(00:01):
I just got continually pounded by the child welfare system. And so I like, I've gotta learn more about this. I've got to figure out why. Because people need to understand something about attorneys. Attorneys really work in a vacuum. They don't. All they learn is the law. They don't really learn about the systems and policies and financial aspects of what is happening around them. And so that's when I started digging in.
(00:36):
Welcome to Shout Your Cause with Sally Hendrick, a digital magazine where you can get found, get heard, and get inspired with content that challenges us to be globally minded. Our focus is on raising awareness around social justice issues, cultural differences, and to bring you, the people dedicating their lives to tackling challenging topics as their way of giving back. Let us be your advocate to make your voices heard around the world.
(01:06):
That's Connie Reguli, founder of the Family Forward Foundation, and advocate for moving families forward and away from Overreach by Child Protective Services. I recently took a trip to Washington DC to document what Connie and her group of advocates have been up to, and I'm hooked.
(01:27):
Oh yeah. Thank you. And thank you so much, Sally, for stepping up and coming to Washington, dc You know, that's really what this is about, is about getting people, I mean, I took 14 ordinary people to Washington DC through an organization that I've built up over the past five years, because we want ordinary people to feel the passion of making changes. And so we, so this year, uh, we got an Airbnb that was a nice large Airbnb. I think it had like six bedrooms. I had somebody from Arizona, Washington, Connecticut, uh, Minnesota, Florida, North Carolina. I mean, we had a group of moms and grandmas and women who just really had, had a heartfelt passion for change. And I am an attorney. I have worked with families for 28 years. We have worked primarily, I've worked down in the trenches with families who have been fighting government systems, who's had their children taken away from them, where there's been medical misdiagnosis.
(02:27):
I mean, I have been a warrior for parents to try to help keep their family intact while the government is attacking them. And so, during this process of me representing people and litigating, I just got continually pounded by the child welfare system. And so I like, I've gotta learn more about this. I've got to figure out why. Because people need to understand something about attorneys. Attorneys really work in a vacuum. They don't, all they learn is the law. They don't really learn about the systems and policies and financial aspects of what is happening around them. And so that's when I started digging in, and I really did that about 10 years ago. And then it was explosive. What I found out was that our federal tax dollars are incentivizing the government now. This is our money. This is our hard earned money that we work so hard for, comes out of the Social Security funds. And it's called Title four Money. And Title four covers a couple different things. It covers the child support money and Title four D. It covers the foster care money and Title four E. And when I really started digging into Title four E, and when I say digging in, I mean, I read the professional, uh, government literature. I read congressional reports, I studied budgets. So I really took a deep look at it.
(04:00):
I love the fact that you said you've been doing this for 10 years, and I felt like I got that 10 years dumped right on me in Washington, because that was quite the task to get educated on all of this and talking about ti e funding and social security and all this stuff. And it was like, oh my goodness, what have I gotten myself into? So I want to give you a huge kudos and applause for that work and advocacy work that you've been doing to dig into the system, the child welfare system, because that is what you were running up against all the time.
(04:36):
Oh, absolutely. And you know, and I'll, I'll tell you, it's really kinda odd, you know, I mean, our life works in such mysterious ways, , and if we just always, my theme is, if you just always just like, reach out, just put it out there and, and, you know, and, and I'm gonna throw this back at you because this is one reason I'm so proud of you and what you're doing and the, the aspect that you're taking and the platforms that you're using, because whether you're, whether that passion and you look around and you go, oh, there's something wrong in education, there's something wrong in healthcare. Whatever it is, when you take that, when you just put it out there like, God, just bring me the right people, bring me the right places, bring me the right resources. It's amazing how that happens. And the way it happened for me was, I had had a very difficult case, and I had had the opportunity to work with a professor out of the University of Michigan, and she was an awesome person.
(05:33):
She had written a book about forensic interviewing of children, and, uh, our, our case was over, but I'd read a lot of her reports and I sent her an email one day. She was actually teaching like, like a social welfare or something. I sent her an email and I was like, Dr. Fowler, why, why is DCS so set on putting kids in foster care? And she wrote me back a one-liner and it says, because Title four E is unlimited and Title four B is limited. So let me tell you what that means, because I had no clue. I was like, oh my gosh, what does that mean? So Title four E is the social security funding. And it is an entitlement, it is not an appropriation. So for little baby people thinking of civics people, right? For sixth grade, civics 1 0 1, there's a huge difference between an entitlement and an appropriation.
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An entitlement never has to go through Congress. It is a, it's set up and it's set up through the social security money. And it is a use it or lose it scheme. It's never subject to sequester. So these agencies never have to worry about a government shutdown, and it is almost a dollar for dollar match. So what happens is our state agencies, such as, let's say Tennessee, which has a billion dollar budget for, for the Department of Children's Services, about 40% of that money is federal dollars. So they have to have that money like flowing into the agency every year. The only way they get that money is to put a child in foster care. Now, I call it Stranger care because, you know, I, I don't even know how it was ever thought to be a good idea to pick up a little child, 2, 3, 4, 5, even 7, 8, 9 years old, who can barely understand the world that they're living in anyway, and pick 'em up from their home and dump 'em in the house of a stranger with a bat, with an arm full of clothes and maybe a toothbrush if they're lucky.
(07:26):
So, I mean, it's, you know, it is, it is a, uh, it, it's a buggy whip. It's, it's been a failure. We know how foster care has failed, and it's a system that needs dramatic changes. So I was real. Um, so I've been working really, really hard for the past six years, building my organizations, uh, through social media platforms. We've used, uh, Facebook for, uh, building the Family Forward Project Group, and we have about 18,000 people who have found us through that. But included, but above and beyond the Family Forward Project, I mean, there are, there's probably 80 different groups out there that other people have created in other states, cps, corruption exposed cps. So if anybody has an interest, if they will just start Googling around. And actually, I have a YouTube channel, and if you just put CPS corruption or Connie regularly in there, you can learn a lot.
(08:24):
So it became, it became so important to me because I saw it. I mean, I, I, they never, it, it wasn't my personal life. They didn't take my children, but I saw what happened, okay? And I saw them take babies outta mama's arms. Okay? I saw them take children from parents and refuse to give them back. And it's really, really heartbreaking. So I developed a passion for that, and that's when I started saying, I've gotta have help. And if that help comes from people on the street, people who have been affected, people are willing, who develop their voice, then that's what I'm going to work on. And that's how we ended up in dc.
(09:13):
Make sure you check out the latest deep dive article on Shout Your Cause, where I go deep into the legislation, the issues and the money trail surrounding child welfare, foster care, and adoption. Our entire season four is dedicated to this topic and will publish a couple of articles as well.
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You said something about how just you just put the information out there because when you put it out there, people will come to you, the right people will come to you, and you know, you doing this because you saw it happening, shows how much, um, you know, empathy and compassion you have for other people. And I love that because I feel like that's what happened with this group in DC when we went, I just jumped out there, I found somebody else. I didn't even know who you were. I found Heather, uh, out there with her case, and I had been following her, and then she said, Hey, we're going to dc blah, blah, blah. I just gotta raise enough money to get my ticket. And I was like, I'll do it. And I wanna go, I wanna be able to be there to document the process, because my goal in this is not for some quick flashy story. My goal in this is to create a platform for you to elevate what's going on with, with this throughout your cause. So I can't thank you enough for actually letting me come and be invited into the meetings with you. I appreciate that.
(10:50):
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Yeah. And you know, and, and I wanna, uh, because the people who are listening to this weren't there, I want to, um, talk to you a little bit about what you actually saw, and not just us, you know, sitting around and, and talking together about it mm-hmm. . But what you were able to see is when we got there, you know, we sorta kind of created little subgroups, right? Of three or four people. Three or four people, right? And then that little subgroup got to work right away. We looked up the congress people that we thought we might have some connection with. I particularly looked up certain committees, uh, you know, the fi the Senate Finance Committee, the, the Congressional Health Committee, uh, the, uh, uh, family support committee. And I pulled those names and we just like, went on their websites, made a contact, said we wanna come in.
(12:07):
And we were working on those appointments right away. Now it's, you know, sometimes it's like, you think it's better to maybe try to get an appointment a couple weeks in advance, but honestly it's not that much better because their, their schedules change so much all the time. You never know what kind of chaos is gonna come up. Now, we were super lucky because I will tell you, we started this process in 2015 and back in 2015, and I mean, we were neophytes, we were just stumbling around at what we were doing. We had no clue what we were doing. But here's what we could do. We could take a few little cheap printed flyers that we had made, and we could walk in the doors. There are three congressional buildings and three Senate buildings. We could walk in the door and we could literally, I mean, we were like fuller brush salesman for anybody who remembers what that is.
(12:57):
I mean, we could just knock on the door. We could go in, we could just introduce ourselves, say what we're here for, give them a little flyer. Sometimes we'd be able to make an appointment that day or the following day, and we would just put a, put the word out there. Now remember, in congressional offices, in congressional offices, they do have to document what's going on. So even though you're not maybe sitting in front of a congressperson, because they are very, very busy, you will talk to somebody who has to document that you were there and talk to their congressman. So we were able to start setting up these meetings. So when we would get these meetings, we would take three or four people in there with us. And I know I kind of led one group right alongside with me from 2000, took a group, and we really had about three or four people.
(13:47):
And so what would happen is I would first just kind of lay out the, just lay out the groundwork. Just say, here's what we're looking at. We're looking at this horrible, you know, generational long funding scheme with Title four E. And then we would have at least one person tell their impact story, their personal impact of how it affected them. And it was nice to kind of have two, now that everybody has to keep their story short, it's really hard to do. They've got to isolate their story to about three, four, maybe five minutes. And then we sort of have a wrap up , and the wrap up is like, here's where we are and here's what we need done. And, you know, we got to the place, we had Rachel there, uh, from, uh, Nashville. She had us a horrible story about what they did to her. Of course, Heather Carter a year and a half. And, um, I mean this Maureen, she's been dealing with a, you know, a situation with her daughter and her special needs. So, you know, we're able to, to kind of give them the whole wrap in 30 minutes, 25 to 30 minutes. And, and you were able to see that and see how, you know, and, and to you at this, on this trip, it probably kind of looked like we had it down Pat . However, I will say we worked really hard to get there.
(15:04):
. I love that because I, um, I don't know if you realize it, but, um, the week before I attended a, a Zoom call with Maureen and Amy and several others, and we just talked through how to do the meeting, how to, you know, what to say, what not to say. Um, kind of like a structure. And then Maureen showed up with a structure. She's got educational materials, and I guess you do too. And, um, and that's something that, you know, you may not think about when you first get started, but hey, when you start pounding the pavement, you've just got to do what you know that you can do. And then you tweak from there to be more effective. And with, as long as you've been working on all of all of these things, you've got, you know, you've got the chops and you know, you walk the walk and now you're, you know, you're really putting it out there really well.
(15:57):
Well, and it's so important. And I really just wanna reach out to people. It's so important that we want others to go with us. We want others to step up. You know, we've been able, family Forward Foundation is a nonprofit organization. We haven't really focused a lot on fundraising, but over a couple years during the pandemic, we had raised a little bit of money and we were able to use that money to pay for the Airbnb so that we could stay together. And then we also had raised some money for some food to be able to eat there. So the people who came paid for their own flight to come up there and just, you know, the general transportation to the Airbnb. But we were able to, uh, cover the cost of our housing, which is huge. And we were able to stay together, which is very important.
(16:43):
And so, you know, I want other people to reach out and be willing to do that and be willing to learn. And maybe your first trip up there is a tag along trip, or maybe you just start watching the videos and see what we're doing. But, you know, this is a, this is a, um, this is dynamic change that's going to happen, and we want as many people to participate in as possible. There is nothing about this that, you know, sometimes people wanna be a hero for change, and they want their name attached to the change, you know, and they wanna be the one in the history book for change, like Susan B. Anthony, you know, getting women's right to Vote. But, you know, I remind people that they didn't get the right to vote until 10 years after she was dead. So , I think it's kind of a misnomer, but anyway, you know, it's not really about that.
(17:31):
It's about the dynamic impact. It's about the critical mass. It's about the narrative and getting the narrative and people speaking of it all the time. You know, if people watch me and they watch, uh, I'm on, uh, I am on TikTok, I am on Instagram, of course, on Facebook. And you know, a lot of times I will pull the videos, the actual videos of, of watching police, watching police pull a child out of a home. And there was a video I posted this morning on in Montreal where this officer in the social worker are, I mean, they've got all four limbs of this child that they're dragging out of this home while they're screaming. People need to understand the reality of that and the, and the separation anxiety and the long term traumatic effect on children when they are removed from a family, even if it's an imperfect family.
(18:29):
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(18:56):
Yeah, I understand. And in the article that I wrote about the whole situation, and you helped me tremendously with that, thank you very much. I need to give you credit for, for that as well in the article. Um, I, I think I know what video you're talking about too. I think I saw that and it was really frightening. And it, and it is, you know, you sit there and think about all these children and you know, these are lives, these are everyday people. This is not always the, the harsh news story where some kid was horribly, horribly abused. And you know, you, you hear those types of things, but 80% of these cases go unfounded. And then the definition of like, child neglect is used almost 90% of the time to document that this is what's going on. There's a neglect, but then what does neglect actually mean? And is there something where, where maybe this family could have help and that little bit of help would just erase future, you know, worries and, and cause for removal from the family.
(20:09):
Yeah. Yeah. And, and since you mentioned that about abused children, I wanna, I wanna make sure I include this in our story today. So I've been doing this a long time. I've been at it well over 20 years. And so I've seen a lot of just sort of, kind of slight changes and drifts in how they handle situations. These agencies, these state agencies, they don't want severely abused and traumatized children in foster care. Okay? Foster care is a for-profit industry. These people who service foster parents, there's nothing special about them. They are not child development specialists. They are not, um, uh, you know, pediatricians, they're not child therapists, okay? Ordinary people. You only have to have a high school degree to become a foster parent. And so if DCS goes and pulls a child out, let's say a seven year old child who's been severely neglected and locked in a closet and starved and not fed and tied up and, you know, maybe taped and, you know, pooped in their pants, you know, whatever, that child is so traumatized that the everyday foster parent cannot handle that child.
(21:22):
And I'm gonna say that for sure, and I can say that definitively because I have represented people in those situations who bleed these bleeding heart people and bless their hearts and souls, because with the very best of intentions they take on a severely abused child. And let's say a child who's been a victim of sexual assault, they can't handle it. I have represented people who call me up and say, I can't have this child in my home, and we have to give it back. I mean, we literally have had to, to dissolve adoptions to give back foster children because they're so highly traumatized. So these state agencies, they don't want those children. They want the children that come from imperfect but not abusive homes. Okay? So they are homes, maybe there's, maybe they're environmental neglect, maybe there's housing issues. Maybe their home is not, maybe they're bad housekeepers, you know, maybe it's a medical misdiagnosis.
(22:28):
Um, I mean, oh gosh, they, I mean, one of 'em, I mean, they will call, they, they can do it on an anonymous report, and then they can take your children on it. So they want these children that are otherwise fairly stable because they wanna put 'em in a foster home. They wanna keep 'em in a foster home. Under Title four E there's a time limit, and it's, you have to the 15 to 22 mark, they have to, they wanna keep them 15 months so they can start a termination of parental rights based on the 15 month separation solely, and then terminate the parental rights within 22 months. So this two year period of fostering is a cash cow. And for people with a business mind, I just want you to think about this business model for a minute, because I come from a business background before I was a lawyer and I was in the restaurant business.
(23:20):
And you have to have a physical plan. You have to have equipment, you have to have employees full-time. The foster care business is the ideal business plan. You basically have people on call to be foster parents, and you don't have that overhead for that foster parent until they're fostering a child, which is the money you get from this state. Okay? So it is a, it's an incredible profit, uh, for, for foster care private agencies, it's huge, huge business. It is billions and billions of dollars. So they need to continue to feed that cash cow of private foster care to be able to keep getting that money back from Title four E to be able to keep these huge bureaucratic agencies. In Tennessee, it's 3,900 people, and they only have like 8,600 kids in foster care. That's like, you know, two foster kids per employee, almost right?
(24:18):
Or three, you have to go, like, what are they doing in that agency? Now, I will say they also do juvenile justice, which is a whole nother conversation we could have because that's all privatized as well. But this organization is so top heavy laden. There was an audit that came out in Tennessee in December, 2020, and they actually went out and interviewed employees across the state. And even these employees, these case workers across the state, they were talking about how they, um, uh, you know, how it was a top heavy organization, you could only, all they were interested in is money. They didn't even care about your safety. They didn't even care about the children's safety. So there's just so many ways this has just gone so topsy turvy that it just, it's so overwhelming for most people.
(25:13):
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What about what's going on in Tennessee with you? Do you have anything you want to say about that to kind of, you know, clear the air? You know, people are probably asked, so I would love to know what you want to mention about that.
(25:55):
Yeah, so, um, they, uh, I have been, uh, retaliated for being a voice for several years by bits and pieces. And, you know, they keep trying to retaliate and then I'm able to rise above it, and it's continued to get more and more aggressive. And this past year, I decided to pull a petition to run for the juvenile judge so that I could conduct the court where these children are going through in a different manner, in a different way. While the, uh, elite who are, uh, profiteering off of that, uh, could not have that happen. And so it has been a full force of criminalizing me, particularly the past 12 months. But they started it like four years ago. They dragged it out for four years, all to discredit my voice, because I go down and I talk to legislators, and I sit and talk to them, and dcs wants to go in there and say, don't listen to her.
(26:50):
She's crazy. She's always in trouble. You know, she commits crimes. They, their whole, the only way, the only way they can defeat me is to discredit me and close those ears of the people to listen to, because I am articulate, I'm well versed. I know the facts, I know the history, I know the budget, I have the personal stories. And so they have worked extremely hard to discredit me. Now, I don't want, I don't want people to be afraid of that because I am working through it, and I'm going to help, uh, you, uh, kind of explain that to people more as we go. But I will say this, literally the judge and the district attorney had to rewrite the law to be able to prosecute me and my client. So judges cannot rewrite laws, district attorneys cannot rewrite laws. So that whole process is on its way to the, an appellate court and an appellate review.
(27:49):
And for those who have an interest in constitutional law, you know, and they have some memory about Arthur Anderson and the United States versus Arthur Anderson, if anybody remembers that huge case outta Texas, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a case where the judge and the DA changed the law and they changed the law to lower the state's burden of proof to prove that all of these employees of Arthur Anderson were guilty of federal crimes. It goes, and they were found guilty. And it goes to the appeal, and the appellate court finds him guilty. It goes all the way to the United States Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court tossed it out, tossed it on its head, released everything, reversed, all the convictions. But we're talking about several years now. I'm looking now, and I'm looking at my Tennessee people in the legal world, and I'm, uh, try, I'm just like baffled at the way that they are not even able to understand.
(28:52):
But this issue has already been be before the United States Supreme Court, and you cannot rewrite the law. So it's, um, it's, it's very interesting and it's still unfolding, and they're going to, there's going to be some federal litigation over it, I am sure, but it's go, because I'm going to continue to push what I'm doing. They've tried to gag me every time I turn around, they're trying to gag me. Most recently, they tried to gag me again, and then I found out the reason why. It was because there was a secret, this secret communication going on. So the way I, the way I kind of come through that and work through that is going to be a story in and of itself, but I don't want that to interfere with people understanding that this foster fail system that we have, which is generational genocide and is a social experiment that has totally failed, needs to be abolished. And we need to take a renewed look at how we stabilize our family system in America.
(29:54):
Love that. Love that. I really appreciate the fact that you are as well versed in all of this as you are, and very strong going against all of this adversity. Um, and also you're being the beacon of light to the rest of us to say, Hey, look, it's okay. We can do hard things. We can do hard things. And speaking of hard things, the last thing that I wanna mention and talk about real quick, right after we got back from DC I thought, oh, I'm gonna work on this article and I'll be done in a couple of weeks and I'll talk to Connie. But when I looked up, you were overseas and you were talking about the same things that we've been talking about in the United States over here. And please tell me about that. Cause I wanna end on this hopeful note of this is not just right here in your backyard. This is everywhere.
(30:54):
Yeah. So thank you for bringing that up. That was, uh, well, I'm, I am in it to win it. Let me just say that. So, uh, I have a, a follower in Switzerland and she had been, she's been following me quite a while, and she's been also watching, watching what's going on in the European continent. And there has been, there are a lot of the same things are going on. This whole child welfare debacle is going on in Israel, France, Norway, Sweden, great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. I mean, it's like, it is like a modern day craziness. And they're all using the same script, it appears. So she reached out to me and she said she was gonna do an international sort of a seminar. It's the first time she did it. She was willing for me to do it on Zoom, and she was going to have interpreters available so that she could, uh, put it in several languages once we had finished it.
(31:52):
And she was kind of getting it set up and I said, I'm gonna come, right? I'm like, I'm gonna come. And she had told me about a Norwegian attorney who was gonna be there, and his name is Maurice. I can't even pronounce his last name, but, um, MAs, I think is the way you say it. And I'm like, I wanna meet him because I knew just a tiny bit about him. And so I go over there and first of all, I went to Lagano, Switzerland, which is beautiful. I mean, oh my gosh, what a place to go. So we had this little meeting. And so I did this presentation and then Maria's come up and I'd never talked to him before. And he sits down to do his part and he goes, oh, he goes, basically everything that she said I'm going through in Norway, .
(32:40):
So he is, uh, taking it as a, at an international stride. He, Norway is really bad at taking children and he has taken that issue to the European Court 17 times, and he has won. And Norway will still not return children, even though there is a finding of human rights violations. So we, we talked about that. We talked about how do we get, how do we get that information on a broader platform because I want the, the, the narrative needs to be international. The narrative does not need to be Davidson County, Tennessee, Williamson County, Tennessee, the state of Tennessee, or even the United States. It needs to be an international conversation. And so as I was talking to him, we started talking about the Nordic Committee, uh, on human rights and child welfare. And this was an organization I had first seen in probably right before the pandemic in about 2018 or 19.
(33:43):
And I had wanted to go to their conference, which they hold in October, and I was not able to go cuz I had a full load of cases and stuff and I just couldn't make it work. And so MAs and I, we actually were talking about what to do. Uh, he's telling about what he's doing traveling around. And so he said, while we're sitting in Lagano, Switzerland, he said, there is a human rights attorney, uh, named Carl Baden Boden in Zurich, and we should try to go see him. And so there on, uh, Monday morning, as soon as we, we had the conference on Sunday, Monday morning, he sends an email or text message and to Carl, he responds to us and says he can meet us Wednesday. And I'm like, it can't be Wednesday, it has to be Tuesday, because I had a flight out on Wednesday.
(34:31):
And so he emails him back and he goes, okay, Tuesday. So we go from Lagano and we go up to Switzerland and or Zurich. And Zurich is also beautiful. So we get into Zurich and we go meet with Carl Baden-Baden and his, uh, I think it is, uh, a great, um, attorney who's much younger. He's much older. He, and I think it's his daughter-in-law, I'm not re certain, she's American. He's from Switzerland. So we have this great conversation about what's going on in child welfare. And he had actually written a, he, he was a, uh, administrative judge for many years on, uh, and I don't wanna call it the wrong thing because I'm just not up to speed on the way the European Union has all kinds of different levels of courts now. And, but he had served for 17 years as a judge and then he went into private practice and it is pri it is primarily human rights and and economics.
(35:28):
And so, but we got him interested about the child welfare aspect of it because of course it is economic as well. And we had a great conversation with him. And so he said that he would help us, um, just kind of be a voice as well. So we're looking forward to doing some additional work with him. And then while Mari and I are there, we were talking about the Nordic conference, which was like two weeks later and I really wanted to stay in Europe for two weeks, but I couldn't manage it. So I came back, I turn around, I flew all the way back to Sweden two weeks later and participated in the Nordic conference, which is up on my YouTube and met, uh, dear Sweet Ruby and um, who is a Sweden, a Swedish attorney, and she's been working against us for many, many years.
(36:15):
So it was great. I met so great people. These stories are heartbreaking. Um, you know, I I will tell people I tried to use, uh, Google Translate while some of them were talking. It was kind of interesting and it was part of it worked. I could figure out some of it. But the, the voice needs to be international. That's the bottom line here. I have spoken to a member of Parliament, parliament in Australia and you know, I'm continuing, you know, to reach out. I have some followers in Canada, so I'm just continuing to reach out and I want this to be a larger international platform so we can raise our voices. I do have to get a little shout out to the American Bar Association because just a couple years ago they created the parent subcommittee, the parent representation subcommittee, and we sort of have a list serve of attorneys who are involved in parent representation. And this is the first time that we're really able to share across the nation some of the similar things that we see going on within the court system and everybody kinda reaching out in a different way to either try to help another attorney or to kind of talk about the, the direction that they're taking.
(37:28):
You need anybody to tag along ? I love international trips. So I, I, I have to say I do speak Spanish and Italian, but I'm not, not good enough to talk about all of this. No, I would get pretty hairy.
(37:42):
I'd love to have you. Yeah, there's actually, there's actually a conference in Paris, but I think it's like next week and you know, I had a, um, a bunch of deadlines and stuff that I had to meet in November. But yeah, I'm gonna be looking out for more international. I will also, I'm gonna go ahead and put this out there for everybody so that they can, if they just want to learn how to be a citizen activist, then they want to learn to have a voice to help us. We'll be making another trip to DC I anticipate February or March, they have not put out the new congressional calendar yet, so I am keeping my eyes open for that. We want to go, we have to get the congressional calendar so we can look at the weeks when they're in session so that there are people there. Uh, and even if, and you know, like I said, we don't really get to talk to Congress people that much, but you would be surprised sometimes you see them walking down the hall and so you've got to, you've got to know what their faces look like so that if you see one of them walking down the hall, you can just walk up to 'em and you can just put a, you know, put in that word.
(38:47):
We need to get somebody to just make a video game where you just replace the pictures every time you have different politicians to deal with and then learn how to match their names up with what they do, the committees they're on. And then we would go and be completely prepared.
(39:02):
Yeah, right, . Exactly.
(39:04):
There's money in that too. Right,
(39:07):
Right, right. Little clips. We need to take little clips. So of what, of famous things they've said so that people go in and they can actually say to Jim Jordan, they can be like, oh man, I loved it when you made that comment about right . Because of course they all love, they all have egos and they all want to be recognized, you know, for their hard work. So yeah.
(39:28):
Well thank you so much. This has been really great. Is there anything, anything final you wanna add to this before we go? Or are we good?
(39:37):
Okay, so, uh, I just would like people to know there is a website of family foundation.com and that website does have just a little contact form to put your email in as we're beginning to grow that website. Our most active place is either on TikTok, as you've seen, you can put in CPS and find a lot of information. And then I do have YouTube, it's just under my name. People can go on and just watch some of the videos. And then our Facebook group is called The Family Forward Project. And in that Facebook group is where we are, are constantly putting up stories from across the country, news stories we're putting up, just all kinds of information there. And then, um, and then we would also, you know, you can contact me through Messenger on Facebook is one good way to do it. And you know, I get tons of messages, but anybody who's interested I wanna make to help, I wanna make sure we talk.
(40:38):
Definitely. And we'll get this in the show notes on the uh, episode. And that's all we've got for today. Thank you very much everybody for listening to shout your cause.
(40:49):
Thank you for listening today. My name is Sally Hendrick. Be sure to visit our website for show notes and more information on how you can inspire others. If you would like to contribute content to our magazine, please apply on our website at shoutyourcause.com.
