Austin’s Homebuilder for the Homeless: Alan Graham

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker, and this is Hope Is My Middle Name, a podcast from Consensus Digital Media. Today, I am thrilled to bring you Alan Graham, all the way from his tiny home in Austin's most talked about neighborhood, Community First Village, where Alan and his wife live alongside 400 formerly homeless neighbors and friends.

In 1998, Alan started Mobile Loaves and Fishes with one food truck and a mission to meet people where they are. As you can imagine, this took him to some pretty interesting places. His approach to serving the homeless is unconventional, and it works. With 19,000 plus volunteers over the years, they have never missed a night, delivering more than 6 million meals from their mobile food trucks.

And Alan and his team have raised upwards of 250 million to help communities offer food, housing, and employment for neighbors coming up off the streets. I read Alan's book, Welcome Homeless: One Man's Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home, And I was so moved by his personal story, and how it took him to where he is today.

As you'll hear, Allen didn't plan on dedicating his life to serving the homeless, but a twist of fate and a leap of faith changed everything for him and for so many others.

Kate Tucker: Hi Alan, it's so good to see you.

Alan Graham: Oh Kate, it's so awesome to be here with you guys today. Thank you so much. 

Kate Tucker: Where are you? Are you at home?

Alan Graham: No, I'm actually in my office. My wife and I live in the village here and my house is actually just behind me about 75 yards. 

Kate Tucker: Amazing. And this is the Community First Village?

Alan Graham: That's correct. 

Kate Tucker: So I would love to come and see you there. If I were to knock on your door today and we hopped in a golf cart and drove around, what would we see and who would we meet and what might they be doing? 

Alan Graham: Well, we would have a blast. So I really look forward to you coming. And we usually start our tours at what we call the front porch, which is the second ever 3D-printed house in the history of the world. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. 

Alan Graham: And if it happened to be today, you would actually see the printer in operation because we are coming towards the end of printing 10 more homes. So you would see that. 

Kate Tucker: How did you decide to use a 3D printer? I mean, that's pretty innovative.

Alan Graham: The company that does that is an Austin based founded company called ICON, I-C-O-N. And the founders of that deal are friends of ours. And the idea that they could come out here and test and beta that technology was appealing both to them and to us. One, let's come out here and build something small. And then secondly, let's get some humans to live in it and get the lived experience of what this is going to be like. So it was a natural entrepreneur attracting another entrepreneur kind of an effort. You would also see what we consider the most affordable house on the planet, which is a manufactured home. You would walk in and you would see one of our micro homes. These are 200 square feet or less, no plumbing. You would see our aquaponics hydroponics operation.

You would see our entrepreneur hub where the Van Goghs of the world come and create some of the finest art you will ever see. You would see our farming operation, our Airbnb operation, our outdoor Alamo DraftHouse. We have a 44 foot outdoor movie theater, our community market. You would see our clinics, over 300 chickens, all kinds of things.

Kate Tucker: This sounds absolutely fantastic. I don't know any town like that. Tell me, you know, you mentioned that the homes are small, and this was an intentional decision, I'd imagine. 

Alan Graham: The population that we serve are single men and women, predominantly. The average occupancy of our homes is 1.03. And you and I, as humans, actually don't need much space. It turns out that we need a lot of space to store stuff in because we are these massive consumers of stuff. But if you were to remove all that stuff out of your life, it's amazing the doors that get opened up to build relationships with human beings, so. 

Kate Tucker: So you're building the homes in the hopes that people will come outside and interact.

Alan Graham: Well, that's exactly right. Everything about what we do is all about community. One of the ways that we describe this place is a 550 bedroom, 50 million mansion. And so we all occupy in this forged family that we call Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Community First Village, occupy our bedroom, so to speak, and then we can come out and enter into all the other spaces that include a living room, a farming operation, a media room, being the outdoor movie theater, the farm, places to gather and eat. Food is a big deal here. We believe that the number one conduit that connects you and I, human to human, heart to heart, is food. And we've created a community here that is centered around, breaking bread. We actually claim, Kate, that we have more potlucks per capita here than anywhere else in the world.

Kate Tucker: Oh, that's my kind of place. Is there a story maybe of a resident who you could share about how their life has been transformed just by living in the Community First Village?

Alan Graham: The neighbor that lives across the street from me, in May of 2003, so 20 years ago, when myself and about 14 or 15 of us went to spend the night on the streets for three nights here in Austin for the first time in what we call a street retreat, we ran into him and he came up to us in a park and he could tell we were attempting to look like we were homeless, but he could tell that we clearly weren't. You know, he very euphemistically asked us, what are you assholes doing out here? And, you know, we're trying to explain that we're trying to get the experience. And the first thing that rolled off his lips after that was, would you guys like to go dumpster diving with me tonight? And my vision of dumpster diving is eating something out of a dumpster, which was not appealing at all. But before I could say no, my then 15 year old son said, yeah, we'd love to go! You know, and next thing I know, man, we're pushing a grocery cart called a buggy through the streets of downtown Austin, jumping in and out of dumpsters, harvesting recyclables like aluminum cans and stuff like that. And I met one of the hardest working people ever in my life. He still dumpster dives to this day. My home is decorated with the accouterments of things that he has found, and it's turned into kind of a very eclectic, beautiful place because of him.

Kate Tucker: So how did he end up living in the village? 

Alan Graham: He's always been like a dumpster diver, but he's also one of these guys in his younger days that would steal copper out of air conditioners. And he ended up going to jail for that. And I picked him up out of jail and drove him to an RV dealership. And I purchased an RV. And lifted him up off the streets into a privately owned RV park. And this is really how this part of our ministry started. And then when we built this community and he decided to move in, he wanted to move in across the street from me, so that was great. 

Kate Tucker: How many neighbors do you have?

Alan Graham: Yeah, there's about 400ish right now, low 400s.

Kate Tucker: Wow. 

Alan Graham: Yeah, and growing. 

Kate Tucker: And how many acres are you sitting on? 

Alan Graham: Well, right now we're on 51 acres, but across the street, we're under construction on an additional 51 acres that'll add about 650 more homes. And then about eight miles from where we sit right now is another 76 acres that we will break ground on within the next four weeks.

Kate Tucker: That's amazing. 

Alan Graham: And that'll add another 700 homes. 

Kate Tucker: Let's talk about you and how you got here. I'd love to hear the beginnings of this. There was a story you told in your book about going out on a date with your wife in 1981. Would you tell me that story and kind of go from there? 

Alan Graham: Back in that time frame, you know, I'm feeling like I'm the White Knight on a white horse with a white hat. I'm here to impress and defend and do all the things one would do. And there was a taco stand in downtown Austin that was pretty famous. And we stopped and got out of the vehicle to go and get a taco. And she was accosted by a stereotypical homeless guy downtown to be panhandled. And I got between the two and began to excoriate this guy and say all the things that people think. “You need to clean up, you need to quit doing dope and alcohol, you ought to go get a job,” you know, whatever all of my stereotypes were, thinking all along that I was doing something honorable, not really understanding the gravity of how dishonorable that was. Christ was up in heaven with an alligator tear coming down one side of his face and a big Cheshire grin on the other side knowing that, you know, in about 15 years, he was going to reel me into working with this population and actually falling in love with the population.

Kate Tucker: How did the gentleman you were speaking with at the time, how did he respond when you gave him all that information, about what you thought?

Alan Graham: I'm absolutely certain that wasn’t his first tongue lashing from people that didn't understand who he was, I'm sure he just took it and walked on. The resourcefulness and resilience of my neighbors on the streets is extraordinary. We have a lot to learn from them. Whoever that guy was, he probably doesn't understand what a ginormous lesson I learned from him that day. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. But it didn't happen overnight. So tell me how you got to the idea of starting Mobile Loaves & Fishes. Tell me what happened next to kind of push you in that direction.

 Alan Graham: Well, I'm in the real estate business here in Austin and I had a pretty moderately successful career. And that girlfriend became my wife and we were married in 1984 and started having babies in 1987. We have five of them, four biological children and then a niece that we raised. And at some point in time, my wife, we're both very hard, you know, I don't want to call ourselves workaholics, but we work hard. She especially, and you know, one Sunday I'm reading the paper, about to get up to go shower and go into the office, and there she's going out the door with a couple of the kids at the time to go to church and it looked like at that moment that the train was leaving the station. I grew up with an absent father. And I didn't want my children to grow up with an absent father. So in a very reluctant way, I said I needed to attach my car to that train and start going to church with them. And I ended up developing a very intellectual relationship with Jesus.

And in 1996, I got invited to go on a men's retreat at our church where, Kate, had I known that men were going to hold hands I would not have gone. And God forbid do that “bromance,” “hugging it out” thing that we do. And I went to this retreat and it turned into exactly that deal. But it had a tremendous impact on my life where the intellectual relationship that I had with Christ in my head really dropped a full floor into the depths of the cave of my heart. For the first time in my life, I really felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. And that dynamically was a complete change. And I came home that night. It was a Sunday night. I'd been at this retreat all weekend and my wife couldn't believe who she was talking to. It was so incredibly powerfully present in my life and still is.

And, at that point I just started asking God, you know, what do you want me to do? And then in 1998, Trisha, my wife, and I were having coffee with a girlfriend of ours, and she was telling us about a ministry in Corpus Christi where on cold winter nights, multiple churches would come together and pool their resources to be able to take out to the men and women that were living on the streets of Corpus, and at that moment, the image of a catering truck came out of my subconscious mind into my conscious mind as a distribution vehicle from those of us that have abundance to those that lack. And, sister, here I am 25 years later. It just blew up on me and it kind of sideswiped me. And here we are. Can't believe I get to do it. 

Kate Tucker: So when you had this idea for food trucks, what happened next? I mean, how did you start to build it out and how has, you know, maybe your original idea changed as you started to actually get out into the world and try it on?

Alan Graham: Well, on September 13th, 1998, me and five buddies went out in the back of a green minivan just to test, you know… All of us lived in Westlake Hills, which is kind of the neighborhood, one of the high income neighborhoods here. The original founders are five of us– so I always talk about it as five white guys from Westlake Hills– because we didn't know anything about homelessness and we went out that first night and it was transformative, one of the greatest nights ever in our history, and we bought that truck and and started taking that truck out on a regular basis in April of 1999.

And there were three things about that truck that we didn't know at the time, Kate, but we learned along the way. One, that truck goes to where the people are. Secondly, I have, from a spiritual point of view, an abundance mentality, and so the food that went out on that truck was always brand new, store bought food, we never gave leftovers, and we gave choices to people. Instead of getting your food unit at the soup kitchen, you got to choose from the variety of things that were on that truck.

But the third, most important thing, was that those that were serving and those being served were on the same side of the serving counter, which required this human to human heart to heart connection.

So if you came up to the truck, the first thing that would happen is that my hand would go out to shake your hand and go, “My name is Alan.” And you would say, “My name is Kate.” And then I would say, “Kate, what would you like?” And now you're making choices. And it could be that you would share something with me.

Maybe your mom is sick or you haven't been connected to your family in 15 years or, or something like that. But here's where the miracle was. When I came back out on that truck, if I happened to have run into you at a stop and I saw you and I remembered your name and I said, “Hello, Kate.” And then suddenly you remembered my name and you go, “Alan, how are you doing?” Guess what happens then? We're friends. And so it's a Kate and Alan deal rather than a homeless person and non-homeless person. So that was the power of that truck, that one on one relationship. And then in 2003, we went out and started spending the night on the streets and I've now spent over 250 nights on the streets, hanging out with our friends.

And then in 2004, I got the idea to buy the gently used RV and lift one guy up off the streets. Went and did that. And as a serial entrepreneur, I started brainstorming, how do I build a community and get people up off the streets as inexpensively as we possibly could. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. So on that first night out, you're a group of five white guys from a fancy neighborhood. You're out there delivering food from your green minivan, and this is before you bought your food truck. What was so transformative about that first night? 

Alan Graham: Your stereotypes of the men and women that were out there on the streets began to fall down. There was the beginning of the aha moments that would take me back to the taco stand deal where I was wrong.

And if I was that wrong about this person, where else am I wrong in my life and in my relationships? And those stereotypes that were falling were, they're lazy, they're choosing this, they're drug addicts, they're alcoholics, they're mentally ill. And, that's what was beautiful. I couldn't wait to go back out again.

And, the gratitude that was being shown… I've had quite a bit of money handed to me by homeless people. Including 100 bills. Going, “I just want to tell you, I really appreciate y'all being out here.” You know, and they call you to look at your own generosity, when they're willing to give you everything, you know, and you still got that Snickers in your pocket because you're waiting for no crowd to be around so you could open it and eat it all by yourself without sharing it. That's not how they operate. 

Kate Tucker: What were you starting to understand about homelessness and how people end up on the streets? 

Alan Graham: Over time, we begin to see a common denominator of what we believe the single greatest cause to homelessness is, and that is a profound, catastrophic loss of family. That it wasn't mental illness or drug addictions or job loss. Those are all big issues and those are all issues that exacerbate one who finds himself homeless. But the single greatest common denominator was no family. Because, Kate, I've never met you, but I know right now in your family is a drug addict, an alcoholic, or somebody battling a mental health issue. And the probability of them having found their way out onto the streets is so incredibly low, it's unbelievable.

But for less than 1 percent of 1 percent of our entire population, this profound breakdown of their family and what we really call the forged family has occurred and their only safety net becomes the government. And the government cannot do this and that should not be our expectation of the government. 

Kate Tucker: So you're seeing this breakdown and you're, you're starting to reframe the way you see not only the individuals you meet who are obviously all unique and different, but the whole problem. And you decide that the answer or one answer could possibly be to create a community where people can find their forged family? 

Alan Graham: Exactly. 

Kate Tucker: Take me to that moment when you decided to build Community First Village. Where were you and what were you doing? 

Alan Graham: Well, the very moment a buddy of mine in the summer of 2004 called me up and he said, “I'm looking at buying a ranch in Fredericksburg.” Which is about 90 miles outside of Austin. And he said, “You want to go look at the ranch with me?” And I said, “Yeah, hell yeah, let's go.” So we jumped in the truck and drove out. And on this ranch, there was an RV. And I'm looking inside this RV. And I said, “I could live in something like this. Do you think we could buy one of these for 5,000 bucks?” He said, “All day long!” And I went out and we bought one. And it was that simple. And, look, I had stayed in RV parks, I've camped in camping cottages and tent sites and things in the past, and I thought at that moment that there was an inherent sense of community in these RV parks, and the moment that I thought of that, I go, “If this works, we could build a KOA, a Campground of America for the whole…” and that's how it all came together. And we affectionately call this place an RV park on steroids. 

Kate Tucker: Steroids, indeed. So then what did you do? I mean, that seems like a ginormous thing to pull off. 

Alan Graham: We get to where we get in life by doing small things. But I did believe that we could build a community and it turned out to be bigger than we thought. Not just big in terms of geography, but big in terms of movement and how people are looking at how we're all living in the United States. We call the houses that we live in now, these hermetically sealed single family sarcophaguses that we call the American dream. We're isolated. We don't know our neighbors.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

Alan Graham: I thought we could do it. 

Kate Tucker: So what did you actually have to do first? 

Alan Graham: Well, first thing would be to buy one RV, lift one person up off the streets, do it a second time, do it a third time. As a real estate developer, the idea of building was not foreign to me. So the next thing was to find land. We finally found the land, closed it in 2012, and went under construction in 2014. And here we are in 2023. You know, at the front edge of what I believe is a national movement. 

Kate Tucker: How did you end up in the location you're in? 

Alan Graham: Well, we tried very diligently to work very closely with the city of Austin. I had gone to the mayor in 2006 and said, if you would provide us with a tract of land anywhere in the city of Austin, I don't care where it is, we will raise all the money. To develop this deal I just had two requirements. One, that we have the entitlements we need, zoning, water, sewer, etc. And then secondly, reasonable, but not perfect, access to public transportation. And he thought it was a great idea. The city council thought it was a great idea. But every time that we had an attractive land that we were honing in on, NIMBY, the “Not In My Backyard” people came out.

Kate Tucker: Hmm. 

Alan Graham: And so by 2010, I made a decision to go solo, basically and try to find the tract land. And in the state of Texas, there's no zoning outside of the municipal boundaries of any city. 

Kate Tucker: Hmm. 

Alan Graham: That virtually eliminates the NIMBY quotient. And we found the land and here we are. 

Kate Tucker: How was the land when you got there? Like what shape was it in? 

Alan Graham: It was overgrown. It had a thousand discarded tires on the property. There were two automobiles that had been stolen that were being parted on the property. So really raw land, but we turned it into a little garden of Eden. 

Kate Tucker: And now you're growing your own produce. 

Alan Graham: Oh yeah, we have a full blown farming operation. We have several hundred fruit and nut bearing trees on the property. We had a phenomenal peach crop this year. Right now the figs are blowing off the trees. It's just unbelievable how many figs we have. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. Why did you decide to cultivate a farm there? 

Alan Graham: Well, when you live on the streets, three meals a day is what I call a McDonald's level diet.

And this isn't an indictment against McDonald's. It's just that there are certain foods that you and I enjoy, but we should not eat those all day, every day. And so my goal was to figure out a way that we could get the best food on the planet into the bellies of people who could least afford that food. You know, free range organic chicken eggs, heirloom organic tomatoes, that kind of stuff. And so the first thing that we ever did out on this property outside cleaning it up was to build the farm. That was number one. And we've been producing food on this land since at least 2011. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. So, I mean, you're producing your own food and you have communal kitchens. What other enterprises, you know, are people able to participate in and how do you think that's impacting their daily lives? 

Alan Graham: Well, we have a number of micro enterprises on the property. Last year our neighbors earned over 1.5 million dollars in dignified income. That's from property beautification to maintenance and landscaping. We have an art house. We have a very large ceramics operation. We have our own line of jewelry. We make custom lines for fancy hotels. And then we also assemble jewelry for Kendra Scott, if you're familiar with Kendra Scott. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah, the jewelry company, Kendra Scott. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So you sell these in various places. Is there like a farmer's market or anything, any ways you engage with, I know you're a little outside of Austin, but just engage with the greater community? 

Alan Graham: Yeah, we have over 300 volunteers that come out here every single week and we have a market on site and we showcase all of the products that are made here. We also do a number of pop up shows, typically at churches throughout the year. And then every Christmas, we have an Advent Market. We'll decorate the village with about 300,000 lights. We also have an online shop at mlf.org that people can go and purchase things that are made by our neighbors.

Kate Tucker: Amazing. How does one become a resident of Community First Village? 

Alan Graham: Well, you have to be chronically homeless here, and that's an unaccompanied male or female living on the streets at least a year with a disability, are episodically homeless, adding up to a year over a four year period of time. And we have relatively easy ways of ascertaining that. You got to jump through quite a few hoops, in order to get in here, but those are very purposeful hoops to jump through. 

Kate Tucker: And so what are the other organizations, public private partnerships, the church, like what organizations do you work with kind of on a daily basis to make this happen? 

Alan Graham: Well, we have several organizations that are here on site full time. Integral Care is our behavioral health authority for Travis County. So they have 10 or 12 full time people on site. We have family elder care, which is a big deal because our average age here is 57. Average age of death is 59. Yeah. And so people are old, but they die young. And we have a company called Life Anew. They're a restorative justice practice. And then plus anybody and everybody in Austin that deals with the chronically homeless are a partner of ours and they feed people into the community. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. And there in the community, you have people called missionals. 

Alan Graham: Yeah.

Kate Tucker: Tell me about missionals. 

Alan Graham: It's one of the secret sauces of our operation. And these are men and women that have been called by the gospel to live amongst men and women that were formerly chronically homeless. It takes about six months to a year to discern. You go through a spiritual discernment process. In order to be accepted to move in, we have people that, you know, are physicians and nurses and are still employed. We've had titans of industry here. We have retired folks, we have massage therapists, people that do hair, all kinds of things. 

Kate Tucker: How many people are serving right now as missionals?

Alan Graham: I think there's about 60 total. 

Kate Tucker: Wow, cool. And so you live there. When did you decide to move in and tell me where you moved from?

What was it like, your prior home? 

Alan Graham: Well, my wife and I raised our family for 34 years in the same house in Westlake Hills. And that zip code is kind of a super zip code for some of the richest people of Austin that live. And, you know, when we started building out here, we had moved a part model RV here. And that 399 square feet kind of became my pseudo office. And my wife and I, we would have late in the day meetings sometimes and then have to turn around and come back early the next morning type of deal. And one time about seven years ago I said grab some clothes and stuff to shower, and let's just spend the night. And that one night turned into two nights, turned into five nights, turned into, we were out here all the time and made the decision. And we've been out here full time for six and a half years, living in 399 square feet. 

Kate Tucker: What do your kids think of that? 

Alan Graham: Well, they grew up in this ministry. They know we're crazy and support us. They all live here in town. So it's great. And we get together here, we have a big deck outside of our home. So it's a comfortable place to come and hang out. 

Kate Tucker: And so Mobile Loaves and Fishes is a faith-based organization. And what does that mean, faith based? How does that play out in the Community First Village? 

Alan Graham: Well, we're very Christocentric. Our faith is very deep here, but we are not proselytizers. We believe in a saying that was attributed, but I'm not sure it was... it actually came from St. Francis of Assisi that says, “Preach the gospel often and only when necessary use words.” So we're here to live our faith, love our neighbor, and welcome everybody no matter what their belief system is. But we're doing this out of our love of Christ and where we come from in the Christian world.

Kate Tucker: So from your perspective, You know, your faith and your experience as a businessman, I'm curious, how do you measure success when it comes to the work that you're doing and when it comes to addressing the homelessness crisis we have in this country?

Alan Graham: It is an impediment to the very slow and arduous work of God. And so we don't want to get locked in to measuring things like in the fix and repair mentality that we Americans typically have. It's really the blending of all of us together with all of our positive and our negative attributes that actually creates the beauty of what we call the mosaic of the body of Christ. I don't have to agree with what you're doing and how you're living your life in order to love you. We have active drug addicts out here. I wish you weren't doing dope. Dope is not good for you. I wish you weren't consuming the amount of alcohol that you consume. It's not going to do you well. It will in fact kill you at some point in time, but I can sure love you in spite of all that.

Kate Tucker: Talk to me about numbers. I hear that we're not going to solve this. We're not going to eradicate homelessness, but we have a crisis on our hands in cities like San Francisco and Seattle, and it's a very hard conversation. It's become increasingly polarizing. So how do you see that piece of it? And how do you participate in that conversation if you do at all?

Alan Graham: No, we participate in it. First of all, it's by sharing our model and our belief system that the single greatest cause is a profound catastrophic loss of family and that housing alone will never solve homelessness, but community will. We've got to figure out a way to get people back into the community and into a place where they feel like they belong. That would be one.

Two, I believe very powerfully that the government should only play a subsidiary role to you and I in mitigating these profound human issues. Now, if we, the people, aren't going to do this, then yeah, the government's going to step in and do what the government does. But, you know, it just turns out that you and I are deeply relational beings that need to be fully and wholly loved and fully and wholly valued for who we are. And the government just in a transactional manner cannot accomplish that. So the community has got to jump in. Hence the term “community first.” It's saying to the broader Central Texas, Austin, Texas community: “We have to come together to do this.”

That's why it's important to have 3D builders or other home builders or Integral Care or Family Elder Care or all the other organizations out there collectively working together to mitigate this pandemic. We're not solving this deal. It's unsolvable. 

Kate Tucker: So, you talk about community to find a sense of belonging, and then the opposite of that is isolation and loneliness. I'm curious for you, in your upbringing, in your childhood, in your experience, where do you see yourself in this work? 

Alan Graham: You know, I tell people, I share with people that the only memory that I have of my mother and father together as husband and wife under the same roof was when I was about four years old, and my mom was on her bed with a knife in her hands threatening my father. And the next thing I know, my mom's in the hospital. She was institutionalized that time, one of many, for a year. While she was there, my dad served her with divorce papers and unleashed an Armageddon of a custody battle. So, my three brothers and I essentially grew up without a father in the house.

And so there's a level of loneliness that I guess comes from that, but if you contrast that to my wife and I, we will celebrate our 39th anniversary this year, and we've been together for 42 years, raised these five children, extraordinarily stable environment, not lonely at all, and, you know, I have a great deal of empathy and compassion for my friends whose, you know, mothers and fathers were giving them heroin and raping them and doing things that you just can't fathom another human could do to another human, but we humans do those things.

So I have a great deal of empathy for that. 

Kate Tucker: How do you help other people see that? I feel like there's a lot of shame on all sides, I think. Because we don't know how to connect and we don't know how to see each other. I’m curious how you bring people into the work of really being able to relationally connect and see people for who they are, not for what label, you know, society is slapping on them.

Alan Graham: Well, the first thing would be those trucks. Those trucks still go out, you know, every night of the week here. Over the course of 25 years, there's been tens of thousands of volunteers that have connected human to human, heart to heart. And then this village is a model of what is hopeful. You could drive through town and see under all of our bridges the collateral damage of this issue and then come out to this village and you're blown away. So this village becomes a training ground for changing all of those stereotypes. So, it's really all about connecting people to people that you wouldn't have normally been connected to. And that's our goal, is to get people here into the village to see what is possible.

Kate Tucker: Tell me, you know, what is it that you would want people to see and understand about living on the streets, and maybe the people who are coming into your community?

Alan Graham: Well, you know, if the grid ever goes down or Armageddon, I tell everybody that you need to hook up with the homeless or the formerly chronically homeless because you will survive if you're with them. I've got a guy here that can walk you down the street and show you every edible plant that's growing. It's just totally unbelievable. They're smart people and they can build things and most of us can't build anything anymore. You know, I think getting connected to them and learning more about who they are and what they have to offer us and society. And how do we mine that giftedness? Because there's a lot of it out there.

Kate Tucker: It makes you just wonder, who are we missing? I mean, so many lives. And so many potential friends and co-workers and inventors and healers. 

Alan Graham: Well, my favorite of all time is a guy named Vincent Van Gogh, who started painting when he was 27 years old, committed suicide at 37, only maybe sold one painting in his entire life, and considered arguably today one of the most gifted artists of all time history. Forensiologists believe that he was schizoaffective and maybe a drug addict. But he had a brother, Theo, that loved him very deeply and kept him going. That's potentially what's out there on the streets. Other Van Goghs. We want those people impacting our lives. 

Kate Tucker: Mm hmm. You shared a little bit about how you're about to expand, but what's on the horizon for Mobile Loaves and Fishes? And then what do you hope happens even after you're gone?

Alan Graham: I think as Americans, we've become very disconnected from each other. It's almost unique to the United States, although it's spreading around the world a little bit. I would like for people to understand how catastrophically we're actually raising our families today and separating our families. And how we're all yearning to be settled in community. So I would hope that from that point of view, there would be a movement of really understanding and caring about your neighbor. I wish people would listen to this podcast and then jump outside their homes and go knock on the people next door and go, “Hey, I know I've lived here for five years, I want to introduce myself…” You know, or something.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. You talked about in your book the eight characteristics of home. What are the eight characteristics of home?

Alan Graham: That came out of a book called Beyond Homelessness, Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. But home is a place of permanence. It's a dwelling place. When you cross over the threshold, when you come into your home, it's as if you liquefy and pour into every nook and cranny of your home. Home is a place of embodied inhabitation. If you come to my house, we still have the thing that we used to measure the kids as they grew up. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah.

Alan Graham: Yeah, and now they measure dad because I've shrunk a little.

Kate Tucker: Oh no!

Alan Graham: Home is a place of hospitality. Home is a place of stories and memories. It's often said that the mortar that holds the bricks of even the most impoverished home together are the stories and memories that flowed from that home. Home is a place of safety and refuge. You know, my home in Westlake Hills, nobody in my family had a key. The door was never locked. Think about how we live today. Gated community, gated house, alarm systems all over our doors. Home is a place of orientation. No matter where I've been in the world, my compass is always oriented to this place right here where I'm sitting right now. This is where I want to be more than any place else. And I've been to some cool places. And then last and not least, home is a place of affiliation and belonging. Kate, it just turns out that you and I like to be around people kind of like you and I. And so when you've battled homelessness and drug addictions, and you've had these life experiences, you affiliate and belong best with people that have had those shared experiences. And that's the eight characteristics. None of it has anything to do with bricks or mortars or walls or roofs or any of that. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah.

Alan Graham: That does not make a home. And so if you want to understand homelessness, you must understand what home is and home can best be understood through those eight characteristics.

Kate Tucker: Hmm. What's giving you hope these days? 



Alan Graham: Oh, I have a lot of hope. You know, no matter how we make fun of the Millennials and the Gen Z's and everybody made fun of the Baby Boomers and still make fun of us, I have great hope for our future. We're always going to struggle with all the things that we struggle with, but there's a lot of people coming out of all of these generations that have done phenomenal things and will continue to do those things.

I'm just a very hopeful person. 

Kate Tucker: Well, Alan, I just so appreciate you taking the time. It's been such an honor to talk with you and I have so much to think about and I feel so grateful to be thinking about what home truly is. So thank you. 

Alan Graham: Well, beautiful. You're welcome. Thank you for doing this with us.

Closing Credits: Thank you so, so much to Alan Graham for sharing such a powerful perspective on what home truly is and how we can help each other find our way there. To learn more about the amazing work being done by Mobile Loaves and Fishes, go to MLF.org. 

Hope Is My Middle Name is hosted and executive produced by me, Kate Tucker.You can find me on Instagram at katetuckermusic, and I would love to know if there's someone you think belongs on the show. Just send me a message. This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Our sound designer and engineer is Scott Somerville. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and me. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and fearless leader at Consensus Digital Media. Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It would mean a lot to us if you would follow, rate, and review the show.

Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media, produced in association with Reasonable Volume. See you next time!