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And the bank truck guy pulled a gun on him. That's when everything changed.
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Welcome to shout your cause with Sally Hendrick, a digital magazine where you can get found, get heard, and get inspired with content that challenges us to be globally minded. Our focus is on raising awareness around social justice issues, cultural differences, and to bring you the people dedicating their lives to tackling challenging topics as their way of giving back. Let us be your advocate to make your voices heard around the world. When I started shout your cause four years ago, it wasn't anything that I really knew what I was gonna do. I just thought what a great way to post some content about things that I'm concerned about in the world. Some of the first things I posted about were really a kind of like the view of downtown Nashville from my dog's point of view, her name was sunny and I called her sunny downtown.
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And I got the idea because a few years before we had been to Italy and one day my youngest child got the camera and the videos that she, and the pictures that she took and the view that she had from a little child's perspective was just so funny and so different from the view that we had seen on the exact same path. Now we would take sunny on walks and we had to go over to an area where you could walk your dog. We called it homeless park. It's really true street park. And it's right across the street from the library. And a lot of homeless people would hang out there because going into the library was something that they could do freely and openly, and they could use the internet there. It was a great location. And every time I would go out and walk sunny, people wanted to pet her, especially the homeless. They could tell that she was a really sweet, caring dog, really gentle. And if you pet her, she wouldn't let you stop. And they didn't seem to mind that at all. Before those experiences, I really was thinking of the homeless as just people that didn't care about the world and people that didn't care about themselves. But once I saw the perspective from son's perspective, it changed the way I thought about the homeless.
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Do you have a dog learn unleashed potential dog training secrets with duke Ferguson, this free video series will get you pro training tips. So you can get your dog's attention, eliminate behavioral problems and enhance your relationship in just 20 minutes a day, sign up sallyhendrick.com/dogtraining. So that was why I even started things. I thought, oh, I'm just gonna post issues and problems that we're having downtown in Nashville, because we were going through a growth spurt, which seems to have never ended. We're still going through a growth spurt. And while all of the tourists get all the favors, when it comes to Nashville's, you know, budget for infrastructure, the people who live downtown are getting left behind. It seems like every few months we lose a parking space on the street to a valet spot or a loading zone or something else where people in this building who don't own a spot, no longer get to park there.
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And the alleyway that we have that is our driveway before we get into our garage, it's, you know, it's kind of a mess. There are huge rats that are running around back. There. There are several restaurants that were opened up on the end, like pockets, grocery at the corner of fifth and church there's TA on the corner. And the garbage cans that are in the alleyway for the restaurants are residential garbage cans, but they need to be commercial, but there's just not enough room for them. So it's a really gross alleyway. Anybody who has ever walked by their knows what I'm talking about, would you rather work or would you rather play? If we're going go through all of this business building stuff, it better be for something that we love doing, right. Take a moment to do this quick life purpose challenge to discover what makes you truly happy. It's free. Visit Sallyhendrick.com/lifepurpose.
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We also had problems in that. It was a one way alley, but a lot of people liked to drive down it the wrong way, but how were they supposed to know? It was one way, because there were no signs. There was nothing to indicate that people couldn't park in the alleyway either. In fact, there was a Coca-Cola truck that would come and park and then he would unload all of his Cokes and he would take them around to the different stores around, down here and leave it. There literally parked right in front of our garage entrance, where we couldn't co go in or come out. There were also bank trucks that would come in and they would stop and sit and not be courteous enough to let us in and out of our garage. And it got to the point where, you know, these bank trucks were just so interruptive. It would be a 10 or 15 minute delay and people were getting upset. They were literally blocking about a hundred people who lived here
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Almost forgot to mention. One of the things that happened in the alleyway with the bank truck was that one of our guys who lives here was trying to get out or trying to get in. And he went up to the truck to tell the guy, Hey man, you really need to move forward
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Or move back or something to let me in,
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Or let me out. And the bank truck guy pulled a gun on him. That's when everything changed.
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So being the project management type of person, I ended up gathering all the different types of people and agencies that we ne needed to pull together to be able to handle the situation and make our needs known to the city. But cuz no one's gonna ever know if you don't tell them. And it's even more than that. It's not just telling them it is actually documenting incidences and taking pictures and posting them and creating a database so that you could send it to someone and say, look, this is a problem. Look how often it happens. And this is only the things that people have reported think about all the things they haven't. So that's when sunny downtown was born, which was kind of my way of talking about issues that needed to be talked about in such a way, not to complain and moan and about it, but to pull together information so that something could be done about it.
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But once the issues kind of tamped down for the downtown area, at least for us personally, and for our, uh, people who live in our building and in our little, little neighborhood down here, once things kind of calmed down there and things were, you know, fixed cuz they, the city come and, and do a lot of things for us. I didn't really have much to post about anymore, but I didn't get rid of it. I put it on the back burner and I thought, oh, at some point someday, I'm going to have some sort of ad advocacy website or channel or something to be able to raise awareness about issues that so, you know, MIS you know, misunderstood or unheard, do you want to stand out from the crowd with your content? Come discover how to market yourself as an expert, as a change maker, as a positive influence on other people's lives with the exponential market club, you will learn the ins and outs of content marketing. That makes a difference in the world. Visit Sallyhendrick.com/club.
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Hey, I've got one more story to tell here, and this is a doozy. So one day I used to go running a lot. And one day I was running near the library, which is right across the street from the park that I told you about the homeless park. And the city had placed a couple of police officers there to be there monitoring the park like 24 7. And that had been going on for quite some time. They just really at, in the car next to the park, or maybe they would step out onto the street, but they didn't really go in the park or communicate with anyone there. They, they just stood there just to make sure that nothing was, you know, nothing nefarious was happening. So I'm running up the side street across the street from where the cops are. And I see a man smoking a crack pipe on the steps of the library.
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Now, if you've ever been downtown to the Nashville library, this library is awesome. It's like, like it is so beautiful. And one of the staples of our community is really beautiful place. And I get it that the guy needed to, you know, take his hit or whatever, but right there on the steps, right where anyone and everyone can see him. It just, I was like, no, this is not okay. Is just not okay. So I, I was still running and I just ran across the street to the police officers and I go up to talk to them and I was like, Hey, uh, my name is Sally. And I put my hand out to shake the guy's hand. Now this is all pre COVID. So don't worry about that. But uh, the guy looked at me funny, like, what is this? Why are you putting your hand up to my, you know, to shake my hand?
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And I just looked at him and then the other guy put his hand out and shook my hand. And I said, thank you. And I explained, I said, there's a guy over there on the steps. He is smoking a crack pipe. He's literally smoking a crack pipe and I'm letting you know that he's there. Can you go over there please? You know what that guy said to me? The first one that looked at me funny when I tried to shake his hand, you know, we're not supposed to leave this area right here. And I'm like, there's two of you. One of you could walk over and see what's going on. It's literally a homeless guy smoking crack, but he was, he just looked at me like I was crazy. Then he said, oh, well, we can't leave our post right here. Um, I can't go over there right now, but we'll call it in.
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And I knew I, in that moment that there was no way he was gonna call it in that he was just like, I don't wanna deal with this. I don't care. So I called it in and then I told the story on Facebook, on the sunny downtown page. I copied the mayor on it. And then I ran $75 worth of ads to, to the local area. And guess what? I got a message from the mayor directly. The mayor just said, Hey, you know, what's going on? Do you know the officer's name, blah, blah, blah. So I didn't have the officer's name. I, I just wasn't thinking in the moment. And uh, but I did remember the time I had the time stamps of when I, you know, made the phone call to the police department, et cetera. And I said it was right then and there. And it was whoever was assigned to the park. And then the chief of police from the downtown precinct actually called me within a couple of days. And then I don't know what happened after that, but that really me off.
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Now, fast forward a little bit. I don't really remember catalyst for making me go buy, shoutyourcause.com or shoutyourcause.org. I bought both of those. I don't remember what made me go get the Instagram and the Twitter and the Facebook and all of the things. But I did do that and I researched it pretty well to make sure that nothing else was called that. And I couldn't find anything else. So I secured all of that online, real estate, if you will. And then like everything else, it seems like the pandemic hit and sparked inspiration in me trying to make sense of the chaos sense of what was to come, because I knew that something was wrong with the numbers that the us was reporting very early on.
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Okay. One more story. I keep forgetting about these things. So I want to make sure that I express them to you. So as soon as the pandemic hit, you've gotta realize that I had already been watching things because we had been in Ecuador in early February of 2020. Also, I had been watching out for things in December whenever the cruise ship and other things started happening around the world. And I I'm very to world news junkie, I'm constantly finding out things from all over the place. And so I was in tune to things happening in China and things happening on the cruise ship and so on and so forth. But when it comes to the virus reaching the United States, I mean, obviously it was already here, but it was just not being talked about. It was being squashed. And when I went to Ecuador, we were already being screened at the airports and at various places in early February.
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And then when we flew home, we expected there to be quite frat when we got to the Dallas airport, but it was like business as usual. There was nothing, no precautions, nobody asked any questions. Nobody was taking our temperature. There was nothing going on, like it was in the rest of the world. And that's a big reason why I started writing for news. Landed news landed is a website where if you're a writer, you can go and become a writer. You just have to pass a couple of little tests and then they will give you assignments. Or if you're really passionate about something and want to write some deep tie commentary, you can do that as well. And I was like, I've gotta get messages out there about things that I care about, and I need it to be a bigger platform because right now, shout your cause is just, you know, it's just the name of the website I had not even really created much except, um, except I had put up a page and then that was it.
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I just didn't have anything. But once I started writing those articles, that was it. I was like hooked. I'm like, I've got to start really building up, shout your cause so that I can have a platform to speak about things that need to be talked about things that need to be explained clearly and well, and from a professional standpoint. And that is the whole premise behind shout your cause. And well, I'll just share it with you in a little bit, but there is so much more coming with shout your cause and so much more happen right now.
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So let me back it up a little bit. I was an actuarial consultant for 25 years and basically that's someone who evaluates risk liability for companies, so that to make sure that they are able to handle the costs associated with that. That's workers' compensation, it's healthcare. It is malpractice for hospitals, it's general liability, auto liability, all these different things. And you basically analyze people's behaviors and how incidents happen, and then what they normally will cost and how much you, you project it out over like years and years and years. A lot of the science that goes into predicting death and predicting, you know, mortality rates and watching the patterns is very similar, uh, when it comes to how COVID has been evaluated. So I was able to look at the numbers and I was able to look at the charts and I was able to see that the us was squashing information.
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There was something missing very soon missing in the data. So I started writing articles on my website on shoutyourcause.com. You can go back and see when I started talking about it, I also signed up to be a writer for news landed.com. And that way I was able to express even more to a much bigger audience, some of the problems that were having. So I went on and wrote more articles about different things that were happening. I was really focused on COVID. So I decided to start a podcast to go along with the articles. And since I was writing for news landed, of course I would use my podcast episodes and my articles to refer to when I wrote articles for them. Now, this was way more fun than writing articles for marketing. I really was enjoying writing articles about what was going on in the world that year.
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I raised a little bit of money as well. And I donated to some worthy causes that were started by friends of mine who had started these nonprofits that were small nonprofits with really big goals. But unless you have corporate backing and you know, somebody with a lot of money, it's really hard to get things like that, either off the ground or thriving, there needs to be some sort of creative edge to be able to get the marketing where it needs to be, turn what you know, into what you do. Join the platform with the most ways to monetize what you know, whether it's online courses, coaching memberships, podcasts, newsletters, communities, or more Kajabi gives you all the tools you need to build market and sell it with just a few clicks sign up at Sallyhendrick.com/kajabi. That's K a J a B I. So here we are, I've created these articles.
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I've donated some money. I've done a little bit here and there, but I've really needed to be a, would make money. I didn't need to just write a bunch of articles and not have any way of making some kind of money at least to sustain the podcast and the website and the time and attention that was being paid on it. But later that year, I started working on a memoir, a project that I have been and wanting to write for a long time around my life, the history of my family, racism, all kinds of things. And I wanna give you a little introduction as to what I've been working on.
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Humble pie by Sally Hendrick. The sound of this book is a combination of cheerleading, stomps R and B music and parade marching band beats that reverberate through your soul. Humble pie is a novelized historical memoir from a white girl's perspective in the post civil rights south, as she imagines what life was really like for her own mother and grandmothers and for the black women who raised her through their stories, both told and untold this literary Anthem takes place in a small Tennessee county that subconsciously and consciously, still practices segregation of the mind. Now this novel is in progress. I've been for the last 15 months. And now I finally have the outline of my story. And several chapters started or written in progress, research, being done, et cetera, et cetera, all of a sudden the entire marketing of this book. And anything else that I'm gonna do with shout your cause came to my mind.
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Now, if you head over to shout your cause.com you'll get access to a chapter it's called white cotton hand me downs. It happened in 1912, January in Gibson county, Tennessee. It starts out with a little girl named Sudi and Sudi was my grandmother. And most of the things in this are actually true. Just twisted a little bit for creative license, if you will, but there was a hanging and she really did ask her brothers to take her into town to see the second part of the chapter is from a little girl named, Mabie, M a B I E. Mabie lived in the tenant house on the corner of the property of SU's family. So when I decided to release the chapter and put it on the website, I ended up having to recreate the website all together. Now I still of all the articles and all the podcast episodes that I've had in the past, but this opened up a whole new way.
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So please head over to shoutyourcause.com, take a look at everything. That's there. Find the yellow button in order to get the first chapter read through it. There's also an audio of me reading it, trying to use my best Southern accent ever, which is not too hard considering I am Southern and then click through to get all of the history behind the chapter to find out what's true. What's not true. And how I decided to put it together. There's also some references and more things coming, resources, cetera. The, that I'm patching together a little bit at a time, and I'd love for you to follow me on the journey, stay tuned.
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So in a nutshell, that is the story of shall your cause and where it has come from. We're still in progress. We have a long way to go, but I want you to follow along. I want you to see what we're doing, and if you are a content creator, if you are an expert or a professional or an influencer or someone who wants to be a part of this, we've got an incredible plan for a major hub for great content. And for promotion, it's a reciprocal type of thing. You give us content. We give you promotional, you know, a space online, a place to be able to get your word out as well to shout your cause. So just, just keep coming along with us. Okay. That's it for today. See ya.
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Thank you for listening today. My name is Sally Hendrick. Be sure to visit our website for show notes and more information on how you can inspire others. If you would like to contribute content to our magazine, please apply on our website at shoutyourcause.com.
