So yeah, then they started making everybody turn them off because airplane
mode didn't. I mean, I guess it's pretty rare, but it does happen.
Like somehow that it, it, it interferes with that wireless signal.
I see. Okay. So I'm not sure if I'm going to make you turn it off or not.
Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. You bet.
Okay. All right. Well, she's doing that. I'll have you. Oh, sure.
Where's it already off? It's on, um, silence, but I'll just turn it off.
Perfect. Yeah. We just like to make sure because even if it's on silent,
sometimes the signal of the cell phone is still.
That we're off. And then do you want any more water before we get going?
Oh, thank you.
Kurt, you're going to be more beautiful when you leave here than you were when
you came. Is, is that possible to work?
People are going to stop you in the sidewalk.
I say, excuse me, sir. Can I help you with anything?
Number of you have a Milwaukee connection. Is that right?
I lived there for two years. I worked in WISN. Oh, okay.
Channel 12. Yep.
Freddie, Freddie worked to work there as well. She was there. She was there a
little before me. We overlapped a little, just about six months, I think.
I think I was when I got there, she was only there for maybe six months, maybe a
year. I forget, we forget it's so long ago.
But yeah, I lived in, um, I was in Oak Creek briefly.
Yeah, because I didn't like to be too close to the station because I was on
you live too close. They call you all the time. And, um,
and then I realized when the snowed and things like that, it was a little too far.
Yeah. So I ended up moving to the east side.
So I lived over the east side for about a year. Okay.
Now left there and I went to Sacramento.
Now I was in Sacramento for two years and then I went to Tampa from there.
Okay. And I was in Tampa for it. Yeah.
I can do it, but I know that I swing it. So yeah, thanks for catching that.
Me. No, no, no, please. I can do it. Okay.
Yeah, it's pretty distracting.
No, I would have stopped swinging it once we started.
I'm just waiting. We haven't started. So I'm just relaxing and okay, okay.
But if you guys would have given me a heads up, yeah, I could, I don't have to,
I can stop swinging that leg. Okay. Yeah.
I just don't know. It's uncomfortable. No, no, it's fine.
Just takes a little effort to get it up there.
Thanks for catching that. Yeah.
Okay. You just let me know. Yeah.
And then and then I'll have a clock. I'll have a timer on that one, right?
Okay. And I'll cue you from over there. Yeah.
Cause yeah, I plan to wrap up right around, right around 30.
And I'll, yeah. So you want them to set the clock for 30, right?
That's fine. It'll, I think it how it's, if it has a running timeline,
that though, that gives me where I'm at.
And I usually just wrap it up by saying I've got time for one more and then I'll,
that'll give you the idea that I'm about to wrap it up.
And Kurt, we're doing this in real time. That's the plan. Okay.
If something catastrophic happens, like my legs falls off this stool and I start swinging my leg,
which they don't like, they don't like, we can, you know, we'd have the ability to start over,
but we prefer to just kind of roll through. Sure. And if anything, we would pick up kind of where
we left off, you know, but, but yeah, the whole idea is that it's just a
two old friends conversation chatting. Yeah. And then we can define old and
different kinds of ways, I guess. Right.
So, Marva, I'm actually not going to cue you. What will happen is whenever you want to start,
we're already recording. So that's when I will start the clock is whenever you just start.
Oh, kid dokey. So the pressure's on me. Nice. I like, I like the, no, I like, you know,
it's funny. I can hardly see you over there anyway, because of the light. So it's all good. So yeah.
Okay. All right. Do you guys all right? I feel, I feel like a lot of pressure right now.
I think I've never done this before, Kurt. But here we are.
Yeah. Uh, Kurt, it's hard to reach a child. Welcome, go ahead and focus.
Thank you so much. You know, I stumbled on your organization and the work that you guys do,
and I'd love to just even start off by talking about your mission statement that says,
help first responders, comfort children, and crises. But you do that through reading.
Tell us how it works. We do, Marva, and the, the primary device that we provide to first
responders is a backpack. The backpack is filled with new children's books,
along with drawstring backpacks. And so we, we provide them to the first responders.
They keep them in the vehicle. So as they head out to maybe a car accident, domestic issue,
maybe a house fire, if there are children in the area, they will invite the, the child or
children into their vehicle or some safe place. They'll open up the backpack. The children will
choose a book to read and they read it together. So now the child who was probably pretty upset,
scared, highly emotional, is comforted through the presence of that first responder and the power
of the book that they're reading together. A really important point here, Marva, is they're
also distracted. So if the ambulance is there and Grandma is not doing well, we're distracted,
we're looking at the book, not over there. I'm going to say how does reading help them
distract from things and how did we deal with this before we learned that this is something that helps
them? Wow, good question. And we are currently supporting 350 departments, department being an
EMS unit, police department, things like that. And honestly, before a reach a child was able to
provide these resources, I'm not sure there was a good solution because you're a first responder
going to a scene, highly emotional child, what do you do? And to further complicate things,
what if that first responder is not a parent? So they don't have the parenting skills, the
knowledge, the experience and things like that. So we, we are trying as fast as we can to get
these books and backpacks out to first responders across Wisconsin because we know that children
are in crisis. I'd love to hear what you're reached right now, like how far out are you
in terms of reaching different departments in different regions of the state of Wisconsin?
Happy to report that we support 350 departments, which is thousands of first responders.
The flip side though is that there are approximately 2,000 first responder departments.
Now help us explain what, when we say first responders, we're talking fire, police, what else?
Fire, police, sheriff, university police and state patrol. So our largest
supporter and partner is the state patrol. They have 550 vehicles across Wisconsin and every one
of those vehicles is carrying one of our backpacks. But another department might be
a load-eye for instance with two vehicles, so they carry two of our backpacks.
So paint a picture for me when a first responder arrives to the scene, you've got this horrific
thing that's happening, you've got this young person. First of all, what's the age group of
the folks we're targeting here as far as young people? The first responders tell us age is 2 to 12.
Anything older than 12, that boy or girl, young man, young woman, they probably have a device.
So they're on an iPad, iPhone, whatever the case may be. So they may not find the books as engaging
as those that are younger. So it's 2 to 12. And I'll just point out, Murv, that that was feedback
that we received from the first responders. We have a group of first responders that we call
the advisory council. They give us feedback constantly. So our mission is to support them,
and they provide feedback to us to ensure that we're on the right track.
It has to be extremely intense for a first responder when they show up at something like that
to assess things in real time so quickly. Any sense of kind of what that feels like for them?
Well, since we are on campus, I'll share the story from the UW Police Chief, twice removed,
who came onto a situation where a boyfriend took a knife to girlfriend's throat. And there were
two children that were en route home from school, and the police chief was on site. And she engaged
with those young girls, and it was an experience that she found to be probably the most challenging
in her professional career. Sometime later, she found out about Reach A Child, and she said,
I want a backpack at every one of the vehicles that are part of the UW Police Department,
so that at least there was this tool, the solution, to help the first responder to deal with sometimes
a really tough situation. Yeah, and I was going to say you guys have a name for
the bags, you call them Reach Bags. Yes. What's in them? You guys have in them.
So we have 20 brand new children's books, and a comparable number of drawstring backpacks. So,
again, is this what you have here? I see you brought the bag, and I hurt, unless you're in
school again. I assume you brought this with... I did. So, again, if we can get one of these into
every first responder vehicle in Wisconsin, I'll be able to retire. So... How close are we to the...
We're a long ways away, but we're working diligently, especially in the larger communities of Milwaukee,
Madison, WASA, etc. But this is the bank that they keep in their vehicle, and the process that
they use again is inviting the child to choose a book that they will read together.
And... There's some lean stock. Yeah, I know that one. And so now they are together,
first responder, child, reading the book together. And again, if I'm that child, I'm looking here,
I'm not looking there. And where have we get asked all the time? What about stuffed animals,
or something like that? Yeah, it seems like that might work. I think it does work to comfort the
child, but again, if I'm holding this stuffed animal, where are my eyes? My eyes are still
there with grammaghetti. And it's the whole idea you don't want them looking at the traumatic
thing that's taking place that's right in front of them. There is a story that our
current Dane County Sheriff tells, Calvin Barrett, and it's tragic, and it was at a very young age.
But the bottom line is, in his words, something happened in his home that no one should ever
have to see. The good news is the first responder took him to another room, spent time reading a
book. Again, Sheriff Barrett at the time was about five. And he tells that story as what happened
last week, just amazing. And what's the sense you get when you've gotten that child to be
distracted? How can you tell that it's working, that you've accomplished your mission to get
them to focus on this book and not this horrible incident that may have happened? That's a really
good question. And I would just say that the typical scenario is that when the first responder
arrives, the emotional level of the child is off the charts, usually. And the child is having,
without a doubt, the worst day of his or her young life. So we're talking, they might be
screaming a little bit. They might be crying a little bit. It might be a little disoriented,
just not knowing kind of what's going on. Yes. Yes. All of the above. And all they really want
is some degree of normalcy. So we want to get back to what was happening pre-crisis,
pre-trauma. And so this is a temporary solution to at least bring them back from that highly
emotional state to being very content. And we received so many testimonials from the first
responder saying, thank you. It works. We just didn't have anything that could engage the child
at such a level that he or she transitioned from off the charts emotional to contempt.
I wonder, you may or may not know this, but what happens to this trauma if these young people
don't have an escape from it? I think back to my generation, the word trauma, I don't even know
if it really existed in the way that it does now. And we've obviously learned a lot more about it
over the last four or five years, decade or so, however you want to measure that. But what happens
to that trauma? Like what does it do to them? How does it affect them for the rest of their lives?
There was a research effort underway at Marquette University a number of years ago. And what they
found was that untreated, the trauma could very well lead to emotional challenges, emotional problems
year later, years later, later in life, things like that. They also found that if you can
interrupt that process, interrupt that, in essence, PTSD from establishing itself within the child,
here she is very likely to avoid some or all of that emotional baggage isn't the right word,
but the emotional impact of being traumatized. I assume you're getting a chance to
learn how to cope with it earlier in life, and you've got some tools at your side that can help
you navigate it. I would imagine that would help someone get through it better. And part of the
issue is that the child is keeping whatever books they read together. They get to keep the books.
They do. And so they may find that by looking at this book weeks later, months later, years later,
it brings them back to a situation where they just felt good. They felt comfortable. They felt
content. And so it's all of the process that we try to inject into the system of transitioning
the child from emotional content, but also to give the first responder a tool that they can feel
like, wow, I had a real challenge here, and I was able to solve the issue by spending time with
the child and reading the books with them. I wonder, does it give them this kind of positive security
blanket kind of a feeling like even maybe they reflect on this trauma, this event, and then
now they can pick up that book and it reminds them of the calm that it brought to them. Is there
any sense of that? Do you know? Oh, I think there is, Murv. But I have to be careful here because
I've been part of this organization for 14 years. I have never personally engaged a child in a
traumatic situation. Our role is to get these resources to the first responders. So they
really have the ability to gauge the impact of time with the child, reading the book, and just
the overall experience. Yeah, I'd love to hear how, since you say you haven't never engaged,
how did you find yourself on the front line so passionate about this issue? How did you get there?
Thankfully, there were people that came before me. Specifically in 2007, there was a husband
or wife from Wannakee. And they gathered up the books that were in the house because the kids were
on their own and mom and dad were empty nesters. And so the thought was, what should we do with
these books? So they took them to the Wannakee Police Department and offered to have this as a
resource when the police officers are engaging with children. And they received such a positive
response that they decided to engage their family and friends and invited them to donate
books, which then they took to other first responder departments across Dane County.
And they had been doing this for five years when I met, in this case, Paul, and asked him about
the organization, again, this is in 2012, and I just thought, wow, they ever heard of something
like this? This is really great. And what I've since learned, Murph, among other things is that
Wisconsin, we believe, is the only state in the country that has these types of resources.
And we've been asked, I've been asked, by about 15 states to introduce the program
in Arizona, in Missouri, in Illinois, et cetera. I've been asked multiple times now to introduce
the program in Australia. Well, a bit of a hike. But so we think we're the only ones that have this,
and yet we're still lacking full penetration across Wisconsin, so we've got a lot of work to do.
But other states are looking to learn from what you guys are doing.
They are, in fact, a woman from Phoenix came and visited with us,
and she now has all of our templates, all of our resources, and she's hoping to introduce
something similar for the state of Arizona. That's impressive. Hope it happens.
Can you paint a picture for me in terms of the amount of engagement that our first responders
are seeing in these situations where they come across these kids that are dealing with traumatic
things? Like how many people have you reached through your backpacks, maybe since you started
or in the past year or so? And how often do they come across these traumatic situations?
So a couple of thoughts. Last year we distributed 30,000 books.
So here's 20, and then take that time, whatever, a big number. And that's the distribution of
new children's books that we provided last year. This year will be in the range of 30,000 to 35,000.
So that's an example of our pushing out these resources to the first responders.
But let me bring it down to a specific community, a specific incident. September of last year,
we traveled to Stevens Point and deliver these backpacks to the Stevens Point Police Department
and Fire Department. September of 2023. Five days later, I received an email from a lieutenant
in the Stevens Point Fire Department. Said I just want you to know. We had a medical issue,
medical emergency at home. I walk in, there's dad having some serious health challenges,
and then there's a six-year-old and a four-year-old. And I said to the kids, I said,
how are you guys doing? And the six-year-old said, not good, not good. So he went to his vehicle,
fire vehicle, grabbed his backpack, said, well, let's sit on the Davenport, opened up the backpack,
they started reading books together. And so how often this happens? Again, we don't know.
But that lieutenant in the Stevens Point Fire Department was so grateful that he had a resource
to use to comfort those two children. Eventually, mom comes home and the medical emergency is
addressed. And in our pre-integrator, which wasn't very long, we talked maybe 15 minutes or so,
you spoke to me about the joy you get, providing the first responders with these book bags.
And you also spoke to me a little bit about the joy that the first responders get in terms of
reading the books. Can you speak to that a little bit for us? You bet. There's no better feeling
for me than to go to a community and provide these backpacks, and specifically when they put
them in the vehicles. So recently, we went to Delafield, and they have eight vehicles in the
police department. We delivered them, they put them into the eight vehicles. We know that it's
likely that same day or maybe the next day, those police officers are going to encounter a child
in crisis. So we know that they know have this tool that they can use when they're out and about
and addressing whatever issues there might be in the community. The other thing is from the
perspective of the first responder, the police chief in Madison once removed, so Chief Coball,
told us often that he finds the greatest benefit going to his men and women in the police force
who are not parents. These are people that have all professional skills, right? They're
great law enforcement officers, but they don't have the parenting expertise and the parenting mindset.
So he said, these backpacks are great for everybody, but they're really powerful for
the first responders, the police officers that are not parents.
And then do you have to be a parent to get it in terms of this impact and then being put
kind of put on the spot like I mean, do the first responders have designated people that
only read to the kids in these situations or can any of the first responders in that
particular unit answer the call to redo those kids? Yes, it could be anyone and it's not a
common for multiple departments to show up at the scene. And so the story that I might tell is that
Middleton's fire chief, Aaron Harris, was at the scene of a pretty bad car accident and a four-year
girl had to be extracted and he knew that she was in pain. And so he decided to hop in the
ambulance with her and he grabbed one of the books and started reading it to her. And he
noticed right away that she was totally focused on the book and she was just not at the moment
aware of her pain. He finished the book and she said read it again and he read it like five times
because the book was a relatively sharp book. The trip to the hospital was 15 minutes or something
like that. But for every moment that he was reading the book, she was focused on him and the book,
not focused on her pain. And so really powerful. The one thing I'll mention to your question
though, Murph, is first responders tell us all the time that they received tremendous training
and they have incredible resources. The one thing that they don't get is training on how to engage
an emotional child. And so maybe the training is lacking, but the resources are not. If we can
get these backpacks into their vehicles, they now have a solution and we're just so happy to provide
those solutions. I have this wonderful ability as the host of Infocus. I give out superpowers.
Kurt, I give superpowers away and I let people say, hey, you've got a superpower. What are you
going to do with yours? Well, what I'd like to do, if you can help me with this, is to let everyone
across Wisconsin know about reached child. You know, again, we were founded in Wanaki and
Dane County in South Central Wisconsin. A lot of people know about us and love us and support us
and we're so grateful for that. But how about in Bayfield County and Door County and Racine County?
You know, so I would use that superpower to raise the awareness across the whole state.
Let people know that our business model is basically to raise money from a community
and convert those dollars into books and backpacks and put it right back into that same community.
And I would contrast that with, there are many, many great organizations that we could donate to,
but this one, I mean, you literally see your dollars going from your wallet to the fire department
or your bank account to the police department. You can literally see that and son of a gun,
an added benefit if you have children, maybe one or more of those will be comforted by those
first responders. Yeah. And you bring up the issue of money, you know, 30,000 books in a year,
giving them out. I mean, somebody has to pay for that. So how do you guys fund this great effort
that you're doing? I would say there's primarily three avenues that we use. Number one would be,
and most significantly would be community foundations. I've learned that there are
community foundations in pretty much every pocket of Wisconsin, and they have been unbelievable
and so grateful for them. There are a number of businesses, especially businesses that are
headquartered here in Wisconsin, but maybe have multiple locations across the state. They have
brought us into their, you know, their headquarters, their corporate office, but then they allowed
us the opportunity to provide the same resources to the other communities where they have a presence.
And then thirdly is the individual donations that we receive. When people find out that we
operate basically at the intersection of children and first responders, what's not to like, you know?
So when people find out about us, they're so incredibly supportive. So back to that superpower
that's what I'd like. Nice. I love it. And then I'm curious to know if you guys ever hear from
some of these kids when they get old enough to kind of express themselves in terms of the overall
impact of what that first responders interaction meant to them when it happened. Do you guys,
have you seen any of that? Have you come across that yet? We have not. And again,
we've been doing this since 2005, 2007, I'm sorry. But maybe a story which is more common,
and that is I was giving a presentation at Asbury Church to their, happened to be a big
Bible vacation school. And we've been invited a few times there and it's just a wonderful
opportunity to talk about reach a child, but also the kids are donating money that's going to go
books and backpacks. But as I was finishing my presentation, walking out of the
chapel area, I guess, a woman rushes up to me and she gives me a check and she says,
my granddaughter suffered a terrible incident that involved a first responder and she didn't have
anything like what you guys are offering. So in my small way, I'm going to help to make that happen
for some other child. That that's fairly common is to hear from a family member but not the child
directly. Yeah. So looking down the road, do you think there will always be a need for a program
like this to help these young folks? My mother is such a wonderful supporter of reach a child and
she's the one that puts the labels on the books and things like that. And she often mentions
it's too bad that there's an organization like reach a child because that means that there
are children in crisis. Well, you know, that that is reality. There are children in crisis
as we speak and there will be forever. But at least we can address that through the backpacks
and the books and take the child off of that emotional roller coaster and bring them to a
better place. So yeah, I think reach a child is going to be around, you know, kind of forever
and perhaps we'll go outside of Wisconsin but we've got some work to do in state. That's a good
thing, right? It is. Yes, you bet. Well, you mentioned this already a little bit about some of the
traction you've seen from different states that are kind of paying attention to you. What do they
like about it? I think they have found that stuffed animals are nice blankets are nice
other tools that might be provided to the child or children are nice. There's nothing quite like
this. And so we've never given out anything other than books and we're going to keep with
that model. It sounds like we're that you're evolving and we as people and grown-ups are
evolving in terms of how we help young people. Is that the sense you get? Oh, thank you so much
for asking that question and I'll answer it by way of real life situation. There's a wonderful
gentleman in the Sun Prairie Police Department, Sergeant Tommy Foy. Sergeant Tommy Foy is also on
our advisory council and he came to us years ago and said, you know, I give out way more books
in a positive situation than in a crisis issue. And he said, for instance, at the time he was a
patrol officer in Sun Prairie and he would see boys and girls maybe playing or whatever,
he'd go up to them and and he'd say, well, who have you likes to read books? And Sergeant Tommy Foy
is chiseled and like me. Yes, exactly. And tall and handsome. And I mean, he's wonderful. He's a
teddy bear, but he's wonderful. Anyways, so maybe because he is such a person of authority,
everybody would raise their hands, say, well, yeah, I like to read. So he'd give them a book.
And he'd tell them, the next time I see you, if you can tell me what that book was about,
I'll give you another one. So the children in Sun Prairie have been building their personal
library thanks to Sergeant Tommy Foy. And so the 30,000 books that we gave out last year, for instance,
my guess is a small fraction were used in crisis situations. The vast majority were
engaging with kids in a positive situation, a positive relationship, and we couldn't be happier.
That's how we have evolved in terms of changing the business model. I was going to say that has
to be good too. It's awesome. And honestly, Murph, we're always looking for other avenues that would
be, you know, not not directly first responder related, but would serve as a channel that the
child might flow through at some point. The Dave County Health Department is an awesome partner
for them, for us. We love them. And in even the Overture Center, where we provide books for the
Saturday morning program for kids, and I'll come up with the name of it, I think,
but Rotunda at the bottom.
It's hard to stop like, it's how that works.
Yeah, kids in the Rotunda, I'm sorry.
So we provide books for the families that come for kids in the Rotunda and things like that.
So again, not part of the first responder universe, but we know that families are benefiting from
books.
What's the, I'm going to wrap this up shortly here, but what's the market out there in the state
that you'd love to be in, that you're not in right now, that you'd love to reach?
Do you think stand out?
Yes.
Racine, the whole county of Racine.
It's a dynamic, economically very dynamic area, and it's a large population, and I regret to say
that at the moment we don't have any relationships with the city of Racine, Racine County,
any of the communities in Racine. So that is a significant area of focus for us here in 2024.
Good luck with that.
Unless, thing here, I want to say, I get a sense, Kurt, that there's no place
else you'd rather be than living in this space of a reach a child.
Is that the case, and why is that?
It is a case, and I just about two hours ago, I was interviewing a candidate for the
reach a child board of directors, wonderful young professional, and I just couldn't help
myself. I just said, okay, I'm going to share another story, and then I promised that's the last one.
I got to share one more story.
There are so many wonderful situations that I'm experiencing in this role, and I'm so delighted
that there are so many first responders that are experiencing another type of exhilaration,
another type of satisfaction, because they took that child and comforted him or her,
and now the child's in a better place, and the first responder,
honestly, would be in a better place, too.
Very well. Kurt Fissar, thank you very much. We appreciate you joining us for InFocus.
Thank you, Murph.
Good stuff, man.
Thank you. Oh, good stuff. Really good questions.
No. You're the man.
You make it easy, brother. It's really, really good, Kurt.
Thank you. Nice job.
Thank you.
Do we need to do it again? Will you guys rolling on that?
Oh, good.
No, that was nice, Kurt. Thank you.
So, I'm not sure when it's going to air.
Again, I've already done, but I'll make sure you get a heads up on it.
Yeah, and every now and then, they might do a clip on here,
now to promote the segment online.
But I'll let you know if any of that stuff happens, too.
Well, thanks for the opportunity.
No, let me give you my card, too. Am I okay to move with that?
Yeah, are you guys all good if we stop the recording every time?
Yeah, I think so.
Just want to make sure you guys get what you need.
I'm going to grab this microphone.