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The Hanoi Beards are in the House! An Interview with Mike & Michelle Beard of Imago Work: Podcast Ep 117

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Mike & Michelle Beard from Imago Work in Vietnam, sit down with Beth in person to share about the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 strategy that launched the ministry and the ripple effects it’s had in Hanoi and beyond.

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Beth Golik: Hi friends, it's Beth from Key Ministry: The Podcast. I have the privilege of talking to ministry leaders from all over the country and all over the world, but frankly, it's usually by Zoom. This past year I got to meet with Mike, Michelle and Evan Beard from Vietnam -- by Zoom, of course -- and was so interested in learning about the work that they're doing in Vietnam through Imago Work. Well guess who was in northeast Ohio and sat down with me in person in Cleveland?

It was fun zooming with them when they were in Vietnam, but they're actually here in my office. So please tell us about yourselves, your journey, and about Imago Work. Our listeners are really excited to hear about this.

Michelle Beard: Great. Well, we are Mike and Michelle Beard, and we've been in Vietnam for 14 years. We first moved there as teachers, actually. We went in teaching and just praying and asking God to show us where he was already at work in Vietnam and asking him where we could, how could we partner with the local Vietnamese churches. And so we just spent those early years working in the international school. During that time, we had a chance to meet other families like ours. So a little bit about our family. We have four children, they're all adults now, and they are living in California. One of our sons, who's 28, his name is Evan, he has Down syndrome. And so when he was born, of course, that began a whole journey for us to think about him and his development, and not just his work life and his school life, but also his spiritual life.

And so we've always just been asking that question, how do people like our son Evan, who have cognitive differences, neurodivergent people, how can they connect with God? That question has followed us all the way into our work in Vietnam. And then we started to meet other families that had children like Evan, and we found it to be a great opportunity as we met these families to also help these families to know about God. 

So in Vietnam, people come from the worldview that is kind of a mix of Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism and also ancestor worship. So a very different way of looking at the spiritual realm. Something we found that's very, very precious and very important in Vietnamese culture is community and family, and they just love their children so much, but there's a tension for them when they have a child born with a disability because now the child who was meant to provide for them in the future or meant to kind of bring honor to the family has become maybe a source of shame, or they might feel that it's like a result of karma or some curse because of something they've done in their past.

So as they would share their stories with us, we began to just really feel for them, but also we're also excited to just tell them that their child is made in the image of God and that their child is a gift from God and their child is someone that God gave them. And this child has a meaning and purpose and dignity and is meant to use their gifts in this world. So long story short, we started a coffee shop. I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that. 

Mike Beard: So yeah, my name's Mike, and I'm famously known as Evan's dad.

Beth Golik: Which, by the way, I'm a little disappointed that Evan is not sitting here in my office.

Michelle Beard: I know, I'm so sorry!

Mike Beard: Well, true to form. We gave Evan a choice of what he wanted to do today, and he said he didn't not want to hang out with his parents. So yes.

Michelle Beard: But we can arrange another time!

Beth Golik: Although I have zoomed with him!

Mike Beard: So we can get him on Zoom at some point in time. So yeah, so when we moved to Vietnam, we didn't have this big idea of starting any kind of program or vocational training center or even a coffee shop and really had no, you would think having a child with Down syndrome that we would've pursued something in terms of working with the neurodivergent community. But we were just teachers and an opportunity came up for us to get a coffee shop going. We have a friend in Bangkok, Thailand who started Simple Coffee in Thailand and partnered with him to open up a branch of simple coffee in Vietnam. And when we opened it up originally we thought, “Oh, this will be cool. We could open up an inclusive workplace and we could hire both typical employees and people with different types of abilities, and we could all work together in the same coffee shop.”

And so that's kind of how we started. We started out with just a few employees and one of our employees has a developmental disability and is also hard of hearing. And so right at the get-go  we had this up and going, and we got to a point where we were asking the question, “Well, how do we expand this?”

It was really, we saw this as a great opportunity because there just weren't a lot of job opportunities for young adults once they age out of the system when they hit 18 years old. There weren't a whole lot of job or educational opportunities. And so we knew we wanted to kind of expand what we were doing through the coffee shop, but it gets expensive to start coffee shops and it's not a very fast process for doing that. And so our son, Evan, around the same time that we were getting the coffee shop off the ground, he saw his older sister go off to college and started asking questions about college himself.

And he said, “Well, when am I going to go to college?” And so we thought, “Oh, that's a good question, Evan. You always have really good questions.” 

And so long story short, we ran across Shepherd's College in Union Grove, Wisconsin, and Evan ended up going there for college and had a really great experience. And after college ended up moving with some of our friends to Atlanta, Georgia and worked in a restaurant for two years. And we were just watching this happen and we thought we could do something maybe similar to this, maybe not to the scale of Shepherd's College to start with, but we could do some kind of training and maybe connect with other businesses in Hanoi to provide job opportunities for young adults with just differences. And so that's kind of what led us down this pathway of starting Imago Work. 

And it actually here in Ohio in 2019, Michelle and I were driving down the road and just kind of the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 launch Imago Work popped into our head of what we really needed. We were trying to figure out what do we really need to get something like this off the ground? And we said, well, if we could have five young adults to work with at the beginning and then four people in the community that would be advocates for us in what we're doing, if we could find three other businesses in the community that would partner with us and want to provide workplace experience for our trainees, and then find two job coaches who are Vietnamese that have a background in special education or social work that could come alongside and help train our trainees and then eventually raise up a director who's Vietnamese to take over, which we're still moving in that direction at this point. So we just started pursuing that and praying through that and 2020 we were able to launch and with all of those things in place, we had five trainees to start with, and now we're in year five of our program. So maybe you can share a little bit more about that.

Michelle Beard: So in 2020, that was the start of Imago Work. And so Imago Work is a vocational training center for neurodivergent young adults that are 16 and above. It's a three year program where in the first year we focus a lot on life skills and social skills and vocational skills, and a little bit of work experience in Simple Coffee. That's why we are located in the same building as Simple Coffee so our students can practice. And then in the second year, they continue the training at our center, but then we also send them out to some of these partner businesses and then by the third year we try to get them into an internship in these companies. And so the cool thing is by this year now, we have 25 families that we're working with, and they're all in different stages of our three year program. Seven of them have finished the program and are actually working and receiving a salary for a part-time work anywhere between 15 to 20 hours in our businesses.

And then we've got many, many community advocates. I don't think I can count that. Just people in government, people in education institutions that are all very supportive of Imago Work. We have now 5, 4, 3, we prayed for three businesses. Now we have 10 businesses that work with us. So we work with companies like Intercontinental Hotel, JW Marriott. We found that international companies in Hanoi were really interested in experimenting with neurodivergent staff. And so we not only train in our center, but we send our job coaches to train the staff that work alongside our students. So then we also, our team has grown from two teachers to now we have five Vietnamese job coaches that work with them. And a director, we're still praying for a Vietnamese director. We have some people in the pipeline and that we are just thinking through what that would look like.

So it's been very exciting to see that all come together. We didn't really expect it to grow that way, but it's shown that there is this desire in Vietnam to just create environments that will allow for more flourishing for the neurodivergent community. It's encouraging to see the mindsets changing among the families who may be used to being really protective and really hiding their child to where they're really putting them out there and then seeing the differences in the different businesses. So people that would never have interacted with a neurodivergent person before, now they feel comfortable, they're willing to work with them and even want to because they've developed these relationships. So that's been really exciting and cool to see God working that way. But we're also asking the question about their spiritual life. How do we help them connect with God? Most of our students, they really do in some way or another show signs of just wanting to have a spiritual life.

And so we are really thinking now how can we create spiritual communities that will allow our students and their families to come together and to begin to understand more about Jesus, understand how to follow Jesus and how to worship God in this environment. So, we want our students to be able to be involved in churches in Vietnam. And so we are excited because in February we're going to launch the first Night to Shine event that comes from the Tim Tebow Foundation. And Mike's been doing a lot of the behind the scenes to organize that. So maybe you want to share more about that.

Mike Beard: So yeah, I'm sure your audience is very familiar with Night to Shine, and so this will be the first Night to Shine in Vietnam. We're excited to partner with the Tim Tebow Foundation. We just got approval a few weeks ago for that. We're going to be working with a few local Vietnamese churches to host the Night to Shine. And we actually have a church out here in Ohio, Grace Church Worcester, that is partnering with us because they run Night To Shine every year. And so they're going to kind of walk us through this first one so that we know what we're doing and know how to get through the big manual. 

Beth Golik: I'm pointing out my manual over here.

Mike Beard: Yes!

Beth Golik: I’m familiar with the big manual.

Mike Beard: Yes. So we're going to hopefully launch that. But again, and I think Tim Tebow Foundation would say this Night to Shine is not the end goal. The end goal is to be a catalyst for churches to sort of shift their mindsets and open their doors to different types of people that maybe have not been in their church before.

Beth Golik: Yes, the other 364 days of the year!

Mike Beard: The other 364 days of the year. So that's one of the things that we're excited about coming up this year!

Beth Golik:I have to put in a little plug here, because Key Ministry is one of the Shine On contributors. There's about a dozen organizations that are Shine On contributors for the Tebow Foundation to help equip churches to welcome individuals and families impacted by disability, not just that one night a year, but all year every day. So yeah, it's a privilege for us to be able to work with the Tim Tebow Foundation.

Mike Beard: Very cool.

Michelle Beard: And that's kind of why we're here with Beth with you today to just learn more about Key Ministry. And just as we do this event, we are really looking forward to working with churches and helping them to be more accessible to our families, to be more accessible to people with disabilities. And so we know we have a lot that we can learn from churches like yours and ministries like Key Ministry about how to actually do that. So we are very excited to learn.

Beth Golik: And it's exciting for me to hear again about the work, the work that you're doing with Imago Work and just the ripple effects that are going on. The impact, it's so much more than just the one individual. I mean, you are impacting families, you're impacting whole organizations. I mean, thinking about the hotels, their minds are shifted. They're taking on a whole new look at individuals that perhaps were overlooked before. And then I love how you do have this goal of sharing the Gospel as well. So that's pretty amazing. So for our listeners, we will have a link to Imago Work so that everybody can check it out online. That's available in our show notes at keyministry.org/podcast. So I do encourage everybody to check that out. Any other thoughts that you'd like to share with us, any prayer requests that our listeners can lift up for you?

Michelle Beard: Yeah, I would just ask you to pray for neurodivergent people in Vietnam. I think they are, like I said earlier, Vietnam is a place that really values community, values family, and there are so many amazing people. And Vietnam is a country that has come out of a lot of difficult times. And so since the early nineties, they've been developing economically. And right now they're experiencing a great season of growth. And so we want the neurodivergent community and their families to be a part of that, to be brought into that and not be left behind. And we just pray for God to just pour out His love on Vietnam and pour out His love on these families and pray that they would come to know His love and this grace that is available and just this great life that we get to have with God. We pray that for them.

Mike Beard: And just pray also for churches in Vietnam, they're doing a really good job of trying to be relevant in their communities, to love their communities. We have a coalition of churches in Hanoi called Love Hanoi. They cross all the denominational spectrums, and their whole goal is to identify what are needs in the community that the church can come alongside to help address. And so we are representing sort of the neurodivergent community, the disability community, and helping to identify where are the areas in Hanoi, in those communities where we can bring hope, where we can bring access to things that maybe are not available currently. So you can just pray for that as we work with churches. We're excited, a lot of the people that we're working with are just really very talented and have a lot of resources to bring to the table.

And then just pray also for the companies that we work with, because we're seeing a lot of change in the mentality of a lot of the coworkers that work with our students. I won't name names to shame anybody, but are examples where our students go into the workplace and maybe they're not treated with the amount of respect that they deserve. And those give us learning opportunities where our job coaches can sort of come alongside those in the workplace and show them a different way to interact with people. And so it's really cool to see that it's not just us providing opportunities for people with special needs to improve, but it's also people with special needs, providing opportunities for the workplaces to also grow and also improve and also become better humans.

Beth Golik: I love it. Well, I can't thank you enough for the work that you're doing and for how you've been obedient to God's calling on your lives. So thank you and Evan and I encourage our listeners to visit your website and just learn more about the work that you're doing and the impact that it's having. So thank you for being here today.

Mike Beard: Thank you. Thanks for having us

Beth Golik:. And thank you listeners for joining us for another episode of Key Ministry: The Podcast.