This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Breaking Common Myths About Foster Children on the Giving Back podcast.

This is a gift. This is the Giving Back podcast, the number one show that will deliver the inspiration needed to motivate you to make this world a better place. Tune in every week to hear how influencers, entrepreneurs, and everyday servant leaders give back to their most coveted charities and social causes. How will you start giving back? Let's discover together with your host and social entrepreneur, Rob Lowe.

Welcome to the Giving Back podcast, where the spotlight is on great charities and people making our world a better place. I'm your host, Rob Lowe, and today our guest is someone who is taking on negative myths about foster kids head-on. Imagine growing up without parents, without a home, without a family to take care of you. Imagine that because you don't have parents, people assume you've got behavioral problems. Imagine that because you don't have parents, people assume you have medical challenges. Imagine that because you don't have parents, people assume you're an underachiever. Our guest today is a search engine optimization and online marketing expert.

A three-time author, he is the founder of Netconcepts, a leading SEO firm acquired by Covario, and the inventor of GravityStream, an automated pay-for-performance natural search technology platform. He donates time, money, and expertise to charities such as the Carter Center, the Singularity University, and the New Zealand Trust for Conservation Volunteers.

He is also committed to educating the public about foster kids so they can have much-deserved stability in their lives. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce Mr. Stephan Spencer. Welcome Stephan Spencer. Thank you very much for joining us. We're really, really happy to have you on the Giving Back podcast.

Well, it's great to be here, thanks.

So, Stephan, I wanna jump right in, but you are somebody who gives back to quite a few charities, and you have a pretty remarkable story in giving your time and expertise and really well-established and very successful work and helping to build the organization in a sense and becoming what I see as really a strategic commitment to their success. And that's wonderful, and I think it's a great example of well beyond just writing a check.

The thing is that you give to so, you're involved with so many organizations. You know, at last count, I have the Carter Center, the Singularity University, the Foresight Institute, the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, Impact Network, the New Zealand Trust for Conservation Volunteers, the Combat Blindness Foundation, and I know that you also have something that's very close to you. So you just tell us what you want to share the most because that's what we're here for, to hear your story.

Sure. As you said, I have worked in many different organizations and have given back projects. I believe in giving my time, my expertise, and my staff's time, and I want it to be more strategic than tactical.

For those organizations that you just mentioned, I either gave them a total site redesign, an SEO search engine optimization consulting project or both or some major project. For example, with the Carter Center, I got President Carter to blog for the first time in 2004 or something like that. I got a great testimonial. It was indirect because I didn't actually get to speak with President Carter. But my contact convinced him to blog back in the early days when no other ex-president had been blogging, so essentially, he turned his trip reports into blog posts and started blogging instead, and that was that generated a lot of press for him as the first president, the ex-president who was blogging at the time and they credited me for it.

For that initiative and for all the marketing benefits that the organization got from that because they got a lot of press about that. So there's that give back in your expertise, in your gift, and I believe wholeheartedly in that. I also believe in giving in the way that hurts, and not in the way that it's painful hurts, but it feels uncomfortable. So, for me, and I hate to admit it, but I'm going to admit it, I'm stingy. I'm stingy with my money. So it's a lot easier for me to give my time than it is to give my money. Yet, I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and I just gave several thousand dollars to this charity in Israel that takes care of young children and their mothers.

They gave us money to an organization called Kite Child, which one of my staff is the co-founder of. It's a nonprofit that helps with orphanages and all these different projects all over the world, like building wells in Africa. So I'm really excited about helping them out monetarily, even though that's more painful for me than helping with the strategic direction and so forth, their online marketing. I also believe in giving back not just to an organization but also to an area like, for example, foster care because I was a foster child and very few people know this about me, but when I was a teenager, I was a foster child for three years and I only just recently decided to go public and say it. Not that I was embarrassed by it or anything. It just wasn't something that I decided to go out and talk about. But then I just went through this training on how to be on TV, how to get TV appearances, how to pitch TV producers, cold calling them and so forth.

You have to have timely hooks, and it just so happened that last month was National Foster Care Month. I noticed that I realized that, you know, I've got a message to share, and there's no organization specifically, then I'm trying to help out here with this. I'd just want to help out the movement of getting people to help foster kids either to foster or adopt or to just donate money something to that whole area. And so I got on TV two different TV appearances last month talking about my story and about how folks can care. That's an acronym that I came up with for charity, and I attended training and requirements for licensing and evaluation by a licensing agency. 

I explain briefly what is involved with becoming a foster parent and what the three big lies are about foster kids that just tend to get perpetuated like that they are badly behaved, essentially juvenile delinquents. Over half of Americans wrongly believe that these kids in foster care are juvenile delinquents. I busted those myths. I talked about how people can care, and I shared my story, and I've done that twice so far. I intend to do it some more, even though it's not like an organization. It just was a thing that I decided I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a difference. 

And this wasn't, a lot of people go on TV to talk about their company and say, this is what we're doing that's innovative and so forth. And this was not about being on TV to get business. I believe in karma that you put stuff out there into the universe. That's good, and the universe will reward you. It's just like tithing, giving money even though it's difficult for me. I do it, and I tend to get more rewards from the universe. That's not why I do it. I do it because I want to grow. I want to grow as a person. I want to stretch outside my boundaries and my comfort. All growth happens outside your comfort zone. 

So, I'm going to stretch out of my comfort zone. I'm going to maybe get rewarded by the universe, but that's not my reason for doing it. Right. That's one area where I'm studying Kabbalah, which is the mystical branch of Judaism. My fiance is Jewish and Israeli, and I wanted to learn more about her religion, so we're taking Kabbalah classes together. And this is one of the core precepts. This idea of not stopping the flow. There's like if you could imagine a pipe of goodness, right, and if you have the desire to receive for yourself alone, you've stopped the pipe. It's not flowing through you. 

You are not a conduit for the light you are grabbing, and you're just hoarding it for yourself. And so you keep that flow going. And the universe will continue to reward you with more and more gifts and more light. So, that plays out. Surprisingly, you can test this, and this is one area that in the Bible, they say that this is going to happen. This is like basically, you're guaranteed. So try it out, give some money and see what happens. I bet beautiful things will come into your life because of it.

Well, I have to tell you that when you were talking about Kabbalah and Judaism, there are so many examples where the passage is about giving back, right? There's somebody influential in my life who talked about working with a business mentor and how he was surprised that the first thing that the business mentor tasked him with was looking examining his life.

What his activities were, what he felt strongly about, what he had a passion for, and what he was doing. And at the time, he just said, I don't have the time, I don't have the money. But he followed that path because he committed to this mentor, and he said, "If I'm gonna be successful and this is what he does, I'm gonna do it too." And he just, I mean, he said, "I gave and enjoyed the giving without any thought of recompense, without, you know, not even thinking of a thank you." He said it was, he said it was remarkable. He said I couldn't keep up with the getting I was giving. He said it was remarkable.  He could not keep up with everything he was getting in return and he was truly giving it from his heart. And clearly, I love the fact that you brought up Kabbalah. 

I mean, he's a Christian. He's a low-key, but very proud of it, but just low-key. And here's another religion that talks about that, about spreading what you have. That's wonderful. I mean, and I have to say that generally, when people embark on training, especially for media training and doing that, I find it actually impressive that with the time and effort and probably money that you spent in for this training, your decision was to tap into something that was deeply personal for you and use that to bring awareness. And I wanna continue that theme because you touched on one myth, one of three myths. And I actually would like you to talk to us a little bit more about the other two big myths that people have about foster kids. And I want you to break them, but just absolutely break them for everybody.

Yeah, absolutely. So let me finish off with the first myth, which is that these kids are badly behaved, right? Because, in reality, they are the victims, not the perpetrators. They're the ones who are in the foster care system because they've been abused, neglected, or abandoned at the hands of their biological family. So that's really important to consider that these kids are not misfits. They are not juvenile delinquents.

They're victims. And you know, there's a saying that goes that we're all, none of us are victims, we're all volunteers. But I say there's a caveat to that unless you're a child. You know, children can be victims, but as adults, we can choose our fate, right? So we can, like when I was a kid, I had a really rough childhood until I ended up in foster care. It was rough. I was bounced around a lot as a kid.

Mom who is mentally ill, a grandfather who was physically abusive, and I bounced around between their homes before that as I go to my answer a couple of years and Connecticut and Florida and back until you know and so forth, so it was a lot of instability and uncertainty, and stuff foster system gave me all this great stability because I was placed with this really wonderful foster mom who taught me how to cook and how to sew buttons on and how to just be a stable influence on people. What an amazing gift I had. I didn't feel it at the time. I was just really upset that I was a foster kid. I felt unfair. It felt like nobody loved me. It's not the kind of alone where I'm on.

For example, I was living for a time with my mother, and I was home alone every night. That was really rough because my mom worked the third shift. So, can you imagine being home alone and being housed by yourself every night? That was my life for a while until I went back to my grandpa's, and then he got sick, and he called children's services, and I became a foster kid. But you know, the kind of alone that I was talking about when I was a kid. First, when I became a foster kid, I felt like nobody in my family loved me and that I was not going to be able to be taken in by my aunt and uncle or my dad or anything because they just didn't want me.

Wow. So, I mean, there's an insecurity. There's one type of insecurity, which is the physical part, right? Food, clothing, and shelter. And then there's another part, which is the emotional side. And as a child, that must be, I mean, I can't imagine. I'll tell you right now: my parents were together for a long time until my dad passed away, and I had them. And that stability I took for granted, and I can't imagine how destabilizing and how uncertain you must feel with that emotional insecurity.

Yeah, but at the same time, it was a huge gift because I got this wonderful foster mom who is a big part of my life to this day. I mean, I just spoke to her a couple of days ago. I send her flowers on Mother's Day and on her birthday, and I usually see her at least once a year. So she's a big part of my life, part of my kids' lives, and I wouldn't have had that gift if things hadn't kinda gone sideways with my childhood. And also, here's the thing, I mean, you gotta look at life as, like, you're gonna get trauma events, and you're gonna get things that suck basically, but we don't have the clairvoyance to see the bigger picture, right? 

So the bigger picture is that this was actually a gift; it's just maybe the bow is on the bottom, and you don't see it yet, and you don't recognize that this is a gift. It was a huge gift. I have three beautiful grown children in my life because I had all this turmoil as a child. Because I became very much like a little adult. I matured at such a rapid rate. I was ready to get married at 19 years old. I was married at 19, and my first kid was at 20.

Wow.

I have these beautiful children. I'm 45. I have a 25-year-old, a 23-year-old and a 20-year-old. They're just huge gifts in my life, and they wouldn't be here if I hadn't gone through that hard childhood. It's tough to see, but you have to look for that gift now—the bow on the bottom.

Yeah, I will. You're definitely making the most of it, I mean, just, and I think that's part right now. I mean, yeah, I hear all of you know, really, actually pretty well-known. Obviously, we don't know President Carter and your other groups, but you know, your focus right now on making this visible is a big part for you, and it is a giving back, and you're making the most of what you had and what you have now, which is great.

Yeah, so when I did all this work for these different organizations, I wasn't out there like milking it for PR and stuff. I mean, for years, most people didn't know that I had done a lot of work for the Foresight Institute, for example. Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, I'd done redesigns of both of those sites. I did a redesign of the New Zealand Trust for Conservation Volunteers because I had a team of designers and developers working for me. 

So, I was able to leverage them to help with this different site and complete site redesigns. And I wasn't out there really pushing it to the media or anything, but then I decided I'm going to put a page on my website to offer organizations that I'm available to. So, I reached out to Sea Shepherd, for example. I just liked what they were doing. And they didn't bite. Really? That's fine. It was an email. It wasn't like a cold call, and they got to know who I am. I cold called the Foresight Institute after I read Nano by Ed Regis.

I was just so inspired by what they were doing, kind of like a public policy organization trying to help with steering the evolution of molecular nanotechnology in a positive direction only used for good and not, you know, the technology could go so haywire, and it could like to destroy our planet if it has that capacity. so I was just really inspired by what I'd never heard of the Foresight Institute I read that book it was talked about in the book. I cold-called them, and I said I wanted to help you guys and talk to their executive director, and he was really excited about getting me involved. Now, I've got these lifelong friendships with great people inside Foresight Institute like Christine Peterson and so forth. She is just on my podcast.

I have two podcasts, and she was on the Get Yourself Optimized, talking about futurism stuff and nanotech and extreme life extension, all sorts of great stuff. She's a great friend now, and she's the co-founder of Foresight. It came about because I just called and said, "Hey, I want to help you guys." And I've been helping them for well over a decade. You know, and just my life is different because I decided to make that call.

I met all these really interesting people, and I learned all this stuff about future technologies. I was invited to their conferences, and I met some really amazing people like Ray Kurzweil and Rob Freitas, as well as some really innovative people in future tech. That came about just because I decided I would help them out idea of what I was going to get out of it. This is important too that I learned from Kabbalah is that there are two types of sharing. There's reactive sharing and there's proactive sharing.

Please describe that, tell me a little.

Well, when you're reactive sharing, let's say that you see a homeless guy sit down on the concrete and on the sidewalk, and you give them five dollars. You probably expect some sort of positive reaction to that, right? But by having that expectation, by looking for that expectation, that is reactive sharing. That is give to get.

Give to get, okay.

And there's no blessing in that. What you get from that guy's reaction is all you get. Whereas if you give proactively without a desire to receive an exchange. Then, the blessings come from the universe, from the light, from the creator.

Without expectation, right?

Right. And, in fact, I'm hoping that I don't get, like, if that guy spits in my face because he's so offended, that's totally okay. Because I wasn't looking for a reaction, positive or negative, I'm just sharing the light.

Got it. Sharing what you have with somebody who doesn't.

Yeah. Without the expectation of receiving something in return from that person, from society, or whatever. If I'm making a big donation so that I can get a big tax break, that's reactive sharing. And that's all I'm going to get is the tax break. The blessings come when you don't have that attachment to getting something in return. And that's a powerful shift. And that's a tough one to make.

We all want something out of it. Like if we're making breakfast in bed for our significant other, we want the brownie points or whatever. If we're doing it without that expectation or that desire or hope, we're just kind of kidding ourselves because we really want that.

I got you. That's a powerful mindset, though, right? I mean, that's true authenticity.

Yeah. It is. It's a lifelong struggle to get there because we get to a certain level and then we think that we're all spiritual and everything. It's at that moment we're full of ego because we're all spiritual that we realize, wait a second, I'm full of ego, and that's not spiritual at all.

Right. Well, I'm going to tell you something and I know that you are working that proactive. So, I hope I can do something because I'm going to tell you the foster care system needs help. And so I'm going to keep going at it until we get those other two big myths broken. And I know that's not why you came on. You didn't come on with the purpose of that. But if we can bring that, I mean, it's powerful and it's personal to you. 

And you can talk about so many other things. I know you can. And I love hearing them. And I'm going to keep piling up because we need to hear about this, and that's what's going on. I shouldn't say break. We're not breaking cycles. What we're doing is creating cycles of informed, you know, informed action, and we're getting people to take action. And if that's the way we're going to do it, then Mr. Spencer, I want you to knock down the two other big myths that we have that are in the way.

All right, let's do it. So, myth number two is that kids in the foster care system have medical or behavioral needs that make them difficult to parent.

Huh, yes, definitely.

And here, the truth is that only a third of kids in the system have any diagnosable disability. And so two-thirds, no disabilities at all, and they're just hoping for our love and support. And then the third big myth, the third lie, is that foster kids are underachievers. Again, not true. I mean, sure, I was an exemplary example of a foster kid who made it. I got a 32 ACT score and a 4-point GPA, and I was really excellent at computers, which carried over to my business today, where I'm optimizing the websites of some of the biggest brands in the world. And yet none of that would have been possible if it weren't for the stability of the foster care system and giving me the ability to focus on my studies and not have to worry about where I'm going. 

My next meal is going to come from, who's going to hear me you know, I was pretty much on my own until I was in the foster care system I had scrounge my own meals. I had a lot of SpaghettiOs from a can and stuff because I didn't know how to cook. I was just kind of left at my own devices having that, so the third big lie about kids being at the foster kids being underachievers: 65% of former foster kids had seven or more school changes from kindergarten to 12th grade. And I was in that boat, and it's tough, having all those school changes, that uncertainty, that instability. 

And yet, it's still possible to thrive even in that kind of a challenging situation. So those are the three big myths or big lies. And I'm happy to share how folks can make a difference with the care formula if you like. Absolutely I'd definitely want to hear that because this is something that I saw, and so that is almost like an acronym that's just so beautiful and in its clarity, so please definitely share that.

So, C is charity, which means that you're gonna give generously to organizations that are making a difference for these kids, like Together We Rise, Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption and CASA and Projamma program. So those are some great organizations where you can if Even you're unable to take a kid into your home. No problem. Give generously and help save a kid's life.

Yep, excellent. Yep.

So, A is a 10-training program, like Partnerships and Parenting, which is a great program that teaches you how to really help these kids who have special circumstances because they're in the foster care system and really get their world. There are also other parenting programs. I went through a parenting class or program when I was a new dad and 20 years old. It was really helpful. It was called PET, Parent Effective Mistraining. But partnerships in parenting are specifically for foster parenting, learning how to foster parenting.

Then, R is required for licensing or for licensing, so to be a licensed foster parent, the requirements are really simple. You just have to be at least twenty-one years or over. You have to be a legal US resident and a legal resident in your state, own or rent your house or apartment, and just have a home that's safe for these kids. Then, the E is evaluation by a licensing agency. They just come in and check you out, make sure that the home is safe for kids and that you are fit to serve as a foster parent, and then you're good to go.

You know, I love the way that you take the depth of involvement in care. It's not just an acronym about how to do it, but it's also just starting out, right? I mean, I know that you also include The National Foster Care and Adoption Directory, which is the directory search. So when people are looking for something maybe local that they can get involved with, that they can donate to, and that's on a, hey, you know what, I'm not ready or maybe I just want to find out, right, because that's the first step. 

 

And you take us through that. And your A for attend the training is something that everybody can use. I mean, you use it as an example. And I know myself; I have always wanted to be a better father. I'm always looking to be a better father, and that's something where, hey, you know what? You don't have to be a foster parent to be involved in something like that and be a better parent. As you go through the requirements, just look for that and that stability, but you take it through these different depths of commitment that you can make. And I think that's fabulous.

So, Stephan, I want to make sure everybody knows where they can get a hold of you and some of these organizations. Where can people connect with you give you feedback? I mean, I have to tell you, there are so many ways to give. You're one of our guests who is taking it even outside of your comfort zone, which is great. Still, that expertise that you're letting everybody have the expertise, and that's one of the things that I was so excited to have you on today, is that, yes, Stephan Spencer does work with some of the largest brands and companies doing what he does. 

He's very good at it. He's very successful. But all of us are really good at a couple of things, and that's another way to give, and it can be very local. It can be global. When you start and you take action, you will have an impact. It's wonderful to have you. Tell us where we can get a hold of you or send you comments and some of the places that are near your heart.

Yeah, so my website, stephanspenser.com. It's a great starting point where you could watch some of the TV segments I did on being a foster kid. On my blog, there's a whole article about what my life was like as a foster kid. And there's more details about it. Some of the organizations that we mentioned are Together We Rise, CASA, and so forth. So there are links in there. There are also a couple of podcast shows I'll mention because I'm a podcaster myself, and I think they could be interesting and useful to your listeners. 

The Get Yourself Optimized is all about personal transformation, and transformation could be spiritual, emotional, mental, like mindset, or peer group. Partner intimacy, career business—it runs the gamut. Finance—I've had Phil Town on there, who's a finance guru. I've had Harville Hendrix, who's the creator of Imago Couples Therapy, and he's been on Oprah and stuff. I've had Byron Katie on. She's amazing—what a gift to humanity she is. So yeah, Get Yourself Optimized, so GetYourselfOptimized.com.

Then the other show is called Marketing Speak. So if your listeners want to know more about how to get to the top of Google, how to get more traffic from Facebook, maybe advertising on Facebook, on YouTube, on AdWords, or Google AdWords, there are a lot of great episodes about marketing on that. And that's just MarketingSpeak.com.

Great. So, Stephan, thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, thank you for being on the show. I would like to say thank you for doing so much with your time, your expertise, and your money. But also, thank you for sharing. And that's a very personal piece that you went public with, so to speak, and I think it's really important that people learn more about that and understand what the foster child system is about and get involved because it affects all of us. When we think of ourselves as parents, we think about what we want for our children.

And we extend that just a little bit. If we extend that thought, that thinking just a little bit, what we want for kids who don't control a lot and can be thrust into some very, very uncertain and frightening circumstances, you know, how can we help? So, thank you so much, Stephan. Thank you for everything you're doing.

Yeah, and just one last thought I'll leave you guys with, and that is to lead by example. So, I was leading by example here, sharing intimate details about who I am and the things I struggle with, like being tight with my money, right? So I don't want to just like share that with everybody, but I go outside of my comfort zone because I want to lead by example. I want other people to go outside their comfort zone and make a difference in other people's lives. And maybe it's not helping the foster care system. For a listener, maybe it's doing something in relation to homeless people or to kids in remote villages in Africa or whatever. It's just whatever is outside your comfort zone, stretch beyond that. 

Find the areas where you really feel uncomfortable making that leap, right? So that's why I'm not just donating my time and expertise. Still, I'm donating money too because "Ouch," that hurts like I donated twenty-five thousand hours to build an entire school in Zambia for the Impact Network because, yeah, I just wanted to make a profound difference if one of the schools was funded by me. They've got ten schools, which is an amazing bargain when you look at that's less than the price of a car, right? All these kids and remote villages in Zambia are getting their lives changed on a daily basis because I did that.

That's outstanding. Yeah, that is very cool. You talk about big bang for your buck, right? I mean, that's unbelievable, and I think those are definitely words to live by going outside your comfort zone and, you know, taking action right wherever it is, whatever your passion lies, whatever the cause that you want to fight for, take action. Thank you, Stephan. Thank you very much for joining us today on the Giving Back Podcast.

You're welcome. It's a pleasure.

Thank you for joining the Giving Back Podcast, where the spotlight is on great charities, solving problems, and taking action. Please keep your comments coming, and remember to share your love by subscribing and rating our podcast. This is Rob Lowe signing off, and we'll see you on the next show.

Thank you for listening to the Giving Back Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher Radio and leave us a rating and review. To learn more about the charities featured on this show and to learn how you can start giving back, visit givingback.com.