The Rooftop View – Transforming Lives & Unleashing Opportunity – with Pastor Corey B. Brooks – [Ep. 257]

P101-ep-257-podcast-transcript

Linda J Hansen:  Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Breakroom Economics® Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck® and the creator of the Breakroom Economics® Online course.

The book, the course, and the entire podcast library can be found on prosperity101.com. I seek to connect boardroom to breakroom and policy to paycheck. By empowering and encouraging employers to educate employees about the public policy issues that affect their jobs. My goal is to help people understand the foundations of prosperity, the policies of prosperity, and how to protect their prosperity by becoming informed, involved, and impactful®.

I believe this will lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention, and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. Listen each week to hear from exciting guests and be sure to visit prosperity101.com.

Thank you so much for joining with me today. It is just a joy to have you with us and I think you will really appreciate hearing from my guest today. If you're especially frustrated with things you're seeing in big cities these days, inner city crime, lawlessness, poverty, hopelessness, I think that you will really appreciate today's episode.

But before I introduce our guest, I just want to say thank you to our prosperity partners. Those of you who give monthly or on a one-time basis from time to time to help us keep the podcast on the air, thank you. We truly appreciate you.

And to our strategic partners all listed in the show notes, we thank you for being a strategic partner and helping us keep the podcast on the air, but also supporting the freedom economy. So listeners, please do go to the show notes to help support our strategic partners. Many are listed, but today again, I will focus on Mother Nature's Trading Company.

Please go to the link in our show notes and on our website to visit Mother Nature's Trading Company, where you can find organic natural products that are made with cranberry seed oil, fresh from Wisconsin. So you will want to find that and find these products for your whole family, and there's a special buy one, get one offer as well.

So go to the website or the show notes and seek out Mother Nature's Trading Company. Please go to our website and our show notes and find our strategic partners, support them because small business drives the economy. And we thank you to every business owner, every listener.

Thank you for being here. Someone who is trying to build up the economy and business and helping people understand the importance of entrepreneurship and growth and real community engagement is Pastor Corey Brooks. Pastor Corey Brooks, my guest today, is the founder and senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago and is CEO of Project HOOD, which is an acronym for Helping Others Obtain Destiny.

Widely known as the Rooftop Pastor, he first spent 94 days living on a rooftop in the dead of winter to draw national attention to the needs on Chicago's South Side. A decade later, he returned to the rooftop for a second unprecedented 343-day vigil where he raised over $20 million and garnered more than 20,000 new partners in the mission to transform lives and rebuild the community.

Project HOOD has several pillars to its mission, but recently under his leadership, Project HOOD is building a Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center, which will include training, trauma counseling, entrepreneurship hubs, and a private Christian school for boys and much more.

Pastor Brooks is a national voice for urban renewal, conservative values, and faith-based solutions to systemic issues. His work emphasizes personal responsibility, economic opportunity, and spiritual transformation. He offers bold insights on community change, school choice, and restoring the American Dream.

I first saw Pastor Brooks on a newscast, I think during COVID maybe, and thought—I have to have him on my podcast. Now we've had lots of stops and starts to getting this scheduled, including illness and schedule upsets, but Pastor Brooks, I'm so glad you're here today. Thank you.

Corey Brooks: Thank you. I'm glad to be here and appreciate you having me on the show. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, it's just a joy to have you and to highlight the work you're doing—as I have told you before, I'm not far away in a neighboring state. I've run the Chicago Marathon several times. At one point, many of my kids lived in Chicago. One lives nearby now. I just love Chicago, and I hate to see what has happened to Chicago and other really urban cities that have just seen decay—not only economically, but spiritually and culturally.

I just so applaud what you're trying to do with Project HOOD and with your church. Tell us just a little bit about yourself and then the pillars of Project HOOD.

Corey Brooks: Absolutely. Well, I pastor a church called New Beginnings Church of Chicago on the South Side of Chicago. We started it 25 years ago, and we decided we wanted to be in a really tough neighborhood. So here we are in Woodlawn of Chicago, on the South Side.

The block where we serve has, by worldly standards, been called O Block—named after a young man named O.D. Perry, who was shot and killed. The gangs took the “O” in his name and started calling it O Block. It’s actually 66th to 63rd Street on King Drive. We’re right on King Drive, at 66th Street.

We decided to keep the “O,” but we call it Opportunity Block.

The reason we call it Opportunity Block is because in 2014, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the most dangerous block in all of Chicago was O Block. We took offense to that. We said—we want to change that. We want to make things different. We started rebranding the block.

We started transformation, and part of that transformation was using our non-for-profit Project HOOD. HOOD stands for Helping Others Obtain Destiny, as a missions arm of our church, and coming up with the pillars that we believe that would help to transform the neighborhood. We have five pillars that we work from. 

One is education, that we so desperately need to reform and to change so that we can make life better for young people who are not learning how to read, not learning how to do math. We have a really strong educational push. 

Our second pillar is economics. We're really big with entrepreneurship and making sure that we start businesses and help businesses as well to sustain and be stable.

Our third pillar is social ills. We do a lot with fighting the violence and the poverty that we see every single day in our neighborhood. 

The fourth pillar is spiritual. We believe that there ought to be a connection to God and that we ought to fill the void that's been left in people's hearts by not having a relationship with the Creator. So we're really big about telling people they need to be in a relationship with God.

And then the fifth pillar is health and wellness. We have a health and wellness component because there are so many issues in our community as it relates to people's personal health. We want to make sure that we help them to see a doctor consistently, and we want to make sure they are aware of the different illnesses that our culture is prone to, like diabetes and heart problems and things of that sort. It's our goal to help them live a more healthy lifestyle.

So we have all kinds of workshops. We do all kinds of education—even teaching them how to eat properly. I myself have lost 70 pounds recently, and I'm really excited, but that's because our health and wellness department was saying, “Hey, Pastor, you’ve got to lead the charge of getting healthy.” And so they've been very helpful.

So we have five pillars that we work with, and those five pillars are what we use to transform individuals but also to bring transformation to our entire community.

Linda J. Hansen: I just think it's so important that you are encompassing all the pillars of this effort because it really speaks to the breadth of a person's life and their needs. And I just think that's so important. A lot of times, ministries or organizations just focus on one area—which is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as there are others who are complementing that to give that full spectrum—but the needs are so great, and it is so important to be able to cover it all.

If I think of scripture in Luke 2:52, it says, “And Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”So you're really covering that. You've got the social, you've got the spiritual, you've got the educational. It’s like He gave us an example. And so the best way we can serve people is to really help them grow in all areas. So I just think that what you're doing is great. And I love it. I think it can also be an example for other cities. And if we had a Project HOOD in every urban area—just think—or in every part of Chicago, it could be great.

But under your leadership, you are building this Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center, which really caught my eye as I researched more for this. Because as we've discussed, my heart is to have employers educate employees about how all these policy issues and everything affect their daily lives, and how they need to be engaged as citizens. I mean, to be awake and aware and educated and to know how to go get information.

Like, how do they seek out information? Never telling them what to think, but how to find out the information that will be helpful for them. And I see this in your work with the Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center. You've got trades training, trauma counseling—so important—entrepreneurship hubs, and a private Christian school. Where would you like to start in that to tell us about this Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center?

Corey Brooks: Well, we're building this facility, and we believe it's going to be transformational. We believe that it's the linchpin in bringing about the type of change that we want to see in our neighborhood. It's a 90,000 square foot Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center. And within that center, we're trying to make sure that the five pillars that we're concerned about, that all of them have space and staff to be able to strategically change our neighborhoods.

So with that said, the Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center has so many different pieces. We have three restaurants where we're teaching culinary arts and restaurant management, where people will be able to get a job, but also where people can hang out and have fellowship.

Because in our neighborhood, there are not a lot of sit-down restaurants. There are not a lot of cafes and places that people can go to have a decent meal and also have decent relationships with their neighbors. It's a very neighborly place.

We also have on the first floor, along with those restaurants, a health and wellness component where there's a clinic where people can go and get the services that they need. If they're sick or if they're ill and they can't get to the hospital or can't get to their primary care doctor, they can come to the clinic and we can serve them.

Along with that, next to the clinic, there is an exercise workout facility that we're really proud about. It's going to be state-of-the-art. We also have a bank. We're banking with a bank called WinTrust Bank. We presently have that bank now full-scale in our church lobby. We're probably one of the only churches in the Midwest or country that I know of that has a full-scale working bank in the church lobby.

But they're going to be moving across the street. And we're really big on teaching financial literacy and helping people to understand being accountable financially. And along with that, we have an entrepreneurship training facility.

We have a trade school where we're teaching carpentry, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, roofing, and automotive. For young kids, we have a STEM lab because there are some gifted kids in our neighborhood. And we want to make sure that they have access to the things in the center, as well as kids who may not be as gifted.

So we have a STEM lab that's sponsored by Astraseneca, a pharmacy. Their headquarters is in D.C., and so they're sponsoring the STEM lab. We also have a swimming pool on the first floor.

If you ask the kids what are they most excited about, they'll say the swimming pool. And in our neighborhood, that's really important because there are no swimming pools in a two-mile radius where people can go and learn how to swim and just have a good time with their friends.

If you go to the second floor, we have a 350-seat theater where we're going to be teaching the arts. We're also going to be teaching media—how to not just work in front of the camera, but how to work behind the camera. Showing them how to do podcasts, how to do lights, how to do engineering, how to do editing. All of those skills that they could use to earn a living and live a part of the American dream by getting involved in the economy.

And so we're really big on that. We also have a golf simulation room. And somebody asked me, I was in a neighborhood, and they were like, why are you going to have a golf simulation on the south side of Chicago? What's the point of doing something like that in the hood?

I was like, the Obamas and Tiger Woods are redoing the golf course that's about two miles from here because of the Obama Center. I said to them, as much as I disagree with Obama's policies, I'm glad that he's redoing that golf course because now it's going to give me an opportunity to train some kids on how to be golfers and how to be caddies so they can go over there and work and build some relationships and make some contacts as they normally would have never had the chance to do.

We have two basketball courts because you can't be on the south side of Chicago without some hoop courts. So we're going to have some hoop courts.

We have a lot of office space, a trauma counseling center where people can go and get the counseling that they need for the traumas that they have experienced in their lives. Along with that, we have a rooftop experience. It's a full community meeting space outside, enclosed in glass, encased in glass.

It's going to, you can see straight downtown, all the buildings downtown. And that's amazing because we're on 66th, but you'll be able to have a straight shot and see downtown from our roof. And so the building is a fantastic facility.

It's a little bit over $45 million. We're about $10 million from paying for it debt-free. That's our goal. We want to be debt-free because we realize that just being in debt compounds the situation for us. And so we don't want to be in debt, and it allows us to do more work for the programming and hire more people to do staffing so that we can do the work that we're called to do.

So this facility on the south side of Chicago is going to be an amazing facility, and a lot of lives without a shadow of a doubt are going to be changed dramatically.

Linda J. Hansen: Absolutely. It's so visionary, but it's so needed. And a couple of things I just want to highlight. You have the trades. Well, we can see now what a sham in some ways college is for many people. And you get a degree and you can't get a job, or you really don't learn something that's life skills.

Now I can't say that about every college degree, so I'm not making a blanket statement. So before anybody gets upset—but we are finding that the trades are so important. And especially with jobs coming in with AI and everything, you're always going to need someone to fix your air conditioner or your sink or your toilet or something.

You will always need someone. You'll always need a welder. You will always need someone, a roofer. And these things are so important. And the apprenticeship opportunities where they can apprentice and then get out, start their own business even, and they're making $60,000, $70,000 a year or more without any college debt. I mean, it's incredible. It's an incredible opportunity. So this is very good. 

But also the educational piece you're giving them about entrepreneurship and helping them be engaged in their community. And I just had to smile even when you said golf, because it reminded me of what I used to always tell my kids.

My kids are all grown now, but I was homeschooling them. I was a homeschool pioneer and homeschooled them all. And they'd get all annoyed when I'd teach them absolute manners and how to write thank you notes. I mean, all these things that are great cultural things to do. I'd say, look, I am teaching you to be able to converse and show respect and love to a beggar on the street and to sit and dine with presidents and kings.

This is my goal—that you know how to respond in every situation in a way that honors the Lord, is what my hope always was—and that they would be able to be prepared for every situation. And so even just teaching golf, think of how much business occurs on a golf course.

Corey Brooks: Absolutely. I'm going to start using what you just said—teaching kids how to treat beggars on the streets all the way to being in rooms with presidents and kings. And so, yeah, I'm definitely going to use that. You'll be here.

Linda J. Hansen: Good. I'll send a bill later. Just kidding. Yeah.

Anyway but that's the thing, you know, and I tell employers too, and this would be true for you as well. When I'm encouraging employers to educate employees about simple issues in the workplace, I tell them, you never know who you are educating. You never know. That 16-year-old kid washing dishes in the back of your restaurant— or in Ronald Reagan's case, he worked for General Electric.

And he was a liberal. I mean, really, he had very liberal mindsets, very liberal views. And General Electric had a free market book club, basically. I mean, a free enterprise book club. And they just wanted their employees to read books like The Road to Serfdom, and others that really taught about free enterprise and capitalism, so that they understood the importance of our system of government to the vitality of the company. Over time, Ronald Reagan's views began to change.

Well, over time, who's telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall? It was that lifeguard from Eureka, and that communications guy from General Electric—who knew, right? And so I tell people, you don't know where that person is going to end up and the impact that they are going to have. So it's up to us to pour into them and help their God-given potential come out. They don't do that if they don't have the tools.

So we want to give them the tools to really flourish, that human flourishing. I like to teach people too that prosperity is not about money. I mean, I know my business title and the podcast title— it's Prosperity 101. And a lot of times people think I just talk about money. But no, it's about human flourishing and freedom.

And it encompasses money, there's a piece of that, but it's so much more. And when we really care about people, we help them see the big picture, which I love what you're doing. Tell us a story that you think someone would really appreciate about one of your students or a turnaround story.

Corey Brooks: Yeah. First of all, there are so many stories, and I could go on and on all day long telling you about the fantastic stories that we've been able to experience here at Project Hood. But I'll tell you one, and that's the story of a young man by the name of Jonathan, that I had the blessing to be able to write about and to do a video story about.

Jonathan was in our neighborhood and he was participating in gang life, so much so that he and his brother had broken into a home, allegedly. And the home that they broke in, there was an older woman upstairs. They did not know that she was in the house, and they didn't mess with her or anything. They just stole a video game from downstairs.

And later on, allegedly, her son found out about it, made some calls. And as a result, there was some retaliation by someone. When that retaliation happened, they came up on Jonathan early in the morning. He was getting ready to take his daughter to daycare. She's a newborn and she was about six months old at the time. And they shot the car up.

And when they shot the car up, they shot Jonathan's six-month-old child. It was one of the most horrific things I've ever experienced in all of my life. I didn't know Jonathan at that time, but I got a phone call from someone in his family saying, "Hey, there's a shooting in your neighborhood. There's a young man and his family. They really need your assistance."

And so I rushed to the hospital and I was there with Jonathan. And seeing that baby's body ravaged by gunfire, it just broke me. And so I made a promise to Jonathan, regardless of what happened, I was going to help him to turn his life around. 

Unfortunately, his daughter passed. And weeks later, I decided to contact Jonathan after the funeral to start trying to help him through the trauma, trying to help him through the experience. I found out a lot of things. One, Jonathan had a third-grade reading level. He couldn't read. I found out that he quit school when he was in the eighth grade. I found out that he was from a single-parent household and that his mother was dealing with some mental illness issues. It was just a lot of fractures in the family, a lot of chaos. And on top of that, he was selling drugs and just out in the streets.

But I was committed to trying to get him to change his life. And so we got him a job. One of my mentors, an Irish man who owns a car dealership called Metro Ford here in Chicago, I convinced him to hire Jonathan. That lasted about a month because Jonathan felt he could make more money in the streets in one day than he could in two weeks. So he went back to the streets, but I didn't give up. I kept pursuing him, kept going after him. Eventually, we got him in some counseling. Eventually, we got him in a GED program. Eventually, he became a full-time employee—one of our first violence prevention workers here for Project Hood. And now he's turned his life totally around.

He's one of our best violence prevention workers. He also has a business of his own called Jonathan & Sons. It's a landscaping business. And he is doing remarkably well. He's finally got his GED. He knows now how to read. He works responsibly in his own time every day. And he's a prime example of what we're trying to do as it relates to these young men who feel like they're not a part of the American dream and feel like it's not attainable to them.

We try to teach them that if you take responsibility for your life, if you decide that you want something different and you pursue it, we'll give you the opportunities and get you mentors to help you walk every step of the way. But you have to take advantage of it. You have to take responsibility and understand no one is going to give you anything and life owes you nothing. You have to be able to go after it and pursue it relentlessly. When we find those individuals that we can convince to do that, nine times out of ten, their lives are changed—just like Jonathan.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, I know I told you at the beginning, before we were recording, that I was going to ask you, what would you say to employers who need to educate employees about the importance of these issues? But I think you just answered that. I think you just answered that. What we need to say to employers is: love on your employees. See past what their current state is and look at their potential.

And your story that you shared made me think of the movie The Forge. I'm sure you've seen it. 

Corey Brooks: Yes. 

Linda J. Hansen: And so listeners, if you have not seen the movie The Forge, it stars Cameron and BJ Arnett, and you will love it. It is such an incredible story. And it basically, in many ways, mirrors what you just heard. The story talks about the impact an employer had on an employee who was headed down a wrong path and really didn't have the leadership and mentorship in his life that he needed. And it's just an incredible turnaround. And you see this all the time.

So employers, please take an interest in your employees. I would love to help you. Employers, I would love to work with you and help my course to be a great resource for you or to come in and work with your teams. But also, I'd really like to recommend that you look at what's happening at Project Hood—not only to support it. I'm sure if you're a business or an individual who could support the work of Project Hood financially, that would be great. Help them reach their goal so they can finish building this facility.

But at the same time, look and see what could you do. Maybe you can't build this entire Opportunity Center like Pastor Brooks is doing. Maybe that's not what God is going to call you to do. But maybe there's some smaller way that you could address these five pillars. And so I invite you to just ask the Lord, what can you do?

And then, in your business and in your life, just make sure you educate people lovingly—give them the information they need to be able to make great decisions for their lives. And that's what we're about.

So do you have any other closing comments before we give your contact information?

Corey Brooks: No, I just want to say thank you. I really appreciate it. I believe in prosperity. I believe that people can have lives holistically and be blessed—more than, like you said, it's more than just financial blessings. It's about health. It's about mental capacity. It's about all of those things that make us whole. 

So I really appreciate you giving me an opportunity to talk about the work of Project Hood. I really feel it's important, and I really want to make sure—and hopefully—we can get it in other cities that really need the type of help that we're trying to give on the South Side of Chicago. So thank you so very much. We really appreciate it. 

Linda J. Hansen: Well it’s an honor to do so. It’s a great ministry and opportunity and I feel like it’s important that people see that you don’t need government. Usually government is– we throw our money down a black hole, as we have seen with DOGE. 

But we need people who will love on people and really care about people and that’s what we need. So what you are doing is really great. Please give the website information, and if you would like people to contact you personally how should they do so?

Corey Brooks: projecthood.org and I always give my phone number out, you can call me anytime. 312-813-5211 is my personal cell phone so give me a call. And again it’s projecthood.org

Linda J. Hansen: Well thank for that and listeners you can write that down and again consider supporting this work. It fits into everything that I stand for and try to do with Prosperity 101® in terms of really helping to educate and empower individuals that they can live out a future that is flourishing and fulfilling. So thank you so much, I look forward to having you back with an update. 

Corey Brooks: Blessings. Thank you so much.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity101® podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share and leave a great review. Don't forget to visit prosperity101.com to access the entire podcast library, to order my newest book, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck®, or to enroll you or your employees in the Breakroom Economics® online course.

You can also receive the free ebook, 10 Tips for Helping Employees Understand How Public Policy Affects Their Paychecks. Freedom is never free. Understanding the foundations of prosperity and the policies of prosperity will help you to protect prosperity as you become informed, involved and impactful®.

Please contact us today at prosperity101.com to let us know how we can serve you. Thank you.