Welcome back, readers, to the blog that’s dedicated to highlighting our local nonprofits! Thank you for checking in on what’s happening in our nonprofit scene. Today I bring you a conversation I had with Michelle Rodley, founder of Out of the Boat Swim, an organization that I think you’ll find to be beyond inspiring. This month’s post also features guest photographer Janalyn Rose of Horizon Light Productions.

If you have a heart for kids and a love of swimming, read on and enjoy!

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.*

Thank you so much for speaking to us today! Tell us who you are, and what your organization is all about.

That’s a big question. I’m Michelle. I’m a former San Diego City Lifeguard. I lifeguarded for 11 years, oceanfront lifeguarding for San Diego, and then a few years with the pool system too.

Photo by Janalyn Rose; Courtesy of Out of the Boat Swim

I got started with the nonprofit when I was 19. I was a swim instructor and I was going to school up in Thousand Oaks, but I’m from San Diego. One weekend, the girls from the church that I used go to were going down to Tijuana to paint walls, and I decided to join them. I fell in love with this little orphanage with about 27 kids in the Zona Norte, which is the red light district in the area. I started coming down every few weeks from my college to visit them. That summer I had some extra time on my hands and I started thinking, “What can I do to give back to these kids?”

I decided I could start teaching swim lessons, so, on a weekly basis all summer I started taking the kids down to a local water park. I would spend about one of my paydays a week to pay for these lessons and give them a nice lunch. We would do a couple hours of lessons and then we would transition into just playing all day at the water park. I just fell in love, and the next semester I missed the kids so much that I decided to come back and live in San Diego full-time. I started going down there every week for years.

Did you transfer colleges?

Yes. I went from having a full-ride scholarship at Cal Lutheran to transferring to the community colleges down here in San Diego. I felt called. I felt that this was something that was really impactful on the kids. Not just because it was something that I could offer, but down in Mexico specifically, swim lessons are expensive. There’s not a lot of local pools, and being able to swim isn’t accessible. And Tijuana, like San Diego, is a coastal city, so teaching these kids how to swim not only helped save their lives in a sense because it lowered their chances of drowning in a backyard pool, but also, it increased their confidence. A lot of their friends didn’t know how to swim.

You taught the lessons yourself?

Yes, for the first 4 – 5 years of the program, I taught them myself.

So, when you say you spent your paycheck, you were referring to paying admission to the water park?

Yes. I would pay for the admission to the waterpark, I paid for the transportation to get there, I paid for their lunch. We got a lot of donations, but sometimes I’d have to pay for swimsuits and goggles and that stuff.

How many lessons would you teach per week?

I would bring 5 – 10 kids per week. It was a lot, because I didn’t speak Spanish at the time. A lot of what I did was have them watch me and I’d demonstrate; and when they were in the water I’d try to correct them by touch. I eventually learned Spanish -- I would consider myself pretty fluent now. If you talked to someone who was actually from Mexico they would probably tell you I wasn’t completely fluent, but I can definitely hold a conversation.

In what year did you start doing this?

2004. This will be 16 years. A long time.

When did this become an official organization?

It became an organization in 2009. Before that, it was just myself. Eventually, it started growing. The orphanage that I specifically worked with at the time went from 27 kids to over 50 kids. They moved to a bigger facility. We started having to do more lessons at a local pool, so we started contracting local instructors to help with the lessons as well. At first, I got all my friends to come and do sessions with the kids. But when the orphanage got bigger, I started looking at local instructors to be able to facilitate more lessons for the kids. When that happened, I needed to raise a little bit more money. At the time, I was working with the San Diego Lifeguards, and they have a nonprofit called The San Diego Lifesaving Association. So, they were our parent nonprofit, we worked under them. We held our first fundraiser in 2006 or 2007. Through that, we were able to fund the program.

And then you became a separate nonprofit in 2009?

Yes.

What does the organization look like today?

In Mexico, we work with three orphanages. We provide swim lessons and we also run a summer camp. The summer camp has been going on since 2011. It’s kind of like a junior guard camp. If you’re familiar at all with junior guards of San Diego or Oceanside, it runs like that. It’s usually a 3 - 4 week program, and the kids take swimming lessons before the program in order to be prepared for it. They learn about rip currents, they learn about boogie-boarding, surfing, making water rescues. A few of the kids who have gone through the program have actually made water rescues. They also learn about environmental awareness. Our director in Mexico, Anna, she is a former Tijuana lifeguard. She’s a huge advocate for environmental awareness. We do beach cleanups; we’ve worked with the Scripps Institute and done water testing down in Tijuana, and a lot of our kids have been involved with that. She does this thing called Cultura de Playa. Our kids who have gone through the program who are now volunteers, they help run Cultura de Playa and we work with a university down in Tijuana. During the summertime we’ll do weekly presentations to the community about beach cleanups and water quality and water safety. We do a lot of outreach into the communities down there, on top of the swim lessons that we do and the summer camp that we run.

Do the Tijuana lifeguards help?

We have some volunteers from the Tijuana lifeguards that help, but we are a separate organization. They have their own junior guard program, which is for people who pay to be in the program. Our program is completely free to underprivileged kids in the community.

Is it available only to kids at the orphanages?

The big thing about our program down in Mexico is that we try to integrate community kids in with the kids who are underprivileged, not only to raise awareness with kids in the community about what’s going on with kids their same age, but also to decrease the stigma of working with kids who are disadvantaged. We want them to all feel equal. And in this program, they do. They’re all on the same page, they have to go through all the same testing. If they want to eventually become an intern -- or, now we have paid positions for kids who are 16 and up -- they have to go through the same type of testing that a San Diego lifeguard would go through. And they have to go through a lifeguard training – there’s a couple different lifeguard trainings down in Mexico. If they go through the programs -- a community kid or a kid from one of the orphanages -- they would have to go through the physical testing, mental testing and training in order to be able to actually get paid to run our programs.

Do you do any programs on this side of the border?

Yes. We started working with the refugee community in 2015. One of our other directors, Naomi, started the program. She and her husband specifically moved to City Heights in order to serve the refugee community. City Heights is the big hub [for refugees in San Diego]. City Heights has a lot of people from Somalia, the Congo — we also have people from Syria in the community, Myanmar – all over. So many languages in that one tiny area. Don’t quote me on this, but I want to say that there’s 100,000 refugees in that community, which is a lot. Naomi and her husband, they specifically moved to City Heights in order to serve that community. Their church was in that community and all of their close friends were in that community. One of her close friends runs San Diego Refugee Tutoring, which is another amazing nonprofit. We like to partner with other nonprofits in order to build each other up. We just like to work together because we believe in that whole idea of community. So, they run an after-school program for kids where they provide one-on-one tutoring for kids in elementary school for whom English is their second language because they came from another country. It helps these kids to focus on their schoolwork – a lot of these kids lived in refugee camps before they came here, they didn’t have structure, and they don’t know English or how a classroom runs. So, if they have that one-on-one person to hold them accountable that they can look forward to seeing once a week, then it makes them want to come back and it makes them want to work harder, and it’s a really good stable base for them in an unstable situation where their family is transitioning. So, Naomi realized that a lot of these kids don’t know how to swim. There was actually a drowning a few years ago, a boy from Syria at the San Diego beaches. It was after hours, when the lifeguards weren’t on [duty].

We decided to start teaching swimming lessons. We started working with San Diego Refugee Tutoring, because it was easy. Their programs run through the [school] year, and then we picked up in the summertime. Which is great, because a lot of these kids rely on school lunches as well. So, we provided a program that they could go to during the day and we provide lunches for them, too, just to create that continuity for them. We went from having ten kids, and then one summer we had thirty kids. We started working with the City of San Diego pools and we started doing some lessons through that. We got a lot of our funding through another program, called Prevent Drowning Foundation, which branched out of the junior guard group. They help support the financial means for us to have these swim lessons at the city pools. We help provide the transportation, the translation for the permission slips and communication with the parents. These are not just disadvantaged kids. There are a lot of programs at the pools for people who don’t make enough money, in order for them to have free lessons. These are the kids that wouldn’t even have the ability to get to the pool, that wouldn’t even know about the program. So, we bridge that gap. Not only do we have scholarships available for kids for free lessons, but we also provide the transportation, communication, and follow-up, which is what they don’t have.

What’s one thing that you’ve learned for yourself through this process of starting a nonprofit, running it, and watching it grow?

What I’ve learned is [that] it’s not about me. I feel like I started off with this little seed, this idea of, “I want to do something for these kids.” But it was a lot bigger than I realized. The program has really changed lives. And even the times when I feel like I’m done, I’m overwhelmed, I’m stressed, it’s a lot of work – because I do this all for free, and at certain periods in this journey I would put in 40 hours a week on this, on top of having another full-time job. It consumed me, but in a good way. I was passionate about it. But, one of my big stresses throughout different times in the process was, what if I stepped away, what if I let go of the reins? What I’ve realized is that the more I let go of the reins, the more other people step up, and the more [and] different opportunities have opened up for the nonprofit. And what it’s made me realize is that, even though I’m the one who stepped forward, this was really God’s vision. For this little nonprofit to be around for 16 years and to have impacted so many lives on such little funding – I feel like it really speaks volumes to what God’s vision was. I would like to take credit, but honestly, this whole process has been God -- the entire time.

When it comes to nonprofits in general, what do you think their function is in our society?

I think they address needs. There’s a lot of needs in the world that can be filled in different capacities, but unfortunately, the way that the world runs now…we’re all about the self, and about our own progress, instead of about community. Nonprofit work and activism helps remind people that we’re made to live in community, and that we’re made to support each other. It’s not just about us. I think what nonprofits do is help glue communities together, and they also help to address really deep needs and concerns that people didn’t even realize were there.

What, in your opinion, does it mean to be a visionary?

I think that it means not being afraid to step towards your dreams. I think that everyone has little visions of what they think would be nice, but I think a visionary is someone who sees a spark in something, and then walks towards it to see if there’s any more light. It’s not just seeing the spark, but it’s walking towards it and trying to explore more of what’s there.

Tell us about the name of your organization.

It’s called Out of the Boat Swim. It comes from Matthew 14:29 [in the Bible] – it’s the story of Peter, when he’s in the boat and it’s stormy. All of a sudden, he sees Jesus walking towards him on the water. And, I learned this from a guy named Rob Bell -- he’s a pretty famous pastor from Grand Rapids, Michigan, I think it is. In his interpretation of the story, he talks about how Jesus was a rabbi, and back in that time if you were a rabbi and you were choosing your disciples, it was a very rigorous process. When you were really young, you’d have to pass through certain educational means, and at every age, if you didn’t make it, then you would go follow the family trade [instead of becoming a disciple]. And finally, you get to this point – let’s just make it understandable in this day and age – when you are applying to college. If you’re applying to go to the school of this specific rabbi, they would only choose you if you they believed that you could do everything the way that they could do it – every mannerism. That way, if you were to go out and teach, people would know that you were a disciple of this rabbi, just by the way that you spoke or the way that you interpreted things. So, Peter, knowing that, [thinks] “I’m a disciple of Jesus. If He is walking on water, then I can walk on water, because I’m His disciple and I can do whatever He can do.” So Peter says, “If it is truly You, tell me to come out of the boat.” So Jesus tells him to come out of the boat. And he comes out of the boat, and for a moment, he’s standing on water. But then, he sees the waves and fear consumes him and he starts to sink and he reaches up to Jesus to help him and Jesus says, “you of little faith.” And a lot of times people think of that as him losing faith in Jesus. But in no way did he ever lose faith in Jesus. He reached out to Jesus, he knew who He was. What Peter didn’t know was who he was, himself. So, the way I interpret that into our programs is that a lot of times these kids who end up in our programs are meant to be there. They’re meant to swim, they’re meant to float, they’re meant to progress in their lives and build confidence. One of the big things that I try to teach when I teach the swim programs is that the words “I can’t” and “I’m not able to” don’t exist. Because you’re there, you can. And my goal for the program isn’t just safety, it’s that these kids can think back on these lessons when they thought that they couldn’t float, they thought that they couldn’t cross the pool, they thought they couldn’t reach the buoy, and think, “Wow, I was really scared, but I did it anyway.” When they get to bigger challenges in their lives – applying for a job, or a big life catastrophe, or whatever it is – they can think back on that time, “I didn’t have confidence then, but I went for it anyway because I felt the faith that I could, and I made it! So I can do that now, too.” Because God won’t take you anywhere that He can’t help bring you out of. So, that’s where the name comes from. It’s not just about water safety but it’s also about building confidence.

How can someone help support Out of the Boat Swim?

There are many ways that you can help. If people have different skill sets that they want to bring to the table, we are always more than happy to welcome those skills set. We always accept volunteers, either on the admin. side or hands on, if they want to be at lessons. There is a background check that is required if you were to work directly with the kids. And then, financial help is always a good thing, too. We are a small nonprofit, and we do a lot with the little that we have. We always welcome financial support as well. You can find us on our website, www.outoftheboatswim.org.

Readers, I hope you enjoyed this inspiring conversation with Michelle as much as I did! How uplifting it is to know that there are people out there helping kids who might otherwise fall through the cracks, and helping them in such a practical and important way! If you have the heart, the skills, and/or the finances to contribute to the safety and the building of confidence of these orphans and refugee kids, please check out Out of the Boat Swim’s website and get involved today! Why wait?

If you have anything you’d like to share, please leave your comments below! Keep walking toward your spark!

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Learning to Walk on Water - Teaching Kids Confidence and Water Safety with Out of the Boat Swim