Alan Graham’s Mobile Loaves & Fishes (founded 1998) transformed his faith into action by creating communities that cut chronic homelessness—9 years average street time—while rejecting government dependency. His Community First Village in Austin, built on land valued from $150K to $450K per home, houses 17 3D-printed dwellings with a 150-person waitlist, proving harm reduction works: drug use dropped 80%, alcohol 40–50%. Panhandling’s entrepreneurial roots were crushed by licensing laws, yet Graham’s model revives dignity through self-sufficiency and art, like $10K chess sets. Psychedelics and compassionate alternatives could reshape addiction treatment, offering a blueprint for societal healing beyond institutionalized care. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, Joe, the organization is 26 years old, so founded it in 1998.
It was just a simple idea to start going out on the streets and feeding people out with a catering truck, what many of our friends would call a roach coach.
And I got this idea built on a conversation that my wife and I had with a girlfriend of ours who was telling us about a ministry in Corpus Christi, Texas, where on cold winter nights, multiple churches would come together and pool their resources to take out to the men and women that were on the streets in the winter in Corpus.
And at that moment, the image of this catering truck came out of my subconscious mind into my conscious brain as a distribution mechanism from those of us that have abundance to those that lack.
And that was pretty simple.
And as a serial real estate entrepreneur, I thought that that idea was a brilliant idea.
Of course, every idea that you come up with is a brilliant idea when you're a serial entrepreneur.
And it just blew up in a positive way.
But it really began a couple of years prior to that on a spiritual retreat that I went to at my church that I was invited to.
And had I known that a bunch of guys were going to get together and hold hands and kind of do that bromance hugging it out, I'd have never gone.
But I end up in this retreat for 30 hours of hand-holding and romance hugging it out and had a pretty powerful experience that really just led me to go and God, what do you want me to do?
I mean, I wasn't asking for anything big.
It's just, you know, what are the little things that I can go out there and do?
And it was through that and a series of things that led to the founding and then ultimately the founding of the community.
You know, out of the retreat, the idea was fundamentally to what can I do at church?
You know, I can become a lector.
My wife can go do the nursery.
You know, we get our kids involved in the thing.
The intellectual relationship that I had with Jesus, because there was an intellectual side to this, during that retreat just kind of dropped a floor into the depths of the cave of my heart.
And so there was a different relationship that I was experiencing with.
Well, look, there are elements of the Christian faith that would, you know, first begin with, you know, the, you know, that the angel of the Lord came to a poor Jewish 14-year-old little girl and impregnated her with the power of the Holy Spirit.
That's a weird thought that you got to buy into.
From that, the Son of God is going to be born, a virgin birth.
He's going to be on this earth for a period of time, and then he's going to end up being executed, and he's going to rise from the dead, descend into hell, then ascend into heaven.
But prior to that, he hangs out for another 40 days with his brothers.
These are incredulous things to believe.
And so at some point in time, you have to end up in this intellectual space where you're just kind of going, okay, I'm going to believe that my faith is going to drive me there.
So when my wife, prior to 1996, started taking our children back to Mass on Sunday, and I wasn't part of that.
I began to look at that as the train was leaving the station.
And my father had left us when I was young and divorced my mentally ill mother and left me and my three brothers, you know, almost stuck with a mentally ill, beautiful mom, but struggling mom.
And I began to look at Tricia, who we will celebrate 40 years this year.
Kind of gets me emotional thinking about it as taking our children and leaving the house, the train leaving the station.
I'm sitting back fixing to get ready to go into the office to do some work on a Sunday because, you know, we're both kind of serial workaholic types.
And I decided to jump back on that train and begin to really explore my Catholic faith.
And through that process, I just got enamored with the church.
And when I talk about the church, I'm talking about the whole thing, the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Church, the Protestant Church, the schisms, the heresy, the wars, the Reformations.
And I got enamored with maybe one of the greatest novels ever written in mankind.
What a train wreck this whole deal is.
Yet, at the center of that deal remains this Jesus of Nazareth.
And so that was very intellectual for me.
And I was buying into it.
My faith was buying into it.
I was believing in it.
I wanted to believe into it, but I had no factual things to take me there.
This retreat took that intellectual stuff and dropped it afloor right into the depths of my heart.
And that's where the change really began to occur.
It became more of a heart relationship with Christ as opposed to an intellectual thing.
So when you talk about these specific concepts that are hard for people to wrap their heads around, like the resurrection and like the virgin birth, all these things, like how do you, what do you do with that in your mind when you say you have an intellectual relationship with it?
When you come across something that seems impossible, how do you manage that in your mind?
Well, you know, look, I think there are just some things in the world that you just have to be willing to accept, the immensity of the unknown, basically.
And you and I live in a universe of the unknown.
We would all agree, and I think science would agree that there are things that we know, but it's probably extraordinarily limited.
Obviously, much more than we knew 500 or 600 years ago.
But today, we're not even, you know, I was talking to somebody today about transistors, you know, and if you go back to the Apollo days and your little radio that you could dial in, you could open it up and you could see the little transistors that are in there.
Well, now we're putting a million of them on the very edge of the size of a fingernail, you know, and you and I can't comprehend that, but I believe it.
But I can't see it.
And I know people do see that.
So you and I live in a world, basically, where we're having to accept things for the most part that we can't.
My mom, when she went into a mental hospital when I was four years old and spent a year there, subjected to the most powerful psychotropic drugs known to man, electric shock therapy, the whole deal.
My dad files for a divorce during that period of time, attempts to strip my mother of her maternal rights of her four boys.
My mom wins all that because she had great parents.
She gets out, and at some point in time, she converts to Roman Catholicism and drags me and my brothers to church and the whole deal.
I was four or five, so I don't have much memory of that, but I have a lot of memory of the love that my mother had for Christ and Mary.
And When you're in love with somebody that has profound behavioral health issues like my mom had, and you see that Christ and his mother, Mary, brought tremendous relief to my mom, that has an impact on you.
So I go into this with faith, complete faith.
And I'm just released of trying to figure out is it right or is it wrong?
And I'm released of having to prove to people.
I don't get into apologetic arguments with people.
That is one of the more fascinating things about people that are very religious is that whether or not you think they're correct or not, it obviously has a profound effect on them.
And then this relief of release, like you're discussing, is obviously hugely beneficial to people and to communities.
And it motivates people to do beautiful things like what you've done.
No, that's, you know, look, if God is the creator, he's created all this.
So when I tell people all the time, you know, that want to get into a different argument about this or that or the other, I just go, look, man, you know, God created all this.
He's going to have to sort all the bullshit out.
I'm not the sorter outer.
But this is how I'm going to live my life to the best that I possibly can, which is simple.
And it's interesting that some people would dismiss it and even dismiss the beauty of it because they're opposed to the idea of it being attached to religion.
Well, if you look at what we humans have done in the name of religion or even non-religion over the course of our entire history here on earth, we've screwed the pooch.
I mean, last year I walked the Camino de Santiago.
I'm going back in.
What is that?
That's a pilgrimage.
Today, in a funny way, is in almost providential, it's the feast of St. James the Apostle.
And it is believed that the bones of St. James the Apostle are buried in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
For over a thousand years, there have been these pilgrimages, and a half a million people will do that pilgrimage this year walking along a 500-mile journey, which I did last year, and I'm going back in September to do another 300 miles along one of the most medieval journeys on the planet,
going from one little small medieval Spanish town another until you get to Santiago where the bones of the apostle are buried.
And so it's a pilgrimage.
It's one of the three great pilgrimage, pilgrimage to Rome, pilgrimage to Mecca.
And, you know, although people from all walks of life walk this deal, it's a very Roman Catholic deal because all the churches in all these small towns are Roman Catholic churches.
And it goes back into medieval time when the, you know, when the Crusades were going down and there was the battle between the Christians and the Saucerans and, you know, all that.
It is always interesting to me when those moments do have when someone enters your life, you meet someone, and you just go, I want to know more about the way you think.
I want to know more about what you're doing.
And the way I was introduced to you, my wife and I went to a fundraiser and you had this incredible demonstration of what you're doing and what your organization is all about.
And then maybe more importantly, you came out and talked.
And the way you talked was with no ego and with kindness and with sincerity.
And immediately I thought, I want to talk to that guy.
I want to find out what's going on with him.
You know, there's people that you meet that are like extraordinarily peaceful and extraordinarily content.
And that's how you seem to me.
And when you were on that stage talking, I was saying to my wife, we've got to get his information.
I want to get him on the podcast.
I want to talk to him.
I just want to find out what's going on with him.
Because I think you're a very unusual person.
Because there's a lot of people out there that profess to be Christians.
They profess to be whatever their denomination is, whatever their religion is, but they don't necessarily live it.
Like you abandoned your beautiful house and moved into one of these tiny homes in this homeless community.
And then when we went and toured the community and got to see how you interact with everybody, it's beautiful.
It's really very extraordinary.
And I don't think there's very many people that would do that, what you've done.
You live with them, you feed them, they have all these activities, different things to do, different ways to make a living.
There's all these people that are extraordinary artists.
It's really amazing, impressive art that some of these unfortunate souls, you know, they have all this creative ability, but they just have nowhere to put it, nothing to do, and no hope, and no understanding of how to get out of this.
And no one around them is getting out of it either.
And they're sort of trapped.
And then you come along and you find great value in these people, you know, and they find incredible value in this community that you've created.
And the community is constantly expanding.
We were there.
You were showing us about this new area that you guys are developing.
We're going to expand it.
It's really amazing stuff because it's an example of someone who's actually doing it.
You know, you're actually living that life.
You're actually contributing in an incredibly positive way to all those different human beings, the hundreds of different human beings that you encounter with this and how much you've shaped and changed their lives.
Well, the interesting thing is that they've how they have shaped my life.
And that's That's where the miracle sits.
And when you drive around Austin or you drive around LA, you know, where you came from, or any city in the United States, and you see this catastrophe that's unfolded on our streets of all of our urban cities, it appears to be hopeless.
It's just a mess.
And what we want to do is be able to bring people into our village and let them see that there is hope, unbelievable hope, if we do this right, if we get our act together as a civil society and begin to do things for people.
When we begin to learn, you know, and how I like to describe this is I say to people, you know, and people will, you know, they've got this stereotype of the men and women out there.
You know, and you know what's amazing is I'm 68 years old today.
And if I'm driving and I've got ACDC cranking in the car, guess who is on stage playing that guitar and singing that song?
It's not Angus Young or Bon Scott or Brian Johnson.
It's Alan Graham doing that.
Or if I'm watching a great football game, you know, and I see somebody throw a great pass or do a great block or a hit or something like that, I go back in time.
Or if I see a F-22 screaming across the sky, I still dream today.
And I tell people one of my favorite smells on the face of the planet is burning jet fuel.
I love being on airports.
I became a private pilot.
I don't fly now, but many years ago.
So the embers of those little boy and girl dreams are still inside of us.
You had them.
I don't know what they were at that time.
And then somebody came in and poured fuel on top of those little boy Joe Rogan dreams that now have you, because you couldn't be laying in bed at night going, hey, man, I'm dreaming of doing the Joe Rogan experience thing.
But somebody was fueling whatever your dreams were along the way until you got to the dream that the world needed you to be in.
And for these men and women who lost their family completely and nobody there to pour fuel on those embers that were burning, that's really what we're doing.
So when you come into our art house like you did and you see the artwork that's being produced, the van goes that are being produced by men and women that are on the street, we as a society are missing out.
And yeah, look, we got the crack addicts and the glue sniffers and the prostitutes and the convicted felons.
How do you do that to make it safe for the other people there?
Like if you do have the, you know, the bank robbers and all the people that live a dangerous life and they find themselves homeless, and how do you, do you screen those people out?
I think most people are good people, but we are so we're so we gravitate so much to elevated threat levels that we concentrate on the bad people all the time.
It's like the news, right?
The news doesn't show you all the news.
It shows you what's scary.
There's a lot of beautiful things that are happening all the time that the news never highlights.
The news just gets you freaked out about global warming, nuclear war, economic collapse.
Is that really Biden or is that a guy in a Biden suit?
Whatever it is.
It's just more crazy things that get you freaked out.
But the majority of your interactions with other people, the majority of your experiences with people are pretty positive for the most part.
Even considering all this stress that everybody's under all the time.
Bills that can't be paid, relationships that suck, jobs that you got fired from, all these different things.
Hopes and dreams that are crushed, flat tire, bad transmission.
Fuck.
Most people are good.
Most people.
That's why you can go on the highway and everybody, for the most part, is doing what they're supposed to do.
Well, you know, they're bringing, you know, most everything that happens negatively out there is going to be related to dope and alcohol.
So you may have the on-site dope dealer that we got to manage and figure out how to either tone that down or get them out of there, that kind of thing.
The really aggressive meth or crack cocaine addicts are going to be stealing somebody's bicycle or debit card to go buy, you know, something.
Or sometimes we have the confluence of a profound mental health issue and drugs coming at the same time, and they'll get destructive on their property, those kind of things.
It's the reality of the whole world that we live in in a microcosm there at the Community First Philippine.
It's just these threat things that people concentrate on.
You know, we are engineered to try to stay alive.
That's what our DNA is all about.
Like, if you want to procreate, if you want to carry on your genetics, you want to keep your loved ones alive, you got to stay alive.
And so there's this fear, this constant fear, and it's crippling, you know.
And because it's projected, it's projected both by the The mainstream media and it's projected by social media algorithms.
The things that you interact with the most, the things that freak you out the most or anger you the most are oftentimes the ones you see the most because you interact with those and it's designed to keep you hooked.
And unfortunately, what that's doing is it's making us anxiety-ridden freaks.
And we're losing our understanding of humanity.
You know, it's and it's also extremely polarizing.
We had a conversation about this at your place.
You know, this, the news today, it's like so polarizing.
It's us versus them inside our country for like the first time in my life.
When I was a kid, when I was in high school, my parents are very liberal.
And they never talked disparagingly about conservative people or Republicans.
They just thought they were wrong.
That's all it was.
Like they had conservative friends.
They would sit at the dinner table and have conversations about stuff and maybe they'd argue.
But it was always fine.
It was just two human beings disagreeing on things.
Now it's like everybody's a Nazi or everybody's a communist.
It's like it's just one side is absolutely sure that they're right and the other side is absolutely sure that they're right.
And it's just accentuated by everything we see.
So when you can see someone like yourself in a microcosm put this together and make a real community of some of the most disparaged members of our society.
The people that know you look when they're trying to get money at the stoplight, you look away, you drive past them in their tents.
Jesus Christ, what's that guy doing in there?
You don't even think about them.
The same type of person that might see someone with a flat tire and pull over.
Like, hey, buddy, you all right?
Can I help you?
Because you're me.
I'm you.
We're at the same sort of stratus in society.
We're acceptable members of society with cars and homes and normal people with jobs.
You know, when you look at the purpose of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, our vision statement, the thing that drives our organization is that we empower communities into a lifestyle of service with the homeless, not two and four.
with the homeless.
This metaphorically is the same thing as pulling over and helping the guy change the flat tire.
There's a guy on your street corner and up underneath that bridge that you pass every day.
Can we pull over and help them change that flat tire?
That's what this is all about because the government, we have to quit yelling at the mayor and the city council to go and fix this problem.
This is what we do.
Okay.
We need government to come alongside of us to do this.
But look, this is a human issue and the government is not coming into your bedroom tonight to tuck you in.
You know, we need a human-to-human, heart-to-heart connection between people who are broken and battered and come from a trauma background that you and I, I mean, a battlefield background that you and I can't even begin to understand.
I mean, there are things that you should do in your life.
You should have discipline.
You should have work ethic.
You should strive to your goals.
You should be a good person.
Try to keep your body healthy.
You should do all those things.
But all this pretending that everybody's starting from the same spot and the reason why you're successful and they're not is that you work harder.
That's just foolish.
That is ego and nonsense and a complete lack of perspective.
One of the things that I've always said is that I find it fascinating when you see a city like Los Angeles is a great example of this because in Los Angeles, no one walks.
Everyone's in their car and you go from your car to your home, right?
So you're constantly isolated until you choose not to be.
And then when you do go out and you find these people that are in these tents, that's like they just, they're not in the community.
They avoid them.
They get away from them.
We didn't, if you go back and you study the history of tribal human beings, we didn't ever live like that, right?
We were all communal.
Everyone lived together.
We had tents and then we shared fire.
We shared food and everybody had a role in the community and everybody had a purpose.
When we isolated, we developed agriculture and then developed cities and then developed walls and then developed ways to block everybody out and ways to hide from the rest of the world and you're in this and then now that we have cars, you get in that box and you drive past all those people.
We've lost so much connection with human beings and the proportion and size of the homeless drug addicts that are on the street intense is a direct reflection of how sick the culture is and how sick the community is.
And Los Angeles, which is one of the most morally deprived, twisted, ideologically imprisoned places I've ever been to, has the biggest, most insane homeless population.
Well, you know, it's a political move for sure, but it's related to that Supreme Court ruling the Grant passed versus Johnson ruling that the Supreme Court just did.
And so it's an interesting byproduct now of what we're going to witness.
You know, what was interesting is I had a woman that worked for us a few years ago, and she was a PhD English classic, you know, very, very smart, learned person.
And I asked one time, where did the word homeless come from?
And she went and researched it.
And the first time that she could find it appeared back in like the 700s in a limerick from Ireland or something, an Irish limerick.
And then it didn't reappear again until about the 15th, 16th, 17th century type of thing.
And it was not even hardly present.
But when you get to the 1970s and 80s, the word became ubiquitous.
And through a Google search, you can see that this word appears in every publication, on every news media staff, a million times every single day.
It just becomes, and why in this window of time, basically the 70s, you know, on, is that word so prevalent?
Because we didn't have this.
When I moved from Austin, Texas, I mean, from Houston, Texas, the Houston area in 1976, there weren't people standing on our street corners begging.
You had the, you know, the Otises from the, you know, Andy and Mayberry, downtown, chronic inebriate, drunk downtown, but it wasn't ubiquitous on every single street corner.
What the hell happened in the past 46, seven years?
Culture of death, just people not caring about other human beings.
Our individual rights superseding the rights of the community, those kinds of things.
Our constitutional, individual rights, and I believe in our Constitution, this isn't an anti-constitutional thing.
But, you know, recently, you know, on my Facebook, which is my only social media deal, I'm a member of my high school thing.
And one of our assistant principals recently passed away, Coach York.
And there were five, 600 comments on Coach York, and 90% of them were from men who got into his office and ended up being paddled, you know, during that period of time and talking about how awesome Coach York was.
And I couldn't tell you how many licks I got from Coach York during that period of time because I was a little turdball when I was in middle school.
And we are so trapped in our own life and what we're trying to achieve and what we're trying to do in our social circle and all the nonsense that we have going on in our life that we lose our perspective.
And that's really unfortunate because even our perspective, just to think about how small we are in this life and how quick this life goes by, that in the universe, this planet is nothing.
Like nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything.
It's just too much.
It's so big.
I think that's one of the reasons why, in a similar way, people who live by the ocean are very chilled out.
You know, I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go, oh, what is this?
But there's something about the humbling of the environment.
Like, mountains are another example of that.
There's a humbling of the person by their environment.
And I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution.
And because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were.
Our ancestors, every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos right above their head every night.
And now we don't even see it.
We sacrificed that so we could take our Toyota to 7-Eleven at 10 p.m.
We're talking about like 2009, I guess, 2008, probably 2008, when this really rocked me.
I just remember thinking, watching it, like, no, you know what?
I know for a fact, it's 2007.
I remember thinking, this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night.
And I think it would change the way people think.
It would change the way people feel about just the mystery of life itself, just to be confronted by the stars, just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing.
You know, and the dreams that got us beyond that, somebody thinking to themselves that, no, there's got to be more because they're looking up and they're seeing all of that vastness had to be looking across and being able to see a similar vastness that didn't end.
That's what they believed that wouldn't go out there.
And, you know, it's amazing because, you know, we vilify Christopher Columbus now, you know, because we've, you know, found out he wasn't such a good guy.
Well, he had his issues.
Like, you know, look, we are, we got, we all have to admit that we are a perverted species.
But my point was when we started this whole journey, that the health of a community is often measured by how they treat the downtrodden.
And I think it's a great, like again, I think Los Angeles is a great example of a place that's really fucked up.
And the evidence is these people intense everywhere you look.
And the fact that people just pass them by and they live there for years and it just expands.
I mean, it was bad.
It was bad in certain parts of downtown L.A. when I was filming Fear Factor there in 2003.
We were filming, we'd filmed downtown because there was a lot of these warehouses that were abandoned.
We used them for stunts and different things that people had to do.
And I took a wrong turn once and I was down on Skid Row and I was like, yo, this is crazy.
Like, I couldn't believe the numbers of people that were just wandering around the street, cracked out cardboard box houses.
And that was the beginning of it.
And the crazy thing about that is Skid Row was essentially an engineered environment.
They took all the mentally ill people that they arrested from all other parts of Los Angeles and they brought them to Skid Row and they kept them there.
They just put in food kitchens and some kind of a shelter and they're like, you fuckers stay here.
We're keeping you out of Beverly Hills.
We're keeping you out of Bel Air.
Just stay right here.
And it just stayed like that and grew.
And there was, was it the Cecil Hotel?
It was the documentary on?
Watched a documentary on the Cecil Hotel, which is in the middle of all that.
It was this beautiful old hotel.
And now that whole area is just chaos.
And then now it's expanded considerably.
So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown.
And in fact, more people are hired to work on it.
And those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it just shows you how sick the culture is.
It's an example.
And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture.
You know, I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that are like, that have got your back and really love what you're doing.
And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community.
And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it.
And if this can be done more, like this might be the solution.
I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever.
Because you could see those people when they were walking down the streets and waving to you and talking to you.
We've been dealing with these issues, issues of poverty and issues of abandonment and issues of trauma since the advent of man.
Hell, the Bible basically begins with the Cain and Abel experience.
So what we're witnessing today is really nothing extraordinarily new, but because of the urban environment that we live in, it's very congregated and we're so separated as a culture today that it's manifesting into this chaos.
What we need to do is we need to open the door very wide to innovation.
And I will tell you from 1975 to 1995, 20 years, one simple generation, we eliminated in the United States of America one million.
That's one with six zeros after it, single room occupancy units in the United States.
Okay.
Tonight, there'll be about 600,000 people living on the streets.
And then over that period of time, since the 1970s up till now, there's been this creeping affluence dictated by the government as to what housing quality standards should be for people, as opposed to, I'm going to help you get up off the streets.
Here's a sustenance to get you off the streets.
You choose where you're going to live with that sustenance.
Raised the standards, but these places were also in neighborhoods where people didn't want those people in their neighborhoods.
So it's kind of a confluence of not my backyard, plus this elevation of these housing quality standards that makes a place like Community First Village, which you have seen firsthand, not approved by the United States government, housing and urban development.
Yeah, we have to change this.
We have to open the door to vast innovation to get people out of this into places that they can afford.
And what I would do, there's a great podcast that came out recently through NPR called Lost Patients, P-A-T-I-E-N-T-S, that goes through the historical background of that entire debacle.
And it really begins with JFK and the effort, and the exclamation point was put on during the Reagan administration.
People want to blame Ronald Reagan, but it wasn't Reagan.
It was lots of people, all of us, we the people, frankly, that were trying to get people out of the state mental hospitals that didn't need to be there.
And the vast majority of them didn't need to be there and re-acclimate them back into the community.
What we're seeing out on the streets right now are the small percentage of people who probably need to be institutionalized or managed in a phenomenally different way than how we're managing them now.
So they had a problem with people that were just using the mental health institutions to stay there, or was it just a matter of like they had diagnosed people with manageable illnesses but wanted to keep them there?
And so we, the people of the state of Texas and the state of everywhere, knew that we had to have a place for our neighbors that lived in our communities that had profound mental health issues.
The problem is, is that we did a lot of human experimentation during that period of time.
Right.
By the time the 50s and 60s came around, we had invented these unbelievable drugs, Haldol, Thorazine, all these drugs that we could give people.
Electric shock therapy, which had been around for many decades prior to that.
Lobotomies.
The whole deal about Kennedy had to do with his sister having a lobotomy.
Right.
And that there's got to be a better way that we can bring people back into the community as opposed to being in these institutions.
And so I ask you and all of our listeners here, how many people do you know that are on psychotropy, they're battling depression, bipolar disorder?
It's all around us.
And they don't need to be institutionalized, but there are a few people in this world that need a different level of care than we're currently giving them.
We have half a dozen of them that live in the village that we can't manage, and we need a different level of care.
By the time Ronald Reagan came around, we were completing what was really an honorable experiment that has gone partially awry.
So who else besides yourself has, do you know of other places like your place that they've done it in other cities around the country where they've done something similar?
We have a replication operation at Mobile Lows and Fishes.
So three times a year, people fly in from all over the country, sometimes from around the world, to come and learn for two and a half days in an immersive two and a half day symposium.
And so these people that come to you, how did they hear about you?
How did they hear that you were doing this?
Have you had experiences with these people that explained their calling, like why they were brought to you to try to replicate this thing in their town?
Well, there's, I mean, there are people all over the U.S. that are working in the homeless space that have been in this space, that are dealing with these people, looking for ways to compassionately move the needle on this deal and witnessing that we're not doing a very good job in our country of moving the needle.
And then we've been all over the news.
This show is going to have a giant impact.
We're going to get slammed, frankly, in a positive way by people interested in what we're doing.
But we've also, the Today Show, 60 Minutes, there's just been so much, New York Times, that we've gotten to experience.
They just hear about us.
And we're pretty, I mean, we're pretty well known.
And when you go there and you experience it, you go, wow, I'm so happy there's someone like Alan out here doing this and so happy that all those people that work with you are also equally moved to do it because it just feels like you're doing something really good.
And sometimes you don't see a lot of that in life.
You know, you don't see a lot of like real selfless sacrifice done under the spirit of just trying to do good.
I think, you know, through these symposiums and through the work, there are a number of people out there in the U.S., you know, trying to figure things out.
It's the confluence of where I came from out of the business community, you know, maybe kind of rare, people leaving, you know, one thing in order to jump in to another thing, but have had the experience of running operations the way that I ran those.
And that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to really demonstrate to people that no matter what your leadership qualities are, no matter how well-spoken you might be able to articulate what's going on, there's a place for you to lead to make a difference in your community.
Because people will say, I'm no Alan Graham.
Well, thank God, number one, you're not.
It doesn't take an Alan Graham to do this.
But let me show you the pieces that it does take in order to make this happen and where you fit into that puzzle.
And what's interesting also, too, about the place that you have is you give these people an opportunity to learn things and to express themselves.
And then these people wind up selling these things.
Like the artwork was truly extraordinary.
Like the person that's making those chess pieces, like those are really intricate.
Like you look at something like that, like that's very valuable.
And a lot of the art is really incredible.
And just think like how many people get affected and get moved by these pieces of art that would never experience it if these people didn't have an opportunity to express themselves.
During his lifetime of artwork, he sold one painting.
He was an abject failure.
And it's forensically believed that he was maybe schizoeffective, bipolar schizoeffective.
It's also rumored that he was possibly a drug addict.
I forget the drug.
He spent two years in an insane asylum in a little town in Arles, France, where he probably painted the most expensive art on the planet while he was in an insane asylum.
And And it was post-hath and because of his sister-in-law, his brother, who died six months after Van Gogh, who really exposed him, and he's considered one of the greatest artists of all time history.
That's what I believe that we potentially have out there on the streets, are these Van Goghs.
And you met Utta Dittmar, a German woman who is gifted beyond all giftedness and sold that chess set for $10,000 by the way.
Hand carved, hand-glazed, absolutely, stunningly beautiful.
And I think it's up.
And that's because we poured, we collectively, we the people, us, not just Mobilos and fishes, decided that we're going to pour fuel on those childhood embers of her dreams.
And that's what she gets to do every single day is come in there and paint.
You know, I don't know how you were when you were little, but I was the stick figure guy, and I could only color outside the lines.
It never worked for me.
But then there are those people that you knew when they were growing up and they could draw all the faces and stuff like that.
There's a natural talent that something in the brain, man, that they're able to get this creativity out onto a canvas that is beyond our comprehension.
I don't know how they do it.
My art is the village.
That's my canvas.
That village is a different kind of art.
But I'd love to be able to draw and paint something.
She's really, really talented, like more talented than I was when I was her age.
She's incredible.
I think maybe some of that comes from genetics.
I don't know.
I don't know how that works.
I'm not sure.
You know, there's some people that are children of great singers and they have incredible voices.
And you wonder, like, is that the genetic makeup?
Is that just like you have this capacity for sound that I don't have?
Like, you can make beautiful songs that I can't do?
Or is it a learned thing in your genes from some person, you know, your parent, one of your parents that has this thing inside of them and it somehow or other gets into you?
Yeah, time spent learning something is 100% legit.
The more focus, the more dedication, the more you're all in on something, the better you're going to get at that.
And that's the difference between someone who's truly great at something and someone who's just kind of mediocre.
It's how much time you spend on it, how much focus, how much energy do you have to apply to it.
And this thing about your village is that there's a lot of these people that do have this energy and do have these, they just didn't have a path for it.
And it just was banging around inside of their head.
And I grew up in the Houston area, born in Houston, Moved out of there in middle school to Alvin, Texas.
When I moved from Alvin to Austin in 1976, there were no panhandlers on our street corners anywhere in any city.
You might have had the chronic inebriate downtown L.A. or Houston, you know, or Austin.
But you had men and women selling bottles of water, newspapers, flowers, cowskulls, cowskins, and I'm sure your favorite Velvet Elvis art.
Everybody's favorite.
Yeah, everybody's favorite.
We need Jamie Elvis Art on screen somehow.
And we've outlawed all that.
That entrepreneurial spirit of people, that quest of people to go out and be purposeful.
And instead, the only remaining bastion of entrepreneurialism remaining in the United States for poor people is the First Amendment free speech right to stand on a street corner and beg.
And you can't go to any country in the world, Joe, and not be accosted by somebody that is selling you something.
And you'd be in the plaza in Rome somewhere drinking your $10 cappuccino and a rainstorm like today comes on and there's 100 people out there with umbrellas and ponchos selling them.
And you're buying them.
The rainstorm goes away and the bottles of water and the artwork and the whirly gig things come back out.
What happened to that piece of who we are?
One of my great friends, a guy, he's dead now, John Brombell, used to sell, you know, stuff like the skulls and the longhorns and stuffed animals and stuff and rugs and cowskins and cow skulls from a van on a street corner and built a multi-million dollar a year business,
you know, that was here in Austin where you could go buy all kinds of stuff like that because he could do it on a street corner.
It's either illegal or the occupational licensing requirements to do it have become so onerous and expensive that people that live in extreme poverty can't navigate that deal.
That's the problem.
Like, I think that if you're going to sell a pre-packaged food item like a bottle of water or bag of chips or a Milky Way or something like that, you ought to be able to go buy a box of those from Sam's Club and go stand on the street corner and sell those things or walk up and down Congress Avenue and, you know, Milky Way is two bucks.
You know, bottles of water.
You know how much a bottle of water is when you buy it, buy the case?
You would buy a bottle of water faster from a guy that's tried to sell it that bought it for 20 cents than you would just to give him the 20 cents without earning it.
And they would rather earn the money.
So I wrote a little blog post many years ago called The Panhandler, The Greatest Yet Most Ineffective Entrepreneur I've Ever Met.
They're great.
They're willing to stand out there on a street corner in absolutely abysmal, shitty conditions, being rejected over and over and over and over again, spit on, reviled, all for our nickels and dimes and dollars, 40, 50, 100 bucks a day.
Crazy.
We should empower that.
But our nanny state will have them, oh, we can't have them on the street corners.
But I'd rather walk down 6th Street and see a guy with a guitar on the corner playing with a hat out in the front and throw money in that deal, thanking them for that deal or selling me a whirligig while I'm walking with my family to the restaurant that my kid's looking at and going, hey, Daddy, I want one of those.
Get me, please.
And you pull out a $5 bill.
It's dignity, man.
And then we never know where that might lead somebody.
Well, that place came about in the 1990s when downtown Austin was just kind of a shithole, nothing going on.
We were barely at the beginning of the revitalization of downtown Austin.
So the obvious place to have put that shelter was there on the eastern fringe of downtown.
And then there was an explosion of people wanting to revitalize, move downtown, and then suddenly this thing became kind of the source and summit of the center of the town, reviled by everybody moving down there.
So it kind of came about naturally.
It actually happened during my buddy's Kirk Watson's first term as a mayor.
That makes sense because I have noticed a difference because when we used to do the Vulcan, which is down on 6th Street, it was like Caddy Corner to that place and it was just madness over there.
And, you know, I drove by it the other day, and there's like 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them like barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on.
It's like, oh, it's such a heartbreak.
That's someone's kid.
You know, that's what it is.
When you have children of your own, too, you look at people like that and you go, hey, that was someone's baby boy.
And now here they are, like half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.
When they get out of that misery and come into a place like Community First Village.
Our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village and about a 40 to 50 percent drop in alcohol use.
And because how are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back?
So it's hard to blame people.
I mean, we're anesthetizing all of us, right?
I mean, there's so, I mean, one of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies where, you know, we're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals.
And, you know, you know, and there's, look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that I want to see explored, especially around addiction.
And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people.
And I just would like for the world to come around and, you know, make things easier to bring relief to people because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole.
And we ought to explore a number of different things.
And, you know, I take the legalization of marijuana as an example.
You know, look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there.
Everything is there from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana.
And I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy.
And the folks that are, you know, smoking or shooting, you know, meth and crack, many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.
And I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.
I wanted the roughest, toughest, hardest, most despised, outcast, lost, and forgotten population.
I wanted the ones that nobody believed had value.
So that fundamental was a spiritual decision of mine as the founder of Mobile Lows and Fishes.
And then, you know, it's easier to go after the women and children and the little families that are living in the van in the Walmart parking lot or the veterans or the this, that, or the other.
But I wanted the lowest on our radar, our totem poles to go after.
In the early days of Mobile Loads and Fishes, we had these catering trucks, still do.
There's a dozen of them in Austin.
They go out every night, serve about 1,200 meals every night.
And so we're deeply connected into that environment.
In 2003, I started something called a street retreat.
In May of 2003, I took 15 people from my church out for a 72-hour sleepover, basically, a retreat, one-on-one retreat between you and God.
And the retreat center were primarily the wallace streets of downtown Austin.
We've done dozens of those.
I've personally done 50.
I've probably spent 250 nights on the streets myself.
And you begin to build relationships with people through that process.
So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network.
Today, we're engaged.
We have an organization in town called ECHO.
They are our continuum of care lead in Austin, Texas.
And a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village.
And they have a coordinated assessment.
They call it something else, I think, now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.
So the goal from the continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions.
We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal.
We're considered a pretty awesome entrepreneurial nonprofit, Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown.
And as they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us.
And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology.
But here's a powerful new technology that's actually benefiting people who could have never afford that technology because that technology today is not cheap.
They're beating it down, but it's not cheap.
So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now.
We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase.
And there'll be another 50 over on Burleson Road by the airport where we're under construction there.
Well, there's a population of people that live in our community.
It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals.
Just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary.
There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village.
So there's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children and more are coming our way.
So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside and with the formerly chronically homeless.
And I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community.
The people that were neighboring it, they were worried that you were going to affect property values and things weren't going to, it's going to be dangerous.
But in fact, the opposite happened.
Yeah, and so you haven't had any problems.
And on top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever.
Yeah, it's pretty funny because we the initially what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin.
So we're actually just outside the city of Austin.
We share a property line with the city of Austin.
But for several years, from 2006 roughly, 2005 roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin.
Provide us with a tract of land anywhere and we'll raise the money to build.
In 2008, April of 2008, the city unanimously, city council granted us a long-term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin.
In July of 2008, we went to a neighborhood meeting.
Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, assistant city manager, my wife, Tricia, that just turned into Armageddon.
Police had to be called to escort us out of there.
And what happened?
Oh, we were assaulted and spit on.
And the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience.
The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.
We regrouped and we began to look at other property.
And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on on Macaulay Lane.
And then we got the Not My Backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood.
And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Leffingwell, good friend, great guy.
And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting a tract of land there, but I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities.
And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a dropout.
And, you know, I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either.
So, and that's what we did.
We went and bought that site where I live today and then bought the site next door to it and then the one across the street with some great support of, you know, some of our big donors.
And really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning.
You can't, we had the legal right to develop that property.
There was no zoning and nobody that could approve what we would build on that property.
And so the big fear is crime and lower property values.
Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for call it plus or minus $150,000.
Today, it's plus or minus $450,000.
The other argument is crime.
There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door.
And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community.
Mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polarises, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, you know, the random juvenile, the kind of stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old.