Adam Torres and Luke Mickelson discuss Sleep in Heavenly Peace.
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Show Notes:
Sleep in Heavenly Peace is helping solve the “bedless” problem in the United States for Children. In this episode, Adam Torres and Luke Mickelson, Founder of Sleep in Heavenly Peace, explore the bedless problem in the United States for children.
About Sleep in Heavenly Peace
Sleep in Heavenly Peace (SHP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization committed to ensuring that every child has a bed to sleep in. Through the dedication of volunteers and the generosity of donors, SHP builds and delivers beds to children in need, expanding its impact across the U.S. and beyond to help every child Sleep Well and DREAM BIG.
Believing that a bed is a fundamental need for a child’s well-being, SHP stands by a simple yet powerful mission: NO KID SLEEPS ON THE FLOOR IN OUR TOWN!
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today I have Luke Mickelson on the line, and he is founder of Sleep in Heavenly Peace.
Luke, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. It’s good to be here. All right, Luke, so I’m excited to get into today’s topic. So we’re gonna get into Sleep and Heavenly Peace, and what a title, first off, , where did you come up with that name? . I read it the first time and I’m like, come on man. It’s a call to action and it’s a brand.
I mean, it’s, there’s layers. Where’d that come from? Heck yeah. You know, and you, you nailed it on the head call to action. You know what’s funny? When we, when we started this, it was just a family Christmas project. I mean, I remember when. I delivered the first bed. I found out that, you know, child bedlessness actually was bigger than, than I thought, because when I built my, second bed with my kids, I didn’t know what to do with it.
Like, it was, it wasn’t like I knew that there was all these kids sleeping on the floor. I just didn’t do it one. And we had, delivered a bed to this family and, I wanted to do it for my own family. So we built this bed. Okay. Didn’t know what to do with it. And you know, it was recommended to me.
Hey, why don’t you just throw it on Facebook, some buy, sell, trade Facebook group. And, that’s always kind of scary because, you put something free out there. You just don’t know what you’re going to get. And true. And anyways, I remember we did that and we got a lot of I can tell a story in a minute, but we’ve got a lot of inquiries.
And, I remember my wife’s like, well, we have to call it something. I said, don’t worry, I got the best name. Okay. Beds for babes. We got it. No, no, no. I’m glad that you’re married and that you have them. Yeah, we’re not calling it that. I’m calling that your actual better half executive decision. Go ahead.
You know, it was like not a good, not a good Google search, by the way. So, man, So yeah, and it was Christmas time, right? , and who doesn’t love silent night and, sleep in heavenly peace, just it really emanated what we wanted these kids to do is just sleep in peace. And and it was funny.
I ran into Rob Schneider, you know, Rob Schneider, the, actor, and he was really interested in what we do. And, and I remember he texted me back later. He says, Luke, sleep in heavenly peace. That sounds like a funeral home. And so it’s been fun, you know, it just, it emanates what we want these kids to be doing when we, when we leave the home after we drop off the bed.
What does it entail to make a bed? I’m just going to throw this out there. I don’t know how to make a bed. What does that mean? Like, I don’t like what I can’t make a bed means I go to Ikea and I do like, I don’t know. I like, that’s I’m looking at the bed. I’m looking at now there’s some screws there.
What does it mean to make a bed? You know, that’s a, one of the beauties beautiful parts about sleeping in the peace. And when you say call to action that’s really what we want. This is a community problem and we want the community to be involved. Well, I knew when I first started this, I knew my way around a saw and a drill.
You know, it wasn’t like I was a full fledged carpenter. In fact, I wouldn’t call me a woodworker at probably. Disgrace the name of those guys that know what they’re doing. But, I knew how to build stuff and I had never built a piece of furniture before, but when I found out about this family that had kids sleeping on the floor, I thought, and at the time I was, what was called the young men’s president.
So in my church group, I was over the spiritual growth as well as the activity, the weekly activity for this young men’s program, boys, eight, about 12 through 18. Well, I don’t know if you, when you’re trying to. Find a fun activity for these teenagers to do nowadays If it doesn’t involve a screen good luck, you know It’s just it’s just difficult and here I was hearing about this family had kids sleeping on the floor And the thought came to me just you know What a great opportunity to take an xbox controller out of these boys’s hands and let’s put a drill in the sander in it Let’s teach him something right and and not only teach him something fun to do but obviously for a great cause and what I found when we did that, it was, quite amazing.
These kids just love to do it. like to think they, it was because they knew where it was going, but who doesn’t love messing around with wood and drills and putting stuff together and, the activity of putting it together was just as fun. Well, may not just as fun, but quite, it was a lot of fun as delivering the bed too, but I knew.
You know, these are 12 year old, 13 year old kids. I got to make this as kind of, simple as possible. and by doing so, we created this platform where people anywhere, maybe have never touched a drill in their life can now take, and we take raw lumber, like, straight two by fours, one by fours, we take raw lumber.
And at the end of the day. three, four hours later, volunteers have never touched a drill before have now created a bed and super fun. how many beds have you did to have you made to date or, distributed? How do I say that? How many? How many bed put, how many, how many heads are in beds?
I’m trying to rhyme stuff too now. , right? Come on. Well, we kind of, you know, we started in 2012 and just like, I think a lot of nonprofits are, a lot of organizations they, you kind of have this slow row roll if you will, but in 2018 we had kind of our big. Let’s call it a break. Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe, you know, he yeah, he’s a stud.
He, was hosting this Facebook watch program called Returning the Favor, and he, they’d travel across the country, and they’d highlight, what they call do gooders and then they would give him something. Well, when he came to Idaho, where I live He highlighted me, our organization, and gave us a warehouse free of space.
And when that, hit in February of 2018, it was a megaphone. we were viewed by like 10 million people. And we went from about seven chapters that we had to in one year, we, went to 150. I mean, we just blew up. And since then we’ve built nearly, we’re coming on. 300, 000 beds that we built and we yeah, we built man.
That’s a lot of heads in beds. It is. And we build now. Our goal this year is going to be close to 90, 000 beds this year. We just grow exponential. Wow. and so just to circle back to the need when somebody thinks that may be listening to this thinks about, oh, well, like. There’s a need, like, obviously, so that we’re talking about beds, a physical product, and, you know, I’m kind of saying tongue in cheek, heads in beds, right?
But that head would be maybe on the floor or maybe, piled up or who knows what that living or sleeping condition could be like without those beds. There are obviously weeks where somebody’s sleeping in them. So those numbers are significant like that. Oh, absolutely. Well, the sad thing is, is, yeah, number one, the sad thing is, is there’s even a need out there.
There’s even a need for Sleek and Lovely Peace. We hate to even think about that. But when we started this, when I started this, I certainly felt like there’s other charities that do what we do, and there wasn’t. I found one charity in North Carolina, this is back in 2012, that Provided beds for kids.
No one else. I mean, there was like little church groups here and there that would have an activity, but no one really was diving into it. And so we, got together. Me and some friends got together, said, you know what, we’re going to build beds. That’s all we’re going to do. We’re going to build and deliver beds, this twin size bed.
And we want to. Really be the best at or at least provide the most and so that’s what we’ve done Child we take child bedlessness may not be a real word But it’s a real problem and it represents greater than 3 percent of a total population That’s our numbers There’s no statistics anywhere other than what we’ve come up with as an organization and that’s kind of rough numbers when you look at how many applications we’ve received and In the population of a town, and we know it’s greater than that because not everybody has heard of sleep and Emily peace in, especially in big metropolitan areas.
Some areas. We know it’s much greater than 3%. And so when you sit at home for your listeners, if you’re in a population. Math is easy. 100, 000 people in your population. They’re literally 3, 000 kids. And I’ll tell you the conditions, Adam. These kids, some of them, if they’re lucky, get to share a bed with a sibling, share a bed with their parents, maybe sleep on a couch, maybe even have an air mattress, which we all know deflates every night.
those are the lucky ones. There’s many times my first experience, I call it my Haley experience. I walked into a house of a mom and daughter. Haley was six years old, never slept on a bed ever slept in the backseat of her mom’s car. They were homeless. They just got a. out of homeless, was getting her life back together, got this, government assisted house, if you will, but little Haley, she slept on her clothes.
I walked into a room and in the corner was a pile, a nest of clothes, and that’s what she slept on. And that is not an uncommon situation that these, kids, even teenagers have never slept on a bed. Yeah. And so when the listeners hear that, we, know it’s a, thing like maybe some people listening grew up with privilege or other things.
And even having a bed is obviously a privilege, right? Right. Oh, well, and it’s, beds should never be a luxury for a child. You know, and when I tell people what we do at first anyways, I get two reactions. First of it’s like, well, it’s really not that big of a big right there. I mean, there’s not a lot of kids and I just say, Oh, absolutely.
It’s, it’s right next door, you know? And the next thing they say, well, it’s not in my town. And, I live in a fairly, I don’t know not a poor community of, , or County in Idaho, you know, magic Valley is a. Fairly rich agricultural rich type of community. We’ve been here since 2012 and we still, still, and in a population of less than 100, 000 people, we still get an application about every other day and an application is 2.
2 kids. So the need is absolutely real. And the sad thing is, Adam and I appreciate having me on because the hardest thing we’re doing right now is. Raising awareness about this really is a major need. Not only is a major need, major problem in America, but it’s one that not very many organizations or not very many resources this need.
And that’s why our mission statement is no kid sleeps on the floor in our town and we want our town to be everybody’s town. And we take that very seriously because there’s just not very many resources available to solve this need. mentioned the word chapters earlier. I want to circle back to that.
Like, how does this work? You bet. So let’s keep in mind that I’m a farm kid from Idaho and I’m not ashamed of that. I’m a proud of that. I didn’t grow up in the nonprofit world. I grew up with kind of an entrepreneurial mind. Like I I’ve started many businesses, sold them and, I just enjoyed that.
, but. starting this, charity, whatever, that meant back in the day, I didn’t even know really how charities work. What I did know is I didn’t want to be one of these charities that people donate their money to. It goes to some pie in the sky. You have no idea where it goes to, you know, your money is you donate my community in some charities go clear across the country, right?
I wanted. The money that you donate or someone donates to stay in the community and help the kids in their community locally. Because we feel like this again, this is a community problem and things are only going to be solved by the community. And so when we had friends and family. See what we were doing on Facebook and we’re interested in seeing how they could do it in their own hometown.
we developed this, what we call an NCR chapter request, which turns into a chapter. These people can go to our website. They can apply to become a chapter and then through our, online onboarding and training process. People can become a chapter and chapters are men and women. They’re not paid.
They have a what we call a core team around them. They look for money. They build beds. They deliver beds. They operate under the same E. I. N. number. So we’re one big, you know, one big overall charity. But the beauty of. Your question the beauty that I want to get across is you live in I don’t care what town you live in If you find a chapter close to you and you donate money to that chapter That money stays in that chapter.
The The only way and we’re proud of this The only way we finance let’s call it the overhead of sleep and heavenly peace is we pull 10 from every donation That’s it. So 90 percent of your dollar 90 cents a year. Dollar stays in the community. Those beds that we build stay in the community that person donated in and we, and we love that.
Wow. What, an amazing story. And I just have to ask, cause I feel like this is, definitely going to be a thing with geography wise. Are you targeting any geographies versus others? Is it wherever somebody wants to get involved? Like, I mean, where are you guys at? Like, give me a little bit of a feel for the footprint.
I have the idea of over 300, 000, which that’s, that’s significant. And obviously there’s much more work to be done, but talk to me about the footprint. Okay. Great question. So we’ve trained over 400 chapters nationwide, right? Since 2018 and some of those, closed down because chapters move.
We have about 350 that are completely active chapters building beds and delivering all the time. And it’s really funny. We’re scattered all across the country. I’d say 70 percent or more of our chapters are on the East Coast, mostly because of population. And usually what happens is chapter starts somewhere.
So you’re. In a city and then just organically it has grown to cover the state, Wisconsin, Florida. These are great examples of where we had one guy started in, I think the first one was in Portage, Wisconsin, and now there’s, 20 plus chapters all over Wisconsin. You know, they see it on the radio where they come to a build and then go back home and realize there’s not a chapter there.
So they want to start one. And so we, don’t, we haven’t, we’re starting to find. Large cities, Miami New York, San Francisco, some of these large cities that we don’t have chapters in and probably could use 10 chapters in there based on the population. We’re trying to target those, but, we really feel and we, we grow at the tune of about 50 chapters a year, which, you know, we don’t want to, we don’t want to grow too fast because we want to be able to manage and support these chapter presidents, but.
we also want to grow as fast as we can and, especially reach those cities, those big metropolitan cities that we know there’s kids that are mm-hmm. Desperate need, right? It’s just you know, we don’t, we, don’t pay these people. These are usually retired people that are, want to give back to the community.
They’re always looking for things to do. And I, and I’ll tell you this, Adam. There’s many times I’ve talked to people, retired couples that have donated their time to many different organizations and they’ve, come back to me on countless times. We’ve, I’ve had situations where they’ve come back and said, Luke, I’ve donated a lot of time.
I’ve spent a lot of time at other charities. This is the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. and that, you know, passion is, is affects people in different ways. And, and not everybody has the same passion and that’s great. We don’t all. Try to solve the same problem, but I will say the beauty of what we do is we we involve the community and we want the community be involved and being a chapter president.
You just become, this person that manages and provides opportunities for your local. Town your local neighbors to come in and number one, learn about child businesses, learn the problem and then learn how to solve it and be a part of that solution. how do you spread the word out to get applicants that need the bed?
I’m curious about that piece. It’s a great question. example, what we’re doing right now, I hope people now take an opportunity to be aware that this is an issue. A lot of, you know, a lot of teachers and school counselors know what we’re talking about. A lot of first responders, you know, firefighters, police officers that go into these homes and see the conditions that these kids live.
And we deal with, and work with a lot of other service organizations, you know DCFS child support services, transitioning homelessness and foster care. We’re sponsored by Jockey, who’s our national foster care sponsor. You know, we, we deal with a lot of these organizations that know these kids, know the situations they’re in, you know, and, and some of those are the saddest ones.
These, kids that are in the foster care program, you know, , these families. I have a great story where. this couple, or rather these, this brother and sister, six and seven years old the parents were not in the picture. I don’t know why, but they weren’t in the picture. The grandparents lived back east.
They couldn’t handle them. The only people they knew were each other and they went to a family and the family didn’t have enough beds. The judge literally gave him 24 hours to find a bed or else these two kids are going to be separated. It’s hard to talk about. I cry every time. We had a bed into the home the next day.
and those of the situations that we provide and I tell people, Adam, it’s far more than just a bed. It’s a, confidence. It’s keeping families together. It’s, having these kids feel ownership of something that is theirs. I had a friend of mine say. Oh, you call it S. H. P.
That’s funny because me and my sister growing up, we called it our secret hiding place, which is S. H. P. And I thought, oh, my gosh, that is, that is beautiful. How many times these kids need to get away and escape from their problems? And they go, to their bed, which is their comfort zone. And if you don’t have one, You know, I had Mike Rowe in his, podcast once he said, Luke, he said, it’s interesting when I first thought about this, you know, there’s a bedroom, we’re going to the kid’s bedroom, but if he doesn’t have a bed in it, then it’s just a room.
And when you stop and think about that, that’s true. It’s just a room. The kid might as well be in the bathroom or be in the kitchen or be in the living room. He doesn’t have a bed. It’s not his, and it really has a lot of meaning and it provides a lot of solutions for these kids that that need a leg up.
Yeah. Luke, do people get involved? Like, what are the organization need? How do people follow up? How do they get involved? Absolutely. Thanks for asking. F H P beds. org is our website. S H P Sam, Harry, Paul beds, plural. org. You can go there and there’s a bunch of ways to help. Number one, raise awareness.
You’re listening to your podcast, Adam. Thanks for keeping us on or having us come on. Those are listening right now. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Find out how bad, how big and bad child bedlessness is in your own home. Let people know about it and let them know about sleep and Emily peace, how we can help together solve that.
Number two, find a chapter close to you. They’re always chapter presidents and core teams are always looking for those people that want to, maybe spend an hour a week delivering beds. I promise you. It will change your life to talk about it, to even see videos and hear stories about delivering bed to a child is one thing, but until you actually go into the room and assemble a bed and see this little five, six year old kid over here hiding behind his mom because the strangers in his room and watch him, his demeanor just changed from scared apprehension to appreciation.
My first delivery, Adam. I had this little girl hugged and kissed her bed. I’d never seen a child kiss a bed before. And, those are the experiences you can talk about, but until you’re in the room, you just don’t get that feel. And so find a chapter donate or offer to help be involved there.
Of course, donations were nonprofit. That’s how we, finance this thing. You know, our, beds cost 300 it’s bed mattress sheets. Pillows, the delivery of the bed. It’s the whole nine yards and we do it for 300 bucks so you can donate mattress. Everything’s brand new, right? So you can donate the cost for a mattress or the cost for a bed.
We have a program called the bunkhead club where you can go in, become a bunkhead and donate money to your chapter on a monthly basis. Be a part of that program. it’s really just how can we help these kids in your local community? You know, and get involved. And the last thing is, is if you don’t have a chapter in your community, you can sign up to become a chapter president.
And, it’s, we make it as simple as possible. But it takes a unique individual with some drive that really wants to solve this problem and help out their communities. And those are, probably the 3 biggest things that we certainly looking for help. Amazing. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the website in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day, we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Luke, man, really appreciate you coming on the show and thank you for all you’re doing to help. The bedlessness problem in the United States. So thank you so much. Thank you, Adam. Appreciate your time and thank you, you listeners for, joining in.