One Woman's Midlife Journey Through Community with LeEllen Smith

This week Kim shares her conversation with LeEllen Smith. She shares her journey of founding OutsideIn, a social enterprise and recovery program in Troy, Tennessee. Discover how she turned community needs into empowering opportunities for women, creating a ripple effect of hope and transformation.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Midlife with Courage and Guest LeEllen Smith
00:23 LeEllen's background and the founding of OutsideIn
01:06 Community challenges and the motivation to create jobs
02:13 The early days: making products from T-shirts
06:33 Evolving product lines and social impact
08:06 Redefining success and purpose in midlife
10:32 The importance of community and support for women
15:52 Transitioning to a recovery-focused organization
19:37 The house as a recovery residence and community impact
23:42 The women of OutsideIn and their growth stories
33:11 Training women for leadership and new opportunities
38:59 The community's acceptance and the power of kindness
42:34 How to support OutsideIn and its mission
45:10 Closing thoughts and gratitude for community support

Learn more at the link below:

Website - https://outsideinworks.com

Transcript

Kim Benoy (00:01.646)
You are listening to Midlife with Courage. This is where women in midlife come for inspiration, motivation, and sometimes a little education to help them live more boldly. Now let's get started.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Midlife with Courage. I am Kim Benoy, your host. Very happy to have you all here listening. I'm also very happy to have my guest here with me today. Her name is LeEllen Smith. Her name is LeEllen Smith. Welcome to the podcast, LeEllen.

LeEllen Smith (00:29.774)
Thank you, Kim.

Kim Benoy (00:31.514)
I'm very excited to talk to you as we kind of talked a little bit before I hit record. You live in a town in Tennessee that is one of my happy places. Up in the top three, I think of my happy places. you own a company, you founded a company called Outside In, where you help empower women who sometimes are maybe disregarded, overlooked. Tell us about that. Tell us about your company.

LeEllen Smith (00:41.378)
Hehehehehe

LeEllen Smith (00:57.666)
Yeah, sure. So it's it is called Outside In and it's a 501c3 nonprofit that I started in 2013 really in for several different reasons. Kind of a perfect storm for me personally and for what was going on in my community. Our county's largest employer pulled up stakes and left town and took

2,000 of our best jobs with them. So our unemployment rate soared to over 11%. And that kind of just sent a shockwave through my community. And we all wondered where these folks were going to work. I began to wonder about the people who had to compete with those folks for jobs, because those had been really stellar employees. And now the labor force was flooded with those folks. So I began to think about people who

didn't have quite as good a track record with their work history. And I wondered if I could create a job for those folks. And Outside In was a result of that. Remember when every little town in our country had a factory of some sort, a shirt factory, a shoe factory? Well, those jobs left many years ago. And I just wondered what it took to create a job and could I create one?

Spoiler alert, it's not all that easy to create a job. But you know what, as one of those midlife women, I thought that it would be a piece of cake. And we have done it. But it was not quite as easy as I thought it might be.

Kim Benoy (02:27.706)
I can't imagine.

Kim Benoy (02:42.778)
It never is. never is. So what is your background, LeEllen? How did you, you said you started this in midlife. How, what was your background before that?

LeEllen Smith (02:51.978)
Right, well, it's kind of a, you know, it's a little bit of an odd way to get to social entrepreneur, I guess, my journey. I was kind of an overachiever in high school and went to college. Then I decided to go to dental school. Then I decided to drop out of dental school after two weeks and basically come back to the farm.

Kim Benoy (03:16.026)
LeEllen Smith (03:20.192)
and married the most eligible man in town, think, transferred to UTM, a local university here, branch of the University of Tennessee, and got a degree in accounting. Well, I don't really know why I got a degree in accounting. I didn't know then. I do know now, which maybe I'll get to later on in the podcast. But got a degree in accounting and a CPA certificate and worked for a while, and then I started having my family.

And then I realized despite the fact that most women in my generation have been told we could have it all and we could work and raise a family, I decided I was not that woman. Because I had a high maintenance husband also in the mix. We did have three children the traditional way and then decided to adopt a baby from China, a little girl who's now 25.

Kim Benoy (04:03.064)
you

LeEllen Smith (04:15.586)
Family became the overarching moment in my life and I stopped working to raise them. And that was a good move. I never regretted that. While I was doing that, I used my accounting knowledge to serve as the volunteer treasurer for all kinds of different organizations who needed that. And so I kept up on my skills.

with that, but you know, one by one those kids all did decide to leave home, fortunately, and I was basically downsized from my job as a stay-at-home mom. So I thought about the fact that I had a small window here that I could maybe do something helpful in my community.

Kim Benoy (04:53.241)
Yeah.

Kim Benoy (05:02.329)
Sure.

LeEllen Smith (05:13.804)
And that's when unemployment rates soared. Social enterprises were pretty new at that point. You remember Tom's shoes. The idea of having a place of work, a business that could give back to the community was pretty new. And I was really, really intrigued by that. So I thought about the idea of making a job. What would it take to make a job? And...

Kim Benoy (05:22.169)
Mm-hmm.

LeEllen Smith (05:40.928)
I remember that I had a degree in accounting and I had been sewing since I was about 12 years old. So I thought, hmm, we'll just make something and sell it and that'll create a job. And in the beginning, it almost felt like, well, all we'd really have to do is just make work of some kind. And people would embrace the idea of what we were doing and support that by buying these products. So.

In the very beginning, our raw material was a T-shirt, believe it or not, because even though I wanted to do this thing that I thought was kind of a big, hairy idea, I wasn't really willing to invest a lot in it. I'm not really a risk taker by nature. I had about $900 that I thought I would use to open my first bank account. And we did that.

Kim Benoy (06:16.217)
you

LeEllen Smith (06:37.902)
asked for people to give us t-shirts and they did and we cut those up and used those to make things like scarves and skirts and little girl dresses and a whole myriad of products made out of t-shirts which looking back on now I have to smile at those products they were not sophisticated by any stretch of the imagination but you know what our community supported us and people bought them and

Kim Benoy (06:58.841)
you

LeEllen Smith (07:08.598)
And it was a very humble way to start, but I really, I kind of cherish that now, honestly, it was the way we started. But a few years into that, we gained enough confidence to buy fabric. know, nobody's really empowered from cutting up a piece of $50 a yard fabric wrong. So it was important that we have a safe place to start and that's what the t-shirts allowed us, but.

Kim Benoy (07:27.993)
you

LeEllen Smith (07:37.198)
little by little we gained confidence, we found a good source of fabric, we found a product that we could make that I think is underrepresented in the marketplace which is a hanging garment bag and we found a good way to put in a zipper and we started making a hanging garment bag which we call a hang up. I say because they're made by women with genuine hang ups and I

Kim Benoy (08:03.118)
Love it.

LeEllen Smith (08:03.502)
I also say if you don't have a hang up already come to OutsideIn and you can get one. We laugh about that a little bit too. So that was our first product of fabric travel gear. That was we started making those I think in about 2015 or 2016 and since then we've just added a whole product line of fabric travel gear.

bags that are made from upholstery weight fabric that are washable. We now have tote bags and the hanging garment bags, more things like backpacks and that kind of thing. So, my journey to this has not been straightforward at all, but I'm still an unpaid volunteer with this organization. The ladies I hire are paid workers, but...

It's been, it's just been a wonderful, wonderful way for me to use that, that little chunk of time I sort of had after really what I would have considered my most productive years. I look at my kids sometimes and I tell them I gave y'all the best years of my life. But it's really not true. It's not true at all because really this last decade of dealing with this.

social enterprise, its nonprofit have been the most rewarding in my life, really.

Kim Benoy (09:30.103)
Yeah. I've been talking lately with other women about what success means. And the definition of success seems to change throughout our life. You know, as we're, when we're younger, it's, know, maybe it might be financial, it's career, but as we reach midlife, it seems to me anyway, it's more about what brings me joy and how I can help bring it to others. And that to me is successful. And that kind of sounds like what you're doing in a way.

LeEllen Smith (09:34.762)
Thank

LeEllen Smith (09:57.974)
Yeah, you know, I will say this and this is kind of a this is kind of a true confession, I suppose. One of the reasons I decided not to work when I was raising my family was because I felt in my heart that if if that didn't turn out well, if they didn't turn out well, then nothing else that I did in my life would matter. And that's just

I guess that comes from the upbringing I had where family was so important and I knew my mother had invested so much in my upbringing and I felt that weight of that, you know? So that was really what I guess directed a lot of the decisions that I made when it came to employment in the mainstream workforce outside the home, that kind of thing.

Fast forward a few years.

My kids have struggled in many ways. So I guess you might say that idea I had that I would stay home and do all the things right and my kids would turn out as model, responsible citizens, giving back in all kinds of different ways, leader of the Qantas Club and church groups. Maybe that didn't turn out

quite like I thought. trying to say all that in a nice way in case my kids do listen to this, which they may not. But I say all that to say that was just not true because something I have done in life besides that does matter. And that's really, think,

LeEllen Smith (11:55.434)
a thing I would want to say to women today that listen to this. While it's important, I think, to do the very best we can by our families, we may do that and not be completely and utterly thrilled with the way things turn out or the way things go because in the end, you don't control other people. You do the best you can. You give them things they need.

and then you just hope and pray for the best outcomes, but you really don't have control over that. So what you do have control over is what you do. And the time that you have on this earth, making the most of that. And I just feel so fortunate that I was able to navigate that whole transition in my life where I went from being a stay at home mom

to recognizing, and that's really the key is recognizing, wait a minute, I got an opportunity here. Am I gonna seize it or am I just gonna sit back and say, I gave them the best, the most productive years of my life, which was actually not true at all.

Kim Benoy (13:10.423)
Yeah, I love that that take on it. That's I haven't heard it put that way before, but it's it's so true. And I mean, for me, too, you know, you think your kids are going to turn out one way and things happen and whatever. But but yeah, we we have we cannot control our children or anyone else. We just control us. So darn it. So let's talk about

LeEllen Smith (13:15.501)
Ha ha ha

LeEllen Smith (13:22.424)
Try it.

Kim Benoy (13:39.641)
You don't just offer jobs to these women. You're actually teaching them skills and working alongside them to empower them, which I love that. How has that been working for you? It seems like very well.

LeEllen Smith (13:42.126)
you

LeEllen Smith (13:51.182)
Well, it has worked well. There is just something powerful that happens in a workplace when you are shoulder to shoulder with another woman. And it takes effort. And there have been days when it has not gone as well.

LeEllen Smith (14:20.062)
Generally speaking, when women are mentored and encouraged and supported, I think it just can change the trajectory of their lives. I know one of the young women that has came here, she would not even look me in the eye when we began to work together. And I'll tell this story about her because it's one of my favorites.

She really, really struggled with self-esteem and confidence, but man alive, she's just been a workhorse here. She has thrived, she has learned, and she has grasped what we're doing. She's smart, although that was not her story in school, she is. And she started catching on, and I have to explain something to her, maybe.

I'll explain it one time, I'll show her one time and that's it. She's off and running. But one day early on, we'd had a really good week. We'd kind of fired on all the cylinders. So she was leaving that day. And one of the things I have been sort of scolded about is sometimes I forget to give praise. And that's really my job. That's what I'm here for.

is to encourage and hand out praise. And I find myself stingy with that sometimes. So I'm always working on that. And this particular day, I recognized that it was, needed to give an atta girl, you know. So as she's leaving the workplace that day, she opened the door and I said, hey, Kayla, before you leave, I said, you know, we really had a good week this week. I said, you really did a good job.

And she looked back over her shoulder and she said, yes, I did. And I was just so thrilled by that because that is what we're about is empowerment for women to learn and know that they can do things. One of my favorite little life mantras is just the little quote that says, can and I will. And that's what I want.

Kim Benoy (16:19.449)
you

LeEllen Smith (16:41.93)
women to learn because where I live here in rural West Tennessee, that's not always the message that women learn when they're coming up through the ranks. Because there's such a lack of opportunity here that that's just not what resonates with women. That's not the message they hear often. So that's the message I want them to hear.

So I'm always working on that. this is the idea of a supportive, nurturing and encouraging workplace, a healing-centered workplace. That is just what drives me every day is creating that environment where women can learn better workplace attitudes and behaviors that they can take out into the mainstream when they want to leave here.

Kim Benoy (17:37.251)
Sure. Do most of the women that work for you end up leaving or are they long-term?

LeEllen Smith (17:43.138)
They really, you when I started, didn't even know how that would play out. I didn't really want to limit. I didn't want to, I didn't want to fence myself into any certain idea with that because I just didn't know. No, it's the way it's turned out. The women that have come to me have stayed with me. Now, I think there's a reason for that. There's a whole big metamorphosis that has happened. I guess we might get to that next with, with this nonprofit.

So I think that's happened for a reason because what we've really done for the last, I'll say four or five years, is really tried to grow this brand as something that can take us into the next level of what we want to do here at Outside In. So now the women that I have working for me now are poised to become leaders in this organization.

Kim Benoy (18:11.981)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (18:39.278)
as we kind of transitioned to a whole new phase.

Kim Benoy (18:42.795)
Yeah. And you brought that up beautifully. So let's talk about that. Yes.

LeEllen Smith (18:45.958)
Yeah, okay. All right, great. That's great. I guess maybe because of that, because over the years we've been here now 13 years, we've worked with about 25 different women. Some have been paid employees, some have been volunteers, some have been court ordered volunteers. People who have to do court ordered community service often need a place, safe place to do that.

We've always just used that as an opportunity to love on those ladies and help them understand that maybe what they've been dealing with through the justice system was just kind of a wake up call. And they had an opportunity to see that as a way to start something new and different in their lives. So the 25 women over the course of 13 years is maybe not what I had set as a goal for

what I wanted to do. guess I just thought we could have a bigger impact. So the way I realized that we could have a bigger impact was if we added a recovery residence to the program that we had already started. And that would be a home where women could live in community together. They would work on a recovery journey together.

and then they would receive all kinds of wraparound supportive services, but they would also have the opportunity to work in the social enterprise that we had already created. Now that's a whole different level to what I'd been doing, you know. So that's kind of a whole concept. And I'd been thinking about that

Kim Benoy (20:27.321)
Yes.

LeEllen Smith (20:38.7)
for a while and but of course it kind of leads us back to the not a risk taker idea. So to have a recovery home you have to have a home to put it in and despite the fact that we live in a pretty much an impoverished area here in northwest Tennessee real estate prices have gone up here just like they have everywhere else. So I knew the idea of purchasing a property to do that in wasn't

Kim Benoy (20:51.246)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (21:07.628)
very feasible for me with just this little nonprofit that I had. We'd never done much with fundraising here. We'd tried to always just kind of be self-sustaining. So I just kind of kept that in my heart and thought about it from time to time. But when I would do that, I would think about my own situation in my own home, which was great for raising four kids, but it had become way too large for my husband and I.

since they had gone, I was like, we had this huge house, a big property. We had begun to travel a lot and knew that we wanted to travel even more in this time we had. And so I thought, man, my own home, it would be great for a recovery place. It's big. There's actually a metal building out behind the house. I thought, you know, we could...

We could even put in a second workshop there and we could work there at the project. In fact, that's where the whole thing started. Before I got a shop in our town, we had a workshop in the, we called it the bunkhouse at the time. So I thought, man, my house would be great for this, but there's no way that I would convince my husband.

that we needed to move out of our home and make it a recovery house. So I just kind of kept that to myself. I thought there's no way. We'd always said we'd go out of that place feet first. You we'd loved it. Anyway, one day out of the clear blue sky, he just said, you know, I've been thinking we might should make our house recovery residence. Well,

Kim Benoy (22:34.905)
Sure.

LeEllen Smith (22:56.724)
You know how you have to let it be their idea. You know what I'm talking about.

Kim Benoy (22:59.273)
Yes. yeah, for sure.

LeEllen Smith (23:02.356)
I did not dare say, I've been thinking about that for about six or eight months now. I didn't even say that. I just said, that's a great idea. Let's do that. And just a word about him. He's been on the bench as a general sessions judge since 2009. And the most gratifying part of his work has always been working as a judge in the

Kim Benoy (23:11.353)
Good idea, honey.

LeEllen Smith (23:31.778)
drug recovery court we have here in Albany County. So his heart is also turned towards work with people in recovery. So it wasn't completely a crazy thing for him to be thinking along those lines, but the idea that his heart was in the same place as mine at that particular moment, well, it was just a God thing. That's just really all I could say about that.

Kim Benoy (23:58.542)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (24:01.27)
We did talk to our kids about it. We told them this was what we were thinking about doing. And I don't know that they really, we probably didn't give them time to process that fully, but they did all accept that pretty graciously. And we just began to make that plan to make the house a recovery place. that's.

That has not been an easy process, it's been a journey. there have been very few setbacks, I will say, in doing that.

Kim Benoy (24:40.311)
Okay. Yeah. So where do you live now then? Did you get a little place in town or I know Troy isn't really huge.

LeEllen Smith (24:46.658)
Hahaha

Troy's not huge. We actually moved to Union City. That is the county seat in Obion County. That's where my husband works. We really, we sort of did an extreme downsize. We moved into an apartment. Union City had found itself the beneficiary of major philanthropists that came to town about six or seven years ago.

and began to kind of rejuvenate a lot of things downtown in our town and actually completely remodeled an older building right on Main, well, First Street, which is the downtown area, and put in some apartments. So it's about probably a 1,200 square foot apartment, two bedroom, two bath, and...

That was a huge undertaking. We had pretty much been pack rats, I guess you might say, throughout a 42 year marriage, you can accumulate a lot of stuff when you only move one time in that period. So it was a lot to go through. We had a lot of family pieces. I could say heirlooms, but that was...

Kim Benoy (26:02.075)
no.

Kim Benoy (26:10.199)
hahahaha

LeEllen Smith (26:11.746)
That might be a stretch. They probably weren't heirlooms, but it was more like stuff. Anyway, but it was remarkable how I was able to keep the things that meant the most to me. There were a few things that I had to pass on to some family members, but that was kind of fun too. So we left some things at the house for the ladies that are there to use.

Kim Benoy (26:16.121)
stuff.

LeEllen Smith (26:36.942)
It's still a little stuff there, but I'm going through it. We've dealt with most things. But man, it's something to deal with that kind of thing. You just don't realize how much there is and how little space there is in an apartment. But I think we've done it. I guess the thing that I've just disappointed myself about is I really have dealt with the thing that

Kim Benoy (26:54.464)
Yes.

LeEllen Smith (27:06.764)
that most kids have to deal with when their parents go, you know? I mean, it's like, we're still working through some of that with my husband's parents, but you know, I've done that for my kids now. They're not gonna have to do that. And by golly, they should have to do that because remember, best years of my life, they should have to do something. There should have been a payback for that, but I've done that too. But will they really? I don't know.

Kim Benoy (27:11.426)
Mm-hmm.

Kim Benoy (27:19.769)
my gosh.

That's right. You did not you Yeah. They will thank you for that someday. Well, I don't know. We're kind of in that area too with my parents and yeah, anyway, but so my gosh, that is quite the adjustment. So tell us a little bit more about the house for the the women who come there who who's a typical Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (27:36.354)
hahahaha

You

LeEllen Smith (27:50.316)
Yeah, program itself. Well, I did a thing with our name. Maybe it was a good idea. Maybe it wasn't a good idea. I have a lot of fun with the names of things. But it may be confusing for the average person. The nonprofit itself is called Outside In. That's all one word, just like you might think it would be, O-U-T.

S-I-D-E-I-N. Now the social enterprise part we began to call Outside In Works. Our website is outsideinworks.com and that's where we sell our strong and beautiful travel gear. So to me the natural progression for the recovery residents was to be called the Outside In like a hotel with two N's, two words.

So that's the way the whole thing is structured. And yes, I feel like it could be confusing to the un-indoctrinated, but now everybody knows, because I've just explained it. well, that was the idea, but confusing and clever. I don't know. Well, anyway, we modeled our program after one that we used as a template that we had noticed in Middle Tennessee.

Kim Benoy (28:57.389)
Yeah. I think it's clever. think that's perfect.

Kim Benoy (29:07.34)
You

LeEllen Smith (29:15.64)
called the Blue Monarch. That's a really, really successful recovery program for women. And it's over 20 years old. And they've seen 1,000 different women come through their program and achieve long-term sobriety and recovery. So that's, we wanted, we did not want to reinvent the wheel and knowing that this program existed and knowing the people that ran it and kind of a little bit about how they did it.

was the impetus really for us following through with our inclination to start the program. So before we ever even started, we knew how we wanted the program to look. And that is a long-term program of 18 to 24 months Christ-centered where women could come into a home and live in community together along with their children free of charge to them. Now those are the

main components, I think, of our program. It's Christ-centered. They're going to learn that a life spent in belief of God with Jesus as our compass is the way to have a safe, healthy, fulfilling life.

And it's free to them because heaven knows there's not much resources available to women who have been involved in this lifestyle. And then the third thing of being able to bring their children with them is because a woman should not have to choose between her children and her recovery. Because if, let's say, she hasn't learned to parent and be sober at the same time,

Even though she may have achieved two years sobriety being clean and sober, getting her children back, being reunited with them may be the very thing that triggers her into return to use because heaven knows parenting is a triggering thing for many, people and it's not easy.

LeEllen Smith (31:26.414)
And so learning to parent sober in an environment where you've got all the supports that we are offering in our program just makes more sense so that you can navigate those situations that occur that you may not know how to deal with in a healthy way. It just makes sense. Now, is it easy? No, it's challenging, but it will be worth it if you can

break that cycle that occurs in so many families of addiction. So you're really not achieving just a sobriety for one person. You may be, it's gonna be generational, just like the abuse sometimes is generational. Healthy living can also be a generational change, and that's really what we want to do.

The program will involve a lot of supports for that. It'll involve, it involves a recovery program. Ours is called RDAP. That just means Residential Drug and Alcohol Program. That's the one they teach in the federal prison systems. It's just a way to learn tools for maintaining sobriety. And then we have Bible studies. We are

pretty devoted to exercise and a healthy lifestyle with regard to that. We'll do a lot of life skills training, parenting classes, budgeting classes. It'll really be designed to fill in a lot of the gaps a woman might have encountered if she started use at a really young age where she may not even have a high school diploma and we'll help with that as well.

Kim Benoy (33:18.541)
Mm-hmm.

LeEllen Smith (33:18.89)
a high set they call it now, we used to think of it as a GED, but a high school equivalency. We're gonna start with that and we really want our women to be able to go to trade school or a college when they leave our program. Because if we don't, and of course they'll work in the social enterprise while they're there too, but if you don't help a woman achieve

Kim Benoy (33:22.787)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (33:48.206)
financial independence, then even though she's clean and sober, she may leave our program if she can't provide for herself and her children. The thing that often happens is we return to the places that we know we can seek out resources. And often that is just a person that is not a healthy person for us to be in a relationship with. That's kind of a

A nice way to say we just don't want them going back into the situations that may have led them to the abuse to begin with.

Kim Benoy (34:21.113)
Sure. Yeah. What an amazing program overall, all of it. It's just, I love that you're doing this for women, for everyone.

LeEllen Smith (34:30.37)
Well, it's funny, I often don't talk about this part as much, but when I started the social enterprise, I recognized at that time that a recovery program is really what we needed, but because we didn't have one at all, none at all in our county. And there weren't even very many mutual aid programs. There was an AA meeting, but that was really the only mutual aid program for people in recovery.

Now there are some celebrate recovery programs in our county, which are very helpful to people. But I recognize that we needed a recovery program even all those years ago, but I knew I did not have the skill set for that. You know, I had this accounting degree, but I didn't know anything about social work or counseling or any of those parts that I knew were really important. So started the social enterprise, but

But the idea never really left me. And I guess that's why I was able to revisit it so easily. What I learned in that 13 years was that I didn't have to do everything. That there was an amazing group of people working in this sector already that I could hire. And that is really what I was able to do that has led me to this place. Because I certainly could not be at the juncture that I'm at right now without.

being able to identify and hire an amazing team that I'm just so proud of and just a great staff. have a lady that is our program director who's really doing all the heavy lifting who has developed the program and she is the one who is finding the folks that are ready for our program who are recovery ready and able to do the program. And she's just amazing, but we've also got

what's called a peer recovery support specialist. That's somebody that's been trained in a way to be able to help people who has lived experience actually walk this road of recovery herself, who really understands a lot of the problems and situations. So we have one of those ladies on our staff and then we have a residence manager who is also a CPRS and she stays on the property full time.

LeEllen Smith (36:54.058)
is a little bit like a door mother, you might say. So we have an amazing staff. I just feel so fortunate to have been able to put them in place. That's been kind of a big transition for me, going from just a small workforce of two or three people to now. they're kind of like the Eagles song. is it? Take it easy. I now got seven women on my mind all the time.

Kim Benoy (36:56.087)
Yeah.

Kim Benoy (37:21.453)
Seven.

LeEllen Smith (37:23.838)
And probably some of them do want to stone me from time to time. I don't know. Yes, I feel owned by a few and there's a few that are free. No, we are all really close, getting closer every day because we have this shared passion to want to help women break free from the struggle that they've been. It's funny, we do have now our first resident and she's just been so great.

Kim Benoy (37:28.525)
You

Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (37:53.102)
It's funny. I started thinking about her a lot because she really it was just a leaf of faith I think for her to come into a brand new program is the first one I call her Eve because she's our first first lady, but You know, I've begun to look at her now and now I don't really see her So much as a program participant is like she's really just kind of in training I think is to join our staff in a couple of years. So I think that's kind of

Kim Benoy (38:20.121)
I

LeEllen Smith (38:22.606)
because I just see so much potential in her. And I love just being able to think about, we've got this opportunity to just train her like we really want her to be as the next person we hire in our staff. So it may be it'll turn out that way, maybe it won't, but it's fun to think about that. So anyway, I think that's one of the things that, just talking about her potential,

Kim Benoy (38:26.103)
Yeah.

Kim Benoy (38:40.729)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (38:49.966)
I thought I was gonna get asked to do a podcast one time that didn't work out. So I'll use this podcast since I didn't get to show it and tell it in that other one, but the podcaster was gonna ask, they said one of the questions they always ask was, what three things do you know about yourself? Just off the cuff. truly I was able to know that. the three things I knew about myself.

Kim Benoy (38:55.193)
You

Kim Benoy (39:08.633)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (39:19.086)
off the cuff instinctively were, I see potential in everything. You know, I started working with t-shirts as a raw material because I could see that that could happen, that you could do something from nothing. I see potential in people all the time. I've always been able to pride myself that I could find a job for anybody doing anything. Even a young man that was 17 years old came in one day needing to do community service and I let him cut something out.

I see potential in everything and I'm easily inspired. That's really the reason I'm doing this work is because through my husband's work, through the work with the women I had been able to work with here, it is so inspiring to see somebody that has struggled so turn their life around and make something completely different out of their life, something productive.

Kim Benoy (39:48.152)
LeEllen Smith (40:16.59)
That from something that was so broken and I just wanted to be a part of that. So So those were two things I see potential in everything and I'm easily inspired and the other thing is I'm just certain that I'm doing the work that God created me to do It took me a long time to get here It was not a straightforward path stayed at home You know

did volunteer work as a treasurer and here I am. So back into the accounting degree thing, we have been very, very fortunate in getting some really good grants through the State of Tennessee Department of Mental Health and the Opioid Abatement Council from the State of Tennessee and from our county government as well. So lo and behold,

Kim Benoy (40:51.341)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (41:12.842)
now I know why I have an accounting degree because they like accounting and records. And so yes, yes. And so, you know, I don't have to hire that. I don't have to outsource that. We have our own unpaid volunteer CPA working here at Outside Inn. So anyway, it's nice to know.

Kim Benoy (41:22.115)
To the penny, I bet.

Kim Benoy (41:35.961)
Nice. See it all, there's always a reason.

LeEllen Smith (41:41.269)
Yes, yes, and I love that because I was like, why don't I have this accounting degree? But now I know, so anyway.

Kim Benoy (41:46.904)
Now, you know, it's amazing to me. This is, I hear this story a lot. We don't know what our purpose is or our purpose changes through our life. You know, we get our kids going and then, then we get to this point, okay, now what is my purpose? What do I do? And you've, you have found it in spades or it, or just brought it out.

LeEllen Smith (41:52.963)
Mm-mm.

LeEllen Smith (42:03.468)
Yeah, yeah. Well, think it's just, gosh, just paying attention. That's the thing, know, paying attention, noticing the people and the stories that God is putting in your path. And that's what I started doing, you know, through Jimmy's work, through people at church that I knew that were in recovery and hearing their stories. And even now.

Some days I want to, I just kind of want to get up here in this office and do my accounting work. yesterday I had two calls before 11 o'clock from young women who were struggling, you know, and they may or may not be a good fit for our program, but they needed, they needed somebody to hear what they were going through, you know, and give them some kind of encouragement and point them to somebody.

who could help them just being a resource for people taking the time to hear what's going on. You know we all can do that you know whether or not you want to completely head off into something crazy like I did but I think it's important for us as women of a certain age to just to recognize that we do have experience that is valuable to other people and I think our tendency is

to shy away from that and to discount that and think that nobody needs that, but people need that. I find my own daughter needs that and I'm unwilling sometimes to share with her, but we really do need, I think as women to embrace the idea that we need to support one another. And especially, I think women from a different generation of

from our own, you know, need that. Sometimes women don't have a great relationship with their own mother. Now that's kind of been a common thread that I've noticed in the women I work with. Often there is a lot of tension or even a non-existent relationship. So being able to fill that void for a younger woman as a role model, as someone they can talk to.

LeEllen Smith (44:29.566)
That's a really, really important calling, think, too. We can all, I think, do that.

Kim Benoy (44:35.363)
Yeah, definitely. A theme of this whole thing is community. You saw a need in your community, your literal community, and then you build a community of women who are helping each other. That's amazing and beautiful. So thank you for that. Before we end this, which I don't want to end this, but...

LeEllen Smith (44:51.182)
Thank you.

Well, I basically said all my things, so it's a good time.

Kim Benoy (44:58.205)
You said all your things. I just want to mention the products. I love your bags. I have a couple of the purses. I call them purses. wear them. That's my day to day. there's glass, eyeglass, little things and all sorts of what is what's kind of your favorite, your favorite product.

LeEllen Smith (45:07.074)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (45:12.813)
Uh-huh.

LeEllen Smith (45:18.222)
Well, you know, I guess the sling bag is probably my favorite because that's the bag I use most often because it lets you be hands free. You know, we still got to be working all the time. So we need to be hands free. It's large enough to hold a water bottle and all the things that I'm big on drinking water. So I'm always wanting to wag a water bottle with me. So holds that you can wear it on your front. I mean, it's just one strap. So it

Kim Benoy (45:25.293)
Yeah. Yes.

LeEllen Smith (45:45.39)
kind of is like a backpack. You can wear it on your back or I wear mine on my front a lot when I'm traveling. It's really a good travel piece because it holds enough, but it's not so huge either. So that's probably my first thing. One of the things that I'm really excited about, I wonder, you might not have even seen our new makeup bag. We started right after Christmas making a quilted bag. Now that's, that was a big shift for us, but

Kim Benoy (45:45.571)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (46:14.082)
I was trying to find a way, you know, the bags we've got now are fairly sophisticated. mean, the backpack, that sling bag, those are really pretty involved, the process is. But I had to think about now the new women that are coming in, they need a job that doesn't require as big a skill set as my gals that I have now possess. So I thought, what can they do? So we decided that just the process of quilting something, you know,

Kim Benoy (46:26.253)
Yeah.

Kim Benoy (46:35.96)
Mm-hmm.

LeEllen Smith (46:43.886)
two fabrics with the polyfill sandwiched between, quilting that on a machine, straight stitches all the way down, that makes that into a quilted fabric that becomes now raw material for the new bag. That would be a really good starter job for them. So that's what we started doing is making, quilting our own fabric and now making that into a makeup bag. So you have to check that out. I think they're online now for sure.

Kim Benoy (47:08.735)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (47:11.31)
Anyway, that's been, I was excited, I was kind of been stressing about that a little bit, like, ooh, how are gonna, you know, transition these gals, new gals into what we do? And that's gonna be a great entry level job for them, I think. So let me tell you about where the products are so that people can find those that they're OutsideIn works.com. And we do have that online store, most of our things are available there. If you,

Kim Benoy (47:16.409)
Hmm.

Kim Benoy (47:25.293)
Yeah, I love it.

Kim Benoy (47:30.241)
Yes.

LeEllen Smith (47:41.23)
decide to come from the Midwest, say Wisconsin, to Troy, Tennessee. We would love for you to come by our workshop as Kim has done here on the historic square in Troy, Tennessee, 107 West Westbrook. We will invite you in. You can see us making stuff in the back and we'll sell it to you upfront too. So that's good. On the tab, on the top menu bar of the website,

Kim Benoy (47:45.721)
Yes.

LeEllen Smith (48:09.76)
is a tab called the Outside In that is a page dedicated to our recovery program. We're gonna probably launch a brand new website. It probably will get its website all of its own soon. But for right now, that's where it's parked and our application is there and the guidelines for our program are on that page too. So if somebody knows of somebody who needs us, that's a good way to find the guidelines and the application for that too.

Kim Benoy (48:40.05)
Okay. Yes. When you drive into Troy, Tennessee, there's a sign that says, Nice people live here. And I will tell the listeners, very, very nice people live there. It is a true story. So yeah.

LeEllen Smith (48:40.482)
Those are our main things.

LeEllen Smith (48:46.294)
You

LeEllen Smith (48:52.437)
Well, when you when you put that on your side, it kind of sets the bar, you know, I'm not always sure everybody's taking that seriously, but I am. really am.

Kim Benoy (49:01.369)
Well, our experience has been that I even brought my husband down. We stayed down in real foot for a week for our anniversary and we drove into town. I showed him the sign and we were at the grocery store and we had the best conversation with this lady out in the parking lot. And he's like, they are really nice down here. I said, yes, it's right on the sign. Of course.

LeEllen Smith (49:07.16)
Yeah.

LeEllen Smith (49:11.105)
You

LeEllen Smith (49:14.824)
that's good.

Yes, now, and your friend, and your friend Diane, she is one of our nicest. Yes, for sure.

Kim Benoy (49:25.921)
Yes, definitely. Yes, the whole family has my heart. So yeah, that is very definitely my one of my happy places in my life. So yeah, so yes.

LeEllen Smith (49:33.442)
You know, the inn is actually located really pretty closely to where Diane lives. Did you know that? Yes. I mean, it's less than a mile. And so there is this thing in the world of recovery called NIMBY. Do you know what that means? NIMBY, that stands for not in my backyard.

Kim Benoy (49:42.903)
did not know that. I've seen the pictures and it looks very similar to...

Okay.

Kim Benoy (49:54.924)
I do not.

LeEllen Smith (49:59.99)
which you can imagine that some people are not thrilled with the idea that folks who've been sort of marginalized or vulnerable come from these underestimated populations would be living in their backyard. But we have not experienced NIMBY at all. We have had the most loving and gracious set of neighbors that have just...

just embraced what we're doing. Diane is one of those people. She just has supported us from the very beginning. And isn't that just wonderful? I mean, you could understand why somebody might have misgivings about a program landing in their neighborhood. I understand that. But our people, wow, they have not been those people for sure. I love that, and I'm so thankful for that.

Kim Benoy (50:45.613)
Yeah, right.

Kim Benoy (50:51.159)
Yeah. No, they're. Yeah, that's, that's one of the reasons I love going down there. just that that energy and that that goodness and all of the people down there. So yes, love it. Thank you so much. my gosh. yeah. So listeners, check out the website OutsideIn works. They can buy your products. They are do you have a donation setup if anyone wanted to donate? Okay.

LeEllen Smith (51:05.23)
You

LeEllen Smith (51:17.004)
Yes, they can donate online too. We got a PayPal giving fund and there's a tab that also says donate. We would love that. There's a lot, you know, the program's free to the women, but it's not free.

Kim Benoy (51:25.494)
All right.

Kim Benoy (51:29.611)
It's not free. That's wonderful. Well, Leigh Ellen, this has been so amazing. I'm so happy to talk to you today. Thank you so much for spending time with me.

LeEllen Smith (51:38.848)
Sure, thank you for inviting me. It's been a lot of fun.

Kim Benoy (51:41.749)
All right, well, you take care.

LeEllen Smith (51:43.458)
Thank you.