Improving Mental Wellness Through Helping the Community with Justin Kruger

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! --- Listen to the podcast here: 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. --- 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.Share on X 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 h