Crowning Connections: Touring Ground Zero in Myrtle Beach

[Music] hi this is rob clemens with crowning connections i'm here today at the ground zero facilities very excited i'm here with stephanie sebring and we're here to talk a little bit about the fact that we got the dragon boat races coming up this uh a couple weekends from now and we're definitely a participant we're excited to get out there and and do some hard work with our team and enjoy it but i wanted to get back to ground zero and talk about what's this all about and why are we doing this in the first place so stephanie welcome to the show thank you so much so ground zero is a teen ministry we focus on middle school and high school students and the grant or i'm sorry the dragon boat festival is our largest fundraiser of the year so it supports our general ministry budget all year long it's beautiful you guys have done this great facility and that we're able to raise some money for the kids and all these good things so if you would let's take a tour of your building we'll show the people what to expect absolutely come on in oh so when you walk in you enter right away to our coffee shop this is a place where when we have outreach events and when we have other civic and non-civic rentals we open up our coffee shop and we provide our middle school and high schoolers with a free coffee drink as well as well as free food upstairs and top notch which we'll get to now that's really cool so is it when you feed high schoolers and younger coffee and caffeine how do they do with this is it like just a party automatically that's why we do it at the beginning of the evening so that when we send them home they're pretty cafed up oh they're free yeah parents get to deal with that that's awesome so if i were to go order like a double shot of caffeine right now would that be a doable thing it's called espresso and you would definitely be able to get that oh yeah well my people anybody who knows me knows i feed off of caffeine you know at least you know three or four cups a day will be about right if i'm trying to keep it nice and calm right that's a good ratio super cool in here i love it okay so cool what else so we're going to go on upstairs by the way i love the little seating area here oh this is a giant is this what i think it is it looks like a giant game of jenga now do we have time to play a full game here uh i'm talking to the staff no okay all right we don't have a time for a full game but how good are you at this by the way i have played with teenagers i have not played with those but there is there is physics to this of course all right all right well you know i i've shown that i can do it right like wouldn't be funny if the whole thing toppled down the first time i tried that one yeah with just one block that would be like a record of some sort so all right so this is our green room and we have about 30 to 40 volunteers that help us when we have outreach events so we've also got eyes on every place in the building where teenagers can be that's for their safety um our volunteers come in and put their items in a locker this space that is currently holding the dragon boat festival trophy wait a lot hold on all right now we can't just stop there this will be hopefully the monarch roofing trophy that's what we're really hoping for fastest time of the day yeah fastest time of the day my people are training right now like even as we're here they're in a boat or somewhere rowing probably not they're probably working on roots but either way yeah yeah so this is where we keep all of the food for our volunteers they check in they get their credentials their clipboard and their walkie-talkie we have about a 15 to 20 minute gathering where our president will share what's going on for the evening and what if anything is different about tonight than any other night because we change things a lot yeah we identify something isn't working we switch it up so this is the volunteer greener very very cool and and by the way i mean i think it brings great comfort to anybody who you know if your kid was going here for example to know that you know they're monitored basically everywhere right that's that's pretty cool yeah they are very nice so as you know this used to be the old rivoli theater so upstairs are projection rooms and other spaces that used to be utilized for the production of movies this used to be a coat closet and our missions teams that come from leader checks all summer long converted it into what we now use as a staff kitchen man this is a nice little efficient kitchen in here too and i like the fact there's a carrot up here so just in case you didn't get your coffee fix downstairs you're gonna get it up here now what is this stephanie would this is this uh have some significance is it uh so we plan based on a school year we are we run on a fiscal year from a budgetary standpoint but this is our fifth or our school calendar so it shares every date on here is a wednesday night because that's when we do our outreach but it just kind of talks about what the focus is going to be because when we have these outreach events we sit the kids down for about a 15-minute video that talks about things that are relevant in their lives and what the bible has to say about it wow that's very cool and it looks like you guys are busy that's the takeaway here right all right and stephanie makes it happen so i think that's uh that's a beautiful thing well it's definitely a team effort for sure so this is our work room and this is where we have a lot of the meetings and the planning and one of the projects that we've actually like to do is to blow out this wall because you're standing above the lobby now so there's additional office space that we would love to put above the lobby okay that's the headspace now now do you get volunteers to help with those kinds of projects yeah okay lots of in-kind lots of donation well i mean and that's something that i like people to know you know ultimately you know the home builders association people and people like that that are out there you know maybe looking to get some charity work and it's not a bad idea um so we got what's this is death by distraction anything urgent that pulls you away from something that is important that's death by distraction yes i like the fact that you guys have these cool little things around the the room now who can't who came up with all this stuff is this that is all our president's guy yeah yeah scott's a very you know he's a he's a by the books guy it sounds like he's got a lot of great ideas intentional and i think that's one of the reasons why i enjoy working here because it's very focused and very intentioned on what we're doing that's awesome yeah very nice very cool to you so offices are upstairs currently we have five staff so just five people pull off this whole festival wow yeah that's amazing overwhelming so this is the office area hello this is rachel hi rachel good to see you how's it going so is rachel the friendly voice that greets everybody as they come in you got a nice smile too you seem like you enjoy it here yeah these your ducks i just need to because those are kind of cute yeah i actually won one when we were on our trip last year our retreat and this one i found at disney oh you found it at disney so i guess that happens out at disney that's cool very cool very nice to meet you thank you so lots of office space this is lori she's not currently downstairs she's our operations director holden is scott and kimberly's son he's 21 but he is our ministry director he's actually getting ready to leave for the coast guard full-time so we'll be having an open position that's so cool i was going to ask you about that that's so beautiful if you can get a shot of that on the wall it looks like somebody maybe made that for for him or something i think scott kimberly got that as a gift made for him when he graduated very cool um this is my space here so this area over here is where we produce all of our videos so carly is our outreach director but she also by default has been put in charge of filming and taking care of all of that i mean this is a real operation here it looks like a little fortune 500 company you're on it oh wait till you see what's next okay all right now i full disclosure i've gotten a chance to go through here before and this is actually probably my favorite room in the building because it's food well you know food is always going to get to me and plus there must be some coffee around here or something i'm just kidding but what i thought when i came in here is this has that vibe of like uh like a 50s diner or something that's kind of the vibe i got from here but so cool the way you guys did the stuff on the wall and everything so uh tell me what is this room used for typically i mean obviously kids come up here but what kind of things are you doing here so this is our cafeteria top notch the definition of nosh is to eat with enthusiasm so again we're intentional and enthusiastic about everything that we do nice so when the kids eat we want them to eat in an area where it can be contained and cleaned up because as good as they are everyone has spills but we wanted to also give them some familiarity of where they're transitioning from the end of their school day to ground zero and plus if you're eating with enthusiasm i mean that probably it sounds messy it can be forever it's like not just eating but with enthusiasm well i love the fact you guys had a very you know like i said it's kind of got that old school feel but it's got a lot of modern stuff and and i didn't know the definition of noshing is this like in the dictionary or is this like a logo okay i'm gonna go home and notch tonight that's cool and i see you have a nintendo switch on the wall over here so so many digital games now would i be able to compete with my staff on this later to enforce that i am still the video game king of this company only if you're willing to be beaten because i guarantee you some of your staff that's their downtime oh yeah no you're right you're right on this but but that's really really great i love it awesome so this is our patio out here we have and kind of we consider it to be an additional eating space this was actually built and the whole building was renovated from 2011 to 2014 so it took three years and almost 2 million dollars plus because we've made so many changes to the building since it's been open in 2014. so this facility will hold about a thousand people standing only so we do rent the facility out to civic and non-civic groups there is an application process that they have to go through with me and if it's approved then we'll go ahead and have different events here we've hosted a lot i mean i tell you we talked about maybe even us renting this house sometime great place for a team building gathering or just maybe a team party of some sort uh very cool now now do you have some before pictures of this building before all this this renovation happened i'd love to see that somehow yeah absolutely i'll put you in touch with scott he could share all of that with you and then we there's ping pong down here right not only is there ping pong this is almost like competitive ping pong so i'm pretty serious about ping pong i'll bet you i i can see stephanie are you one of those people to stand like 20 feet away from the table and just whipping the ball back and stuff if i were i probably wouldn't be here and do an olympic ping pong or something right exactly well this is cool it looks like a whole production like you're going to the theater or something so yeah and we have tried to maintain some of the integrity of the original theater so we have some of the old seats in there cool cool so let's go downstairs and we'll kind of show you the main room all right and by the way can i go ahead and get some chicken wings while i'm here is that oh okay no not not that kind of hour's too early oh okay got you we'll come back later so as i mentioned because we're a facility that is a concert venue we have a very high-tech av sound and light system so our production booth is manned by not only our employees but also by the students that we train in order to operate these things hi guys carly savannah hey so this is where all the like the magic happens really these guys are like the brains of this whole thing yes okay very much got you got you what's your favorite part of the job here um i love being able to manipulate all the graphics in the video hey it's a good part yeah got you got you now is it true that like i could basically learn how to do this right now and do better than you got no i'm yeah i'm kidding no i'm sure you guys would run circles around me that's very cool that's awesome well good to meet you guys so the biggest game the biggest draw of the evening is usually nine square in the air so i don't know if you're familiar with that game and there's nine people each person stands in a square and they try to defend their square so if you can't defend your square you get thrown out you got to circle back around and get in line to defend your square again wow the goal is to get in the middle and keep that middle square defended so i i would love to see that happening in person maybe we can come back later on when this is actually going down yeah cool cool yeah that's great yeah so then we end the night with everyone seated and again we share a little bit of video time with them we have carly and holden who i mentioned earlier sitting on stage just kind of talking back and forth about some things that are really important that the kids are going through so our goal is really just to give them hope um we try to transform their futures by cultivating their faith so giving them some different messaging um one of the things that the captain said to me today was you know we're trying to recruit some more people but they think they've got to be trained and they think they have to be really strong and i said you know that presents a really unique opportunity for us to talk about the fact that it's not strength and muscling through it's being willing to get on the boat and being very in sync with the people that you're in front of and not smacking the person in in the head behind you with the paddle but seriously being in alignment with one another and being willing to get in the boat and row beside someone so if you're in sync that's going to get you across the finish line a whole lot faster and that's what we try to teach the kids is you don't have to be the best you don't have to be the greatest you don't have to step over top of people to fulfill your purpose in life you just have to be willing to join in and walk side by side with the people that you have in your life every single day and maybe put a little hard work put in a little harder that's awesome absolutely you know it's funny when you go to the you know because we've done this a few years in a row with monarch crew thing and uh when you go out there you can see the boats that are moving really fast and they're always the ones that are in sync and it's not the biggest strongest guys either it's the ones who are really in sync with each other so that's really cool what are the age ranges of the uh of the kids that are out here so middle school in high school okay so sometimes that age is different yeah right middle school in high school so that would put what's uh what's the youngest would be here maybe sixth grade okay like 12 years old okay was there ever a story that you experienced with any particular kid i'm sure you got a lot of them so it may be too hard to but was there any one story that just was it would inspire you that you're just like wow i saw this person come from this level this level or does it happen every day every day so it does happen a lot but they're in such small quantities and one of the more outward facing names changed to protect the innocent um a gentleman by the name of john high school student had always been acting up here during our video time it's supposed to be a quiet time and just always acting up and our policy is we'll walk you out and have you sit at the front until your parent comes if you can't maintain you know some level of decorum in here sure well a couple couple times this had happened and the third week that it happened our president had walked out with two bottles of water and two cookies sat out on the curb with this young man and just said you know hey what's going on you know is there a reason you can't sit still is there a reason you're agitated most kids sometimes they don't even talk to you but this individual showed scott something on his phone and it was an horry county school website where anonymously kids can post things and the post that he was showing scott was about him and it was saying something negative so you know all of the anger all the frustration that scott was feeling because this person wasn't being able to you know maintain some decorum in a group setting literally just melted wow and you come side by side with these kids and you learn what they're dealing with and ever since then he's been a totally changed kid i saw him come and open his arms wanting to give scott a hug one night and i'm like see those are small changes it's awesome and it is awesome because now that person knows there's someone here who's really invested and they really care about him and he can pull scott aside at any time and talk about anything and i would bet that that's probably not something he's got outside of ground zero to be able to have a safe place to come it's amazing it's about trust right so you start with a place like this you bring them in bring them around some other kids their age but sometimes it's that one little reach out that makes all the difference right very cool yeah well so it did did we catch everything while we were here i see a stage left that's pretty neat and that's our merch store okay and there is a lot backstage we have actually an artist green room similar to the volunteer green room but it's an actual full apartment with showers laundry facilities everything for our artists or any anyone else who comes to speak to stay with their family um so that they can kind of get out of the limelight but you know just kind of prepare to to perform that's awesome can we look at the merchandise or is that like okay i think it'd be really cool because the last time i was here uh i it kind of blew me away i felt like i was at disney world a little bit and uh you know and i'm sure the kids must feel like that they do so this is our merch store and we use this for two purposes yeah i mean like that's so cool series these are all of the guitars um some of them and the artists signed the guitars and they were here from our summer concert series man this is really exciting so we're uh you know we were actually just talking about guitars earlier because this year we're sponsoring the country music festival the carolina country and we were talking about guitars and all this so guys see here's our inspiration all right that's very cool i was trying to tell them i wanted to do electric guitar but they said no you got to go acoustic it's country music right yeah yeah yeah yeah all right well you know i'd see so i lose so in addition to being able to sell merchandise from here what we use this for is when we have a first time guest come to our outreach event they come back here to stage left they fill out all their information we take their photograph this is part of our check-in and our safety and security procedure so we know who's in the building we know when they're leaving so then the tokens that you see one is for free coffee one is for free food oh my god i'm really like totally focused no i'm just kidding no but that's kind of cool yeah check that out like free coffee that's that's like world class right there i like it well and it's always free to them but first time guests we want to give them that extra feel of here you go yeah and um then we can communicate with them what events we have coming so april 20th we actually have a really cool your year night so we will have the streets blocked off there are 30 different employers that are going to be coming here um to give the kids an opportunity to think ahead talk about what's next you know what's after high school and then present some potential employment opportunities that's great have you got that all filled up i mean are all the employees spoken for the employers you would have to talk to holden and i can put you in touch well that's that's a great great tip i mean we'd love to take part in that if there's any room left you know it sounds like you've done a good job filling it up for sure right well this is great i mean i i love like some of the gear that they have here if you guys can kind of pan in on this and uh just just neat stuff all around so i'm sure that's great beautiful we're in the process of restocking with some new designs and so we're kind of depleting the inventory that we have and we're working with uh another supplier to get all this stuff situated so that's so cool so so tell us what if if you're maybe a parent out there or somebody that's looking and thinking i might want to get my kid involved with this what would be the first steps for them just show up just show up wednesday night from 6 30 to 8 30. um parents are not allowed in the building so if you want your child to attend and you're curious about all of this we welcome you to come in outside of those hours maybe come and drop them off a little early we'll give you a tour and let you introduce yourself to the staff and and maybe talk to you a little bit about maybe whatever concerns you have but yeah just show up because there's no requirement other than to be age 12 to 18. man that's so cool so so let's go back over those dates again so you said april 20th that's the big event out here you block off the street have some employers kind of give these kids a good jump start in life i love that that's amazing and then any wednesday night any wednesday night at 6 30 6 30 to 8 30 8 30. all right sounds good well this has been amazing stephanie i appreciate it you guys do a great thing at ground zero um i i welcome anybody that's out there and interested come on out get out to the place come see us at the at the dragon boat races awesome we're so thankful for your sponsorship thank you thank you thank you it's always great well stephanie good to see you as always thank you and this is rob clements signing out with crowning connections we'll see you next time [Music]

2022-04-25 10:15

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