Tim L
Meet Layna Haley! She is the 32nd Edmonton and area resident being featured on The Streets Initiative and gets to direct which organization my donations and pledges go as I continue my quest to run every street, alley, and paved path in the city. Since she is the founder and CEO, it’s no surprise that she chose The Kaleo Collective, a grass roots registered charity designed to assist single mothers. Speaking from personal experience I can attest to the fact that trying to generate donations on behalf of a startup organization is an incredibly difficult endeavor filled with all sorts of unique challenges on its own. She started Kaleo in 2016 and has grown it from nothing to an organization that has partnerships with a multitude of businesses and groups throughout Edmonton, is rife with many meaningful programs and supports for single mothers, and now even has 3 employees. The ripples generated by the Kaleo Collective has helped literally thousands of women that otherwise would have been forced to struggle with raising kids all by themselves.
Initially I misunderstood where to meet her but when I finally got my act together and found the right Starbucks Layna was at, we finally got to talk (Nobody ever said attention to detail is my strongpoint). I started by asking the wife and mother of three what one thing people might be surprised to hear about her.
LH: Well it’s pretty random but I drove my Honda Odyssey until it had 340,000 kms on it. My husband was always saying to get rid of it before it started costing us money but I loved it so much and I wanted to drive it until it literally died. I was obsessed with it!
After hearing this I was surprised since 340,000 kms is a crazy amount of mileage on any vehicle but also not surprised since the parallels between driving a minivan from new to 340,000 clicks and starting a grassroots, registered charity from the ground up are evident. Loyalty, dedication, and the ability to stick with something over many years are paramount. It’s also likely that the tools needed run a charitable company were honed from being a young mother herself at 16 and having the challenges associated with that immediately thrust upon her.
LH: Yeah, at times it was really hard, like making it through high school and diploma exams with a baby was tough but Austin was the center of my world. It was just him and I and he became the center of every decision I made. Sometimes I think ignorance is bliss, but one thing that helped was I always wanted to be a mom. I had 3 younger brothers and sisters and so I was always trying to mother them, probably way more than they ever wanted!
TL: I can only imagine how tough that would be…was it just you and your baby or did you have support of any kind available?
LH: Yes, my Mom. I relied on her quite a bit but I was also set up to be very independent. My parents made it very clear that if I wanted to have the baby I could, but I’m to be this baby’s parent- not them. Keep in mind that my mom helped as much as she could but she was still in the thick of parenting and still raising kids herself, right?
TL: Yeah it’s remarkable when you think about it from that perspective.
LH: For sure. I was laser focused but that didn’t mean there were some hard times. I remember when I turned 17 my gift that year was to go to bed. My mom took Austin, who was four months old at the time, and I slept for 22 hours I think.
TL: Obviously your experiences as a single mom must be the main driver behind the creation of The Kaleo Collective. Is that how it came to be?
LH: We were actually called Experience Kaleo back then. Kaleo means “to invite”, and I started a prayer night out in the community that was sort of a just come for prayer if you want it no questions asked. Some nights we had 1 or 2 or 5 people show up and other times we had 20. The idea was to create a place for someone to go if they were hurting and couldn’t go to church. As long as I’m running Kaleo, my faith will be the center of everything because its the place from which I operate. Later on, though, we went through the process with the Canada Revenue Agency to change from being a faith based organization to one that was to the benefit of the community. Kaleo is not a faith based entity anymore.
TL: Ok, interesting. I’ve been to your website which is really good. You have some great programs and structures in place. How did those come to be?
LH: I started getting more and more moms coming to my prayer night and they were asking for help, like was there a course or something that was available to help them. They had things but they were usually through a parenting center that operated between 10am and 3pm which no working mom could ever make. So I ran this pilot at the time to help single moms and the first session was so beautiful. The idea was that I would show up with something to present and it ended up becoming this hive mind where everyone was sharing their ideas. I would talk about how I did journaling, say, and show how I did it and then someone else would show how journaling worked for them. All of a sudden we had 10 different women sharing their ideas and you’ve got something really interesting happening. I did it for six weeks and by the end we all wanted to do it again. Just like that Kaleo was born!
TL: Wow, sounds like it definitely took a life of its own!
LH: Yes. Truly it’s the mom’s that I’m most proud of. What they do day in and day out is so hard, so grueling and so many of them are dealing with financial hardship. Many times they are dealing with isolation and loneliness, which studies all show leads to so many awful outcomes. I think what I would want anybody to know from my experience with Kaleo is that the simplicity in just seeing somebody and just caring about them in the tiniest way can make such a big difference in the trajectory of someone’s life.
There you have it Edmonton, Layna Haley! She’s a pretty remarkable person, so do her a solid and read the summary of Kaleo Collective here on my homepage. I’m a sucker for 50/50’s and I happened to notice they are running one this summer in an effort to raise a bit of extra money to help all of those single mothers out there. Make a donation and let’s see how much we can raise for Kaleo, folks!
Tim
