Building Value With Purpose: A Blueprint for Community-Centered Leadership

Alana Muller:
Welcome to Enterprise.ing, a podcast from Enterprise Bank & Trust that's empowering business leaders one conversation at a time. Each week, we'll hear from top business professionals about lessons on leadership and entrepreneurship that they've learned along the way. I'm your host, Alana Muller, an entrepreneurial executive leader whose primary focus is to connect, inspire and empower community. We at Enterprise Bank & Trust thank you for tuning into another episode.

Hello listeners, welcome back to Enterprise.ing podcast. Here's a question for you: What do you get when you cross an Orthodox Christian priest, a social entrepreneur, a nonprofit executive, and a songwriter and musician? Well, you get my friend Father Justin Mathews. As CEO of Reconciliation Services, Father J is dedicated to cultivating social and economic reconciliation in Kansas City and healing historic dividing lines. With that, Father Justin Mathews, welcome to Enterprise.ing podcast.

Father Justin:
Hey, it's great to be with you and with your audience. This is an honor, thank you.

Alana Muller:
Well, I'm honored to have you, so thank you. With a background like yours, there is so much ground to cover. So, what I thought we would do is start by talking about Reconciliation Services, which is an organization I've had the privilege to get to know a little bit. I love its origin story and I wonder if you would share that with our listeners.

Father Justin:
Absolutely. So Reconciliation Services is a social venture nonprofit located at the intersection of 31st and Troost in Kansas City, Missouri. And for those of you who may not be in Kansas City, Troost Avenue is the economic and the racial dividing line in our hyper-segregated city. It's been that way for generations. And we were started in 1987 by an incredible couple. These two folks were the most unlikely to get married, but they were the most incredible. And the husband's name is Father Alexii Altschul, and his wife was Mother Michaela Thelma Altschul. Thelma was maybe five foot on a good day, African American and from the segregated part of Texarkana, Arkansas originally. And Father Alexii is maybe six foot two, 12 years younger than her, white and grew up in the suburbs in Kansas City. But they met in the mid to late '80s when Father Alexii was doing a ministry in Kansas City, Missouri and was bringing food to an apartment where there was a lot of need in the urban core.

Thelma lived in that apartment building, but was already very much a grandmother and a mother to the community. She literally was going out into the community on Troost Avenue and helping those who are homeless, reaching out to those who were most in need and giving from what she had. The two of them fell in love and this unusual couple became this powerhouse of ministry and outreach in the community in Kansas City. And together they built something called Reconciliation Services and they also founded an Orthodox Christian Church here in Kansas City.

My wife and I started working at Reconciliation Services actually as volunteers in late 2008. And when Thelma passed away in 2012, not long after that, I became CEO of Reconciliation Services. And for about a decade, I was, first, the second priest and then the full-time rector of the church that they founded also. So fast-forward to today, and we have grown quite a bit since that initial foundation and we now have about 30 full-time staff. And we're still in the same building at the corner of 31st and Troost, but as I'm sure we'll get into, we worked with Enterprise Bank to completely rehab this building and make a significant investment here on the east side of Kansas City.

Alana Muller:
So amazing. And you talked a little bit about what Thelma was doing in the community. Do the services that RS offers today, do those match or mirror what Thelma was doing all those years ago?

Father Justin:
Thelma and Father Alexii started Reconciliation Services really with a keen eye towards the need not only for social and trauma therapy services, but also looking at the deeper root issues of economic disinvestment fueled by discrimination as well as the history of particularly racial discrimination, housing discrimination, banking discrimination in lending. And so really the DNA of who we are starts with and forms our vision and it starts with their marriage. As an interracial marriage and addressing those economic and racial barriers and that history here in Kansas City. So, today, as we pursue a vision that is seeking to cultivate a community that is trying to bring about social, racial and economic reconciliation in order to reveal the strength of our community, we now look at that history and all of our programs come forward from that theory of change, so to speak.

Alana Muller:
That's so neat. So neat. Well, speaking of Thelma, I think a really special aspect of Reconciliation Services is it's what you call the pay-it-forward community cafe. I love that expression. So the pay-it-forward community cafe, which is called, appropriately, Thelma's Kitchen. Talk about that. How did it come to be, how is it performing and essentially what are you doing through Thelma's Cafe to serve the community?

Father Justin:
Yeah. So Thelma's Kitchen was obviously named after our co-founder Thelma, who was known for her comfort food and her love through her kitchen in the community. It was something that was uniquely a part of who she was. And our organization ran for years a free Friday night meal that was restaurant style and lovingly offered and prepared by the Orthodox Christian churches and others in the community. But as we did a listening campaign, our neighbors told us that what they wanted was not just social services, but they actually really wanted places to live, to shop, to eat, to be in the community that they lived in. My wife and I raised our kids just a few blocks from here. We lived in the community and we knew how far you had to go in order to find a restaurant when we first moved here. How far you had to go to find a good grocery store and the basic amenities that most of us take for granted.

So we had the idea then to really reinvent the front door of this 30-plus-year-old social service agency as a community restaurant, but we didn't want to do that as just another nonprofit program that would have to be constantly fundraised for. So, part of what gets me up in the morning is my passion around social entrepreneurship. So this effort really is a classic social enterprise. So we are not a soup kitchen, we are also not just a restaurant. We welcome people from every different walk of life, rich and poor, black and white, east and west side of the city, really creating a gathering place to transform the dividing line of Troost Avenue into a place of community where we can be proximal with people that we're often afraid of, or that we don't have a relationship with. And so the way that it operates is, since we're not a soup kitchen and we're not just a regular restaurant, we are the most affordable restaurant on Troost Avenue, perhaps in the city, offering incredible lunches Monday through Friday. And we do that in a way where people can pay it forward for others.

So for example, you might come in and get a chef special and you would pay the full price for that. But at the moment you might also pay it forward for somebody else who might be in need of food and it might be a dollar that you offer or it might be a hundred dollars that you pay it forward. But all of the money that's paid forward then is put into a reserve fund that we use in order to give tokens away — these really cool little wooden tokens with our logo on it, especially to our clients. And we serve almost 4,000 people every year in our social services and trauma therapy and other programming in the community. And so we're driving that food access to where it's needed the most, but the restaurant itself is almost break even. We're on our way there and the goal is not only to break even this year, but actually to continue to grow to where it's profitable and then all of the profit of course then gets plowed back into those community programs.

We also have a catering company, Thelma's Kitchen Catering, and we're catering all over the city. Any different event and a hundred percent of the proceeds go back to support Thelma's Kitchen and the rest of the work that we're doing at Reconciliation Services.

Alana Muller:
Which I just love. And I'm a big fan and a patron, so I love that you're doing this. The food is delicious. And I think just knowing the backstory, knowing the good that it's doing makes it even a better meal. So thank you for the good work you're doing there. I do want to go back. You talked about reinventing the front door when you talked about Thelma's Kitchen. You alluded to the fact that you're in the same building that you've always been in, but that Enterprise Bank helped to reimagine what this building could be. I want to talk about your gorgeous new facility. And one of the things that I've actually talked to some other Enterprise.ing guests about is this program called New Markets Tax Credits. And I want to hear a little bit about that from your perspective. I know that New Markets Tax Credit programming allows nonprofits to access funding for projects in low-income areas. How did you and RS get involved with this important program and what's it meant for you and the community?

Father Justin:
So that's a great question. Let me back into that by giving just a little bit of context for why we made the investment that we did and then we can get into the tool. As we did our listening campaign in the community, we talked to 11 different neighborhood leaders, we talked to other nonprofits, we talked to our clients and our funders. It was way more than a feasibility study. We wanted to do that full reinvention that we talked about.

So what was at the heart of that was a desire to invest in this community because the community on Troost Avenue, like many places around our country that have been disinvested, is gentrifying. There are positives and negatives to that and it needs to be managed. And we felt like our community deserved a building like this. And far too often people assume that if you're doing nonprofit work, you can take a mediocre building in a bad part of town, and that's really where it needs to be. What we felt was that our clients who are, every day, struggling to survive and succeed, not only needed those material things but also needed the spiritual side, the emotional side of life. They need goodness, beauty and truth as well as those material things. And by making an investment on Troost Avenue at this critical corridor, we viewed the city almost like a body and we could apply pressure, think about acupressure. We could apply pressure to this very particular node in the city where there's been great pain. And as a result of applying that specific kind of pressure in the way that we do, we could bring and engender a greater healing throughout the body of the whole city.

And so the kind of development that I talk about here, I call, “do no harm development strategy.” We wanted to do a development that was award-winning, and in fact, thank God we actually just did win a capstone award from the Business Journal we're very proud of, and it's very much emblematic of what we were hoping for. But we wanted to do it in a way that we put a stake in the ground and said, "Look, this community's not leaving. We're not leaving our community. And although things may change up and down Troost, we're going to pursue a mode of development that enables a diversified economic growth strategy, which we believe is the superior growth modality for the region so that all ships rise together." And we need both kinds of development. Both these kinds of mission-driven nonprofit or mission-driven values, aligned development and we also need just traditional rehab of buildings and other businesses, but you've got to have both.

And unless we're greatly focused on being intentional, you'll get normal market rate development because, at the end of the day, they pencil. But what you won't get is a development like this, and this is what's needed to achieve that greater goal. So to answer your specific question, New Markets Tax Credits are specifically helpful for projects like this in areas that are mission-aligned and those tax credits we can't use like a for-profit could, but as a nonprofit, we can turn around and, once awarded, and it's a competitive program, but once you're awarded those tax credits, you're able to then sell them to an investor institution and then there's cash that results from that.

So out of the 10 and a half million dollars tax credit award, which was awarded through Enterprise Bank and Capital One, Enterprise being the majority of that, eight and a half million, we were able to net about $3.2 million of actual cash towards the cap stack making this about a $15.5 million investment in this community on Kansas City's East side.

Alana Muller:
Amazing. Amazing. And I've seen the building and it is gorgeous, and I just congratulate you and how exciting that you were recognized with an award. So I'm just so proud of you and of the organization.

Father Justin:
I can't thank you enough and thank Enterprise enough because without this investment from Enterprise Bank and them believing in our project... Not only on the New Markets side, but also as the construction lender, this project wouldn't be here. So it's a joy to share publicly about that Capstone Award specifically with Enterprise and its audience.

Alana Muller:
So nice. Well, I want to shift gears a little bit. I mentioned in my introduction that you are also a songwriter and musician. And though I've known you for many years, I did not know this about you. So I want you to tell us about your work with your band, which is called Not Made By Hands, and what role does that play in your life? I want to hear more about this and I need to listen to the music. How exciting.

Father Justin:
Not Made by Hands, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, wherever you want to go. So it's interesting, I don't always wear a collar. I was signed to a record label in the late '90s and was living in Nashville. Did a bunch of touring long before I got my business degree from Belmont University, and then eventually a Masters in Divinity and certainly before I became an Orthodox Christian priest. But that desire to create, I believe is innate in all of us, but in unique ways. Look, in my language, I believe that we're all created in the image of the creator. Therefore, the act of creating is something that is important for each of us to find. And so for me, it's not just avocational, but it's really deeply a part of how I live and move and have my being. And to be honest, social entrepreneurship and real estate developments, they're, for me, like an artistic expression as well.I love that creative entrepreneurial process.

So I woke up, I hadn't done a record in a long time. And I woke up a couple of years ago and I said, "Man, I feel like a T-Rex. Like my career body's really big, but my art arms are really short and I can't keep going like this." So I said to my family, I said, "You're not going to see Dad for a while. I've got to hunker down in the studio and record another record." And so got the band back together, so to speak, worked with an incredible drummer, an incredible producer, and a group of people, and wrote 25 songs, picked 12, and I've been putting them out one a month for a little while now. So I'll have the whole record released, but would love for people to check out Not Made By Hands. If you like indie rock, grunge inspired, you might like it.

Alana Muller:
I think that's great. Well, one of the things that I think is so cool about this is even then, I think you and I have talked about this before, I am not a person who can discreetly draw lines between the parts of my life, and I love that you're not really doing that either. You're finding holiness in making music and whether it has anything to do with serving as a Christian Orthodox priest, whether it has anything to do with your role at Reconciliation Services or truly anything else you do in the community, which is vast far beyond what we've talked about here. I love that you're able to express yourself in a way that continues to build upon your holiness, to build upon your spirituality, but in a completely different genre. So I applaud you for that, and I look forward to listening to the music itself.

Father Justin:
Yeah. I have no holiness. Let's be clear on that. Leave that to the saints. I am chief among sinners. But I will say, again, kind of using my own framework here, each of us are called like a priestly vocation. We're called to take the stuff of life and offer it up to God in thanksgiving, and he gives it back to us in that act, in that sacramental motion as the stuff of life that becomes life-giving. And so whether we're doing that with an old building or our daily work or our art, that motion, figuring out how to make the sacred out of the profane, so to speak, I think that's the beauty of life. And that's not just for artists and nonprofits, which is where my love of social entrepreneurship comes from. The more that each of us, as leaders, can figure out how to weave purpose and social impact into our daily life and work, the more inspired we can be about what it is that we do every day.

And I am a firm believer that we, together, especially in the times that we're in right now, we need to pursue creative and unique and innovative ways of evolving business and learning that it's not just about ESG and DEI and triple bottom line. Those are all great acronyms. And when we can learn to co-participate, co-feel, even co-suffer with our neighbor, then we really learn to love them. And that's not just a Sunday thing, that's a Monday thing, too. And we can all figure out how to do that. But particularly those who are in leadership, we have the privilege of being able to even reinvent the way that we do business while still making a profit, while still looking towards our stakeholders to help return good on return on investment. We can also have social return on investment. SROI at the same time as ROI. That's a creative act. And I would challenge each of your listeners to think about how they can do their part particularly right now when we need it so much.

Alana Muller:
Really, really nice. So in that spirit, the way that I think about my own purpose, I tell people that my purpose is to connect, inspire and empower community. And as you know, so much of my own personal work is focused on relationships and how those factor into our lives. I see you all about town. Everyone seems to know Father J. Talk about how relationships factor into your life. And think about it as we're describing personally, professionally, and in the community. What does that mean for you? Relationship building?

Father Justin:
Well, so I'm a raging E extrovert. I charge up by being around people, which is funny because I think we've talked about that. I'm not sure that that's you, and yet you are such a networker. If I remember, you like to recharge also on your own in addition to with people. And yet Coffee Lunch Coffee is your whole business around people. But for me, I really believe that we are called to be in relationship with each other. That's like an axiomatic core foundational value for who I am and for who our organization is at Reconciliation Services. We believe in the value of community, that we are not monads. That we are created to be in relationship with one another. And each of us, as leaders, manifest that in a different way.

For me, my whole work is about being in relationship with people and helping them to fulfill their purpose and their dream in order, particularly, to care for the poor. Some people have done really well in their life and they're tired of just sponsoring tables at chicken dinners for their charity. They are tired of just getting asked to serve on the next board. I love working with leaders all across the country, but particularly in Kansas City, who are looking for creative ways to deploy what they've been blessed with in order to have a social impact that's transformative, but also is life-giving to them. So everything I do is relationship and ultimately I want to be able to help people to connect with things of eternal value. To take things of temporary value and to be able to apply those things with wisdom, with great care, and in a measurable so that they can create things of eternal value, which there can be nothing more eternally valuable, even commanded to us again than to love our neighbor. And right now, we need a lot more of that. That all happens through relationship.

Alana Muller:
I love that. I love that. Is there someone in your life who has had a particularly meaningful impact on you, whether personally and/or professionally, and if so, is there one best piece of advice or a great piece of advice that they've given you?

Father Justin:
Well, being married, my wife is like my bedrock but I think that would be the easy answer. But the obligatory one that if I didn't say and she listened to the podcast, I'd be in trouble.

Alana Muller:
Jodi, that one's for you.

Father Justin:
Exactly. To be honest with you, Jodi is our Chief Impact Officer. She is absolutely incredible. And we joke that I'm the big entrepreneur and she is a visionary, but she's also the realist in the relationship and she keeps me really grounded. But as I think about your question, I think about our founder, Father Alexii. If you look up in the World Book Encyclopedia, if you Google “saint,” he and his wife's picture will come up someday. And I say that not to embarrass him, but to say that he has had such an impact in this community, and it was through his self-giving, self-sacrificing way of leading. And the piece of advice that he gave me. And I'll be a little vulnerable with you: my personality, I'm a pretty driven, want to get things done, A-type entrepreneur, high risk-taker, kind of guy. And sometimes my struggle is to remember to put people before programs, products and process. And I know that sounds crazy coming from the guy wearing the collar, but I get so excited about ideas on ways to help people that the temptation is actually to forget the people. And you see this even in business. Human-centered design and all of the modalities, but it all comes back to that relationship focus.

So I remember one time early on in my leadership journey back before I was even the CEO here, he said to me, “Justin, you've got to remember to pursue people before efficiency and people before the process and the product or the program.” And I did not realize at the time how much I tended to just get excited and go run out and do that. Sometimes we make decisions as leaders that don't make sense on the surface, but are absolutely the right decision to make. I think about his words to me often, and I think that if I put my neighbor, my coworker first, particularly the poor, and those who don't have as much privilege or voice or opportunity as I do, if I put them first, I can't go wrong. It might look wrong right now, but in the long run, it is the right thing, and that gets proved out and has been every time in my 25 years or so of leadership.

Alana Muller:
Love that. It reminds me, I saw a show recently. Not a great show, but one of the lines in the show was, “it's important to understand the difference between fact and truth,” and I think what you're describing is truth, and I think that's really, really nice. Father J, there's a question that I ask of every guest, and I'd like to ask it of you as well. If you could meet with anybody for a cup of coffee, let's say you're going to meet up at Thelma's Kitchen for a cup of coffee with anybody living, not living, fictional or non-fictional, who would it be?

Father Justin:
There are a number of people, but I'll tell you one that I love. Her name was Mother Maria of Paris. She's a canonized saint now, but she was a modern saint. And she was martyred in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, 80 years ago. She was an incredible woman who was not actually a very churchly woman all over her life. In the early 1900s, she was a mayor of a town in Russia. I don't think women were in politics very often. She was a poet and a playwright and an artist and worked with textiles, but she, with many others, fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and ended up in Paris and eventually was made a nun. And when she was in Paris, she was made a nun, but her bishop told her, he said, "You're not going to be in some monastery. Your cathedral will be the streets. Your monastery will be the streets."

And she began to take in the homeless, the working poor and immigrants in particular, and she rented a house on Rue de Lourmel in Paris downtown, and she opened up her door and took in everybody. She fed them. She was pretty radical. Chain-smoking, wine-drinking lover of the poor who I just would love to have met because she is certainly my inspiration. She was an incredible theologian and she lived a life that was exemplary, not only of the faith, but how to love God, but also how to love your neighbor, two sides of one coin. And you can't do one without the other. You can't. We built a new chapel in this building in her honor, the Mother Maria of Paris Chapel. She's somebody I would love to have met.

Alana Muller:
I would've loved to have met her, too. That's especially meaningful for me, so thank you for sharing that. Really just a lovely choice, so thank you for that. Well, as usual, I have very much enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for being on the program. Father Justin Mathews, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and about Reconciliation Services?

Father Justin:
Yeah, well, first of all, Reconciliation Services, just Google “Reconciliation Services” or “Thelma's Kitchen,” or you can go to thelmaskitchen.org and go from there to the rest of our work at RS. You can also go to notmadebyhands.net or you can go listen to it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your streaming music, and I'd love to connect with people on LinkedIn. You can find me at Justin Mathews on LinkedIn.

Alana Muller:
Father Justin Mathews, thank you so much for being on Enterprise.ing podcast.

Father Justin:
It's a privilege. Thank you for the time.

Alana Muller:
Thanks for joining us this week on Enterprise.ing. Be sure to visit our website, enterprisebank.com/podcast, to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. If you found value in today's program, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or telling a friend about us. Enterprise.ing, powering business leaders one conversation at a time.

The views expressed by Enterprise.ing presenters or guests are those of the presenter or guests, and not necessarily of Enterprise Bank & Trust or its affiliates. All content of this podcast and any related materials are for informational purposes only. Enterprise Bank & Trust does not make any warranty, expressed or implied, including warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, and specifically disclaims any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented. Enterprise Bank & Trust is not under any obligation to update or correct any information provided in this podcast. All statements and opinions are subject to change without notice.