Welcome everybody to Midday Magazine for this Wednesday, February 19th, 2025.
Have your host, James here.
We're joined right now by our friend, Pastor Eric Hembrooke.
He is with Loving.
We're going to talk about the Founder's Day celebration, Pastor Eric.
It's good to have you with us.
Thanks for being here.
It is very good to be here today.
I've got a bunch of things to talk about, but if you don't mind, I wanted to start with
the Love Store and talk a little bit about that and the great things you guys are doing
over there with it.
Absolutely.
Love it again.
That's the name of the store.
It's on 12th Avenue just right up the road here from the studios doing all different kinds
of things.
Had a wonderful time doing commercials for you guys over the Christmas break to get foot
traffic and people to walk through the door seem to be working.
The big thing about the store is that is our right arm to sponsor the different things
that we do in through the community.
So anyone listening to this today, I just want you to know, thank you for coming into
the store.
Thank you for purchasing things and it helps us at Love Inc to do our ministry such as backpacks
for those who are being dismissed from the prison.
We have a movers and yes, there's behind every one of these things I'm about ready to
mention has tons of volunteers, but it also, you know, there's still costs for operation
for a 501 C3 and so it helps us to promote our our moving ministry.
And so we literally people who are in need from moving from one place to another for whatever
reasons helps us to do that also and in a plethora of other things and that we connect with
about 20 churches in the area and and try to do things with them and incorporate their
ministries into it.
So we have a staff that helps people to do that.
We are a type of a social work so people call, they do an intake on them, we find out
what their needs are and we connect with other people.
So we have staff that need to be paid in order to make those kinds of things happening.
But and that's where the store helps us and people coming in and purchasing at the store.
And then there's the another big major thing that happens is when people donate their
things to the store, we have people who are in need of furniture and so forth.
And I've been getting more and more involved in delivering the furniture, but people having
a need for furniture, we don't like people sleeping on the floor.
We help people with dressers and things like that.
And so with those items come in, some of those items are sold, some of those items go
right back out, donate them to the people who just don't have the ability to purchase
furniture and that kind of thing.
So that's love it again is the name of the store and the mission of that store in a nutshell.
And thank you to everyone who donates to that store.
And if you don't donate your furniture, thank you for coming in and purchasing because
the funds go on to help other people.
We will let you know how you can know more about and how you can participate with the
store if you want before wrap up today and get some information to you from there.
But thank you for that.
I appreciate that there.
When it comes to what's going on with Grace, let's dive into that a little bit.
Our loving, I'm sorry, and find out a little bit more about the what you guys are
up to.
Well Grace is one of our churches that we work with and hats off to the people at Grace.
Thank you for being a part of loving.
And I, wow, now other churches are going to say, why didn't you mention the same thing.
I was thinking the same thing and popped in my head and I just said it, but yeah, I would
also, I would try to take it off on a list of at thank yous and I church, we appreciate
it.
And they join us on the air from time to time.
So I'll hear from them.
Exactly.
We do shout them out.
All right.
Loving, though.
What do you guys up to?
A lot of things.
Let's see.
Oh man, you're going to catch me and all of a sudden I'm going to have one of those blank
moments.
What happens?
What are we up to?
Well, right now, the big deal we're getting ready to have our Founder's Day celebration,
which is one of our big annual fundraisers that we're going to do.
The way that it works is we've had different churches and businesses and a couple of individuals
that have come along that have sponsored a table.
So that table is therefore paid for.
So when people come in for the evening, $25 for a reserve seat, that goes towards the
fundraiser.
The table has been paid for.
So everything from there on out gets to be a part of the fundraiser that we're doing.
So just $25 a table at the hotel mead, hotel mead is going to be doing, bringing the food
catering it for the evening.
And listen, you're going to spend, go out for dinner, you're going to spend $25.
That's not hard or far-fetched.
So I say, hey, you want an enjoyable evening.
Come out, spend your $25, get a meal on us.
That will get you the meal for the evening.
And then we got a donation.
And I want to give a shout out to Point Brewery, the root beer.
And all of that stuff, root beer cream soda is going to be donated by Point Brewery for
the evening.
So good drinks right there.
And yeah, and then we're going to have, we're working with Jen Oswald at Mission and
she will be catering in our dessert for the evening.
And so all this is just going to be a fine dinner for $25.
So shout out to those people who are helping and being a part on that.
And then what the evening is going to be about when you come in is we're going to take
a look at what loving has accomplished in the past year.
We're going to take a look at where we're going and things that we're going to project
for the future, hence the founders day.
And then really in the middle of it we're going to honor folks that have helped us get
started, hence founders day.
And this year we're going to be honoring the church that donated the building to us where
we are.
And those members.
And so if any of them are listening to the best of my ability, we sent out a personal
invitation to them.
If you did not receive one, we did our best to try to find all that are still in the
area.
You are invited to come in for the evening because we want all former members there.
We want to honor them.
We have a special memorial that was made, hand made just for them.
And we're going to make a presentation on that that night.
So it's going to be an awesome evening.
And then it is fundraiser.
And so at the end we will ask others that may want to consider would you be a part of
helping to support love ink.
So that will be it evening, wonderful dinner.
No mission coffee or burying in a coffee truck so you've got to get that.
And especially if you're going to get the bread pudding that Jen Oswald is catering
in, it's just going to be a nice way to in the evening if you will.
Yeah.
So you're going to have a choice of chicken or pork, rice, or repotato, salad, vegetables,
dessert, all going to be offered.
So you're going to make, you're going to leave full.
That is for sure.
That's the idea.
And you're so right about the price of this, you're going to find very few meals that
you can, you know, feed you for that price.
But you're not going to find many opportunities at all where for that price and that money
and while you're sitting there enjoying that meal, you're going to have to be able to
have thoughts of, well, I just, I just helped out my community.
Yes.
I just put into my community.
I just invested in my community as good as that food tastes.
It's going to taste even better when you're thinking about that.
And those thoughts come to you and it's not even just for that night, but a week later,
two weeks later, months later, when you're thinking about that meal, when you're thinking
about that night, you're going to remember, not only maybe the good conversations you
had and the fun you had commemorating and talking with people, but the good that you did
with this organization and working with this group.
Yes.
You took the words out of my mouth.
That's where I was going next.
Thanks, James.
Hey, I met them.
You truly are a professional.
I see this.
I read ahead on the screen.
I'm so sorry.
I read them.
You know, that's exactly correct.
I mean, in any community, you have your organizations that go or that people will say to themselves,
we need that in our community.
We need that one in our community, folks.
We want to be so integral into the rapids community that that is what you say about us.
And so even our elevator pitch, and I hope everybody knows what an elevator pitch is, right?
But the elevator pitch goes just a little something like this.
Somebody asked me, well, what is love ink?
Is where we bring our neighbors who are in need together with our churches for a hand up, but not a hand out?
That's the elevator pitch.
And we need that.
What are the things that we constantly deal with is inflationary prices and issues.
Inflationary prices and issues keep people from going out to a box store and going, okay, I'll purchase that off of a shelf.
There are those who can do that.
And if you can afford the new things, it's great to be able to buy new, you get greater longevity out of it and all the other stuff.
There's other people who go, you know, I can't.
My budget will not allow me to be able to do that.
And so that's where we offer something.
And then we take that money and recycle it into folks who just can't do anything with it whatsoever.
And they need a couch.
They need a bed to sleep on.
They need a dresser so that their house can be decent, get their clothes up off the floor and have a place to put them away and keep a need or a tighter house.
We can make that possible.
You made that possible by supporting love ink.
And it's something that goes on and on throughout the community.
Well said, when it comes to our communities and just even putting the microscope on our central Wisconsin area here in rapids and our surrounding cities, every city, every community has issues.
And I think that ours are doing better than most, especially when you look around the country, but there's still issues and problems.
But if we asked one nonprofit, hey, take on all of this.
All these issues our community has.
There's no nonprofit no matter how big or small could ever handle that.
It's why it's so key to have different organizations and different nonprofits and not only have them, but have them working together.
And I think that love ink is a great example of this.
A great example of the good we can do when we come together and we work together.
Regardless of any differences or any of these things, we all have the same goal.
We want a safe, good, healthy community that we're looking out for each other in.
And it just really speaks to the power of that.
It's something that I'd like to highlight.
I understand maybe to many people out there, maybe, well, I already knew that or understood that.
I don't want to normalize that.
It's too amazing. It's too awesome to normalize.
I want to repeat it as often as possible because I do believe, especially you look at some areas in some places that didn't do this, that doesn't do the things kind of things.
They're not surviving as well. They're not doing as well.
It's a credit to the community, the people in the community, and they deserve to be noted for this and encourage to do more of this and come together even more and become even stronger.
The Founders Day celebration is a great example of this, but it's also a great opportunity Eric to kind of touch on what love ink is and how it came to be.
If you don't mind, I do want to touch on that just for a second because we're going to rewind everybody back to 2018.
When this organization was brought together, and what was the purpose of the organization coming together?
We'll exactly what we're doing today. One of the big things that we consistently work on is called Mission Drift to make sure that we don't enter into that.
It can happen very easily.
What loving has always been about is to see the neighbor's needs and to bring together a door, if you will, a social work agency, some Catholic charities, Lutheran charities, and so forth do this, but for all churches in the community for us to see the neighbor's needs and to have a way to bring that together and to meet those needs.
Through the body of Christ or through the church, phone call yesterday, just yesterday, Pastor calls me up.
This is in essence exactly what we do. Pastor called me up and said, hey, I've got a guy in my church who is struggling financially and needs, and we're working with him as a church, but he has a housing situation.
And I say, great, thank you, Pastor, for calling. And all of a sudden, he'll go through that gentleman's supposed to call today.
He does. Our department will answer him, start taking down and do just like in social work and intake process. And in that intake process, they're going to find out his needs, and they're going to ask him.
They're going to ask him for references, too, because a lot of times people come to us and they are very humble.
There are a few who try to work the system. It's always going to be that group of people, but mostly 80% of the people are very, very humble and don't want to be in the situation they're in.
And so we'll take that and we'll review that. Why? Because there was another, I'll go to another case, we called and we worked their references, we'll take two references. And as we were working their references, their mom just asked for shoes for her daughter.
And we got a hold of one of the references and said, and they said, hun, she means more than shoes.
Where the mother wouldn't ask for anything else, and we were able to work with that family. Now we don't always have the needs, but what we do is we reference to many other agencies, some public agencies that they're able to work with.
And sometimes what we try to do is to get them to a church, because we also believe in the soul work that goes along here. And that's what a church does.
And so we want them to get in with congregations and to be a part of congregations and what's going on.
But this time Pastor called me and said, how do I start the process, a pastor in the area and said, it's a great example.
Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. And you speak on some really important things when it comes to this.
And especially the idea of, and just knowing a little bit of coming from this world, if you will, of just growing up poor or not having a lot or some of those things.
For me, I was, as my mother would say, a rebel without a pause. This is not shocking to anybody. For me, I was never shy about, well, I am this, whatever that was.
But I know that for my brother and sister, I know for a lot of my friends growing up that had it very similar to me, there was a shame involved.
And there was a shame involved that kept people from asking for help oftentimes. And then you went on top of that, the Midwest mentality that we all have around here, where, well, I'm just going to walk it off.
I don't rub some dirt on and I'll be fine. We treat every subject that way. And God bless us for it. I love it. I love that about our people. I love that about Midwesterners.
But it's also at a time like this where we need you to ask, we need you to reach out. There's so many times where we won't know unless you tell us that you could use a hand.
I can't help you if you don't let me know.
Yeah. So taking that initial step, you do that and we'll meet you halfway. We'll meet that bridge because that hand up happens that way. That's a bridge right there.
And another consistent thing I think that we have with love, and we have with so many non-profits we talk to is the repeating of that.
Nobody is looking for a handout. I don't mean to speak for all poor people or anything like that, but speaking for all poor people, I will tell you there are nobody I've met in my life.
You know, homeless person, no person that grew up the way I did or anything like that that was like, man, I just want to live on easy street or I just want nobody likes to live that way.
People, all they need oftentimes in life is an opportunity. Give a person just that one opportunity and watch them shine, watch them fly.
So I come from inner city Cincinnati. Okay. And you will find tons of that in the inner city because government systems and government.
What do we want to say government policies actually encourage that and and bring that on.
It government and trying to be neutral. It's not a it's not a mastermind conspiracy theory to do things. It's just the nature of the beast.
You know, we we're trying to stay neutral here. So here's help. I'll give you an example. Somebody that came to us a little over a year ago from the Milwaukee area.
Did not understand one of the biggest things that we do is when we start that intake process. It's just talk to me. Where are you at? What's going on in your life and so forth.
This person being from the inner city stood up and said, why you asked me all these questions. Yeah. Yeah. What would you know? I mean, where I come.
I got to watch my I fall into I grew up in a city. So I will I will go right into the dialect. Yeah. Anyway, she said, you know, you're just supposed to ask me what I need. And that's it.
And yeah, that's that's the that's the inner city. That's a governmental program. So do you qualify? Okay. You're on the list. Boom. And you're done. And if you want to stay on that list, you have better stay within these parameters, which all of a sudden starts putting people into bondage.
I've heard it said I can't do anymore. I can't make anymore or I'll lose this benefit or I'll lose that benefit. It's not to be mean or anything like that, but it's governments trying to be fair. Right. And so, but it creates this problem. Whereas what we do, we want to hear we want to humanize it.
You want to know what have you been through? What's your struggles? It will help us to also go, you know, let's connect them with this program or let's connect them with this church.
Let's connect them with this outreach that's going on over here and start dealing with them as a human being and feeding that we you're absolutely right around here. It's very, very rare that we get somebody that is so entangled.
They want to be entangled and just stop and go, just give me the hand up. Well, it's all I want. Just give me the hand out.
And with that, it's so important that part of this and sharing that, those people sharing those things, for a number of things, all the things you mentioned, and also the mental health part of this and the idea of, you know, it's also nice to have somebody, a third party, just hearing you sometimes.
Just being able to, I don't for lack of a better word vent or get these feelings out to somebody. The fact that the loving is there to ask that question is so key to this conversation.
A huge increase since COVID is still a left over from people being locked in and locked away. We are still dealing with that to this very day.
Can I thank you enough for the time and everything that loving is doing in our community want to remind everybody the founders day celebration coming up Thursday, February 27th, six o'clock over the beautiful hotel meet.
You can get tickets and find out more. How can people get tickets? Well, we're actually not selling tickets. What we're going is straight by reservation. So just call love ink. Do you get the number there?
It's seven one five eight one eight five nine two seven that phone number again is seven one five eight one eight five nine two seven.
The person on the other end of that line is name is Dawn. If you say her name before she answers, she will freak out. I would love it. So just say hi Dawn and and reader very warmly.
But she'll take your reservation and we would love it if people could go ahead and bring their money in to the loving office on seven 10 20th Avenue.
Over here in Wisconsin Rapids that would that would be very, very helpful as we're still paying for things as we go along.
But yeah, come in make a reservation and that would be what they would need to do. We'd love to share what love ink is doing in this community and we want this event to keep growing every year.
We want to make it as community based as absolutely possible.
And if you have questions or would like to know more about loving here's a great opportunity to do that to find out more about it. Show up at the founders day celebration. Have yourself a great time.
Some great fellowships and a great meal and a great night. We'll be talking about this on our morning show making sure that gets you guys a good crowd and get some ticket sold and everything.
That would be awesome. Thank you for the time sir. Appreciate you. All right. We'll have more midday magazine coming up for you right here at 97 5 FM 13 20 AM W F HR. We are locally grown radio.
