Funding for this program has been provided by PICO.

♪♪ Welcome to Good Souls.

I'm Cherri Gregg.

For the last four years, listeners and viewers like you have nominated people you believe are good souls because of the selfless ways that they help others.

Here at the Ronald McDonald House in Philadelphia is where we find our first nominee, Richard Cornish.

His Restore Salon services bring smiles to faces.

When I'm at the salon, it's a very different experience for me than it is when I am doing it through Restore.

Do you like getting a haircut?

- Yes.

- When I'm with Restore, these folks are just like, "Please, just do something for me.

Make me feel better, look better."

You're amazing.

I'm Richard Cornish.

I'm the founder of Restore Salon Services.

We are a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that provides salon services to patients in the hospitals, medical rehab, and to the families here at the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Philadelphia.

And we now provide services in Cincinnati as well.

Look all the way down for me.

I was working three and a half days a week and wanted something to fill up that void.

And heard that CHOP was looking for a hairdresser and I was like, "Oh, I think I kind of fit that bill."

Do you like getting your hair cut?

Nope.

Why?

Why?

The interactions were so profound and meaningful and unexpected.

It was just magic.

I would leave a volunteer shift feeling like I had changed the trajectory of someone's day.

It just changed my whole perspective on my career, on what it is that I do, and it really made me realize how powerful being a hairstylist is.

When kids, adults, anybody goes into a hospital, I feel like their outwardly appearance takes a secondary seat.

What's most important is healing.

When you're in that moment, I have come to understand that you have someone who come into your hospital room who is not a doctor, who is not a nurse, who is not a child life professional, who's not an insurance agent, who is not an attorney, that just wants to come in and kind of normalize a day that you would have outside of the hospital.

I think that provides that person an opportunity to see their condition in a very different way.

Thanks, man.

Once you focus on self, you feel better, you look better.

They get to see in the mirror that they're looking better, which will internally make them feel better.

And it works in conjunction with the medical teams that heal them.

It's a lighter room when you go into it after somebody's received services.

It melts away all of the negativity and it replaces it with a good bit of positivity.

There was a young lady who was in the hospital for like 90 days, and whatever her treatment she was getting, her hair was thinning and had a big mat on it, and she was like, "Just cut it all off."

And I was like, "Let's talk about that.

Let's take a minute and breathe, and let's just have a conversation about that, because you can actually have something that's really kind of edgy and cool."

And so we walked through what I was going to do and gave her a nice little asymmetrical with a heavy bang on one side.

And she looked in the mirror and was like, "Oh, I didn't know this was possible."

And so that made the remaining time for her that she had in the hospital, it made it just that much better.

The stylists that we work with, they have life experiences, so they come with empathy.

These stylists are really remarkable, and I think they see the magic that they provide.

We provide services at the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Philadelphia and Cincinnati, Jefferson Moss McGee Rehab in Elkins Park, and at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

My personal vision is to be in every single Ronald McDonald house in the country, to be in every single hospital across the country.

When I hear Good Souls, it's bringing people together who can help uplift a bigger community.

If we could spread more good, then that's what Good Souls means to me, right?

Spreading more good across the community to help uplift the community in unison.

Your hair is magnificent.

I mean, like it's really beautiful.

♪♪ - For more than 50 years, the Ronald McDonald House of Philadelphia has supported families with children who are battling illness at hospitals far away from home.

So how do they do it?

Laura Van Tassel, Director of Development is here to tell us all about it.

Laura, so good to see you.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- So Ronald McDonald House has evolved over the past 50 years.

Tell us about how it has shifted.

- Absolutely.

So we are actually home to the very first Ronald McDonald House in the world.

- First in Philly, I love it.

- First in Philly, home of lots of firsts, right?

So we first opened our doors in October of 1974, actually just a couple blocks away from where we're sitting today.

This facility has expanded twice since then.

This house serves 127 families every night, and our second house facility in North Philadelphia provides housing for 20 families every night of the year.

So we've gone from seven rooms in our first house to almost 150 families every night.

And then we also have expanded to include Ronald McDonald Family Rooms at local hospitals, a Ronald McDonald Summer Camp for oncology patients and their siblings, and a Ronald McDonald Care Mobile, which provides dental care and education to underserved populations in primarily North Philadelphia.

- Wow, and so how has science evolved over the years and impacted the way you serve families?

- Oh, it's greatly tied together.

You know, I always say we are not a healthcare institution or organization, but we are healthcare adjacent.

So as science advances, as the medical care, particularly in Philadelphia, continues to be on the forefront of so many technologies, procedures, medication trials, we've seen that reflected in our guest population.

So we are operating at near or full capacity every night of the year, and we're actually seeing families stay longer than they did in years past because those treatments are advancing so much in this region.

And we're going to be here for every one of those families that we can to provide that wraparound service.

That's beautiful.

And Ronald McDonald House Charities is global?

It is.

So while it was founded here in Philadelphia and we are the first, there is a global Ronald McDonald House system that has 394 Ronald McDonald House programs in 61 countries around the world.

But it all started here, right?

We get to have that feather in our cap.

And we are, each chapter operates independently.

So we have here in Philadelphia, a local board of directors.

We are a nonprofit organization, but we are networked with this wonderful global system to be able to share best practices and work together to serve families.

- And as we wrap up quickly, what's the future of Ronald McDonald House?

- Oh, the future is bright and we'll always need our community to be a part of it.

So we couldn't do what we do without our more than 300 regular volunteers.

So we're always looking for volunteers so that as we listen to our families and find out what they need and how we can grow to better serve them, that we will have our community with us the entire time.

- Wow, Laura Van Tassel, Director of Development.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Our next good soul is Amanda Perrizo.

She turned tragedy into a force for change as she advocates for individuals with disabilities.

- I work at Thomas Jefferson University.

I'm an assistant professor there, and I have my office downtown in Center City.

I was teaching last fall in my class, and I get out of class and I had a missed call and a voicemail from Governor Josh Shapiro saying, "Hey, I'm reaching out because you're nominated to receive this President's Award due to your advocacy."

There's some days I'm like, "Is anybody even listening?

What's the point of this?"

Sometimes I get very frustrated like that, like I shouldn't even do anything.

And I actually was at that point kind of when he called me, and that was the boost that I needed because if you're not seeing a lot of improvements, a lot of action and accessibility, you get frustrated.

You know, it just wears me down and it's exhausting.

So to have that boost that, "Oh, somebody's watching.

Somebody, this is making a difference, even if I can't see it on a day to day, I can see it as a whole, how it's impacting people."

On May 19th, 2021, my friends and I just finished one of our kickball games.

While we were sitting at the benches and tables in the park, out of nowhere we hear gunshots so close, so loud, so piercing.

As soon as I heard the sounds, I felt the sting of something in my side.

I immediately lost all control of my lower body and fell backwards onto the ground.

In that split second of all of this happening, I thought to myself, "You're one of your patients.

You're in it now."

The initial phase of recovery, it was like a newborn baby learning new skills again.

My background is I'm an occupational therapist.

I've been one for 15 years.

Before my injury, I looked at the world with a lens of what I've known from occupational therapy, my education, knowledge of disability.

I have been recognizing all of the accessibility problems that I never even noticed before as an OT.

The things that I advocate for, I do it because I'm seeing these things and it's for me to get sidewalk cracks fixed down the block.

That's for me.

But that's not what I'm thinking about.

I'm thinking about the tourists with disabilities, the people that live here with disabilities, visual problems, strollers, elderly who can't walk as well.

There's two other advocacy things that I'm working on.

One is at Jefferson, we are developing educational competencies for OB/GYN clinics when working with persons with spinal cord injuries.

Another thing that I'm doing is I'm teamed up with a non-profit organization, Blue Journey.

Their founder, Bruckner Chase, he does adapted paddle boarding sessions for anybody with spinal cord injuries.

It makes you feel more included because when I'm on that board, you wouldn't be able to tell who has a spinal cord injury.

You feel included.

The perception after my spinal cord injury of my body, my life, in the moment was really scary but I have found that I've become more aware of what I want out of life.

I've become a better person than I was before and happier with my life.

I think a good soul is someone who's thinking of others, thinking of their community, thinking of ways to inspire hope in people and make somebody's life a little bit better.

I actually can feel my soul at times and that's what moves me.

The world can be a scary place, especially for young people without their parents or guardians.

Good Souls nominee, Rachel Rudder's Project Libertad, provides resources to unaccompanied minors who migrate to America, as well as to their extended families.

I represent about 92 kids right now in their immigration cases.

And the reason that that is so important is that there is no right to a court-appointed lawyer for kids in immigration court.

A lot of people think that that's not right because they think of the criminal justice system where you can get a public defender if you can't afford a lawyer.

So nothing like that really exists for immigration court because it's considered civil and not criminal.

So children, if they can't afford a lawyer, which can cost many thousands of dollars, or if they can't find a non-profit like ours that can take their case, they will be forced to represent themselves in court.

And they're always going to be going up against a trained government lawyer, an ICE attorney who's arguing for them to be deported.

I think it's fairly obvious why that's problematic and why that's unfair to children.

And having representation is the single most important factor in whether kids are able to stay here legally.

I'm an immigration lawyer, founder of Project Libertad.

We represent children who are either in immigration court proceedings, facing deportation, or who are undocumented.

And that just means helping them apply for different types of immigration status that they might qualify for.

The majority of the kids that we work with come to the U.S.

as unaccompanied children.

So that means that they travel to the U.S.

by themselves.

They don't have a parent or legal guardian with them, and they don't have any type of immigration status when they arrive.

So what happens to them is that they are supposed to be moved out of the adult detention setting at the border within 72 hours.

If you've seen the chain link fences, aluminum blankets, those types of images at the border, that's that adult detention setting that they're not supposed to be in because they're supposed to have these kind of special protections as unaccompanied kids.

Then they'll be sent to a network of shelters, foster homes, group homes across the U.S.

that are run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is supposed to be like the child welfare branch of government that takes care of unaccompanied kids who arrive.

We are seeing like the current administration make it a lot harder for kids to be released to sponsors by using sponsor information against them and sharing that with ICE, increasing the requirements for kids to get out to sponsors.

And then while sharing that info with ICE, they're making people afraid to come forward.

So we have kids kind of languishing in detention for a really long time period.

So we're definitely seeing fewer kids.

More recent estimates are that children with special immigrant juvenile status will wait 10 to 15 years for a green card for new applicants.

It's just the government is so slow.

Citizenship is, in general, another five years away after even getting the green card.

So, it'll be quite a while until we see any of them actually become citizens.

Our ancestors who came here as immigrants would not qualify under the laws that we have today.

My youngest right now is about eight years old, and then I work with kids, you know, all the way up to young adults because maybe they arrive when they're teenagers and the cases take so long to go through immigration court or USCIS that many of these kids we like watch them grow up while their case is still pending and still trying to get their status secured and unaccompanied kids can range from babies, infants, toddlers to 17 when they arrive.

I did not always want to be an attorney.

I knew, you know, from my college days that I wanted to work with kids, that I liked working with immigrant communities and that I wanted to do something in like the non-profit sector.

I joined the Peace Corps and I was in Costa Rica also working with kids teaching English.

When I came back, I applied to law school.

I ended up going to Drexel.

While I was at Drexel, I did internships at an organization called HIAS Pennsylvania, another great non-profit in our region that does immigration work.

Going to work at HIAS was like kind of an eye-opener for me because I was like, "Okay, here's something that I love to do that's meaningful and that kind of gives meaning to like why I'm putting myself through law school right now."

While I was working at HIAS, I had all of these clients who still had all these other needs outside the legal need.

I felt like I didn't have the resources to really meet all of those needs through any of kind of the traditional organizations that existed at the time.

That was really where the inspiration came from.

What keeps me motivated is really the relationships that I get to form with the kids that I work with.

And I love to kind of keep myself plugged into some of the more like fun aspects of our work.

Like we have summer camp programs and school programs where we're not talking about deportation and immigration court and all of that stuff.

The real good souls are the kids that we work with.

This nominee is in tune with what leaders of the next generation will need to compete and succeed.

Joseph Conyers' Project 440 demonstrates to young people how music can be a pathway to possibilities.

Growing up in the South, there were definitely generations of my ancestors who sacrificed.

There's a song by Iris DeMint called "Working on a World That I May Never See."

By people who are working on a world they never got to see.

They were working on a world that would be better than the one they lived in.

And I am a product of their blood, sweat, and tears and their lives.

And that's only additional encouragement for me to continue the work that I do.

I've never met somebody who uses the platform that they have for the benefit of others as much as Joseph does.

He's very passionate about music.

He's very passionate about education.

He's very passionate about helping young people.

He's worldwide accomplished as the principal bass of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

He's broken glass ceilings all over the place and he doesn't just do it for himself.

He brings other people with him.

I am the founder and vision advisor for Project 440.

Project 440 is an organization that works with high school youth using music as a tool to teach the life skills needed to thrive.

We have a special guest.

Some of you might know him from Project 440 as the founder.

Some of you might know him as the principal bassist for the Philadelphia Orchestra, but without Joe, this organization wouldn't exist.

This is Joseph Conyers.

Hello everyone.

I'm excited that y'all have made the choice and decision to be part of Doing Good.

It's young people using their love of music, love of the arts, and all the traits inherent in being an artist.

So like collaboration, compromise, and project management.

All these students get together and create service learning projects to serve their community with an art-centric focus.

They're working with their friends, identifying a need in their community, and trying to find a way to make their part of society better.

That's what Project 440 is about.

In a world where it might feel like sometimes we can't do anything, to know that, you know what, maybe I can make a difference.

It may seem small to the world, but it could be big and life-changing for someone else or the community.

I can't wait to hear about all your projects.

Good luck to all of you.

[applause] I'm also the music director or the conductor for the All-City Orchestra, which reaches all the top-performing students of the School District of Philadelphia.

And being involved in that program, you get very connected to the students and their needs.

The more I learned, the more we started to shift our programming to be more specific, to meet the needs of the students we were serving.

At that time it was primarily music students.

But we've grown because those music students have friends in other art disciplines who also want to be part of this opportunity to take their gifts and make something good.

Create these projects that can serve the community and get other young people involved.

To see the work that he's doing, you see it first hand.

I remember attending a concert at the Mann Center about a year ago, which is where the Philadelphia Orchestra does their summer residency.

As soon as the concert finished, he stepped down stage.

A bunch of kids ran to him.

They were so excited to see him.

What motivates Joseph?

He's a very layered person.

For music, if you've seen him perform at the orchestra, he has the most expressive face of anybody on stage.

You can tell that he's playing from his soul.

For his experience with the kids, he wants to open doors wherever possible.

Why 440?

We were called Project 440 because 440 hertz is the pitch A. The pitch A is the first note that you hear at every orchestra concert.

When the concertmaster stands and you hear that one note that's given, and then the whole orchestra tunes to that pitch A before we start every concert.

So we want our young people to be leaders in their communities through music.

It is never too late to pursue a passion.

Our last nominee, Alyssa Bowser's Second Chance Dance Studio, is helping her students discover movement, community, and a place for support.

I know the stories of the people here.

[siren wailing] I know how far they've come.

I've seen the tears.

I've seen the people come to me and say, "I thought this was over.

"I thought I was never gonna have the opportunity again."

I've seen them be changed.

I've seen their family be changed.

There's so many husbands who pay for their wives to come take class because they're better mothers because they have an open.

The other day a young lady paid for her mother to take class and her mother had told her at a young age, "I always wanted to get back to dance but you know I got pregnant."

And that same child paid for her to come take class again.

And it's personal.

I know what my life was like when I didn't have dance anymore.

For as long as I remember, I've always been a dancer.

What dance was for me was an outlet.

It was a way of communicating.

Emotionally, I felt full.

Learning to be creative with my body in that way.

So, dance was comprehensive to me.

I went to a cookout, and at the cookout, a young lady there said to me, "Hey, I heard you're a dance teacher.

Would you teach me ballet?"

And I said, "Have you ever danced before?"

And her first response was, "No."

But I couldn't really wrap my head around why she wanted to if she's never done it.

Welcome to Philadelphia's first law-only dance floor, Second Chance Dance.

[cheering] And there were two of them that started out with me.

And that is really how Second Chance Dance started.

I took what I learned from them, the feedback I got from them, and the experiences that we all shared.

I quickly realized that there was a market and a need for dancers who had never gotten the opportunity to.

Especially minority women who were told that they weren't built for dance or dance wasn't built for them.

That they weren't capable and kind of never would be.

And/or there were a bunch of women whose parents just didn't have the finances to afford it.

If you have to choose between potentially eating or bills and your child taking a dance class.

You weren't choosing a dance class, so you just didn't have that opportunity as a child.

Most of them were stuck in the concept that once they passed 18, it was impossible.

Second Chance Dance was built for the people who were told that they couldn't or they no longer could or, you know, your time is up.

This is your second opportunity to go back and if you've never done it, this is your first opportunity and I believe it's never too late.

I offer ballet, modern, jazz, tap, African, stretch, praise, hip-hop, PBT.

So those are the nine classes we currently offer.

We go in and out of also offering yoga, line dance, and dance fit.

And then we have a Golden Grace class.

Golden Grace is going to be all of our seniors.

Our average dancer right now is 25 to 55.

All year long you're learning, you're dancing, you're growing, you're being challenged, but your family and friends don't really know what you're doing.

And the recital is an opportunity to really show them what you've been working on, how much you've grown, how much you've challenged yourself.

We get costumes, makeup, our shoes match, our tights match, everything matches, and we just show the world what we've been working on.

And you do this for yourself, but I think the world should know.

And then the lights go down, and when they come back up, you're on stage.

You're a different person, you have different confidence.

You're changed, because you've done the hard work.

We deserve to see you in all your glory.

[cheers and applause] I was nominated by Evan Burton.

He's one of our dancers.

I'm grateful that he sees me as a good soul, but that's what I think a good soul is-- someone who puts others first and does the things for others that they've always needed for themselves.

[audience cheering] - Thank you to all of our good souls, to the Ronald McDonald House here in Philadelphia, and to you.

Good souls are everywhere, and we look forward to meeting more next year.

I'm Cherri Gregg, have a good night.

♪♪ Funding for this program has been provided by PECO.