We Are Podcasting, Y'all! - R&R: Resilience & Relationships - Stephanie Olson

In this conversation, Stephanie Olson, CEO and founder of the Set Me Free Project, discusses the evolution of her organization and its new podcast, focusing on resilience and relationships. She shares insights into the project's origins, its educational curriculum aimed at youth, and the impact of COVID-19 on their operations. The conversation highlights the importance of addressing human trafficking and trauma while fostering healthy relationships and outlines the project's expansion and funding strategies.

Takeaways

The Set Me Free Project focuses on resilience and relationships.
The podcast will cover topics related to trauma and healthy relationships.
The organization started in Omaha, Nebraska, addressing human trafficking.
Curriculum development was driven by the need for youth education.
COVID-19 prompted a shift to digital learning and outreach.
The project has expanded its reach to nearly 10 states.
Funding comes from private grants and individual donors.
The curriculum aims to be engaging and not fear-based.
The organization trains facilitators to effectively educate youth.
Future plans include writing a book on youth safety and human trafficking.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the Set Me Free Project
02:17 Revamping Resilience: New Directions
05:08 The Journey of the Set Me Free Project
12:29 Adapting to Change: The Impact of COVID-19
18:50 Curriculum Development and Expansion
20:37 Looking Ahead: Future of the Podcast
22:57 R&R Outro.mp4

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Stephanie,

Stephanie Olson: 0:18

hello. I'm Stephanie Olson, the CEO and founder of the set me free project, and also somebody who did the podcast of resilience in life and leadership. Now, if you have listened to that podcast at all, you have heard me say something similar to, I'm back, or I'm going to do this again, or whatever the case may be, here's what I'm going to tell you. I am back, but I'm back a little differently, and I'm going to kind of give you the story and give you the whole update and all of the things that have been going on, but the set me free project is doing amazing things, and we have been wanting to do a podcast for ever. In fact, we tried to do a podcast some time ago, and it didn't work, and we have a YouTube channel, and it's not thriving yet. We do some stuff on Tiktok and things like that, but our our podcast or our YouTube channel or whatever, just never really got up and running. And part of that is because I was putting a lot of effort into resilience in life and leadership. Some of that was just because we didn't know what to talk about. And I'll explain that in a little bit too. But here is what is happening. We have now revamped resilience in life and leadership, and we're making all these changes. Okay, so here's what the changes are. First of all, we are still doing something about resilience, but I'm going to share this with you. Here we go. Bear with me. I am sharing this okay. Here it is, resilience and relationships. So we're still doing a resilience piece. But I also want to add the set me free project with it. And so no longer is it just going to be Stephanie Olson resilience in life and leadership. It is going to be resilience and relationships, real talk for real life with Stephanie Olson and the set me free project team, yay. How cool is that? I think it's cool. So we're going to change things up a little bit, and we want to hear from you. We want to hear what you want to hear about. We want to hear about what is important to you. But we do have a list, a running list, of things that we're going to be talking about, and some of the things might be obviously about human trafficking. We're going to talk about human trafficking and and MS and facts, and the things that are happening and the things that are not happening. We might talk about some of the people that are being accused of human trafficking, definitely people who have been convicted of human trafficking. But we're not going to limit it to human trafficking, and I think that's an important piece. We're going to talk about all things sexual violence. And I know what you're saying. You're like, yeah, okay, this sounds like a fun podcast. Don't worry, here's what I will tell you. We're also going to talk about things that are really pertinent to all of us. We're going to talk about trauma and how to deal with trauma in the workplace. How do you handle trauma on a daily basis? We're going to talk about parenting. How do you parent youth in this day and age, especially with technology, we're going to talk about, how do you talk to your kiddos about human trafficking and technology? There's a lot of stuff that we are going to talk about, but we also want to hear from you. We're going to talk about relationships, healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships. How can you be a good friend? How can you be a good partner, whatever, all of the things. We don't want to limit this podcast and we want to bring in anything that's about resilience and relationships. Because here's the reality, everything the set me free project does is about resilience, and it's about relationships. So for those of you who haven't followed the journey, or have only followed portions of the journey, let me just share a little bit about what the set me free project is and does, and then I want to share with. You kind of the direction we've been going, and then we're going to launch into some amazing things. So the sent me free project. We started about 11 years ago to date, at the time of this podcast. So it was 1919, okay, here's the deal. It's been a long month. So bear with me. I am old. I'll give you that, but not that old. Okay, so we started the set me free project, 2015 in 2015 and we started because there were a lot of good things happening in our area. And for the record, I am personally in Omaha, Nebraska. We'll talk about that too, because we are no longer a local organization. We haven't been for a long time, but we'll talk about that. So I am in Omaha, Nebraska, in Omaha, believe it or not, human trafficking is a hot spot. There were a lot of really good things happening in the area of human trafficking, as far as counter trafficking goes, but very much on the recovery and restoration side. Now that's important, that recovery and restoration piece really important. But what we recognized was that nobody was talking to our youth. No one was talking to the people who served youth or parents, caregivers, and that's really how we began. I started the organization with Cindy halting, who was my co founder at the time, great friend. Love. Cindy no longer with the organization anymore, and she was an amazing integral part in where we are today. So I just want to give kudos to Cindy halting, love you girl. So anyway, we decided that we needed to do something about the fact that our youth, our kids, because at the time our kids were in elementary middle school, were not hearing about this topic, and yet, we knew that it didn't look like the movie Taken or whatever new movie today, that it was happening in our community. It was happening in our schools, it was happening in our homes with social media. And it was our kids that were at risk, and that's what we saw. So we had talked to a couple of great educators in our area, and they said, Go find a curriculum and bring it to us, and we will get you in front of administration. Then you're on your own. Well, we looked, we looked and looked and looked for a solid curriculum, because I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. That is, that is a lot of work, and we couldn't find anything that was number one, not fear based. Number two, that was written for youth, and number three, that wasn't just just kind of bad. And so we wrote, and, yeah, okay, that was me. I was more the outside the face, the person talking Cindy was the behind the scenes, the money person, the brains. And I wrote a curriculum for youth, middle school and high school, and parents and caregivers on human trafficking and social media safety, and presented it to this school district. And what do you know? They were impressed. We had a meeting with them at in the middle of the month, and then at the end of the month, I was speaking to all of their social workers and counselors in the school district, and we were in the schools, and we sent out one mass email to two school districts in our community, and for at least four years, we never did any outreach. That was fast, that was schools don't work like that, just FYI. So clearly, someone was on our side there. And clearly, school personnel saw the need for this. They recognized that it was really important that we have this. So we grew over those that time to about 400 plus schools in, I think, at least four states. So we were in at the time, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, some reaching Kansas, and we were constantly busy. We were the ones going into the school. We were the ones talking to youth in the schools, talking about the importance of understanding what human trafficking is and social media safety. Now here's the thing that we did a little differently. I told you that all of that curriculum that I found, and there wasn't a lot, but the curriculum I found was very fear based. Now what we did was we added a lot of engagement, a lot of activities, and, yes, a lot of. Humor. And we always have said we take our topic very seriously. We don't take ourselves very seriously. And what we did was come at it from a pedagogy standpoint, from an education standpoint, and so we wanted our learners to respond in a certain way. We wanted it to be about critical thinking, not about us with a PowerPoint and telling people what was going on, but we really wanted our learners to respond in a way that they retained. Studies have shown that retention is better when there is humor. And we wanted our students to want us to come back. We didn't want to be one and done. We wanted to continue to come back. And so we would go back every quarter, every semester, every year, depending on the school. We did that. But again, it was all about critical thinking, that we would ask questions and then have conversations surrounding that. Now we did the same thing with adults, and we started at the time with, I said, middle school and high school for youth, and we started with parents and caregivers. We expanded that over time. And so with our youth curriculum, we expanded that in 2015 from third grade through 12th grade for youth talking about human trafficking, primarily sex trafficking at that time, healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships and social media safety. So we had three specific pieces that we were talking to youth about and then we expanded the human trafficking piece of the curriculum to adults, and so not just parents and caregivers, but school personnel. We added the financial system, we added foster care, and so we started adding to our pieces. Well, that was going really well. We were bleeding money, I will tell you that because we were the ones we had brought in groups of educators. We were the ones going into the schools. We were traveling all over the place, and it was just a really exciting time, but COVID hit, and COVID really turned us inward, to really be introspective of what do we need to do, what is going to work, what is not going to work. Well, here's what we found out very quickly as an in person organization, really hard to be in person during COVID. I think all of you know COVID kind of took a lot of people out. Certainly a lot of organizations, but we definitely could not be in person with COVID. And so we decided we're going to go digital. We're going to do what we can to go digital. Well, when COVID subsided, we started to go back like we had been, but we realized schools were different, youth were different. It was just a different world. And and I think COVID created some really positive changes in our world. In fact, the virtual aspect just blew up. And we can have people working from home, and we have the technology and the capacity to do that, and that's awesome, but there were a lot of really difficult things that happened during COVID as well. Teachers started to leave in mass exodus. Youth were coming back behaviorally different, like developmentally younger, and part of that was because they were at home. They weren't getting socialized, and there were just a lot of changes, and we saw it firsthand. It was then that we really came to the fact that we need to expand to more youth, and we're not going to be able to expand and reach more youth by us going in in person. And so it was at that time, and that's the pivot, right? I think that anybody who worked through COVID and made it past COVID had to pivot. Everybody had to pivot. And so that's what we did. So we took a year off and just really looked at our curriculum. How do we create this curriculum for facilitators? How do we create this curriculum for individuals who want to use it, who serve youth and get it out there? We really were thinking at the time, schools exclusively, not exclusively, but that's who would be, kind of our market. And so we wrote it for facilitators, and we created this curriculum, kind of like a train, the trainer, but it was really intense training, the two day intense training. But then more than that, we. We're like, we're going to support these people throughout the year, and then they can recertify and we can continue to support them. Because what we didn't want to do is just hand over our curriculum and say, good luck, because we know that's not effective. We wanted to make sure that people knew how to serve youth, how to educate youth, because it is very different. So that's what we decided to do, and we kind of changed up our youth curriculum, and then our adults, we were training in person. Well, what happened was that we found that agencies were the ones who were typically reaching out, that there were some schools who were interested. But I think we all know schools are swamped and doing a ton of work and really responsible for a lot. And so it was agencies who came forward and said, We want this. We want this curriculum for our community. We want to go into the schools. We want to do this. And that's really where kind of the sweet spot was we started to get the curriculum into hands of agencies, especially people who served youth and train them, and they were facilitating, aha, but one of our agencies said, No, we want to serve the community. We want to serve adults too. And so we took all of our adult curriculum and made it into facilitation curriculum, and now we have all of our curriculum that we can train people on to facilitate, from kindergarten through 12th grade for youth and then adults of every facet of the community. So college age, law enforcement, medical, coffee shops, salons, school personnel, all of that has stepped parents, community that stayed the same, but adding the financial institute, hospitality and all of those things, well, then we went a step further, and we created online courses. We've created an online course for individuals, just kind of generic industry, or generic this is what you need to know, and that can be found on our website for purchase at a very reasonable price. And and then we created for corporations so hospitality to use for onboarding, and we're continuing to create those, but now we are in the process of creating a parent and caregiver specifically for how do you talk to your youth about human trafficking? How do you talk to your youth about social media safety? And we're writing a book on that. Now, what I didn't mention is, during all of this time when we started to get our curriculum out there and actually get our curriculum in the hands of agencies and schools and things like that, we we went national. It was really exciting to see what happened. We started getting requests from all over the nation, and we have now expanded into almost 10 states now, and we're continuing to do that amazing work. What's really cool about the curriculum, and I will tell you, we have an incredible director of programming, Rebecca Saunders, who you will meet because she will be on this podcast. And we have an amazing director of operations, Erica Zettel, who you will also meet, because she will be on this podcast, but we have 30 plus pieces of curriculum now, which is unbelievable to me when we started over, you know, a holiday break writing curriculum for middle schoolers and high schoolers one piece and one for parents and caregivers. It's astounding to see how this has grown. So that's kind of what's happening with the set me free project. It has been a really exciting time. It's been an exciting time to see the direction we're moving. And, you know, people always ask one of the questions I get is, where do you get your funding? Well, I would say the majority of our funding comes from private grants and individual donors. We do have income through our curriculum, which is great. I think every single nonprofit should have an income base somewhere, and so that is something that we do. But then we also have a couple of federal grants. And in fact, we do have a federal grant through the CDC that will make our curriculum, ultimately, when we're done, one of the first rigorously reviewed or evidence based youth curriculum on human trafficking in the nation, which is very exciting. So it has been an exciting journey. I think about the early times when it was just Cindy and me, you know, me going into a school, and Cindy doing the finances behind the scenes. And, you know, of course, at. First it was really easy for her to do finances, because even I know zero plus zero, it equals zero. So it's just been an exciting journey. But we are going to be podcasting for you, and kind of for us, because I like it. I think it's super fun to do and have these conversations, and a lot of them are conversations we have anyway, so why not have them with you as a part of it? So trying to think, if there is anything else I want to share with you outside of the exciting stuff of the podcast, so you will still be able to listen to all of the past, resilience in life and leadership. Those will be available, but we'll have a new look. It will be on the set me free project website, and just some new topics and new people and conversations. So really excited with what we're going to be doing. I think I've said that quite a few times, but let us know. Follow our socials. Follow us on socials. We are literally, I think, on the majority of them, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, YouTube. Follow us on our socials. Share them. Please give us reviews, five stars, please. If you don't like it, just let us know. Anyway, we are really excited. Yeah, I think I've said that 15 times. So we are ready to go enjoy R and R resilience and relationships where, okay, I got to get the tag here, real talk for real life, and you will get me, but also the set me free project team. All of those people are much, much smarter than I am, and I am really excited to share them with you. Let us know what you want to hear, please, and we can't wait to talk to you more. I have to think of a cool tagline to end with. Yeah, real talk, real life. Keep talking, keep real, keep living life. I'll work on that. So thank you for listening. Cannot wait to see you again. Oh, and before I forget, our goal is to have these out every month, once a month, and I don't know well, we'll work on like a day, but we may have them more often. We'll see but thank you for listening. We can't wait to see you next time, and I appreciate it. Get some R and R. Maybe that's our tagline. Get some R and R, I don't know. Let me know what you think. Bye. You