The Plain Values Podcast EP #03 – Tristan Griffin on the joy of trials

Tristan Griffin:

And then just sitting in front of the ball wall in Akron Children’s and just crying my eyes out and just so many things go through your mind. How’s the world going to treat my child? What are her opportunities going to look like? So often typically abled people, and I’m not trying to poo on this at all, but often they approach scout or special needs families with pity like, oh man, I’m so sorry. And man, I want to be like, don’t be sorry for us. The amount of love and joy.

Marlin Miller:

This morning I had a chance to sit down with Tristan Griffin from Farming with Friends. He has an incredible story of coming out of a hard early childhood, harder and what God has done with his life. He didn’t waste a thing, and the family that they have today and the work that they get to do is absolutely out of my wife and i’s heart and out of our dreams for our own children and for a better approach to community, for taking care of kids that have special needs. Absolutely. Just a joy. So I have no doubt you’re going to absolutely love this conversation. This podcast is sponsored by my friends at Azure Standard. A while back, I had a chance to sit down with the founder, David Stelzer, right here at the table, and we had a great conversation. I love the Azure story. They started out as farmers back in the seventies, and I think in 1987 they began a nationwide food distribution company. And guys, they are non GMO Organic. They do it right, they do it so well, and you can get a truck to drop food right in your town. Check ’em out@azurestandard.com and tell ’em Marlin and Plain values sent Sentia.

Just simply introduce yourself.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah,

Marlin Miller:

I mean, jump right in.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. So I’m Tristan Griffin. I’m the executive director of a nonprofit called Farming with Friends. We employ people with disabilities on a farm in Bath, Ohio. I’ve got a beautiful wife, Melanie and four kiddos. Scout is our oldest, she’s seven. We’ve got twins, Bingham and Tilly that are five. And then we’ve got a three-year-old baby girl named Dossie.

Marlin Miller:

So you and I got to meet through a mutual friend and we were able to hang out a bit. You were born in Texas, right?

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right.

Marlin Miller:

Met a girl up here

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right

Marlin Miller:

In Ohio, moved. And you were an attorney. That’s right. Yeah, in Texas. Just run me through the first 20 years of your

Tristan Griffin:

Existence here. Okay, yeah. So born in Northeast Texas and grew up in a home where mom and dad split early on. Dad was on the road a lot and mom brought stepfather into the home at an early age, and it was a rough time. He didn’t treat me real well. I was sort of the proverbial redheaded stepchild, so to speak, for a lot of my childhood. And he brought stepbrother with him who was also abusive toward me early on. And so as a small child man, I just was full of confusion and pain and just felt really alone. And so I ran to sports as sort of my release, the place where I could find some sort of freedom. And so if it had a ball, I played it as a child, football, baseball, basketball, ran track, played soccer for a year, thought, man, that’s way too much running.

So I’m done playing soccer and really just kind of carried all of this through my adolescence, got into high school, picked up drinking drugs, relationships, and sort of this performance-based addiction trying to prove to the world that there was nothing wrong with me. And so carried that through high school and developed poor mental health in high school anxiety attacks all day every day. Grew up in a home where we didn’t really talk about things of depth a ton. So it was more just sweep it under the rug, muscle up, keep going through life. And so carried all of that with me on into college at Texas Tech University where I studied energy commerce, oil and gas Texas thing. And then went from there to law school at the University of Texas, and so was in law school and a few different things were going on.

One, I just didn’t enjoy the subject matter nearly as much as I thought I would. It’s not like the TV shit. It’s not like law and order in a courtroom daily. Two, I saw a lot of people in that profession who had pursued a paycheck at the expense of their personal health and their family health and really just didn’t want that to be me growing up with sort of the turmoil that I had. I didn’t want to do it to my children. And lastly, and what really rocked the boat the most for me was tragedy hit my family and my cousin shot and killed his mom and sister.

Marlin Miller:

No kidding.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. And so here I was struggling with mental health issues. That was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back, sent me on a downward spiral towards suicidal thoughts. And you’re how old at this point when that happened? I am in my second year of law school, so 24 years old. But it made me think about life a heck of a lot differently, man. It made me start to ask questions, what’s important in life? What type of impact do I want to make? What do I want to do with the rest of my life? And so those moments were actually the catalyst for the decision that brought me to Ohio. So decided in those moments to transition, finish law school, take the bar exam, but transition out of law into coaching college football. And here I was a guy who never played a down of college football.

So ended up sending letters to every head coach and offensive coordinator in the country while I was still in my last year of law school, asking if I could work their summer camps for free as sort of an interview to get on their coaching staff in the fall and worked four or five summer camps. And one of the coaches at Texas Tech University where I went to undergrad knew the head coach at Tiffin University in Tiffin, Ohio. So I called the guy, he said, yeah, man, I’ll bring you up here. I’ll pay you $3,000 a year to coach college football. And I did just what I did there, cleared my throat and swallowed the lump and was like, okay, you’re quite generous. So ended up telling him, Hey man, I’m going to have to sit on that, see if anything else pops up. Nothing did. So I took the bar exam and drove to Tiffin the next day, and it was the first cornfields I’d ever seen in my life driving to Tiffin, Ohio. Yeah, started coaching college football.

Marlin Miller:

Did you pass the bar?

Tristan Griffin:

I passed the bar.

Marlin Miller:

Passed the bar. First time.

Tristan Griffin:

First time, yeah. Licensed attorney in the state of Texas, which does nothing for you when you’re in Ohio, but started coaching and met my beautiful wife there. Yeah, she was coaching softball at Tiffin while I was coaching football. That’s where I became much more serious about my faith. And so worked at Tiffin for a couple of years before transitioning to a large nonprofit called Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Worked for them for seven and a half years, had a child with a disability in 2018, and started doing sports camps for people with disabilities. But then got to the point to where we launched our own nonprofit in 23 to employ people with disabilities. Can

Marlin Miller:

I go back?

Tristan Griffin:

Oh yeah.

Marlin Miller:

I want to go back to your childhood, going through all of those hard things. Did you have a guy, a mentor, a coach that took you under his wing and said, dude, how did that come about? Because it seems to me, excuse me, it seems to me that for you to walk through that and then come out, not bitter, not, it seems like it’s a pretty mature approach to life. How did that come about?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah, so I think a combination of things. I think mostly my father’s family is just full of incredible people, and I didn’t realize it in hindsight. I spent a lot of time around my paternal grandfather and paternal grandmother as a young child and just had an infatuation with my paternal grandfather, I mean the grandfather grandson relationship. We just had a ton of fun. But he passed whenever I was probably 12, and I became a lot closer with my paternal grandmother at the time, started spending more time with her, going to church with her, those types of things. And really, as I got older, I began to understand what an incredible woman she was and the Christian bedrock within that family that was setting the tone for a level of love and generosity, like you wouldn’t believe in that family. And so I got a lot of examples of that, but also you’re quite insightful in your question. So the transition into coaching was spurred in many ways by a coach that I had in high school.

He might’ve called me some names that he probably shouldn’t have on the football field, but the guy cared about my integrity off the field and really instilled in me a discipline and a deep care for excellence in life. And that was something that in transitioning to coaching that I wanted to go help and provide others with. And so a combination of many things. I will say that at some point in my late twenties, I started to have children and reflected upon my childhood, and certainly a lot of my emotions regarding childhood popped up then, and I had to work through some really challenging emotions regarding the things that happened during my childhood. But yeah, ultimately it’s hard to answer the question, why did I spin off this way and others spin off the other way. But I think those are some factors.

Marlin Miller:

Do you have any siblings?

Tristan Griffin:

I do. Yeah. So I’ve got three half siblings. My sister is eight and a half years younger than me. I just had the privilege of marrying her two weekends ago. I was in Texas.

Marlin Miller:

Really?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. It was awesome. Yeah, no kidding.

Marlin Miller:

Are you guys close?

Tristan Griffin:

Eight and a half years apart. So the gap is enough that you didn’t grow up right there with one another. But we both have such a deep love and respect for one another. She’s an incredible young woman. So we talk, but not as often as a lot of siblings. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Excuse me. Again, I grew up in high school being a skater and a snowboarder, I did not play team sports. The older I get, the more I realize the massive impact that a coach can have. And it’s something that I never experienced myself as I got older. But now I definitely appreciate a lot more than I did back then.

Tristan Griffin:

Absolutely.

Marlin Miller:

So you go to Tiffin, did you coach, and I think you said this, you were with Tiffin for a few years and then went to FCA?

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right.

Marlin Miller:

Yep. Okay.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. So no, go ahead.

Marlin Miller:

Got married, stayed in Tiffin. Did you travel the world with FCA, doing their things or?

Tristan Griffin:

So ultimately, we actually, I was in Tiffin for two years. We got married as we moved to Akron to start working for FCA. So FCA brought us to Akron. I became the Akron area director in 2016, and I tell everybody I was a legally trained football coach who jumped into developing an organization and had no idea what he was doing. And FCA provides some quality training, but I was 27 years old. It was kind of a pat on the butt, go get ’em Tiger

Marlin Miller:

Moment. You could do

Tristan Griffin:

It. That’s right. Yeah. And FCA within Akron was no board, no staff, no funding. So it was essentially taking an organization from the ground up. And I had just moved there. Of course, being from Texas, no connections, anything like that. You

Marlin Miller:

Don’t know it. You don’t know anybody. No. Was your wife connected in any way? I mean, she grew up in Tiffin

Tristan Griffin:

Area. She grew up on the west side of, even farther west than Tiffin. So she grew up in Salina, so she’s three hours away from there as well. And I like to tell everybody, man, we scratched and fought and clawed for everything we got for those first four and a half years with FCA. So is

Marlin Miller:

FCA, it’s probably similar to Young Life where you have an area director, you go build a board, you go build your funding, and you go do the work.

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right.

Marlin Miller:

How many kids did you end up having in your club?

Tristan Griffin:

So ultimately, I oversaw Summit Portage in bits of Medina County. And we had, by the time I was finished there, somewhere around 25 different schools within our reach running about 20 kids a week, something like that. So do the math with that 500 a week, something like that, that we’re going through FCAs programming. But beyond that, like I said, we had Scout in 18 and started doing sports camps for people with disabilities within the FCA umbrella. And that was really our wheelhouse. By the time we finished, we launched FCAs first sports camp for people with disabilities in 21, within 45 days of opening registration, we had over a hundred campers registered. No. So we knew we were onto something incredible, and so did FCA as a global organization. And so they said, Hey, let’s launch this thing globally. And so really I spent the last two years with FCA managing what we had in Akron, but helping to replicate that across the country and occasionally internationally.

Marlin Miller:

So in 21, scout is three years old.

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right, yeah.

Marlin Miller:

What does she actually have?

Tristan Griffin:

She has something called Smith McGinnis Syndrome. And I’ll back it up for you. So our beautiful baby girl, first child born March 8th, 2018, and we find out at about the nine month mark. She still hadn’t cried. We could layer on our back not once, no, which is a parent’s dream in many anyway, A lot of people will be like, man, that’s incredible. But obviously it starts to tip off the radar a little bit about, Hey, what’s going on here? We could layer on her back and she wouldn’t roll over. So the doctor said, Hey, let’s just keep an eye on this. She was behind developmentally. We got to her 18 month checkup and the doctor found a heart murmur, and she was still behind developmentally. So he said, Hey, let’s go down two paths here. Let’s start testing the heart, see what’s going on there, and let’s start doing some genetic testing to see if this is a genetic mutation or something like that. And so we start down that path. We find out that the heart murmur is going to require, it was an innocent heart murmur, but the scans on the heart showed us that she needed heart surgery at 21 months. And so we went into heart surgery December 19th, 2020, 2019. And while she was having heart surgery, the geneticist called us with her diagnosis

Marlin Miller:

At the exact time

Tristan Griffin:

While she was under the knife. So it was like this double whammy of whoa. And man, I remember being in Akron Children’s Hospital and my daughter gets out of surgery, she’s all wired up everywhere. Of course, she’s on cloud nine young kids going through this stuff. They bounce back so fast. But Melanie and I are just in sort of a fog trying to process all of this. And I remember going downstairs to the gift shop and buying her a book that had a bunch of quotes from Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers neighborhood. He’s one of my favorites. And then just sitting in front of the ball wall in Akron Children’s and just crying my eyes out and just so many things go through your mind. How’s the world going to treat my child? What are her opportunities going to look like? Those types of things.

So yeah, it was a tough month for Melanie and I to sort of walk through that and process it. But yeah, so Scout is seven now. She has progressed quite a bit. She, she’s a couple years behind her peers, physically, behaviorally, mentally, socially, those types of things, still has a hard time figuring out how to fit into social situations. She’s a social butterfly man. That girl, you can’t get her to do a task at all. You’ll have to tell her 15 times between her bedroom and the bathroom. Hey, scout, go to the bathroom scout, go to the bathroom. But she will talk your ear off. We will walk into a restaurant and she’ll walk straight up to a 60-year-old man and say, Hey, I’m Scout. What’s your name? At years old. And I tell people that little girl can love people better than I’ll ever be able to. At seven years old,

Marlin Miller:

I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody that has a child with Smith McIn. Smith

Tristan Griffin:

McInnis. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

But it sounds a lot like Down Syndrome in some ways

Tristan Griffin:

In presentation. Very similar.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. Just a quick goofy story. So we do a little bit of equine therapy with our

Tristan Griffin:

Kids,

Marlin Miller:

And Lisa told me that our daughter, Adelaide, God, she walks into the barn and sits down next to this guy named Delbert and looks up and says, hi, I’m Addie. What’s your name? Just like Scalp. And he goes, my name’s Delbert. And Addie goes, hi, Delbert, you go into heaven. And it sparked no filter, this fantastic little conversation. And Lisa said, it was just the innocence and the joy and the Purity. It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. It’s so fantastic, I think. Yeah, kids with special needs. So let me ask you, you, on a 50,000 foot level, why do you and Melanie think that the Lord brings, I don’t want to say brings, but allows children with special needs? Oh my

Tristan Griffin:

Goodness, man. And this is part of why I do what I do professionally. I think just to your point, your story with Addie, right? If the rest of the world could interact that way, what a different world we would have. And I think for me, they’re sort of the undercover ninjas of our world. I think of Scout and so often typically abled people, and I’m not trying to ppo on this at all, but often they approach scout or special needs families with pity like, oh man, I’m so sorry.

And man, I want to be like, don’t be sorry for us. The amount of love and joy and sort of this raw, unfiltered way of living that we have received from Scout and has radically shifted the way that we view the world. I’m a highly educated pursue the carrot kind of guy, at least early on in my life and have been slowly working my way out of that for years. But when I see that I have a daughter who, she’ll never graduate from Harvard, she’ll never be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but again, that little girl will out love me day to day, all day long. And if you want to get down to what’s really important in this world, it’s not being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. How well did you love your brother and your sister? And man, that’s for me, again, a big part of why I do what I do professionally as well, because it’s so often we bring typically abled people into what we’re doing professionally, and they come thinking, I’m going to help these people with disabilities, which is an incredible motivation. It’s great. But nine times out of 10, they walk away. The one transformed. Yeah,

It goes the other way around. Their perspective is transformed. I love the environment that a scouter and Addie creates because all of a sudden this pride and ego that us typically abled, people often bring into the room unknowingly, even it disappears. You can’t beat your chest in the presence of an Addie who’s just saying, Hey, you going to heaven. You can’t. It just trips the room of that so fast, and I love that. That’s why call it like the undercover ninja. You just can’t. There’s no way to combat what they bring into an environment.

Marlin Miller:

There are so many times that I get to meet families that have kids with Down syndrome or a bunch of different special needs, and they won the lottery. Absolutely. In many ways, they won the lottery, and they might not be able to see it yet, but it makes a better family. My dad used to say, he used to say, A lot of people think that when someone has a baby with a special need, they go, oh, you’re special. God chose you. And they say, you must be special because it takes a great family for God to drop that in your lap. And Pop would say, you know what? It doesn’t take a great family. It makes a great family.

Tristan Griffin:

Amen. Pop. Yeah,

Marlin Miller:

And it’s so good. It’s so real. How do you think your other children have been changed?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Scout is the oldest, right?

Tristan Griffin:

Yes.

Marlin Miller:

She’s the firstborn.

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right, man. And that’s the beauty of it. She’s the firstborn. And as you know, the firstborn shapes the culture for your children in so many ways. And so scouts just cavalier social nature and just

Marlin Miller:

Grab light. Bled

Tristan Griffin:

Over. Yeah, bled over into our other children. I just told you that I went and presided over the wedding of my sister two weekends ago, Texas. And that dance floor after the wedding for two hours was my children dancing with themselves, dancing with strangers, tackling. They’re basically playing football, but they live life in this really, it seems odd almost to watch children live the way that they live. But so much of it comes from Scout because she doesn’t have those boundaries. She doesn’t come with the social norms that the rest of us come with or the embarrassment or whatever it might be. She just gets out there and dances because, and

Marlin Miller:

There’s no disc.

Tristan Griffin:

It’s

Marlin Miller:

Just everything that she feels and is. You see, it’s bled over into our children, for

Tristan Griffin:

Sure. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

So let’s talk about the farm. Yeah. My wife and I, you don’t understand how much we adore what you guys are doing. Thank you. So for that little bit, just know that it’s unbelievable. How did it come about? Where did the vision come from? How did little two, 3-year-old Scout

Take you guys down this road to Yeah. This episode of the Plain Values Podcast is being sponsored by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. Derek and I have spent a lot of time on the phone and on Zoom calls, which you know how I feel about Zoom calls. But anyway, Derek has told me time and time again how far people travel to come and get their wood from flooring to trim to anything and everything. Wood guys, there’s a reason that people are driving across the country to go to Kentucky in the middle of a little 200 person town. They are family, they are friends, they have great customer service. There is a reason that people are traveling that far. You can find them@drywallhaters.com.

Tristan Griffin:

So I hope the statute of limitations has run on this, but we had an illegal backyard flock of chickens in Akron, and this was mid middle of COVID. As we’re kind of figuring out her diagnosis, we launched this little flock of chickens and a poor excuse for a garden. But I was out there doing this stuff and noticed that as we continued having children, all of my children would be out there taking care of the garden and the chickens with me during the summer, but only one of them would be with me during the winter. It’d be scalp. She just lit up in that environment. The little girl could dig in the dirt for an hour and be on cloud nine. It was just something about it gave her a different level of grounding, which it does for all of us, but it really seemed to resonate with her. And so I would say that’s probably part of where the spark started. I was also having migraine issues. I had debilitating migraines for about nine years, once, twice a month where I’d be knocked down for 24, 48 hours and

Marlin Miller:

Just flat.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. Oh man. I’d have to lay down and just take a nap. I mean, I couldn’t accomplish anything. And went to doctors and bounced around a little bit, realized that they probably weren’t going to figure anything out. So started to just play around with my own diet and lifestyle and recognized that a lot of it was inflammation related that was related to my diet. And so that sent me down the path of studying the food chain and all garbage that’s going into our food. And I say that as somebody who still eats a lot of the garbage. See, I’m not trying to beat up on anybody, but man, I read a book called The Omnivores Dilemma, and it was really eyeopening with respect to, and Joel s is featured in that book. You were just saying you had Joel on a couple of weeks ago.

So here I’ve got the diet issues, I’m seeing this in Scout, and then also just kind of hit a professional fork in the road with FCA. And that coincided with a friend who bought an 87 acre farm in Hinkley. And so I’m, I’m talking with Tim, trying to figure out what’s the path forward and share with him that we’ve had this dream of a farm that employs people with disabilities on our heart. I always thought that I would maintain my full-time job. We would buy a small piece of land and ramp up one of our operations when scout aged out of school, and that way she’d have something. But I’m sharing this with him and he says, Hey man, I bought this farm. We don’t really have a plan for it. What do you think about launching this nonprofit on the farm? He said that

Marlin Miller:

He did.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah,

Marlin Miller:

He said that. Yeah. Yep.

Tristan Griffin:

And

Marlin Miller:

You’ve got the legal background for you to run through. All of that is easy,

Tristan Griffin:

Simple stuff. Able to manage that. March 23, started filing paperwork, and then I quit my job with FCA September 1st of 23 and started with farming with friends. Yep. Full-time for 20 months now. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. So you have chickens laying and meat birds. That’s right.

Tristan Griffin:

Yep.

Marlin Miller:

Do you have

Tristan Griffin:

Sheep? We have, I

Marlin Miller:

Believe. Do you have any cows?

Tristan Griffin:

No, not yet. No, not yet. The staff joke. So I’m a Texas guy, right. So cows are near and dear to my, some odd reason.

Marlin Miller:

Cannot imagine why.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. So I’d love to have cattle in the future, but the property we’re currently on doesn’t have a permanent fence. And so it’s one thing for a sheep to get out on the road. It’s another thing for a cow to get out on the road. Not yet on the cattle, but we do have a lot of veggies and flowers as well. We run a large greenhouse operation and outdoor garden.

Marlin Miller:

Tell me about the marketing. Tell me about the sales. Is it, it’s not really built as a CSA, it’s more of a farm market where I could come up and I could buy.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. So ultimately we sell at the market and we do a lot of online sales with pickup on the farm, so direct to consumer. Our original goal when we were in Hinkley was to build a farm store. We had to shift that model because we switched locations. So we’re in Bath now. We’ve gone more a direct to consumer model where people can order online and then pick up on the farm on specific days.

Marlin Miller:

Are you taking lambs to slaughter and selling?

Tristan Griffin:

Yes. Yep. Yeah, so we’ll have

Marlin Miller:

Very nice

Tristan Griffin:

Lamb starting this fall. We process our own meat chickens, but anything bigger than a meat chicken, we outsource for processing. So yeah, meat, chicken, eggs, lamb, all sorts of veggies, man. I mean, you name it. We’re growing it probably down to kale and all of it. Oh yeah. Kale, Swiss chard. Lettuce right now are the big things. Bok Choy was a crazy seller at the farmer’s market last weekend. So

Marlin Miller:

Can you tell me about the kids that are there?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah, so ultimately our three main pushes are a style of farming called regenerative farming, which I know you’ve touched base on now a little bit. And then our second push is employment of people with disabilities. And then our third is community engagement. So bringing the community out onto the farm. And ultimately our goal with those second two pieces, one is employment of people with disabilities. And so as we started to project scout’s future, we were wondering what her employment opportunities would look like. And then we also just saw that there’s a huge gap in the space for people with disabilities when they age out of school. What do they do is the big question for a lot of families, a lot of parents, and for some it means sitting on mom and dad’s couch and watching tv. For others, it means going into a day program, and it’s not to PPO on day programs.

There are a lot of really good day programs out there, but it’s sort of like daycare, so to speak, or to go get a job. And a lot of the job offerings, from my perspective being the parent of a child with a disability are they’re not pulling out the full potential of the person that’s going into it. It might be highlighting a receipt or something like that, and maybe that is the full potential and capability of that human. But we set out to try and provide something that would really help people with disabilities engage in the world in a way that they felt fulfilled to make a meaningful impact that they could see in the world. And so that’s what we’re trying to do with respect to that piece of it. We’re not government affiliated in any way. A lot of organizations in our space are what you call certified service providers. And so ultimately the government pays them to provide job training for people with disabilities. We set out not to do it that way. We want what we do to be as close as possible to a typical job for our employees while providing the needed supports.

Marlin Miller:

Are you tied into churches at all? Are there some that are helping?

Tristan Griffin:

So we have a lot of churches that help support us financially. And then we also have a lot of churches that send large groups of people to volunteer on the farm.

Marlin Miller:

Really?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. So that’s our last piece of the puzzle is the community engagement piece. And so at this point, we have two volunteer groups a month that come out to the farm during the warmer months of the year to help us out. We just had Charles Schwab brought 16 people out last week, and then the Medina County Career Center brought about eight people out this past Monday to help us build garden beds. We do a lot of farm tours, three to five farm tours a week throughout the warmer months as well. And our goal with the community engagement piece is to create as many collisions as possible between typically able people and people with disabilities. I don’t believe people with disabilities are intentionally excluded most of the time. I think a lot of times typically able, people are just afraid to jump into that space. I don’t want to do the wrong thing. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. So our goal is to create a non-threatening environment where they can come out to the farm, pick up a shovel alongside of one of our employees. See, we’re both a little quirky, but it’s a two-way street. We can love one another and help one another and serve one another.

Marlin Miller:

Do you think, so this is a bit of a longer question here. It seems to me that number one, the employment issue for kids that have special needs is a big deal. It’s a big deal. There’s a lot that don’t have anything going on. The second part of that, I think is the bigger question for me, to your point about folks not knowing what to do or how to be or how to treat other kids that have different abilities, why? How can we help other families go from this assumption of incompetence and not being able to do anything to actually looking for the ability and assuming the competence? That’s something that has just been in the back of my mind for a long time just with our own kids and just watching things like farming with friends.

Tristan Griffin:

And it’s a brilliant question. And I think for me, it’s one of those things where as much as I’d like to gather a group of a million people and shout that message to them, it doesn’t work that way. And you could never download into their heart that information whether or not they hear it. And so again, for us, we’re trying to create that opportunity one person at a time experientially where they can come out to the farm and see, have their perspective shifted on that exact topic where it’s like, Hey, hold on. This whole sort of, and again, I’m calling it a pity model, but again, I am not trying to beat up on it. I too share that model at times. It’s hard to pull that lens away from your eyes at times, but man, to get people out there and to see, I’ve got an employee right now, his name is Alex. That guy will outwork anybody you put on that farm, I guarantee it. You can find your hardest worker. Alex will outwork him all day long. And it’s like, come to the farm and watch Alex and then tell me, Hey, we should probably put this guy in a room and he should, again, I’m just using this goofy example, highlight a receipt or whatever. It’s like Alex has got some really incredible capabilities. Let’s unleash him in that space. Let’s see what he can do. Yeah,

Marlin Miller:

It is amazing when you strip all that away, when you just peel that layer back, it seems to me that it comes back down to real change. Real heart change really comes inside of that one-on-one relationship and having real conversation and having the ability to argue and to disagree and to still respect each other.

Tristan Griffin:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

But how often does it actually

Tristan Griffin:

Happen? I think so often too, coming from my own past, the temptation is to think so big with it is to think I want to change the world. And that’s a great goal. But again, drawing it back down to the day to day of just one person at a time is really, really important. And it’s hard to do. It is. It’s very hard. Yeah, absolutely. Because yeah, I want to go back to, I need everybody to know this now. And it’s like, ah, if you’re approaching it that way, there’s probably not going to be a ton of people who figure it out.

Marlin Miller:

Pop passed away at 55. He was 55, I’m 48 now. He’s 55, and that’s 14 years ago. And he had a way of boiling things down really, really simply. And the older I get, the more I appreciate the wisdom in that. And he would say things like, Marlon, don’t ever forget. You’re just one guy. You’re just one man, but you are one man. And those little things, man, I just miss him. It just me. I just long to be able to sit and have a cup of coffee and talk. So what do you see in the future for the farm?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah, ultimately for me, we shifted from doing sports camps for people with disabilities, to employing people with disabilities, mainly because rather than going broad or shallow with a ton of people, we wanted to go deep with a few, right?

Marlin Miller:

Think I’ve seen that model someplace

Tristan Griffin:

Else. I’m not sure. Yeah, obviously it’s a great piece of wisdom, but ultimately hard to carry out again because, so we’re a nonprofit, right? And so I’m trying to fundraise constantly what the community wants to see or grant making organization wants to see is how many people are you impacting? And it’s like, well, if I go back to the sports camp model, I can impact 500 people in one. But if I do this, I’ve got seven people on the farm multiple days a week, 365 days a year. And for me, that is far more important, far more impactful than the one time a year. And so ultimately for me, we just want to get to the point to where maybe we’re employing 10 to 15 people with disabilities on the farm on a yearly basis. For every three or four people with disabilities, we’ll have one typically abled employee to walk alongside of ’em, help ’em out. There’s not, at least at this point, a ton of aspirations of trying to blow this thing up, take it global. If it happens organically, awesome. And I would love to help others model this elsewhere, but ultimately we just want to create a really hot fire right here where we’re at and let it grow organically from there.

Marlin Miller:

So on the financial side of the nonprofit, how much of your overall needed revenues are coming from the farm?

Tristan Griffin:

So from product sales, a very small percentage. So I tell our employees, we are a nonprofit that happens to farm, not a farm that happens to nonprofit. You can imagine with my background being in the nonprofit space, my wheelhouse is much more the fundraising development, business development side of things. It’s not the farming side of things. There’s a lot of people who can grow a better sheep than I can. And so ultimately, our aspirations from an operation standpoint on the farm are not, again, not to grow this farm massive. We just want to have enough operations to give our employees a quality, meaningful job. We want to produce quality food for our community that we can sell to the community so that our employees can see the impact that they’re making. And then we can also just benefit the community from quality sales. But ultimately donations are 90% of our revenue at this point.

Marlin Miller:

How can we pray for you

Tristan Griffin:

Guys? So we have within the last 20 months launched in a way that I, having been in the nonprofit world for 10 years, having launched something that was taken to the global level, I have never seen anything come close to taking off. This organization is taking off from a community backing standpoint. Really it is. I’m telling you, if we can make it through the first five difficult years, this thing will be around for 50. It is amazing to watch the people coming out of the woodwork to help us out, whether that be financially, whether it be from a volunteer hour standpoint, product sales, whatever it might be. So ultimately, we’ve launched really, really well, and now we find ourselves in a stage of figuring out what it looks like to put quality systems and processes in place to help sustain this thing for the longterm.

Figuring out what it looks like from a roles and responsibility standpoint to really, because when you get something off the ground, your hair’s on fire, you’re running in a million different directions. Excuse me, just trying to make sure you bring revenue in. And at this point it is. Now we’re sort of shifting gears into, okay, what does it look like to set this thing up for long-term sustainability? And so I really think for us right now, it’s a prayer for clarity regarding our structuring moving forward and the courage to carry that out because it’s not always easy. I think I’ve got a business coach who uses the metaphor of new wineskins or even of a snake molting, and as a business grows, there comes a time to mt, to shed to become sort of a new thing. And we’re very much in that stage right now of figuring out, okay, we are 20 months in. We’ve done an incredible job up to this point. What does it look like for us to become the new thing moving forward? Does that make sense?

Marlin Miller:

I think it does.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Those are really, really hard seasons for sure. They can be really tough seasons. Absolutely. Yeah. Does your wife Melanie work on the farm as well?

Tristan Griffin:

Tristan? She does not. Yeah, she stays at home. She homeschools our children.

Marlin Miller:

Really?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah. We’re a fellow homeschooling family. That’s so cool. Yeah, so she does that with four kids, seven and under. That is a full-time job.

Marlin Miller:

That’s a load.

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

How can we pray for Scout for you and your wife, for your other children?

Tristan Griffin:

So we just had to move farms in March. We moved houses in April, and so it’s been a transition for our family as well. Wait, you moved the farms in March and your family moved

Marlin Miller:

In April?

Tristan Griffin:

That’s right. Yeah, so we’re on two different properties, farms on one property. We’re on a different property south of the farm, and the kids are transitioning well, but Scout seems to be, she’s maybe struggling through it a little bit more. She’s had a few more meltdowns lately and my wife carries the brunt of that. And so I think we’re trying to figure out as a family as well, what does it look like to shift into this new season? And in many ways, what’s currently going on for my wife is not sustainable for the long haul. She’s struggling quite a bit with a child with a disability and three other young children, and so we’re just trying to figure out what that looks like as well as we move forward. It’s such a busy season, such a busy season with four young kiddos, and so we’re just trying to figure out how to manage that well right now.

Marlin Miller:

Well, yeah, we will definitely, definitely do that. How can people find farming with friends?

Tristan Griffin:

Yeah, so our website is www.farmingwithfriends.org, and so you can go there to our homepage and sign up for our email newsletter that keeps you updated on everything Farming with friends wise. Or you can go to Facebook and follow us. Farming With Friends is the name of the group there.

Marlin Miller:

That is fantastic. Tristan, thank you for coming. Thanks. Thank you for sharing. I know I said it before. I’m going to say it again. We absolutely love what you guys are doing. Keep up. Just the killer work. It’s so good. Thanks

Tristan Griffin:

Marlon. I appreciate you having me, man.

Marlin Miller:

Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Homestead Living Magazine. Homestead Living is a monthly print magazine that interviews all the big names in the homesteading world and they focus and educate in a wonderful way. You can learn more and subscribe@homesteadliving.com. If you got anything out of this podcast, you will probably love plain values in print. You can go to plain values.com to learn more and check it out. Please like, subscribe and leave us a review. Guys, love you all. Thanks so much.