- This month on The SPARK, our theme is "Caring for the Wellbeing and Welfare of Others".

We'll learn about a nonprofit serving our nation's combat-wounded veterans, Gold Star Spouses and their families, an organization sheltering those experiencing homelessness in a safe environment of hospitality, and a technology-enabled wellbeing program to improve the health of employees and reward them for their efforts.

We'll also share a special moment from our SPARK Awards 2023.

- From Higginbotham's founding in 1948, our insurance agency has been built on the values of customer service, leading with integrity, and supporting our community.

We believe in promoting the positives, encouraging engagement, and leading by example to power the good.

Higginbotham Insurance and Financial Services is honored to be the presenting sponsor of The SPARK.

[upbeat music] - (male announcer) Additional funding for The SPARK is provided by United Way of the Mid-South, EcOp, the Memphis Zoo, and by My Town Movers, My Town Roofing.

- Have you ever been excited by a new idea, inspired by watching someone lead by example?

When we talk about creating change, we start by sharing the stories of everyday heroes who are making a difference in their own way so we can learn and do the same.

I'm Jeremy Park and this is The SPARK.

They're a nonprofit serving our nation's combat-wounded veterans, Gold Star Spouses and their families.

We're here with Dave Lieske, Business Development Director with Military Warriors Support Foundation, national organization.

You're based here in Memphis, Dave.

Give us a little background for Military Warriors Support Foundation.

- Absolutely, Jeremy, great to see you again.

Yeah, so Military Warriors Support Foundation has been around for 17 years now this year.

And the mission has always been to help combat-wounded veterans transition from the military back to civilian life.

So, as we know the story, they get hit, they come home, and the transition piece is very difficult.

And we've been doing that through a number of different programs for, like I said, 17 years, partnering with some great individuals, companies to be able to make that happen.

And I mean, that's really what it's all about, is being able to help these heroes and Gold Stars Spouses as well be able to get back on their feet.

- One of the cornerstone programs is a mortgage-free home.

We've had the honor of presenting a mortgage-free home to a combat wounded veteran here in Memphis on the stage at a cityCurrent event.

Talk about that mortgage-free home program.

- Yeah, so the mortgage-free homes has always been one of our staple programs for us.

We started that back about 12 years ago when we had an opportunity to partner with some of the larger banks, and they were willing to be able to donate some of those.

And so our model has always been that we received donated homes from large banks or individuals that want to purchase those homes, and we go ahead and fix 'em up.

And at that point of being able to get those homes ready, the mission has always been to be able to donate those back to our heroes.

And that's the cool thing for us, is it's being able to see the life-changing effect that it has on families.

I mean, I've told you before and we've talked about it, but generations now, we're 17 years into this, generations are being changed.

And that's a big deal because for many of 'em, they may have been homeless.

For many of 'em, it just would've been a very difficult situation bouncing around and we're changing lives.

And our sponsors love that, but more importantly, man, I tell you what Jeremy, it's all about being able to give back.

And we're well over 1,000 mortgage-free homes and doing more every day.

- One of the things that makes the program so successful is a mentorship component.

Talk about that mentorship.

- So if you take a look at Military Warriors as a wheel and you've got the individual spokes as the programs, the hub of that that holds it all together is the mentoring program.

And so all of our heroes go through, if they receive a home, they go through a three-year family and financial mentoring program.

Why do we do that?

Because you could only imagine if you gave a young individual or a Gold Star Spouse, a home with really no type of mentoring, it would be catastrophic.

And we wanna set these families and these heroes up for success.

And so yeah, they go through a family and financial mentoring program.

We walk with them every month for three years.

They live in the house mortgage free, and at the end of three years we've reduced over $28 million in personal debt.

So they're debt free, they own the home outright, they understand the value of the asset.

We've got 'em on a budget for the taxes.

There's a whole slew of things that go into that mentoring program, but that's the key to it, setting them up to succeed and making sure that they understand what they're getting into.

And it's made all the difference in the world.

In fact, we've only had a handful out of the thousand that, to this day, haven't been able to stick with it.

So the cool thing is, is that we recognize where they are in that process and we can adjust it.

- One of the newer programs is providing transportation.

And so talk about the transportation and the donated vehicles.

- Yeah, Transportation4Heroes has been around now for a few years.

And as you can imagine, the homes are great.

It's been a huge success for us.

But the reality is, is that even with a home, some of these families and individuals need to be able to have a vehicle to go to their VA appointment, they need to go to doctor's visits.

Some of 'em obviously are working.

And so the vehicle program has been big.

It came out of a need that they asked us for.

And so, once again, we've been able to team up with some very large dealers, banks, individuals that want to donate vehicles.

And same thing, they go through a mentoring program to understand the value of the asset, of the vehicle.

And we walk with them for a year while they're obviously driving that payment-free vehicle, but then we award them the deeds of that vehicle, the title, if you will, after one year.

But once again, that mentoring process is big.

And the vehicle has been a nice add to what we do because everybody needs to be able to have some form of transportation.

And if you don't have that as a hero, it can be difficult.

- You have a number of other programs.

Give us a couple of ways though that we can get involved and support the organization.

- Yeah, I tell you what, I think being able to take a look at our community and being able to partner with a number of different events that we have.

And I'll just mention this, that we've got an incredible event coming up October 25th.

It's a golf tournament where we're gonna be honoring several, several heroes.

It's a military appreciation.

If you want information on that, email me dave@militarywarriors.org.

- And where do we go then to carry the conversation forward?

So website, social media, where do we go?

- Yeah, website's the best way to go.

Militarywarriors.org.

Lot of great videos.

You can take a look at what we do there as far as programs and individuals, and that's what it's all about.

- Well, Dave Lieske, thank you for all you and your amazing team do to power the good.

Thank you for coming on the show.

- Always a pleasure.

[upbeat music] - They're an organization sheltering those who are experiencing homelessness.

We're here with the Executive Director for Room in the Inn-Memphis, Reverend Lisa Anderson.

And let's start out, give us a little bit of history for Room in the Inn-Memphis.

- Hi, Room in the Inn-Memphis has been an organization for about 15 years.

We started as a mission to shelter people in a safe environment in congregations.

We have almost 50 congregations that participate in some way sheltering people who are literally street-level homeless, folks who need a free place that is safe in a small environment.

And so that's what we do mostly.

Our largest season is during the winter from November to March.

Then we take a month break and we start back in the summer to shelter women and children because there are so few emergency shelter spaces for women and children in the city.

So we have a summer season for them.

So that's our Congregational Shelter piece.

And we have two other programs that are about three years old now.

Recuperative Care Center is one of those.

And we have a Recuperative Care Center is a place where people who are experiencing homelessness, being discharged from the hospital, who are still medically fragile, not recovered yet from whatever put them in the hospital, and they come here for a place of recovery.

They get three meals a day, they have a private room with a private restroom, and they are recovering from whatever their illness was.

Our staff of social workers then do some case management, and very often we're able to have them go into housing from this program.

Another project is a family shelter, and we have 14 rooms for families.

Most of the time we see single parents with children, but we also have intact families.

And we've had moms with children and dads with children and grandparents and children.

So families look a lot of different ways in our building, but we provide shelter for families for a period of time while they are working on rapid rehousing or working on housing vouchers.

And so we have social workers that are working with those families also.

So those are the three programs that we have.

- Talk about the support services in a little more detail, because obviously you have the physical piece of providing the shelter, but the support services is a big part of where the magic happens.

- That's right.

Relationship building, feeling safe after they're here for a bit, and then having someone who is trained to navigate the resources, because there are resources, but the systems are very difficult, difficult for me.

So I can't imagine trying to parent a family of five children, get them to school, enroll them in school even is complicated sometimes because they've moved from place to place.

So we're just trying to help them to navigate the plan that they need for themselves, and that they're not alone in that.

Our social workers are walking alongside.

And that is true for the Recuperative Care Center also.

That you don't have to know all the things.

We're gonna help you navigate that.

And you make your own plan, but we are gonna walk with you along that plan, and hopefully that ends in a permanent place to live.

- You don't have to name names.

I know you have a ton of success stories.

Give us one that pops into your head.

- Sure, a recent one, it's not hard.

Sometimes people say, "Do you need a minute to think?"

No, I don't, I have 12.

So, [chuckles] but one that was recent, we had a gentleman who came to us from the hospital who had just had a double amputation.

He had no insurance and no income, so he received no rehab.

He received no additional care for that post-surgery that most everyone would get.

He just came to us straight after his surgery.

So lots of recovery time, lots of trying to find places for him to get rehab services.

But during that time we realized that no one had ever applied for disability for him, even though for 25 years he had lived on the street, and for the last decade had had severe health issues.

So our staff started applying for the services that he was entitled to.

And now he's living in his own apartment.

And after 25 years, reconnected with family, and his sister and his niece are visiting him often.

And he calls and says, "Letting you know I'm okay."

[chuckles] And that's beautiful.

- How does the community get involved and support Room in the Inn-Memphis?

So how can the community support your efforts?

- Well, of course, this takes a big effort, and we have hundreds of volunteers.

Our website has a place where people can get involved physically to be on our campus to help with Congregational Shelter.

There is a tab on our website if you wanna become a congregational host.

So your place of worship, your place where you go to express your faith can become a host.

And 12 to 15 people can be staying in your synagogue or in your church.

It's really amazing.

Then there's also opportunities to volunteer on campus and, of course, it takes a lot of resources.

So there's a Donate button there.

And I would love to have you become involved in that.

But the real magic is coming to visit us.

So go on the website and give us a call and make an appointment to come and see the building.

And that's where you get hooked.

You see what's happening here, and I would love to give you a tour.

- We'll wrap up with website.

Where do we go to learn more and get involved with Room in the Inn-Memphis?

- Ritimemphis.org will get you all the information you need.

- Well, Reverend Lisa Anderson, thank you for all you and your amazing team do to power the good.

Thank you for coming on the show.

- Thank you so much.

[upbeat music] - The SPARK Awards annually recognize and celebrate individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the community.

The 2023 Corporate Award for organizations with 101 to 499 employees went to Bioventus.

- Bioventus is a medical device company that has a base here in Memphis.

We focus on active healing through a surgical instruments as well as the rehab products, and then also the ultrasonic and ultrasound devices.

We do have also bone substitutes, so for patients that have a need to heal faster from substitutes of the bone, we provide those as well.

We are 166 people strong, team members strong.

It's been growing for us.

Just last year we were 110.

Since then, we hired about 40 to 50 people, and we continue to grow.

One of the biggest things that we contribute to the community is to the arthritis organization.

Obviously, that plays along with our mission.

It's something that we are actively healing, actively working with those kind of patients.

At least once a year, if not multiple times, we donated both financial support as well as our time.

Just this year alone, between combined time and money, we donated in excess about $40,000.

And we also had a largest fundraiser and attendance for the arthritis organization this year during the Walk at Shelby Farms.

One event that really galvanized a lot of our folks was the Dress for Success.

That was a huge success for us.

The employees had most probably fun.

The site had a fun, and, of course, the organization benefited from it.

The food bank drives were primarily driven by our site leadership team.

And then Rise Against Hunger was one that was promoted and individually who wanted to go and participate.

There is eight hours every year for every employee is paid to give to community.

Sometimes that's self-organized within employees themselves, get to pick an organization and support it, volunteer.

And some cases is on their own, individually.

So you may find yourself that you have opportunity with your family or through your faith organization to contribute, and you need to take four hours, eight hours, six hours to go to do so.

All we ask you to do, make sure that you properly document it, and then so that we can continue to show that we contribute to the organization, to the organizations in the Mid-South.

So any opportunity you can give to folks to do more than just come to work and do their minimum, let's say, right?

They tend to jump on, and for that reason, I believe we have a success in contributing to the community because of that drive towards just our mission as a medical device company, but also for the mission outside, what we call it Mission in Motion or Mission in Action.

[gentle music] - It's a technology-enabled wellbeing program.

We're talking BestHealth by Baptist, and we're honored to have Lia Lansky.

She is the System Director of Wellbeing with Baptist Memorial Health Care.

And let's start out, when you talk about wellbeing programs and the health of employees, why should every company have this sort of strategy?

Why does this matter?

- Hi, there.

Thank you for having me today.

For Baptist, it is a natural extension for us because we're in the business of helping others achieve their optimal wellbeing.

In order for us to take care of our patients, we need to take care of ourselves.

So healthy employees make happier employees, and healthier employees definitely have less missed days, and they're gonna help your business a little bit more by being there, being healthier and happier.

- Talk about why Baptist Memorial Health Care decided to launch BestHealth.

- Well, back in 2017, we were honored to get a grant of $1 million from our Baptist Foundation.

And we wanted to be able to establish a wellbeing program that really had the aim of transforming health and wellbeing of our own employee population.

The journey began with really just looking at our claims analysis, our clinical analysis, our pharmacy analysis, and really starting to develop processes and workflows that we can really dive in and look at risk stratification.

We began by hiring wellbeing specialists and nurses in the fields of exercise physiology, nutrition, health promotion.

And we started to implement engagement-based incentive model which rewards members for meeting a specific health outcome, or if they engage in activities that show their behavior change.

We launched our mobile app.

But I will say that we have lots of tools that are behind the scenes, but we do come out with a personalized approach to it.

We pick up the phone and call.

We email if we think that somebody would benefit from a particular program.

- Talk about working with the individuals and getting them so that their wellbeing is where they want it to be.

So when you talk about the mental health, the physical health, the spiritual health, kinda walk through that individual approach with the employees.

- Sure, so we do lots of one-on-one coaching either by a nurse or a wellbeing specialist in any area that you can imagine.

We do a diabetes program, we have weight management, tobacco cessation.

A big one, especially after COVID, was our emotional wellbeing program.

We partnered up with our CONCERN EAP program for that.

And then we also have a exercise prescription where we will design an exercise program and tailor it just for you.

And so the fact that we can look and have all these different, I guess, paradigms of wellbeing, they all go together in a holistic approach.

And that's kind of how we look at our program.

Traditionally, health plans just focus on maybe pregnancy, tobacco cessation, diabetes, complex care management, and they're often siloed.

So we take a holistic approach, and we want to manage a population.

And so population health has become a big buzzword and we want to make sure that we are delivering a personalized, person-centered, holistic approach to address all health across the spectrum.

We also wanna look not only at the healthy folks and not at the people that have chronic diseases, we wanna look at at-risk too.

So when folks do our HRA, our health risk assessment and their biometric screening, it gives us their five-year predicted chronic disease risk and what factors that we can look at to modify.

And then that's how we would tailor a program for each individual.

- Part of this too, for the companies is obviously improved employee health, but rewarding their employees for good health and wellbeing.

And so talk about that aspect.

- It is so important to have an incentive.

We use a gift card mall to have folks go in and redeem their rewards, and it's around the holiday time, so people love it.

And it works.

You have to incentivize.

You would think just having health, being healthy would be the best reward you can get.

But if you're designing a program, having those incentives, people get excited about that.

And so that really has helped driven our percentage of our population to participate in our program.

- Talk about the technology-enabled app.

- So we have an app that we use, and we can do lots of different challenges on it.

It will hook up to your Fitbit or your Apple Watch.

We can do all those challenges, you can get it synced to do a lot of different things.

And we love to have challenges here, whether it's physical challenges, we have nutrition challenges, wellbeing, emotional wellbeing challenges.

Gratitude is a big one that we like to share with everybody.

And so our tech will allow us to really go in and talk to the individual through the app or the portal.

So our population has the choice, if they wanna it on their cell phone, great.

If they wanna do it on the desktop, that's fine too.

But again, we have all the technology that you could imagine, especially in the background when we're risk stratifying and when we're going through trying to see what gaps we need to fill.

But also I wanna extend the notion that we do like to have a personalized approach, and we reach out and call and invite folks to our programming.

- So where do we go to learn more about BestHealth by Baptist?

- Yes, you can go to baptistonline.org/besthealth.

Or you can call 901-227-2378.

- Well, Lia, thank you for all you and your amazing team do to power the good.

Thank you for coming on the show.

- Thank you for having me.

[upbeat music] - Here in the Mid-South, we're fortunate to have countless organizations and individuals who are caring for the wellbeing and welfare of others.

Part of living together in community means looking out for each other and being there to lend a helping hand when needed.

As we saw, organizations like Military Warriors Support Foundation are caring for the wellbeing and welfare of our veterans by providing programs that facilitate a smooth and successful transition for our nation's combat-wounded heroes and Gold Star families.

Those programs focus on housing, transportation, outdoor recreation and leadership development with a wraparound mentorship program to transform lives.

Room in the Inn-Memphis is caring for the wellbeing and welfare of those experiencing homelessness, providing shelter and support services, hope and hospitality to individuals and families in need.

And BestHealth by Baptist is helping organizations care for the wellbeing and welfare of their employees through a customized approach and a technology-enabled program that can improve the health of employees and reward them for their efforts.

Caring for the wellbeing and welfare of others lifts our community and enriches our own lives.

So where can you help power the good and become a spark?

To learn more about each of the guests, to watch past episodes and to share your stories of others leading by example, visit wko.org, and click on the link for The SPARK.

We look forward to seeing you next month.

We hope you'll continue joining with us to create a spark for the Mid-South.

- From Higginbotham's founding in 1948, our insurance agency has been built on the values of customer service, leading with integrity and supporting our community.

We believe in promoting the positives, encouraging engagement, and leading by example to power the good.

Higginbotham Insurance and Financial Services is honored to be the presenting sponsor of The SPARK.

[upbeat msuic] [acoustic guitar chords]