talk a little bit about yourself sure i was the oldest of a very large family of so this of seven and right before i was four i mother's life you know it was life or death and we lived in a chronic state of emergency and it was a different time at the same time i had a mother who thought of herself as disabled because she had polio as a child and this she had three titanium screws and her r and her arm so we weren't allowed to touch me because we might pull her out and that was her fear so i grew up with are a very strict mom who had incredible faith and delightful father who was just disabled with my brother's birth for his own heartache my brother suffering is entire life and then you know there were four children that came after robert so there were seven of us and it was a lot to do  so my mother had cancer from very young we had a house fire and i was the oldest at twelve so i had to go in the house and carry out the baby you  know because that's what you did and i'm trying to think there was always something you know my my brother on my tenth birthday had is fifty six major surgery at children's hospital and there ronald mcdonald house was not an option you know it was the hospital was a very different environment so growing up i  know aside from from those factors which was you know a chronic state of emergency whenever we heard a siren we looked to the direction you know if we were out playing because likely it was going to our house  you know we had a pharmacy the pharmacist the local pharmacist lived in our neighborhood and he brought medicine in the middle that my i remember ten mixing maalox in the window sill to put in my brother's presser pressure sores and and i and i often think of the seven of us children sometimes i felt guilty about being in the crab that got out of the bucket because i was the first one so i really did get more of my parents hospital from the time i was my brother was seven when he learned to walk so i was about ten when i used to go every day to physical therapy at night then bainbridge in south philadelphia and do physical therapy for him to learn to walk and it was a very poor neighborhood my mother was had her purse cut by a knife off of how does all shoved in cars my sister was attacked and but we did that five days what are the chances that i could have a healthy baby you know and also still live with a brother that wasn't capable he wasn't capable of having that so but to the outside world we were dressed appropriately we went to school we you know we're supposed to get good grades all of us went to college and then the end of the story is different for all of us so that that was a real life experience in my own struggles  i have my faith to draw on i had experiences from very young wanted so much to understand people suffering wanted so much to see the upside of things  of my childhood as an adult i was working in this one day full environment and i had an opportunity privileged opportunity to be the fly on the wall that every parent would want to have advocating for their child or teacher would want to have this person that could come in as a consultant and really respect their environment and help them and it was so egregious so the then i found myself involving myself more and more in some community service and initiatives and i was working for the domestic violence response team and i worked for what was the j c say juvenile conference committee it was an arm of adversity knows no socioeconomic background doesn't know religion or culture grace is an undeserved gift and we all come with a grace we're gifted and if we could help one another to see that in those processes i meet people where they are in the moment and the doubts towards progress and understanding and reinforcing that it's a process and that we all struggle personally i was embarrassed because i was working on domestic violence response team and i went through a very tumultuous divorce i thought who am i that i should be helping people when you know i can't get my home in order perhaps you're stronger because the i'm with because of it because you can understand that you're perfect for that absolutely you are remarkable remarkable woman and i know for a while and i absolutely love her i just think that what you have to give to others it's not the top you know just you do walk that walk you understand it but most importantly you don't point the fingers that you're always looking to see what you can do for others you're always looking to see how you can be of service how you can just improve the quality of life of people and that's who you are and it just embodies grace you embody grace that's why i love the name that you picked for your goodness ation grace in the mud i think when i when i spoke of the name to patti what did you say in ways we can help be that voice that connects you to the community the voice there that allows you to share your story what would that be i would say first and foremost is is the hopefulness of the community process looking toward one another of meeting people where they are and a willingness to work collaboratively cooperate of lee i could never do this without the girls and i think children can thank you well while away if you're not authentic and they give me a lot of love and encouragement and and in this space they feel safe and i think that we have a program that i truly believe would marry school curriculums well established non profits like big brothers big sisters  the girl scouts and boy scouts i think we we need to look at this curriculum as that as part and parcel of our society's  same for them for every person so we have a nice variety of those on our menu and everybody who signs up for the two week fully emotion immersive program they agree to show up and participate so they can gauge and a came to learn what they are you know two years into the program now the kids will invite you to come to mindfulness where have we called this program or it made it all about mindfulness i don't know that they would have been so attracted  currently in our state in jersey we have federal funding for bully boy and program anti bullying mandated right well to me this is a cost conscious it's a real really easily implemented program within the structure of our schools where we're kind of getting out of the curve and we're looking at being reasonable with our teachers giving them the ways to make progress and reduce those and we've got to wrap it up for getting close to the end of our show but can you quickly give us your website so people who are on our website and grazed in the mud or and we have a facebook page  mud and right now we're serving the camden county region of southern new jersey we are desperately in need of funding to create sustainability so if you visit our website a but really i'm here just to brag about my fund our feet because i believe that she has the judgment and the the the training and experience to take this model and