Welcome to your brand amplified, the podcast where we interview marketers, publicists, and

brands to learn their stories, what makes them tick, and tips and tricks that make a

difference.

I am so excited to be back this week on your brand Amplified

with Ashley Moorfield.

She is a multi- with taking youth hire

n-YA consulting company

and Serenity Living Transitional Home.

Welcome, Ashley.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely.

I'm sure you do much, much more,

but I'd love for you to share your story.

It can be your, you know, talk about how you are inspired

to start all these projects and what do they mean?

Well, so yes, I am involved in a lot of projects but they all are very close to my heart.

My husband and I actually started a youth mentoring program and I was in 2007 and we had just been helping kids in the community and wanted to kind of formalize it, but we really didn't have a space, so we used our backyard.

And we both had a lot of siblings, so we told our younger siblings about it and they brought their friends and it really turned into something much bigger than what we expected. We ended up having mentoring at a bunch of different sites, YMCA's different places like that and actually had a young lady in my mentor program who was suffering from homelessness and for me I was like these are teenagers you, surely there are enough programs to keep teenagers 17, 18 years old from being homeless.

And I started on some research and I found that most of the programs that were available were very like punitive in a sense I guess for lack of better words and what I mean by that is that you know they had they were a set up for people that were either sent there by like the court systems

maybe they needed some more assistance with maybe drug and alcohol, maybe they had some issues in school, maybe

programs that were for like assault on a teacher or different things like that. But there wasn't anything

for like a young person that just maybe have been dealt a bad hand or maybe just needed some assistance mostly with people that were aging out of foster care. And they knew they had, I mean like tremendous anxiety when it came to like when I turned 18 my foster parent told me that I have to leave and so I couldn't find anywhere to send her and I started thinking about foster care. Like maybe this is maybe we want to be foster parents and then I felt that I could help more people if I made it more of a program. And so we talked a little bit to my husband. I said, you know, maybe I think what I want to do is open up a housing program for this group of people that there isn't anything for them. And you know, we looked and we tried to apply for funding in order to get like a

...