Banking on KC – Natasha Herdman of Pawsperity
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Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Natasha Herdman, the founder and CEO of Pawsperity. Welcome, Natasha.
Natasha Herdman:
Thank you for having me.
Kelly Scanlon:
Pawsperity is your brainchild. You came up with the idea. So tell us about that aha moment when you decided that this was going to be a solution to a problem you'd been mulling over for a while.
Natasha Herdman:
It started with my work with homeless families about 14 years ago. I learned that so many adults could not get jobs due to criminal records, lack of education, lack of job history, or legal job history. And then some of the moms that we actually did help place in employment working second shift were making minimum wage, and they were leaving the 6-year-old at home to babysit the 2-year-old because they couldn't afford a babysitter. Then a few moms that actually got full-time work, making 10, 12 bucks an hour, would lose all of their benefits within weeks of becoming employed, so housing, childcare, food stamps. And they would have to quit their job to go back on welfare so they could support their kids.
I got to know these families. And some of these adults, most of these adults were born into generational poverty or homes of abuse and neglect. Many of them dropped out of high school, raised themselves on the streets, or in and out of group homes, and would often sell drugs or their bodies to survive and sometimes becoming addicted to those drugs. And the thing that was the most devastating was seeing that their kids were on the exact same path. And so one night when I'm driving home from work, my mom called from Iowa and she said, "Put an ad in the paper. I need another groomer. I'll train any warm body who walks through the door."
Kelly Scanlon:
So your mom was a dog groomer.
Natasha Herdman:
Yes.
Kelly Scanlon:
Or she owned a dog grooming shop?
Natasha Herdman:
Yes. My mom was a dog groomer. And that was the light bulb moment for me because I helped run my mom's business from afar doing marketing and bookkeeping. And I knew how much money she made. And I also know that when we were kids, she scheduled her dogs around our school schedule.
Kelly Scanlon:
Okay. So you knew that you could be flexible in the hours?
Natasha Herdman:
Exactly. And that's the really cool thing about pet grooming because it's felon friendly, it's family flexible, and it's a high wage trade. And that's exactly what a struggling mom needs to actually get out of the situation that she might be in.
Kelly Scanlon:
So how long before you decided that this could be a possible solution? Did you just immediately start trying to figure out how to launch and get going? How'd that all work?
Natasha Herdman:
I knew that I needed more information, so I actually started talking with ... I did surveys in Kansas City with 40 different employers to find out if they would even hire somebody that had a felony on their record, what was the average wage, that kind of thing. I also met with the directors, regional directors for Petco and PetSmart. And so once I knew that this was actually a need all around the country, not just here in Kansas City or with my mom in Iowa, that's when I then went to graduate school to study nonprofit management and generational poverty to really figure out what programs around the world have worked to actually help these families break that cycle.
Kelly Scanlon:
So you did a lot of due diligence, including sending yourself back to school. So then you do launch. It was originally called The Grooming Project. You really hit on something here, a skill that was in demand, good wages, flexibility, like you say, people willing to hire people with records. So this empowerment that people get through pet grooming, how does it help the individuals and the families move out of generational poverty? I know there's more to it than the wage.
Natasha Herdman:
Right. And that's why half of what we do really is that, is the grooming instruction. So the other half is kind of those professionalism and life skills. So a lot of these folks, again, since they were kind of raising themselves as teens, may not have had that parental guidance that a lot of us kind of grew up with. So helping them figure out how to buy that first car or house or what school district to go to, budgeting, parenting. So it's a mix. We do about 23 weeks of soft skill courses that also help with the grooming. And then we actually put social workers in the grooming room with our students so that whatever issues they're working on, so maybe they're in a domestic violence situation that they're trying to get out of, and that can be whether they're in our program or after our program, that they've got support, helping them navigate what that looks like.
Kelly Scanlon:
You mentioned 23 weeks. Is that the length of your entire program? Tell us a little bit about that.
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. It usually takes students about six to eight months to go through our program, but it's based on grooming hours in the classroom. So this can really vary for different families. They might have court dates or sick kids that might prolong the schooling a little bit.
Kelly Scanlon:
One of the other things that you can point to as just in general for the success of what you're doing is your graduation rate and your placement rate. Talk about those.
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. So our graduation rate post the 30-day probationary period is 75%. And our graduation employment rate, so when the student graduates, is 100%. Everybody gets a job that needs a job.
Kelly Scanlon:
Obviously, you can get a job as a dog groomer, but I know that some of your graduates have other jobs as well than pet grooming. So tell us about those.
Natasha Herdman:
Well, we're actually just now kind of starting to break into other industries. I think pet grooming's always going to be our number one just because of the wage that you can make. It's 40 to $100,000 a year. And like I said, you don't need to know how to read to get that job. So that's really our number one. But then there's also entry level jobs for maybe kids aging out of foster care. Do they want to get doggy daycare jobs? Or maybe the person that has had a lot of experience working with animals, they could become a pet trainer. That's another high wage trade. So one of the jobs ... We've looked into vet techs. The problem is if you have a felony, you usually can't get a job as a vet tech, and then the schooling is usually much higher than what our students have that they would need.
Kelly Scanlon:
I was even thinking ... I've talked to some of your students before. And to a tee, they would speak about how much their children enjoyed the atmosphere and the animals and so forth too. So some of these other types of jobs that you talk about, as their children are growing, are there potentials to maybe place them in, even as perhaps volunteers, just because they like it so much? Have you seen any of that happening?
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. So what's really cool ... So we've been open for eight years now. We have our first student of a graduate that's in our program now. I think she's 19 years old. And she's about ready to graduate as a dog groomer. But what we've just kind of heard through the grapevine with our graduates is that their kids that are teenagers are getting jobs in their grooming salons as bather, brushers, and mom or dad were the ones that taught them how to bathe or brush because they went through our program.
Kelly Scanlon:
Talk about breaking the cycle of generational poverty. That is on display right there.
Natasha Herdman:
Have one of our students who is a man, we've got a few men now, came in because he's starting his own mobile grooming business. And he really wants this to be a business that he can hand down to his kids. And so I just thought that that was really great that they're thinking that far ahead.
Kelly Scanlon:
When I interviewed you a couple of years ago, your name was originally The Grooming Project, but you were working towards the new name, Pawsperity. So what prompted the rebranding? And how's it impacted the organization since then?
Natasha Herdman:
There's two reasons why we have rebranded. The first one is if you look up grooming in the dictionary, it's got two definitions. And one of those is not what we are about at all, and we want to get it far away from that as possible. But the other reason is because grooming is our number one job training program, but there are other things in the pet industry that we can start training in. And so we really feel like this move is going to help us broaden our scope of what we can provide to the community.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. And Pawsperity, what an emphasis on possibility.
Natasha Herdman:
Exactly. And prosperity. For me, it's all about our students getting that money that they need so that they can actually get above ground and really start to think about what they want instead of what they need.
Kelly Scanlon:
So we've talked a little bit about the program and who's eligible for it. I know you have more than one program, so explain a few of those and how they directly benefit the community, your students, and then the larger community as well.
Natasha Herdman:
The grooming school, we are a state certified school and we're going through national accreditation now. And so that is really what can take a family from earning less than $10,000 a year to over $50,000 a year. But what it can do also though for the community at large is community members, pet parents can bring their dogs in to get groomed. And when they do that, it's helping us in two ways. It's helping the student learn how to groom that breed of dog, but then it's also putting money in their pocket because all of the reduced rate grooming services or fees, that's what then we use to pay the student stipends. And then the students can hopefully buy a car or get into a house or something like that when they graduate.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. So they're providing a real service to the customer, but in turn, the customer is paying their wages. And then it goes back into the community to the local retailers and so forth as they spend those paychecks.
Natasha Herdman:
That's exactly right.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. So it's a full cycle there.
Natasha Herdman:
And then we've also got ... We opened in our new building, 2023, doggy daycare, just part-time. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But this is ... We charge I think about $30 a day for a dog to come and play at 7:30 in the morning to 6:30 at night. And what doggy daycare does is this is kind of an entry ground for students that might need more help in pet handling and safety. So our doggy daycare is run by a certified pet trainer. But then it also provides money for our grooming school because all those fees that are paid funnels back into our nonprofit.
Kelly Scanlon:
And you mentioned that's a recent program. Your initial building, it's still there. It's at 59th and Troost. So is this an expansion of that?
Natasha Herdman:
No. We're completely out of that building. So that building is now owned by Pet Resource Center next door. So they're doing an animal hospital out of it for low income families, which is great. Good partner. But what we've been able to do, so we've tripled in size, which allowed us to add the doggy daycare. We went from 10 grooming stations to 40 grooming stations. On average, before we were training 10 students at a time. Now we've got 45 in class. And then we were able to add a food pantry. So this has really helped our families, their kids, the students. Added a commercial kitchen, which we really haven't started using yet, but we're starting to look at hot meals for students that they can take with them. Or maybe we learn how to make pet food down the road. Who knows? But it also gave us a really large classroom upstairs where we could have these life skill classes. And then we open that space to the public if they want to come in and have a board meeting there and then maybe learn about us afterwards.
Kelly Scanlon:
Talk to us about some of the other partners that you have. For example, I know that you had continuing education classes through Pet-Ag. What's all that about?
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. So Pet-Ag's been a wonderful partner for us. So Dr. Dale, who's a chemist with Pet-Ag, and he's actually kind of world-famous, does seminars all over the world, he will come in and train our graduates on breed types and what is the best shampoo, and especially like with skin, if there's any ailments in the skin. And then he kind of goes into the behind the scenes of why that certain shampoo works with that certain coat type. So our graduates really get a top-notch education that a lot of others just don't even have access to.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. It sounds like it. They become more consultants to their clients almost rather than just, okay, here comes another dog, get out the clippers and-
Natasha Herdman:
Exactly.
Kelly Scanlon:
... start snipping away. Yeah.
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah.
Kelly Scanlon:
That's incredible. You've mentioned some of your partners. And collaboration is very key, as we know, in all non-for-profit work. So who are some of your main partners? And how do those collaborations enhance your efforts?
Natasha Herdman:
So some of our non-profit partners that have been really key are Operation Breakthrough. So what that really does for our families, one of our moms in our pilot class, just to give an example, she was able ... Her kids were in Operation Breakthrough. That's how she found us. But they continued to pay for her childcare even after she graduated from our program, which then allowed her to get out of debt because instead of using that money to pay childcare, she actually used that money then to pay off some of her debt.
She was able to buy a house, which then she paid off. And now she's the one that just bought our Lee's Summit Salon because she was then able to use the equity in the house to get a loan at a bank to get the business. So partnerships like that. Synergy Services is another one where they pay all the housing costs for our graduates. And one of our graduates, she's been out for about two years now, kids in foster care, she was coming from a domestic violence situation. They really got her back on her feet, sent her to us for training. And because they covered all of that for her, she used the student stipend that she got grooming dogs from us to buy a car when she graduated.
Kelly Scanlon:
You mentioned the woman, the graduate who bought your Lee's Summit store. I just heard about that. That's just one of so many success stories.
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. So Christine Banks, who began in the pilot class for us in 2016, been managing our Lee's Summit Salon for the last two years. She's actually doubled the sales of the salon in the two years that she was there. And she manages six to seven employees underneath her, all graduates of our school. So she has always wanted to be a business owner. We've been working with her on this for a while. But once we expanded on Troost, we were able to open a space that really is very similar to what our Lee's Summit Salon experience is.
Kelly Scanlon:
There's a little redundancy.
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. And putting it under one roof was very important to us. So we knew since we had a graduate that was capable of really making this business a success and she wanted to own her own business, why not sell it to her? So we did have to sell at a market rate, so she had to get a loan from a bank, but we're very excited for her. It's called Furever Pets. It's in Lee's Summit. And we hope that you'll check it out.
Kelly Scanlon:
What other kinds of success stories can you tell us about?
Natasha Herdman:
We've got 140 graduates now, so there's a lot of stories out there of transformational change. But the one that really sticks with me is Amy's story. And that's because Amy was born into generational drug use. Family members had taught her how to make and sell meth by the time she was 10. By 13, she was addicted to meth. And then spent the next decade in and out of prison. No high school degree or education. And when she came to us, she was about two months sober and her husband had just shot her in the head. So she knew that she needed to make some drastic changes. And so she graduated. She worked for a vet for a while. But then we had a grooming instructor position come open, and we asked her to apply, so she did. And she's been working for us for about five or six years now.
But the cool thing is she has also started the largest women's AA group in the Midwest. She has over 600 ladies in this group that she's helping through recovery. And she's sponsoring 15 to 20 women at any given time in the recovery efforts. Not only that, she's working full time for us and really inspiring our students coming in that you can do this. I did this. You can do this too. I started where you started. And I really think that when I see those students out there and they're doing well, not just for themselves and their kids, but they're doing it for the community, that's really incredible.
Kelly Scanlon:
So you talk about some of the students graduating, being able to buy their own houses, but you also have some housing yourself for some of the families, right?
Natasha Herdman:
We do. We have ... The students like to call it the dorms. The donors that funded it like to call it the family residence. But we have six units and about 18 kids living in there right now, each with their moms. So it's only for women at the moment. But they have a kitchen on each level. Everybody has their own bedroom suite with a washer, dryer, and a bathroom. And then there's joint play areas with a big playground outside. We really still are very dependent on our housing partners in Kansas City to kind of fill that need for our students.
Kelly Scanlon:
You've had so many success stories in the short time that you've been in operation. But looking ahead, what are some of your new goals or new directions that you see Pawsperity heading towards that you're excited about?
Natasha Herdman:
Well, what we're really trying to do is figure out how to package ourselves into a licensing model and then expand into other markets. So we've been working with the University of Notre Dame for about a year and a half now, working on what that would look like. So we partnered with the YWCA in South Bend, Indiana. They have housing and childcare. And so this would really bring on that job training component that they really need because, again, a lot of their folks don't have education or job history or any of that stuff, and they have criminal records. To get a job out there. So they can help them as much as they want, but until they actually have money to go pay for things on their own, they're always going to be helping them. So anyway, long story short, we are really trying to hone in on how do we train other organizations to do what we're doing? And one of the hardest parts is definitely when it comes to grooming instructors because it's already hard enough to find a good groomer, but then we've got to find a good groomer who can teach.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yes. It's a different-
Natasha Herdman:
Yes.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. It's a whole different animal. Yeah.
Natasha Herdman:
And then they got to teach folks that are coming from backgrounds that they don't trust anybody. So our students, when they start, they're going to yell at their instructors. It's not always very nice. And a lot of it's because the people in their lives that they grew up with that they should have been able to trust, they couldn't.
Kelly Scanlon:
They're survivors.
Natasha Herdman:
Exactly.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. This is what they've had to do.
Natasha Herdman:
And so it's such a process to really get the student to trust us, trust our instructors, and then get it so that those instructors are very strong and can take what's coming at them on a daily basis.
Kelly Scanlon:
I know you've accomplished an awful lot, and we've talked about a lot of those things today. But you've done it in such a short time. Looking at 10 years. But it's a couple years away yet, but I know you're planning for it already, so tell us about that.
Natasha Herdman:
Yeah. So we are actually planning for a 10-year celebration, so it's going to be a big fundraising gala. And we're actually kind of skipping the gala for this year so that we can plan for that one. We hope that everybody will come. This will be a way for us to really honor our graduates. We'll have many of them come and speak and tell their stories. And hopefully that will continue to inspire the community to partner with us.
Kelly Scanlon:
I know that you put a lot of emphasis on the community collaboration too. What are some of the ways that our listeners can get involved if they're interested in that?
Natasha Herdman:
There's a lot of areas where we need help. So some of those are volunteering for us. So part of what we do is really help find scholarships or financial aid for all the students before they come to us. So students do not pay to come to our program, but it does take some work and help getting those students to find that financing. Then other ways are volunteer mentors for our students. So some of these folks don't really have parent figures in their lives. And volunteers that come in and are willing to give that type of support can be life-changing for the students in our program. Other ways are becoming a monthly donor. You can go to our website, pawsperity.org. And that will also help with emergency assistance for our students. So if the tire on their car blows or they need food, something like that, they can dip into the emergency assistance to get help.
Kelly Scanlon:
You can find out about all of these programs, ways to get engaged. Your website's the best place to do that. What is it?
Natasha Herdman:
Pawsperity.org.
Kelly Scanlon:
Pawsperity.org. Natasha, it's wonderful to have you come back. It's exciting to hear just in the couple years since I've interviewed you, to hear about all the progress that you've made and even more success stories now. So thank you very much for all of the work you've done, you and your team. And appreciate you coming on today.
Natasha Herdman:
Thank you for having me.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Natasha Herdman for joining us on this episode of Banking on KC. Pawsperity's dedication to transforming lives is a powerful model of social entrepreneurship. The organization's efforts offer a new lease on life to families battling generational poverty. By equipping parents with dog grooming skills that lead to well-paying flexible jobs and providing critical support services, Pawsperity provides a pathway for addressing immediate financial needs and fosters long-term stability and independence. At Country Club Bank, we understand the profound impact of empowering individuals, not only for the individuals involved, but also for the broader community. When we invest in people, we strengthen the very fabric of our community. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you, Kansas City. Country Club Bank. member FDIC.