For the past years, covid pandemic has hit us. Making almost all of us isolated in our home. A lot has experienced stress, sadness, loneliness, and mental health disorders including anxiety and depression. How can people help the community at the same time improving mental wellness?
In this week’s episode, Justin Kruger joins us to share the goodness of helping people in need, homeless individuals, foster youth and seniors, and especially to people living with a mental health challenge.
Project Helping Founder and CEO Justin Kruger, helping others having a positive impact on the community that creates happiness within it. Their goal is to improve mental health by providing accessible experiences that foster meaning and connection. Making impactful organization to leverage the mental wellness benefits of volunteering both on you and your community.
To find more of what they do, listen to this episode!
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Improving Mental Wellness Through Helping the Community with Justin Kruger
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re about to try a little bit different of a format for this episode. Usually, I just come on and interview a guest and my guest today is Justin Kruger, who started the Kynd Kit program, which we’ll be talking about as well today, but I also brought on a couple other guests, Hallie Atencio and Phillip Hill, who are coordinating alongside myself an event next month to actually build some of these Kynd Kits to build a little community through this program. As you know, both mental health and community building are very important, very near and dear to my heart topic as where we are in culture today.
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Welcome to the program. How’s everybody tonight?
Justin: Good. Thank you for having us.
Hallie: Yes, thank you so much.
Phil: I’m doing great. Thanks for having us.
Fantastic. Well, Justin, let’s start with you. First, I like to orient my audience here. Tell us a little bit about these Kynd Kits. What are Kynd Kits all about and what do people do when they do a Kynd Kit?
Justin: Sure. So, the Kynd Kits are a program of Project Helping, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we developed the kits about six years ago now, not in response to COVID but in response to the challenge of people are busy, how do we fit volunteerism into their lives, so we developed kits to really be a volunteer project in a box that has 100 percent of the materials you need in it to do something good for someone else. We now have almost 40 different projects that you can do in a box and so there’s a lot to choose from. One example that’s really popular right now is we have a kit where you make sight word flashcards and a reading game for first-grade students. So you open the kit and it has everything you need, you make about 75 flashcards. I have kids so I know what sight words are but for those of you that don’t, they’re words that first graders have to have memorized by sight before they move on from first grade. A lot of kids, if they don’t get to that point, they fall behind in their reading. So we partnered with local schools and we partnered with the Barbara Bush Foundation and we built this kit to have those sight words on them but also you make this little like paper bag monster reading game so when they get a word right, they feed it into the paper bag and that’s how they practice. So that’s one example of almost, like I said, 40 different projects.
So when I think about these projects, I oftentimes think about certain family activities, drawing turkeys at Thanksgiving or making Easter eggs at Easter. Is it a similar arts and crafts type of project?
Justin: Some of them are, some of them are definitely not. Because there’s so many projects, we want it to be a meaningful experience for the kit builder, that meaningful experience is what’s good for your mental wellbeing so some are very creative in that they’re writing a card, decorating a thing. Others are not. For example, we have a STEM kit and in the STEM kit, you’re literally making a solar-powered cell phone charger from raw materials and that goes to the boys and girls clubs for their STEM programming. So there’s a huge variety of projects to choose from.
So there’s a lot of different types of work as well as a lot of different types of projects, a lot of different types of things that people are going to be helping, learning to mental health to homelessness and everything else.
Justin: Yeah, we cover all of the cause areas, like every major cause area from shelter animals to seniors, foster youth, shelter, everything, because we want the builder to be able to choose something that aligns with their passion area.
So where did this idea come from? You said you started about six, seven years ago and you wanted to cater people with busier lifestyles. What made you think this was the idea, that this is what you were going to bring into this world?
Justin: Well, it’s interesting and the story actually goes back quite a bit farther. So, I started Project Helping first which is the parent nonprofit. I grew up in a ridiculously small town in Iowa, like 900 people small, and I started struggling with my mental health when I was really in late middle school, which is not an uncommon time for people to struggle, and how I was raised in a farming community almost 30 years ago, so that’ll give you my age, was that you just sort of suck it up and go on, you’re like we have stuff to do, we’re a farming community, we live on farms, we got to milk cows and do all these things, so I was kind of led to believe you don’t talk about these things.
Phil: Just get over it.
Justin: Yeah, kind of, you got to get over it, keep doing it. If you smash your hand with a hammer, you keep working, that’s the approach. We didn’t even have a doctor’s office in town, much less a psychiatrist or psychologist. There were no resources. To be fair, even if there were, I don’t know that I would have talked about it. So I never did. Ironically, I also, this is a strange parallel but bear with me, I grew up playing golf and I was really passionate about playing golf and so I always believed that if I became successful and notable in all these things that I would be happy. If you make money and you do all these things, you’ll be happy —
So it’s like Tiger Woods seems really —
Justin: Right, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe not so much anymore, but at the time, he really did. And so I went off and played college golf and then played golf professionally for a little while with no success whatsoever but I chased that sort of notoriety and success and then started working in that business and had a great deal of success. But I was actually hospitalized for the first time for my mental health when I was 21 and so I went to the emergency room and checked myself in, drove myself, which is a questionable decision, but drove myself there and I remember after being in triage and then being checked out and it was six or seven hours after I was there, they said, “Oh, good news, it was only a panic attack,” and I’m like that doesn’t sound like good news to me. I would rather you told me something that I understood. You know what I mean? Give me a diagnosis I understand and that there’s a clear treatment for and I didn’t get that and so I left there knowing full well I was never going to tell a soul that that’s why I was there. So I never did anything about it, carried on with my life, ended up hospitalized in the same ER about a year later for the same reason, because I didn’t do anything about it. So I decided at that point that I was never going back to the hospital for mental health, no matter what, which leads to a really dark, dark path. But I had gotten a really great job, I was really successful professionally and actually got moved here by my company. So I was here, I was isolated, and I was in a bad place. I had a plan in place to commit suicide. Ironically, I also started dating someone about that time because I was like, “Yeah, this seems like a healthy time to start a new relationship.” So we had gone on a few dates and then the woman I was dating invited me to volunteer and I was like, “Yeah, I guess, I’ll go,” it’s like the third date, it’s a little early to be like, “Yeah, I’m not really into this whole community thing.” Like, no, like I’m not going to do that. But I did go. We were actually planting a garden for Revision International, they do like gardens and food deserts, like urban gardens, so we went and I remember going for the obvious reasons of like third date with person I liked, and got there and they were explaining to us all the things we’d be doing and I was so moved by that experience. And it sounds super cliché but that day, after we got done, I decided I wasn’t going to follow through with this plan for suicide, because I was like I think I can do some good for people. And so I started volunteering as much as I could, sort of as a treatment for my mental health. And treatment is a strong word, like I am fully on board with all the traditional mental health treatments, non-traditional treatments, whatever you need to do for yourself.
But that sense of purpose and connection that came from volunteering with people was a literal lifesaver for me. Click To Tweet
But as I started volunteering more, I also got really frustrated with how hard it is to volunteer sometimes. If you want to find something to sign up and go volunteer in, especially if you’re an individual or a small group, it’s so difficult. And so it was that culmination of experiences, like I need this for my mental health and it shouldn’t be this damn hard, was the idea for Project Helping, which first and foremost, the mission of Project Helping was volunteering is good for your mental health so we need to make it ridiculously easy for people to volunteer because it’s good for them. It can’t be an inaccessible mental health thing. And so that’s where we started 12 years ago and now we do about 1,000 traditional in-person volunteer events a year where any individual person could just sign up and show up, no long-term commitment, takes less than a minute to sign up. Sign up, show up, do something good, feel better. So we did that first. And then as we continue to grow, we started to work with a lot of companies and a lot of individuals and they said, “Well, I can’t, I don’t have the time, I don’t have…” you know, we all make that excuse, I don’t have the time, I can’t, and so we’re like, “All right, well, what if we could deliver it to you?” and I actually first said to someone as kind of a joke. They’re like, “I don’t have time, like if you could just put some stuff in a box for me to do,” and I was like, “Yeah, I can do that and then I can ship it to you.” And I was like, oh, like that’s kind of cool, I think we could keep doing that. And so that’s how Kynd Kits were born because if we wanted proactive preventative mental health resource, it has to be that easy that you can sign up, have it delivered to your house, do it, and feel better. And that’s where the kits came from.
Phil: One thing that I think is maybe, in my mind, one of the most valuable things about it is that it eliminates the builder’s need for creativity and I think that a lot of us might lack in that area, in the creativity area, especially when it comes to what do other people need. So when I hear about some of these different kits, it’s like I would have never even thought of the first graders’ sight words. So I think that there’s a lot of value in that simply because, now, someone might know I have some time, I do have 30 minutes to an hour to do something, I have the desire to do it, and now I don’t have to identify what it is.
Justin: And that’s the thing, right? Like how do you break down the barriers to people being able to help other people? Because that’s what I think it is. There’s a lot of barriers in place, we are a very litigious society, so people like nonprofits are afraid if someone comes and volunteers and gets hurt and we don’t have all the steps in place, we’re going to be in trouble. And so it becomes more difficult than it should be realistically so everything we do is about how do we break down those barriers? How do we make it so easy that you can go on our site, order a kit, it shows up, you build it, it literally has a shipping label, you send it back to us, and that’s it. So that’s what we do.
Well. First of all, if anyone listening to this wants a kit, what will be the website? What will be the best way any listener can get a hold of you to find out whether it be the in-person volunteer efforts or any of these easy-to-do kits?
Justin: Yeah. So, on our website, projecthelping.org, you can get kits, you can find volunteer experiences, any and all of those things.
Yeah. Well, also, I just want to say thank you for being courageous in sharing your mental health story. I know a lot of people are going through stuff right now. This has just been a really tough time with a lot of anxiety for a lot of people, which I think hurts all of us in the room here to just hear all the people going through that. But, on a lighter note, it is so wonderful to hear that this whole story came about from a reluctant third date and then a joke.
Justin: Literally, yeah.
How many people could say, “My life wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t for this reluctant third date I went on and then just some joke I told someone a few years later”?
Justin: And I’m a deeply sarcastic person so I probably said that truly thinking someone was going to laugh at me and then I was like, wait, that’s not half bad. I do have to add, because I always forget this part of the story, is that person who invited me on the third date is now my wife so it worked out really well.
Hallie: I was going to ask. Good, yeah.
Justin: It worked out really well. I should say, it worked out really well for me. You’d have to ask her how it’s working out for her. But I think so far, so good, we’re 12 years in so that’ll work.
Phil: That’s awesome.
Hallie: That sounds great.
Justin: She’s awesome. Yeah.
I mean —
Hallie: Good influence.
Justin: Right, yeah, for sure.
One question, because I’m a futurist, I’ve always speculated on this, I think most of us have seen how mental health treatment has been legitimized at one degree or another. I’ve had previous guests say it hasn’t really been fully legitimized but I know a lot of people that say in our parents’ generation, going to a therapist was considered this failure. You didn’t properly suck it up. You didn’t win at life, essentially. And now us millennials will often say, “My therapist this, my therapist that,” out in the open without batting an eye. So, do you see some of this getting better in the near future or do you see other parts of our culture continuing to push us on the downward trajectory of mental health that we’ve seen?
Justin: So I think there’s two parts to that. I think, for the longest time, the messaging around mental health is we have to reduce the stigma, we have to get people comfortable with talking about it. I think we’ve done that, personally, and I say that for specifically millennial age and younger. I know for a fact I have two high schoolers, kids talk about what medications they’re taking, what the dosage is, how it’s impacting them, what they’ve struggled with, like it is wide open conversation. So talking about it is not the problem, in my opinion for that age group. The problem is providing them actionable things to do for their mental health, because we pitched reducing the stigma and talking about it, like, “You’ll feel better if you talk about it,” for so long that a lot of people believe that that’s all you have to do. And so there’s this inevitable letdown of, “Oh, if you talk about it, you’ll feel better” —
Phil: Takes action.
Justin: — but you have to — right, talking about it is simply a step towards you have to do things to take care of yourself, like go volunteer, selfish plug, or go to therapy or just start a medication or work more, work out more or eat better, not work more, work out more, or eat better or whatever it is that drives you.
It’d just be the same thing as saying, “Yeah, I really wanna lose weight. I feel like I’m overweight, I wanna lose weight.” That’s what we believed if you said that about mental health would be the fix. Well, we know that’s not the case, you got to do something about it, sadly. So that’s the same concept right now. I will say, in our older generations, and I’m right on the cusp between those two, so life has never changed so much in one generation as it did from my parents’ generation to my generation. We had the internet and access to everything. My parents are only 66 and 67, and I’m 41, like life changed into a completely different thing in those 25 years, 26 years, and so I think we still have to remember that there are people that grew up with that like if you go to therapy, you’re a failure for having not sucked it up, that’s their belief. So I think there’s this really interesting dynamic happening where we need to be more empathetic towards the people that were raised before us.
Phil: I agree. They’re also experiencing a struggle in a great way too because they are aging and they are experiencing the change in technology and, like you’re saying, change from one generation to another greater than anybody else.
Justin: Yeah.
Phil: And being in your 60s, my parents are in their 60s too, like they might need that mental health counselor more than ever.
Justin: Well, and I think if you couple that with people that are older and their struggles with sort of understanding technology and understanding how things work, I’ll use my parents as an example, if you want to get a therapist now, you have to go online and you have to be able to find one and sign up for one and manage your appointments there, manage your medications there. We’ve made mental health more accessible if you’re under 40, under 45. But it hasn’t become more accessible to the people that are older than that, it may have actually become less accessible. We fight against that in our own company, like it’s so easy to make things accessible via technology, sure, that’s true, but what about the people that can’t use it? And not only just people that are older, but what about people that are low income and don’t have access to internet and they have to go to the library to get internet? We’ve made a lot of strides in access to mental health care and mental health resources, we have a long way to go, and so we’re in this weird place where we’re still fighting against stigma in some way, shape, or form with one generation, and then we’re fighting against access for that generation, we’re fighting against access for people that may be low income or thinking outside of the United States, people in countries that don’t have internet or power at all. There’s just so many factors.
We’re going the right direction but we have to give people actionable steps. Click To Tweet
Phil: These Kynd Kits are kind of just an outlet.
Justin: Yes, they are for sure.
Phil: An outlet for your desire or your energy to do something and you don’t know what it is you want to do.
Justin: That’s exactly right.
Phil: You have a great outlet to go online, find something that aligns with me, that makes sense to me, then you’re just waiting for the box, getting the instructions, do it, run through it.
Justin: We sort of jokingly refer to our Kynd Kits as our Trojan horse in a lot of cases, because, yes, they’re easy, yes, they take 30 to 45 minutes, maybe an hour and they’re not overly complex, but hopefully that sparks a desire for someone like, “Oh, this was really great. I should get more involved with something else.” It’s not meant to replace traditional volunteerism, it’s meant to broaden the access to the concept of doing good for people.
Hallie: Or provide a spark.
Justin: Exactly. Hopefully, the people that build them are more inspired to go get involved with something locally or more inspired to then do more with family or put on an event like this where you’re encouraging other people to come together.
Phil: Or take care of themselves.
Justin: Right, exactly, and even if it’s not volunteering, again, that’s not the tool for everyone but it is a tool. I mean, we’re hardwired as human beings to want to help other human beings. When you lose sight of that, which I think a lot of people lost sight of during COVID because it was very isolating and self-care focused, you lose sight of the fact that you’re meant to help other people and then when you lose sight of that, that’s when you really start to find yourself in a dark place, like, “What am I gonna — I can’t do anything to help people.”
Phil: I think sometimes, for some of us, like the darkest part is sometimes not knowing why we don’t feel good, and really we lost track of our own internal need to help others and it wasn’t even a cognitive experience, like it was very much subconscious.
Justin: Yeah, 100 percent.
And that’s why I always advocate try something, because it’s better than move and I know Big Sean said good news you’ve come a long way, bad news is you went the wrong way, so there is a time we have to recognize when you’re going the wrong way, but try something because you can try something and realize it’s not working for you then try something else and that’s always going to get you somewhere faster than sitting there thinking the whole time, “Well, this doesn’t seem like the exact right thing”
Justin: Yeah, try it. It could be 50 percent right, it could be not right at all, but now you know. Don’t think, take action.
Now, Hallie, I wanted to ask you because you did Kynd Kits during COVID, during the pandemic when we’re talking about when everyone was huddled in at home stuck.
Hallie: We did, yes.
How did that make you feel about your relation to the community?
Hallie: Well, I actually brought it to my family for the holidays. I think they were a little confused at first but I think they all came on board. I decided to get a variety of different boxes and I think it was a really fun thing to do as a unit and then to be able to discuss, “Oh, why did you do this?” or, “Why did you pick that box?” So it was a lovely event.
That’s amazing. And, Justin, I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of stories. Do people often who get the Kynd Kits, do they often tell you about their experiences? Do they write you postcards? Like, “Here’s a postcard from my Kynd Kit event in Omaha, Nebraska.”
Justin: Yes, but via Instagram. So we get a lot of people tagging us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, that they’ve done them, which is amazing. Most kits come back to us with return labels and then we check on them and then distribute them to nonprofits. We get a lot of old school handwritten notes because they’re already writing something and they put it in the kit and it’s incredibly moving. We actually have this massive wall that we start pinning things to and it’s all the notes and we take pictures of our favorite completed kits because some people are so ridiculously artistic and they’ll make these things really, really unbelievable. But we had one literally like two weeks ago, this lady sent a message in her kit and then she just said, “Hey, I just want you to know that as someone that struggles with anxiety and mild mental health challenges, as simple as this was, this act of doing something for someone else was incredibly meaningful to me.” We see those things. Last year, we shipped almost 100,000 boxes, and just like seeing one of those things makes every bit of it worth it. It’s so cool.
That is amazing and it feels empowering, at least from my personal experience of starting this podcast and some of my later endeavors, to actually be doing something because one of the things I think is the most disempowering thing is when you’re upset about something going on in the world, upset about some sort of phenomena that you’re seeing, mental health is a great example, we see it everywhere, and you really feel like you’re powerless, you can’t do anything about it, there’s not a thing you are doing and you feel paralyzed, and then you turn to drugs, workaholism, or excessive use of screens to cope with the pain. Let’s talk a little bit about this event we kind of alluded to a little bit, but it’s going to be on November 5th. Now, some of you British listeners might know this as Guy Fawkes Day but this will be the day that we’re bringing our group of people together to build Kynd Kits. Any of my co-organizers care to embellish on what we’re doing?
Phil: Yeah, so we’re going to be getting together November 5th, Saturday, November 5th, in an effort to build kits and give them back to the community but also in an effort to build community together while we are volunteering.
Hallie: And just to build connection to one another and to maybe have some really good discussions about why we’re passionate about certain topic areas, whether that be in the environment, shelter animals, autism, children, older adults. There’s a lot we can learn from each other so we’re really excited to host this event.
Phil: That’s a great point, discussion’s a big deal, and we can only imagine where the discussion leads too, what you might learn about how we could work together to do something else also.
Yeah, because one thing we’re hoping that the group of people we bring together is that we’re going to be able to come together again and again a few other times to take on some other causes that are near and dear to us. And it’s kind of weird because, Justin, Kynd Kits is kind of like selecting your cause from a menu almost, not to cheapen it by comparing it to your list of IPAs at a bar or something like that.
Justin: Sure, I’m okay with that comparison.
Hallie: That’s quite the comparison.
Phil: I think that the Kynd Kits is something that could be done again and again too, but I do like the opportunity to discuss other avenues and other ways that we can get involved together as individuals, as groups, and have that influence that we’re trying to have.
Justin: Well, I think it’s important too that that you get an opportunity to explore other cause areas to that point, sure, you may know that you’re passionate about — my wife and I are passionate about shelter animals, for example, so you may know that already, but maybe you do a STEM kit, maybe you do a kit for foster youth, and you explore that and see how that makes you feel and you’re still doing something for someone that’s really meaningful, broaden your horizons a bit as it relates to cause areas that you might be interested in, which I think is another useful way to kind of use the kits.
Phil: There’s a lot of value there.
Justin: Yeah.
Phil: Yeah. Learn more about yourself and your own interests.
Justin: Well, to Stephen’s point, try things. Try things and determine like, “Oh, yeah, that felt great,” or, “That wasn’t as moving as I thought it would be. I’m gonna try a different cause area or a different thing,” and like I said, the kits are not meant to be the end all of volunteering as much as they are that sort of spark to say, “Oh, I’m really interested in this, I wanna go learn more. I did a shelter animal kit and now I’m, I’m curious about that, maybe I’ll look into Dumb Friends League and see if there’s a way for me to go volunteer there.” That’s what this is sort of meant to drive.
Meant to drive some thought processes around these bigger initiatives.
Justin: Yes.
So how do you, not only the postcards you talked about or everything on the Gram that people will post about during the Kynd Kits, but do you get information from people who’ve said, “Oh, I did the shelter animal one and now I’m at the DFL and I’m doing my thing every Wednesday night,” or something?
Justin: We don’t get as much from those. I mean, to be fair, the kits for us go all over the world so we’ve shipped to basically every country in the world at this point. We actually have a map on the wall, it’s really fun to see —
Even North Korea?
Justin: I’m going to say probably no on that one. I said almost, almost every single one. Yeah.
Phil: You should hand deliver that one.
Justin: Exactly. I’ll send them over with Dennis Rodman. So we don’t get as much of that just because it’s such a broad scope. What we do see is people that come to our in-person volunteer events, which, again, we have a thousand a year, so people come to those events and that may be at Colorado Feeding Kids is a great example, so that event is you come together as a large group and you’re creating these meal kits that go to kids and families that have food insecurity. I have countless stories of people who now just go back there on their own outside of our once-a-month event and find other ways to be involved with that organization. That’s happened everywhere from Urban Peak, who we love, it was our first ever partner, we still go there. Urban Peak’s a youth homeless shelter downtown, for those of you that don’t know.
Less than a mile from where we’re sitting right now actually.
Justin: Yeah. So Urban Peak’s amazing. So we have countless stories where people will come to these events in person, see it, feel it, be a part of it, and then take it upon themselves. And we’ve always said, if someone comes and volunteers with us and then they decide to go off on their own and start volunteering, like that’s a win for us.
If we’ve made volunteering a part of their life now or at least expanded their ability to do so, that’s a win. Click To Tweet
We’re totally fine with that. That’s amazing. That’s what we’re here for. So, yeah.
Hallie: Or just connecting back into volunteering. I’ve been volunteering since I was, oh my gosh, probably like 10 years old and that’s been a big part of my world.
Justin: And like you say, connecting back in. That’s an easy thing that as life gets busy, the world gets complicated with things like pandemics, it’s one of those things that’s easy to say like, “Oh, that’s the thing I’m gonna cut out because it doesn’t,” so you do have to get reconnected. It’s not unlike every time I start trying to go to the gym. I have to go back at some point, like it’s you have to keep doing it and that’s an important piece.
Yeah, I love that connecting. I love that attitude because I’ve covered this in some previous episodes about how we’re not thinking so much as far as competitiveness as much as we’re thinking about fulfilling a mission, and if you’re fulfilling a mission, like, for example, I’ve had on this program other podcasters with similar themes to their podcasts, they are also trying to inspire people, I was recently on one called The Lost & Found Millennial, which is very similar to this idea of, well, how do you find yourself? How do you find the life that you really want as opposed to the life that someone else, the living by the script thing that I mentioned over and over again, which is what we’re all trying to get out of? Do you think a lot of people through volunteer work are going to get out of some of their funks? Because I know a lot of people listening out there are, say, stuck in a job they don’t really feel inspired by and stuck in other areas of their life that just really aren’t getting them lit, and I mean lit in a very broad sense, that we can be lit for so many different reasons.
Justin: Sure. Yeah. I think that one of the best ways to find a sense of clarity, I’ll put it that way because things are very sort of messy and cloudy in the world, especially right now, is to do something that is very intrinsically rewarding, like everything in our society it feels like is set up for that extrinsic reward, buy the thing, post the picture, whatever that may be, like taking your time to actually go help someone else or something else, an animal in need, is one of the best ways to sort of ground yourself and get some real clarity because you’re not being driven by that social media buzz or any of the other things so it’s a good sort of mental reset almost, if you will, that provides a lot of clarity for people, I think.
Phil: When you’re finding that kind of inspiration, I think it’s pretty safe to say that you are finding fulfillment, satisfaction, and that’s naturally generating positivity with it.
Justin: Yeah. One of the things that I found most interesting in some of my early research on the mental health benefits of volunteering was almost all sources of dopamine have sort of this diminishing point of return. You got to keep doing more of it to get the same dopamine hit. Volunteerism does not. There’s no point of diminishing return, like our brains are hard wired to want to help people so it never stops benefiting you. You never have to like get more. You can go once a month consistently and get phenomenal results on your long-term mental health. We actually did a study, we partnered with the University of Denver and we created a modified version of the Life Satisfaction Survey, 20 questions and get this grade, so if people volunteer once a month on average, their score at the beginning versus six months in, they’ll score 26 percent higher on this modified Life Satisfaction Survey so, essentially, their wellbeing after volunteering once a month.
26 percent higher.
Justin: Yeah.
And are there any other sources of this dopamine without the diminishing returns?
Justin: I don’t want to say no because there may be but not artificial ones, we’ll put it that way.
Not like the standard things we think of, like if 75 likes were good enough for you today, you’re going to need 120, then you’re going to need 350.
Justin: Right, yeah. You can’t be at 1000 followers forever and feel good about social media. I think the other thing is, what is the side effect? Like let’s just say you go do it, you get a 15 percent increase or a 10 percent increase or a 5 percent increase. One, that’s still pretty good. But, two, the side effect is you’ve done something for the community and other people have benefited, like there’s no question about that. It’s not just for you, per se. It’s good for you but it also has this ripple effect on the community that’s massive.
Phil: And you still did something for yourself. So you still uplifted yourself and uplifted others around you.
Justin: Yeah. And volunteerism gets this sort of bad rep, like if I volunteer, it has to be out of a purely altruistic mindset, which doesn’t exist, really —
Hallie: Or I’m in trouble.
Justin: Right, yeah, that too.
Hallie: Court ordered.
Justin: Man, I’ll tell you what, that’s a whole ’nother conversation because I feel very strongly that we should not be giving community service as a punishment or making kids have a certain amount to graduate, all those things, like that’s not what —
Confirmation?
Justin: Yeah. It shouldn’t it shouldn’t be that way. But that’s the thing, the side effect is you’re making the community a better place, one way or the other, so I think it’s kind of a no lose situation.
Yeah. And I want to open this question up to everyone here. We talked about your experience where you we’re a volunteer, I wouldn’t say forced to but you volunteered not really out of like your own desire, but in order to do it and in order to get something out of that experience, it seemed like it required a certain amount of openness, that I want to say not everyone has, I don’t want to be a big thrower of shade around here, but not everyone has. What do you think someone needs to do to kind of be open to whatever is going to come their way? Because sometimes you don’t know what to do but there’s someone out there with ideas and there’s someone else out there with a sign, a news article or something that will give you that inspiration but you just have to be open to receiving it.
Justin: I talk to my kids about this a lot, like depression, sadness, frustration, it lives in that space between expectations and reality. And so I think if you go in with a realistic mindset that, “This is going to be good one way or the other, I’m gonna help someone, I’ll feel a little bit better.” It’s not a magic. It’s not a magic pill. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m gonna do this once and my whole life’s gonna change,” so I think you have to go in with realistic expectations, you have to go in knowing that if I go to Urban Peak and serve breakfast to homeless youth, a hundred kids are going to get a meal that wouldn’t have otherwise had one. And if you go in with like, “I’m just going to do this because I can and it’s gonna make me feel a little bit better and it’s gonna help a hundred people,” do that, just that. Don’t go thinking like, “I wanna volunteer and have this lightbulb moment,” like, sure, I had that, that’s unfair, but I think you have to have realistic expectations of this is a lifestyle that you need to commit to. I always see these memes, it’s like someone’s looking at themselves in the mirror thinking like, “When is that salad I ate last week gonna like do its work?” If that’s the mindset, we’re going to be disappointed.
Phil: And I think a big thing too is empathy and just being empathetic with others but also being empathetic with yourself, so there’s times too when, me personally, I sense the desire to get going and to help more and I didn’t necessarily have the creativity side of things, like to be empathetic with myself, to be open to the idea of not needing to have my own internal reason to even do something other than that I want to help is a big deal or being empathetic with others on how we could help or why these things might be so influential. It’s a big part of being open, or open-minded.
Hallie: I think just don’t overthink, just do it. It’s very simple, in my opinion, but —
Very simply put.
Hallie: — maybe it’s easier said than done.
Well, easier said than done for some people, but, I mean, there is a lot to that, because we do, we tend to overthink, we tend to — what is the saying? If you wait for the exact right time, you’re going to be waiting a long time, I think it’s what it is.
Justin: Yeah. 100 percent.
Yeah, I have all these sayings I keep quoting over and over again and not all of them are from rappers, I promise you.
Justin: It’s okay if they are, frankly.
Yeah. I mean, I just like the idea that inspiring quotes can come from anywhere. They can come from Ben Franklin, one of my favorite people of all time, or they can even come from the person street performing down the road if they got something to say and it’s based on something real.
Justin: Yeah, all the good quotes come from authenticity, one way or the other.
Phil: Yeah, the authenticity is the biggest sign.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I hope that more people can find that place. I hope more people can be open-minded and it sounds like we have to just stop thinking too hard, we have to stop coming in with so much high expectations, and also stop thinking, Phil, to your point, only within ourselves. I think that’s one of the main things you’re talking about is a lot of people go through life thinking only within themselves, only what does this mean to me? Sometimes you got to do that, but it can bring you into a really limited mindset. When you go outside yourself, sometimes, you get a better reward for yourself in the end, which is one these many counterintuitive things. Well, I also want to make sure that everybody listening has the information. First of all, in case it’s not obvious from this and other episodes of the podcast, this whole thing is based in Denver, Colorado so if you’re listening and you’re in the Colorado Denver area, this event will be happening Saturday, November 5th, and I think we agreed on 3 PM and the location.
Justin: Yeah, it’ll be actually hosted at one of our volunteer studios, which is, for those Denverites that are listening, it’s kind of Hampden and Yosemite area, and we’ll be able to put up the address here in a bit but it’s Hampden and Yosemite. So, yeah, hopefully we see you all there.
Phil: I think it’s also important to just remind those listening too that you don’t have to be in Denver, Colorado, to use the Kynd Kits and to have some fun and connect with other people and help somebody else in the process. So, by all means, get one, put together send it back in.
Justin: I didn’t even pay him for that.
I got to say, for anyone out there starting a business, you will learn that unpaid advertisement, that word of mouth can be 100 percent priceless, and I guess it’s not just for business, it’s for whatever you you’re trying to do because we can’t personally go and contact every single person in the world ourselves to try to spread the word about whatever our endeavors are. So we’ve covered a few topics. We’ve covered, Justin, your story about mental health struggles and then how this experience helped you get to a better place and how you’re bringing that to everybody else. We’ve talked about building community and we’ve talked about just volunteering and helping. I just want to give everyone one last chance to give any final thoughts you have about community, about mental health, and how we can bring have as many people as possible out of some of the darkness that I’ve unfortunately seen a lot of lately and we all know that a lot of the world is in an era of anxiety and some mental health struggles.
Phil: Today, I feel like it’s easy for us to be led to believe that like maybe — I mean, we are oftentimes in strife, things are not going the way we want it, yada, yada, yada, but I do think that we do have to help each other and we do have to build each other bad as a community and I think that that’s one thing that we have to remember and I think we have to be open to our needs whenever we need to be lifted up. I think we also have to be open to the idea that we need to help others also. And so even in a world like we have right now where it’s easy to focus on what makes us different or what makes us not get along in every way, shape, or form, I think if we choose to focus on what makes us similar, what makes us all human beings, then we actually can find a lot more common ground than we do different ground and then you’re helping more people too.
A lot of different ground in this world, for sure. Well, a lot of people focusing on different grounds.
Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m going to share a brief story, I’m going to use my daughter’s words, so my daughter, Riley, is 17. Riley has had two suicide attempts in the last 18 months, which I’ve learned a lot from and she’s still with us, she’s doing really well, I’m super proud of the progress that she’s made. Obviously, it’s a jarring thing in your life when your child almost dies but Riley actually spoke to a group at one of our events of about 250, 300 people, and so she got up and spoke, asking me if she could speak. She was 16 at this time, which was really moving. Her speech was about what we talked about earlier. She said it is okay to struggle. We all struggle with stuff. It’s not okay to not try to do something about it. Try, just try to do something, try different things, take action, and when you can, encourage the people that are around you to do it with you, to take action with you and include other people.
As rapper Pitbull once said, everybody’s going through something.
Justin: Exactly.
All right, well, I would like to thank you all for joining. Justin, thank you for sharing some of these very personal stories and being willing to share it on this public platform here in the podcast. Phillip, Hallie, thank you for hopping on as well. We’re going to have a wonderful event on November 5th. You’ll meet some wonderful people that are also doing something as opposed to doing nothing, as we just brought up, and also hear about some different endeavors, different activities that hopefully can bring us all to a better place. And I’d like to thank everybody out there listening. I hope, whatever you do, check out projecthelping.org, check out some of these other events, but whatever you do, I hope you find that thing in your life, the thing in your life that you need that’s going to bring you to where you feel like you’re really doing something about whatever it is that you really care about, because struggling is okay but doing nothing is where you really run into trouble and I just want everyone to know, regardless of where you are in your own mental health journey, that you are worthy and you are able to do something about the issue that you’re dealing, you’re able to do something about your situation. Thank you for tuning in and I encourage you to tune back into Action’s Antidotes. There were 70 episodes before this one so, hopefully, you’ll find something in there that inspires you. If not, there’ll probably be couple of dozen or hundred or thousand more, I don’t know what the future holds, let’s just all hope we can make it a good one through projects like this one.
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About Justin Kruger
Justin is the Founder and CEO of Project Helping, a Denver-based mental wellness organization. He grew up in a ridiculously small town in Iowa. He studied finance and economics, which he now doesn’t use at all. He instead played golf professionally before starting a career in the golf industry. Over 15 years he did all the jobs one could find in this industry, most notably staying with PING golf for almost 10 years. His personal struggle with mental wellness led him to leave the golf business behind to start Project Helping and providing purpose, connection, and mental wellness through kyndfulness.