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Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody! Saul Marquez here with the Outcomes Rocket. I want to welcome you back to the podcast here from the ViVE event in Nashville, Tennessee. We’re just having some incredible conversations with leaders making a difference in healthcare. And today, I’ve got a guest that you’re familiar with. He’s been on the podcast several times, and it’s so great to see him again. His name is Nick Adkins. He is the founder of PinkSocks Life Movement. If you don’t know about the PinkSocks Life Movement, I don’t know what you’ve been doing. It’s about love, it’s about caring more, it’s about seeing each other. We’re going to leave a link to Nick’s TED Talk in the show notes. If you haven’t, if you’re not familiar with it. Take a listen. It’s a beautiful movement that he started. And so I want to welcome Nick to the podcast and talk to us a little bit about what he’s been up to. Nick, great to see you, brother.
Nick Adkins:
It’s good to see you here in Nashville.
Saul Marquez:
Always nice to see you.
Nick Adkins:
You know, I lived here from 1988 to 2012, so most of my adult life spent here. It’s amazing, every time I come back, to see how it’s grown.
Saul Marquez:
It’s such a vibrant city.
Nick Adkins:
Yeah, and what beautiful weather we’re having. And I can’t say enough good things about the ViVE event. People putting this on rich and just a wonderful time to be here with a great group of people. All, so many of our friends are here. It’s great to see you in real life.
Saul Marquez:
It is. Thank God.
Nick Adkins:
Lots of smiles and hugs. It’s really good to be back. Thanks for having me back on the podcast. It’s always good to see you, I do a lot of podcasts, and sometimes they’re a chore, and they’re never a chore with you. They’re always,
Saul Marquez:
Thank you, brother,
Nick Adkins:
Always flow.
Saul Marquez:
I feel the same way.
Nick Adkins:
Thank you. I want to tell you a little bit about what we’re doing now with PinkSocks. PinkSocks is a 2020, so we’re next month in April, we’ll have our eighth birthday. So it started in Chicago in 2015, and yeah, so here we are and eight years later. In 2019, we became a nonprofit. In 2020, we got our federal status as a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization. And along the way there, we, and I don’t want to use a lot of time, you can go to the website PinkSocks.Life, read the last couple of blog entries, and it’ll give you the history of how we got involved with schools, but the short version is we’re now in 33 schools in nine states in the US. PinkSocks is a global movement. We’re everywhere, but specifically with the school programs, PinkSocks.edu. We’re 33 schools and nine states, with 55 zero schools in a queue waiting to get their PinkSocks, and these are pre-K through elementary, nine states around the country. A lot of schools, I think 15 or so of the schools are in Texas, that’s where we started, first school is in El Paso. How that school started in El Paso, Dr. Sue A. Shook Elementary, it was a teacher there, a first-grade teacher named Miss Blancas had posted a video of her and her classmates, her schoolchildren, exiting the class. At the end of the school day, the kids would pick one of the kids as the ambassador for that day to pick how they would want to pick a high five, a handshake, a fist bump, or a hug when they were coming out of the room for the day, and most of the kids went for the hug, right? It was adorable. Got posted, it went viral and had millions of views on Facebook. And a PinkSock’s friend in Pittsburgh, Larry Gioia, saw that and sent Ms. Blancas some pink socks. He gifted her some pink socks from Pittsburgh to El Paso. She gets the pink socks. She starts posting videos and pictures on social media of her and her little first graders and pink socks. I’m like, Oh, my God, that’s adorable, right?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Nick Adkins:
So I reached out to her and said, How many kids do you have in your first grade? 33. Great. That’s 33 pairs of pink socks.
Saul Marquez:
That’s nice.
Nick Adkins:
Now we’ve got the whole class of first graders bouncing around in their pink socks, and it’s just adorable. So we’re going to all these conferences and having fun with PinkSocks and tweeting away and celebrating each other and all the good things that people are doing with technology and healthcare and patient advocacy and so on. It was very refreshing to see something that wasn’t that and to see that it had jumped the fence and branched out into schoolchildren. And Ms. Blancas is using these as part of a social, emotional learning curricula, teaching kids about kindness, empathy, connection, compassion, cooperation, inclusion, diversity, anti-bullying, the stuff that grows good humans.
Saul Marquez:
Yep.
Nick Adkins:
Yeah, right? And we did that for a year. We gifted her, when the first graders became second graders, we reached out to the second-grade teacher and said, “Listen, how about your second-grader’s gift?” Ms. Blancas’ new first graders, they’re PinkSocks. When the kids come back at the end of summer. We did that. So now, yeah, so we’re all just tweeting away and loving it, and so that was 2019, the fall of ’19, about a week after those that new class got their pink socks, there was a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, and a lot of people got killed, and that Walmart was very close to where the school was and it was like zero degrees of separation. Everybody at the school was affected by this. So we went from yay, really happy to –
Saul Marquez:
From joy to woe.
Nick Adkins:
– just like that, and the label of the PinkSocks, it says, The world is full of good. When you believe it, you see it, keep doing that. And we just thought, Oh, here’s, here are these teachers teaching these kids the most important lessons of life, and then something awful happens, something that isn’t good, something that’s terrible. What can we do? So I reached out to Ms. Blancas, and I said, “Would you put me in contact with your principal?” I reached out to her, and I said, “Listen, how many pair of pink socks would it take for everyone at the school?” I’m talking teachers, kids, cafeteria workers, coaches, security guards, everybody.
Saul Marquez:
How many?
Nick Adkins:
1337 pairs of pink socks.
Saul Marquez:
Wow.
Nick Adkins:
Gifted to Dr. Sue A. Shook Elementary in November of 2019. Myself and two of the board members from PinkSocks, Julie Reister and Kimberly George, Denver and Chicago. We flew into El Paso, and they had a kindness pep rally. This is a pre-K through five, kindness pep rally doing kindness, cheers. The kids were gifting each other their pink socks because it’s built on this ethos of gifting. It’s not like a bunch of old people came in and gave these to you. We want the kids to understand that relationship bond that comes from gifting. So that was great. Now we’ve got a whole school in pink socks, and we had fun with that through 2020. And oh man, then what happens? Oh, and that was 2019, fall of ’19, and then, oh, beginning of 2020, what happens? The virus.
Saul Marquez:
Yep.
Nick Adkins:
So our first-grade teacher, Miss Blancas in El Paso, she gets the virus, and she is in the ICU in El Paso for 11 weeks.
Saul Marquez:
Wow.
Nick Adkins:
She has her 35th birthday while she’s in the ICU. And on December the 28th of 2020, Miss Blancas died.
Saul Marquez:
Oh, man, that sucks.
Nick Adkins:
Yeah, so our first-grade teacher that started it all for us for pink socks in schools died, and it was awful. It’s still awful. And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Miss Blancas, her family live-streamed the memorial service on Facebook. All the pallbearers were wearing pink socks. The little girls had pink bows in their hair, and the local media in El Paso picked up the story of Miss Blanca’s dying from COVID, a school teacher dying from COVID, and they also picked up that she was using pink socks to teach kids about kindness. The national media picked up the story. The international media picked up the story by the end of January, ’21, less than a month after Miss Blanca’s death, we had over 20 schools from around the country that had reached out to us and said, “We’d like to have pink socks at our school to continue the legacy of teaching kindness that Miss Blancas started.”
Saul Marquez:
It’s great.
Nick Adkins:
Boom.
Saul Marquez:
Love that.
Nick Adkins:
That’s how we pivoted.
Saul Marquez:
It’s such a beautiful story. There is a lot of great things happening.
Nick Adkins:
Lots.
Saul Marquez:
And there is a lot of good. And as you say, you just have to look for it, and it’s there.
Nick Adkins:
Yes.
Saul Marquez:
And not only that, this episode should serve as a reminder to everybody listening that kindness starts with you and it’s giving, it’s being present, and at the end of the day, just being human.
Nick Adkins:
Yes, we cannot always control governments and politics, but what we can control, Saul, what we can control is how we interact with each other one person at a time, one smile at a time, just being kind. That’s how we change the world. As I was walking in here to the convention hall this morning, I stopped and asked one of the greeters where you were. Where’s the podcast?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Nick Adkins:
And she just looked at me in pink socks and the love and war shirt and.
Saul Marquez:
And he’s wearing a kilt, folks. Like Nick likes to wear kilts.
Nick Adkins:
I don’t have the pants.
Saul Marquez:
I love your style, man.
Nick Adkins:
I stopped wearing pants in June of 2012, to be exact. She looks at me, she goes, “Hey, I just love what you’re doing in this message.” And I’m like, I said: are you a hugger?” She says, yes. I give her a hug, and I’m telling her a little bit about schools. We’re in 33 schools in United States. She looks at me, and she starts crying, and I go, Well, I said, “are you okay?” And she goes, “you don’t know, do you?” I said, no. I said, what? She goes, “there’s a school shooting this morning in Nashville today.”
Saul Marquez:
Oh, wow.
Nick Adkins:
An elementary school.
Saul Marquez:
Oh, my God.
Nick Adkins:
Three children are killed, four adults were killed, seven people killed, several more injured, and Saul, we have to get out in front of this. It has to stop. We’re at a healthcare conference. Let me tell you what the number one national healthcare crisis in the United States is: school shootings.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s a big problem.
Nick Adkins:
Everywhere. Tennessee, Texas, pick a state, Florida, just, my kids are grown and married, and I’m grateful, but I also know that I’m going to have grandchildren.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Nick Adkins:
And I don’t want to send my grandchildren off to school having to wonder if they’re going to get shot. It has to stop, and how will we stop it is supporting teachers who are teaching kids all of those attributes about kindness so that one day they don’t show up at school with a gun. We can’t wait on the government. We can’t wait on the politics to solve this. We’ve got to get behind supporting teachers. They’re teaching kids how to love themselves, how to love each other, right? The ripple effects this has for not just the schoolchildren, not just their school community, their state, the country, the world. It impacts all of us. These lessons that the kids are being taught about kindness, that follows them continuum of their lives. Sitting here as the leader of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Nick Adkins:
Do you want to make some donations? Yeah, keep donating to all the other good organizations you donate to donate to, but take a look at PinkSocks Life Inc. We’ve got 50 schools in a queue right now that want pink socks. Help us. It’s a very simple calculus. Pink socks cost $5 a pair. A classroom of kids, typically 30 kids. It’s $150 to outfit a whole school, a whole class. A typical school is around $5000 for a whole school. But for $5 for a child’s life to be taught those attributes that can stay with her or him across the continuum of their life and all the exponential impact it has on all of us. Oh, you tell me. What’s the ROI on that $5?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, you can’t measure that.
Nick Adkins:
You can’t.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, Nick. And where can people go if they’re like, Wow, I want to do something about this? Where can they go donate?
Nick Adkins:
Yeah, go to the website PinkSocks.Life and just hit the donate button. PinkSocks.Life And if you have a company that you work for that has a social good budget or has a kind of matching program, we’re registered with most all of the registries out there that your HR people can point you to say, okay, I want to find PinkSocks Life in the listing so that your company will match. Ask to do that as well. Ask your accountant. All those donations are tax deductible since we’re a 501(c)(3). And if it’s not PinkSocks Life that you want to get behind and support, find something that is, right? But you got to help. We can’t just sit back and go, Oh my, it’s awful or get mad about it or all the other, tweeting does not solve this, spewing stuff out on Facebook does not solve this. What solves it is getting behind people, and I’m specifically saying, let’s get behind these teachers. Pre-K, these are little kids, all the way through high school, right? The number one talked, I’m sure you’re interviewing people that are in the mental health sector. There’s a crisis right now of teen suicide, specifically middle school girls because they’re bullying each other so bad that a little 12, 13-year-old girl is going to kill herself because she’s been bullied so bad at school. That has got to stop. It’s got to stop. And you can say, yeah, I came from a good home and my parents are great and they love me and I’ve learned all this. Unfortunately, not everybody’s getting that. And it can take those one, two, handful of mean, kids that can wreck it, and the teachers and the coaches and the social workers and the cafeteria workers and the security guards at these schools that are showing up every single day to love these kids, that’s where it starts, and that’s where we’ve got to get behind it. In PinkSocks, we’re all in on this.
Saul Marquez:
I know you are, Nick. And so that’s why I wanted to have you on. Just a reminder for everybody that, be kind, right? You have control over a smile. So if you’re listening to this podcast, Weston over there, it starts with a smile, a greeting.
Nick Adkins:
Yeah.
Saul Marquez:
So do that. Don’t wait, do it now. And then, if you are compelled to do something to help what Nick and his team are up to, PinkSocks.Life. So really appreciate you jumping on here today, Nick.
Nick Adkins:
Thank you.
Saul Marquez:
Definitely looking forward to staying in touch.
Nick Adkins:
Yeah, brother.
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