Q & A Episode 40 - Designing Joy: How Space Transforms Lives
Episode #40 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | Designing Joy: How Space Transforms Lives
In this special Q&A episode, Mark D. Williams sits down with Mark Ostrom, founder of Joy Collaborative, to discuss their upcoming “Pairings” fundraising event on May 29. They explore how design and construction professionals can make a tangible, local impact for families with life-limiting disabilities—one room, one child, one story at a time. Hear about the Joymobile, Jaden’s inspiring transformation, and how you can be part of something that truly matters.
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About The Curious Builder
The host of the Curious Builder Posdast is Mark D. Williams, the founder of Mark D. WIlliams Custom Homes Inc. They are an award-winning Twin Cities-based home builder, creating quality custom homes and remodels — one-of-a-kind dream homes of all styles and scopes. Whether you’re looking to reimagine your current space or start fresh with a new construction, we build homes that reflect how you live your everyday life.
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Mark Ostrom 00:00
I've got friendships now from parents and the kids that we've served, and it's really exciting, because the event at IMS, people got to meet our recipient in person, and she's absolutely sweet. And her to hear her mom talk about she her daughter cracked open, right? She talked about, all of a sudden, all this creativity, all this leadership was coming out of this 12 year old she had no idea this girl was capable of.
Mark D. Williams 00:30
Today on the podcast, we had Mark ostramon For a brief 20 minute podcast, and it was really fun. We just talked about our upcoming event on May 29 530 to 730 it's called pairings, basically pairing people, food, design, purpose and play, people and passion, all for the betterment of children in our community. If you're interested, please stay tuned, and please check out the joy collaborative.org events pairing. Welcome to curious builder Podcast. Today is Thursday, your Q, a, and we're going to switch it up a little bit. Today, I've got Mark Ostrom in studio with the joy collaborative. You may have heard him on episode 34 Mark owns a and operates a charitable nonprofit in Minnesota that helps children with life limiting disabilities throughout the state of Minnesota and beyond. Through design and through building, it's an amazing part, a thing to be a part of. And so last year, Mark Williams custom homes, we decided to do an event with you, Mark, and that was amazing. We did at one of our homes on Medicine Lake. For those that are interested, you guys can check out our social channels. We did this really cool paint experiment that was like, very vibrant. We got to hear you and several other your recipients, you know, speak about how the joy Collaborative has helped their lives. And so this is going to be part of our ongoing way to help here locally. And not only do I believe personally in what you're doing, but so does the community and so our homeowners. So basically, once a year, we partner on doing an event with our building company and your company to try to host an event. And it's going to be may 29 from 530 to 730 all the details can be found at Joy collaborative.org We'll have that all in the show notes as well as again, at the end, that's Joy collaborative.org and the fun written. You can go under Events, and you'll see this is called pairings. And then Mark's gonna tell us why it's called pairings. But really, in short, we get to hear Mark speak a little bit about their mission. We're gonna have Jaden and his mom there as well, who has received some benefit of our local community through design and helping him with Jaden a female or a male, male, male. Okay, to help Jaden, you know, just kind of his experiences as a kid, seeing the community turn out for him, and we're just kind of a great evening. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how we came up with pairings. I can speak a little bit about the home that our clients were generous enough to let us tour their home for this, but let's talk a little bit about it. Let's educate to the local community, and we'll keep this to
Mark Ostrom 02:49
about 20 minutes. So Joy collaborative is a group of designers, architects, builders, who come together to help those who may be short of means, who have some functional issues that we can address. But the concept of pairings really came from you mark, because we paired up last year. We had a really fun event. We were trying to figure out, okay, what are the meaningful connections that joy collaborative manifests, and that is how people come together. So it's who can we bring to the literal table to meet each other, to talk about what we're doing for people who may not have the ability to help themselves. So we're mark you can talk more about what we've got lined up as far as what the pairing activities are, but I think it's going to be a really there's a lot of mystery involved in this event. But I'm excited about how
Mark D. Williams 03:33
well I loved it. I mean, you have it on the website too. It's like food and design purpose and play people and passion. And I just, I love, I think it's very creative. You're a very creative person. Just, you know, this pairings. And I think in our community, one thing I that resonates so strongly with me, personally, and having gotten to know you over the last couple years, and just hearing more about your mission, and not only whether you have children or don't have children, we can all relate in in some ways, to how do we give back? I was actually just mentioning to you recently, and and everyone has feels differently about how this I can only just speak for myself sometimes, you know, I read the paper every day, and I hear about and I see some of these atrocities all across the country, across the world, and I feel like, what is little old Mark Williams gonna do? How do I help? I just feel, in some ways, so powerless. I don't know if this is a common message that you hear from people that work with you or not, but I you or not, but I feel like in Minnesota, in my city, in my community, in people that I know that I can help in probably a more meaningful way, through time, through donations, through financial support, through support like this, just promoting it in a way that I can't do that I'm not putting any shade on those that feel called to do stuff overseas, like I applaud that I'll support it. I just, for me, I feel like I need to do something that I can see, touch and feel locally here, and you can do more than one thing. You don't have to just do one or the other. And so I I just feel like, personally, like, now I think I told you in that interview, the first time I interviewed you, I sort of felt like I wanted. At my job and just come work for you. We'll get there, Mark, and it's a very powerful thing that you're doing for young families. And I having last year, John and Leah were kind enough to let us tour their home. And it was incredible home. I think we had 5060, people show up. We had a number of people. A lot of it was really, I was really blown away at how many of our trade partners, our painters, our cabinet shop, our lumber yard people that came to the plate and said we would love to not only come, but we would like to support and be a sponsor as well. And so it's pretty overwhelming just to see people churn up for this concept of you trying to help somebody, and to see it in action is really powerful. And as we create these events, I know you get to do 12 of these a year. I get to do one a year. And so you save it all up, we design, we talk, and we're thinking about what we're going to do. And I thought, well, it's fun to get people into a really beautiful home that we built. So our homeowners, Mark and and Carrie, were very kind enough to let us, you know, tour their home. It's absolutely a stunning home and, like, hey, if we can do a home tour, we can do some wine pairings. I know we've got the saint super estates, vineyards, donating wine. We've got Marcus Hansen. Tell us about Marcus Hansen. He's the, what he's called, the Minister of wine. He like, sings concerto or, like, what I've seen videos of him, like, singing while he's, like, distributing wine. Like, yeah, tell me about this guy. That's
Mark Ostrom 06:21
him. Marcus is a great character. And I want to circle back a little bit to what you were just talking about, the pairings concept and and what, what I find. I still am overwhelmed. I seriously mark, whenever it happens, I'll have a contractor come up to me during or after a project and look me in the eye and say, Thank you. And I'm like, what we wouldn't be here if you hadn't said, yeah. So what is this? Thank you. Business. Well, the fact that you can look the person in the eye that you're serving is really meaningful, because you can, you kind of get an understanding of maybe where they're at and where they're headed, and to see the after and to see the reaction of them, the brother, sister, parent, teacher, it's just this ripple effect is really profound, so that there's a depth of meaning that happens in those pairings. And that's the beautiful part of what we see manifest
Mark D. Williams 07:09
well. And I like it. My shout out to my aunt Holly. She came and she was really moved by what was said. And I think she took you aside later and said, I would like to help. And I feel like one of the things that we want to do. I mean, just showing up is already all people need to do. But if you can't make it like there's a way to don't and money does matter. I mean, one of the things as someone who's known you for a long time and in a business group with you, is like running a nonprofit, is that there's no profit in it. It's a rough business. And like, kudos to you. So what can we do to help with the mission, and how do we grow that mission? You know, the joymobile will be there, which is an incredible Tell, tell those that aren't familiar with it, like, what is the joymobile? Which is like, literally, just this amazing thing,
Mark Ostrom 07:51
Mark I should have my own notepad over here, because now I got to talk about Marcus the wine guys. Talk about Marcus the wine guy. So Marcus is in our c9 group, and I saw a LinkedIn post that somebody had he had presented at one of their groups. I'm like, What are you guys having wine for breakfast? Like, I want to know about this group. And so reached out to our connection and met with Marcus. And he is just this big hearted personality, I mean, just the loveliest person. And we find out that we were both music majors early on in school, which was really fun to hear, and he has toured the world with an a capella group, which turned into an opera thing. So he's been an opera performer for a long time, but it wasn't really filling his his bucket. And what he realized is he's great at hospitality, and he really loved wine. So now he's part of a small Consortium. They bring in these exotic and wonderful wines, literally all over the world. This time, we're lucky enough to get focused on the Napa Valley Saint superus, top performer. I mean, I was looking at their ratings online, and it was just off the charts. So we will have a great pairing when it comes to the to the wine. So I'm excited for everybody to have that and to listen to Marcus give us a little information about wine, like I don't, I don't drink these wines all the time, so it'll be fun to be there, and we'll match the food to the wine. So another pairing won't be happening there, bringing Jaden in, one of our recipients, and talk about the people in the room who participated to get him an amazing space. But you were asking about the joymobile, and what's happened there. So the joymobile is came about because we were working with a lot of institutions, schools in particular, that were servicing those with autism and those with neuro diverse conditions. And it became very clear that they didn't have real estate. The request was, we want space. Well, that countered against reality, which we don't. We don't have space to give up. So we're like, on the fly. We're like, what about a mobile unit? There's mobile book libraries. Like, maybe we could have mobile sensory room here. He's like, I don't know what that is, but let's try it. So we launched it a year and a half ago, a very rudimentary version of it, along with my partner, Tony. He had a son with autism and was 19 and non verbal, who had a very profound experience, just in a very rough version of the joymobile. And in short order, we were invited to the Minnesota State Fair last year, which. Was really exciting to the board until I told them how many volunteers it took. So if you're interested in pairing, we need your help, because we needed 192 volunteers last year. Wow, maybe should have a sign up. We do? We have that? Call me whatever we'll take. Yeah, it was, it was, it was the hardest thing we've ever done to date, the planning for the Minnesota State Fair and the requirements that we needed to meet, and just not having done an event of that scale, we had done large events, but nothing to 2 million visitors in 12 days. But it was also the most profound and rewarding thing that we've done to date, outside of our joy room physical projects, because we saw people who were toddlers and we saw people in their 80s, all benefiting from five minutes in this acoustically sound. You've been in there space where people could just recenter in a very loud space. We were right by the DNR. I mean, the traffic could not have been more intense, especially on the Fridays and Saturdays. But to see people benefiting in a very short period of time, period of time, has been really amazing. And the goal, actually, of the joymobile was not to have it be a single vehicle. So we are moving forward, talking to potential partners about creating a franchise. And when you talk about the stress of being a nonprofit, when I started this, I had a little bit of nonprofit experience, but I'm like, this model is kind of stupid. You're fundraising all the time. And I'm like, there's other ways of bringing money in the door. So are there things that we could do to generate revenue for ourselves? So that's the concept of the joymobile. We're not going to build them and sell them, because then we've lost all control of our brand and the experience. But turning into a franchise seems like a really smart move. So one of our big, hairy, audacious goals is, in three years, to see one in every state. Oh, can
Mark D. Williams 11:41
you get more locally? I mean, like a fleet of them here? Is it really the operation that of people that also becomes
Mark Ostrom 11:47
difficult, right? So we're talking to some community organizers business development as well as potential investors around creating jobs. So the Joe mobile fleet, then would be created here in Minnesota, and then dispersed to wherever the need
Mark D. Williams 12:02
is. This episode of The Curious builder is brought to you by olivin vine socials. If you're a builder, a designer or an architect looking to grow your brand without dancing on Tiktok or spending your whole life on social media, listen up. Olivin vine socials specializes in Pinterest marketing, blogging and email strategy for luxury home brands that help you turn your beautiful work into a strategic SEO driven content that drives real traffic and connects you with your ideal clients without burning you out ready to grow smarter and not harder. Visit olivin socials.com and tell them the cures builder set to you just so you know, I've been working with Alyssa over at olivin for three years. She helped us launch the podcast. She's helped us grow our brand at Mark Williams custom homes. I could not do what I've done without her help, and I'm more than happy to announce that she's our latest sponsor for the curious builder podcast. Lake society magazine is Minneapolis, Premier target market boutique lifestyle and design publication. It embodies the unique lifestyles and design of the Minneapolis city lakes neighborhoods from Lake of the isles to Lake Harriet. It showcases the best in local design projects by both premier builders, architects and interior designers in this area. Lake society magazine has the look and feel of a national publication with glossy covers high end finishes. It's mailed directly to upper bracket, single family homeowners in the city lakes area, and it's the perfect local coffee table top publication. Subscriptions can also be available through the website, Lake society magazine.com additionally, publisher and founder, Karen Steckel, has over 27 years in a local magazine publishing industry, and has a passion for high end photography and quality graphics, her commitment to quality visual simplicity and beauty are strongly reflected in her beautiful lake society magazine. The need is obviously so great. One of the things that was so interesting is just being a builder, and our audience mostly being somehow in the construction design architecture field, is knowing that we build homes for people or remodel and we speak all the time on the podcast that it shouldn't be lost, that most people can remember the address they of the home that they grew up in. Do you remember your address of the home you grew up in? 2126 North upland press. There you go. 1535, the very short drive. Most people remember their address of their home. And the reason I keep I've been bringing that up lately on the podcast, and most people know it's just that has such a profound impact your home. And you would, I think your intro. The other night, we got to hear you speak a little bit of powerhouse smart event here at IMS, and it was, Oh, how did your intro go? It was really funny. It was basically like, Oh, if you if your child is, you know, has a disability, what's the first thing that you think of? And it's kind of a joke, it's a lead in most people are like, safety or health, and you're like, it's probably not remodeling your home, but like, remodeling your space so that it fits your children's needs and helps them have a more full and a more able life. To take away some of those. Disabilities is a really empowering experience, and so to see that on the website, to hear people like Jaden and their mother, equal parts, the child gets to share their experience, but as most of the donors here will likely be parents, it's really a lot of it is through the viewpoint of an adult. If your son or daughter has or has had something like that? How? How much? How, how, how do you connect with that parent? And that feeling of connection, that pairing is super powerful.
Mark Ostrom 15:29
Yeah, I've got friendships now from parents and the kids that we've served, and it's really exciting, because the event at IMS, people got to meet our recipient in person, and she's absolutely sweet, and her to hear her mom talk about, she her daughter cracked open, right? She talked about, all of a sudden, all this creativity, all this leadership, was coming out of this 12 year old. She had no idea this girl was capable of it was just blowing her mom away. Pretty cool stuff, but it's really two point mark. It's really about removing barriers. And that's step one. It's like, okay, we're going to bring a high level of design to remove barriers. Well, okay, but then what? Like, what? What's the point of that? The point of that is to allow you to thrive, like, to imagine a different reality for yourself that you might not have imagined prior and and it's really exciting. We, you know, we started, I've just got some some news from last week. So we started Joy collaborator through the lens of children, primarily those who we knew, you know, didn't have any power and but unfortunately, when it comes to grant writing, nobody's going to fund an individual family, home, an organization. That's typically not what is going to happen. At the same time, we've been invited to clinics, dental offices, very large facilities, asking us to do the same thing that we've done for individual families, and that is ridiculously exciting to me, to be able to serve on a wider scale. We'll continue to work on a full spectrum of people. But we did change our our mission statement, and we tweaked it to from empowering youth with life limiting conditions to empowering those with life limiting conditions. And that minor shift opens up an incredible amount of possibilities for
Mark D. Williams 17:04
us. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, if you're young and you have the privilege of getting old, you still have that same disability, most likely, depending on what it is, I've been lucky enough to been blessed. I've got three Down Syndrome cousins and an uncle, and seeing that the joy that they've brought to their our family, and the memories that I have, and I can only speak from my own experience, obviously, in this case, but it's like when you have children, and you know, I can only as you're having children, this thought goes through this thought goes through your mind, like, what if one of my children have a disability? And I remember when I had that thought for the first time, I started smiling, because I think of like just in our story, and Uncle Stevie, he was 55 when he passed. He lived three times longer than they said he was going to live. They said he was going to live into his teens. And in fact, with the joke was, he outlived three of his cardiologists. So the joke was, don't be Stevie's cardiologist. That's a death sentence. But the stories and the joy in the way, yeah, it can touch it's incredible.
Mark Ostrom 18:03
Yeah, it's where we're at now is nowhere near where I thought we were going to be three years ago. I mean, the leap forward have been really fantastic, but it's really about to your point mark. It's if I am that parent or caregiver or teacher, like, what do you want for that person? You don't want them to keep in status quo. Nobody wants that for anybody you want them to advance. And if we zoom out even further, it's like as a community, how do we want to see those people? Are we still putting them in institutions and just shuffling them away and wishing the best for them? That's not really where we're at anymore. Where we're at anymore is really, is capitalizing on the skills and gifts that they do have absolutely and
Mark D. Williams 18:41
there's a lot of talent. There's a lot of talent there. And I, you know, I've seen people, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, if you I forget what plant it is, but the bigger the pot, the bigger the tree will grow, the smaller the pot, the smaller it stays. And I think that's true of people. If you put people on a box, they'll stay in the box. But if you give people unlimited potential, they have unlimited potential. And I think that's really what joy collaborative is doing, not only for the children and for those that are adults as well, but also their families.
Mark Ostrom 19:08
Absolutely. I mean, I'm encouraging everybody this event that we're doing together Mark Jaden is is coming. And Jaden is a 15 year old boy with pretty advanced autism. He has emotional dysregulation issues. He's got physical control issues. He's got a lot of stuff on his plate, and he's in a family with a single mom and two other siblings that also have special needs, so you can imagine, from the parent perspective, the balancing that has to go on and the patience that is needed and not always available create a space for him that really is supportive of his needs. And on day one, we're hanging out with him, and he looks over his shoulder. I was showing him he was he called himself very organized, which we all laughed about, because everything was on a pile on the floor, but they were separate piles of things. But I'm talking like you'd hurt yourself just trying to get over and so we showed him this amazing storage system that was in his space. And he looks over at his mom. He's like, I've got so much swag in this room. So he was so excited about now I have control. I can see how I can manifest my days, my storage, my tennis shoe collection, like all these things that were in piles before. And for kids with autism, anybody with autism, change is really hard, and disruption is really hard. So if you're trying to find stuff in a pile of junk. That's very frustrating for somebody with that condition. So now, if we have a thing where he can be fully organized, I mean, it's just awesome. So he's going to be there. His mom is just as sweet as can be, and she'll tell her story too, of kind of her family dynamic and what joy has been able to
Mark D. Williams 20:35
help them with. So I imagine there's a number of things that can happen here. One is, you can attend this event, the pairings event, with us, and you can hear the story firsthand. You can meet other people in the community. You can tour home. You can hear Marcus wax us and poetically over the different kinds of wines. There's so many reasons to come out to this, but the main one shouldn't be lost, is just helping the joy collab room, its mission. And again, just to keep this short, and we would talk for two hours, again, I'd encourage people to go back and listen to episodes. Listen to Episode 34 where we talk about the whole joy collaborative. But you know, it's really for a couple hours to take time out of your day to support your mission, to support children and their families, to donate, or we'll have auction items there as well. I believe if you can't make it, all of this will still be available online at the joy collaborative.org under Events and pairings, and then if you're looking to be a sponsor, we obviously would very much depend on that. And our goal, I think, this year, is to try to raise $20,000 is that right? So last year, we didn't set out, I don't think very clearly what the goal was, and I think we ended up netting close to what, nine or 10,000 which is still great. I mean, it was very, very helpful. Every dollar helps. But I think understanding like, if you tell people what the goal is, you can either meet it or, you know, exceed it, would be great. And then understanding that these funds are going to help people in their home. So not only does it help with the joy collaboratives messaging, but it also is going towards specific projects. And I think we talked about this previously, that if we go, if we donate funds to a specific project, sometimes it handcuffs a little bit what joy collaborative can do. Or if it goes to the general mission, there's more you can do with it. Is that accurate? Absolutely.
Mark Ostrom 22:08
Yep. So we'll be talking about upcoming projects so people can understand where things are actually going. If we were talking to a couple other nonprofits now and trying to get some of their executive directors there, so you could actually meet these people and understand, like, again, to my point of bearings, meet these people, understand what they're up against. And in today's turmoil, right? Consumer confidence is dropping. We know all the reasons why. So it's going to be rough for nonprofits over the next couple years. So if you're able to to your point mark, like, every dollar helps, and I say that all the time, it doesn't matter what our fundraising goal is all it's great for aspirations. Everything matters because our work is so important and it's making such a difference for these individuals and for these organizations to
Mark D. Williams 22:51
one and I would challenge is to bring somebody with you. That would be my ask from Mark Williams custom homes to you, is, if you're going to come, thank you for doing that. But if you really want to double, dot bring somebody with you. Not only just but it's that the message that this exists, I think, when you see it and touch it and feel it. And I was really humble, because we invite our past clients and the clients we're working with. And I had several clients, not only, obviously, the ones that donated their house for the couple hours, but the people that came that we were remodeling a house for and just they had young children, and like, right now, 537 30 is prime. Dinner time, bedtime, bath time. Like, it's hard for young families to get out at that time and to see that they got a sitter to come out to support. That was super humbling. And anyway, it's just, it's a way to get very involved in your community in a very micro level which is needed.
Mark Ostrom 23:42
And I started, I started the business because I saw a gap between make a wish, like temporary experiences and Habitat for Humanity that's building the whole house, whatever, and that's great, but we've got people who are living with conditions for that are lifelong. So what can we do that helps them on a permanent basis, through the beauty of design and architecture design to get them to a better place, and yes, to be in our space. We had somebody come to our last event and said, Man, if you could bottle the energy in this room. And I'm like, it's, I don't even know how it happens work, but we the energy is great, and if you come away feeling with your shoulder slump forward, we've failed. Well,
Mark D. Williams 24:19
I just, I just had an additional idea is that we'll, we'll contact everyone that came to the first one and ask them to bring a friend. I'll be sending this podcast episode to everyone that will listen, including all the past attendees. Thank you for your support. Thank you for coming. Please come again. Let's blow the roof off this homework. All right. Thanks for work. Thanks for coming in, buddy. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for tuning in. The curious builder podcast. If you like this episode, do us a favor. Share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends. Like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in. You.
