- You couldn't fill a house with more love, and you also couldn't provision it with fewer resources.

- The NICU can be a challenging place.

He just brings joy.

- The obstacles that they face are really profound.

- Your environment impacts how you feel about your life.

- I probably wouldn't be the person that I am now.

- I'm helping that little kid, but that little kid's helping me.

(no audio) (dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (gentle music) Hey, guys.

(laughs) You guys are all right.

We're gonna keep you.

When you're helping someone, man, it's a good feeling.

My name is Lynn Harris.

I work at St.

David's as a volunteer.

I work in the NICU, and it is a lot of fun.

Chrissy drops me off at the hospital, which saves me a lot of walking.

- [Chrissy] You're welcome.

- My age is personal.

I'm 82.

82, do you believe that?

I've been volunteering 17, 18 years at St.

David's, and the last six or seven years have been in the NICU.

What I usually tell everybody when I get there is I say, "I'm gonna go listen for work."

Because if I hear someone crying, I got something to do.

(baby crying) Come on.

Look at you.

Look at you.

No spitting up on the cuddler now.

- The NICU is a neonatal intensive care unit.

So we are an ICU for babies, basically.

We're a level four NICU, which is a state designation, which just means we can take care of the sickest babies that there are.

- You wanna go back down in your bed?

Huh?

You wanna go back in your bed?

When I started, I said, "I'm worried I might break one of them."

You know, they're so small, and they're fragile.

All of them had tubes or wires running into them.

When a baby cries, you would go over and pick them up and quiet them, you know, assure them that someone was there watching them, helping them.

And when they figure out that there's someone paying attention to them, they stop crying.

That's so nice you don't have any hair.

I can relate to that.

(nurse laughs) - The role of the cuddlers in the NICU is super important.

Having somebody here to be able to hold the babies and just snuggle them when we have families that can't be here or nurses that are taking care of another baby; they're just invaluable.

- I was born and raised in Chicago.

I was there for 23 years.

And then they told me I had to go to Vietnam.

So I became a medic.

Of the amount of kids that go through the NICU, there's very few that don't make it.

You know, overseas, there's a lot that didn't make it.

You know, that's something, you know, you don't want to remember that.

That's something that's... Yeah, you just don't want to remember it.

I don't.

You know, I did what I could.

It's over.

You know, go on to something else.

(device beeps) - It started off overwhelming at first, not knowing what to expect.

And everybody was saying it was normal.

And it was like confusing because it didn't feel normal.

- She came a whole three months early.

She was only two pounds and two ounces when she came out.

It's like 2 1/2 months of coming up here, dang near every day.

And I just know we're getting closer, so.

I'm ready for it to be over, but I'm happy that we have a good team.

- Some families will go back to work so they can save their maternity leave for when the baby actually goes home.

Some families have other kids at home.

And we don't allow other kids in the unit just for infection prevention purposes.

So they have to go home.

They have to prioritize getting rest for themselves or they won't be able to take care of their babies.

- That's what hurts, you know, knowing that you can't be there all day.

But you overcome it coming here and then you see she's developed a team of doctors and sponsors and volunteers that come, and they love her just as much as we do.

So it's comforting to know that.

- My favorite movement is taking my thumb and just rubbing their forehead.

And it just takes their mind off of crying.

They don't know what the hell's happening to them, but they like it.

Look at you.

What do you think?

Penny for your thoughts.

Did you want that crème brûlée first or you want the chicken fried steak?

Huh?

(baby laughs) (Lynn laughs) - You know, some families are like, "There's a stranger holding my baby.

I don't know how I feel about that."

And then Lynn has never met a stranger, as far as I can tell.

- Those little guys can't do anything for themselves.

And it really warms the cockels of my heart when they smile, because it's just so neat.

(gentle music) Oh, I'm gonna brag on myself now.

Is that what you're saying?

In '24, I was given an award by St.

David's.

I was really surprised.

I was really impressed by what they did.

Again, it's 16, 17 years.

I think the last time I counted, it was like 2300 hours.

- [Nurse] It's a lot of time.

And we're very blessed to have had that and that consistency.

So we're always glad to see him.

- You know, just to be a nice guy and contribute to help out people, you know, everybody can do it.

That's the way it should be for a lot of people.

Then one night I was dizzy.

I was out of balance.

Something was wrong.

The room was spinning, and I said to the wife: "Let's go to the ER and see what's wrong with me."

And they sent me to St.

David's.

Well, after a few different doctors and a few different nurses that had came by, they said, "You have a viral infection of the inner ear, and it throws it all off."

- It was very scary and sad.

But it was nice to be able to know that he had given so much to our babies, and then we could also take care of him in return.

- So many people were coming by to say, "How are you doing?

What are you doing in here?

Get out of here," this and that.

And they brought me flowers and things.

And, you know, I really didn't get a chance to be a real patient.

It was like, you know... That's a good hospital.

I can walk better with a cane.

I'm not as imbalanced as before.

But it still, it's weird.

There's no hearing in my left ear.

So when you say something to me, the sound comes from over there.

That's weird.

It's not gonna be the same.

So I resigned myself to that, that I'm not gonna be back to normal.

It dawned on me then, my whole life was wrapped around, you know, taking care of those little kids in the NICU.

And they didn't want me to take care of the kids in the NICU because I was not stable, which made sense.

It made very much sense.

But it took away all my fun.

You know, an 80-year-old man not having any fun, that's not the way to go through.

You know, how much more I got to go.

I don't know.

But I had no idea what I was gonna do.

- He was really wanting to get back to volunteering, but he knew he couldn't.

He would call up to the NICU all the time and talk to the nurses there.

And finally was healthier, stronger.

- And then they said, "Hey we got something for you."

You know, and if it was washing windows, I would've done it.

- [Chrissy] Here we are.

- Boy, this looks familiar.

- He called me and he's like, "Can I just come and talk to the babies?"

I'm like, "Yes, absolutely.

You can come and talk to us.

You can talk to the babies.

You can put gloves away.

You can stock things in the unit.

You can help with laundry.

Everybody's favorite."

There's always stuff to be done.

So we were just glad to still have him around in any capacity.

I'm gonna tell your wife you know how to fold the laundry, and she's gonna be like- - I do my own laundry at home.

- They're just not this tiny?

- No they're not.

(nurse laughs) - He was just as tickled as can be.

So that was the best thing for him this past summer, was getting back to the NICU.

- I'd like to keep going until I can't.

All I would do up there is help those little kids.

You know, they didn't know it.

It's me again.

They had no clue of what I was, who I was, you know, what was going on.

But I did.

And it was like, man, it's a good feeling.

I'm helping that little kid, but that little kid's helping me.

So it's a two-way street.

(gentle music) It was a lot of fun.

I really enjoyed it.

And damn, it was neat.

(solemn music) - I have very vivid recollections from my first couple of years as a teacher, watching kids walk in my classroom.

Every day, kids from low socioeconomic households had a more difficult time in school, not because they were less talented or less intelligent, but because they were facing huge challenges at home.

I don't want to undersell this.

Schools are profoundly important and there's a lot that they can do to help kids.

But I think whenever they are not able to elevate the achievement of impoverished kids, we blame it on them rather than trying to find innovative solutions for addressing these external factors, these things outside the school.

And that was something that Randy Bowman understood intuitively.

It made perfect sense to him because he knew well what all the obstacles are that poor kids face growing up.

My name is J.K.

Nickell.

I'm the story director at "Texas Monthly."

and I wrote Randy Bowman's Radical Idea.

I saw a story about Randy Bowman in the "Dallas Morning News" one day.

He's, you know, locally, a pretty well-known business person.

But I took note of this new philanthropic effort that he had started that he called At Last!

- I'm riding my bike around White Rock Lake, and I hear a podcast in which they say that the most reliable determinant of whether or not a child is gonna perform well in school is whether or not that child hails from a middle-class or above household.

I though, "Okay, how do you make sure that an impoverished child has access to the same educational resources when they're at home that a kid from a more well-resourced family has?"

I'm gonna leave the school day to the educators, the educational theorist.

That seven hours a day belongs to them.

I'm gonna focus on making sure that an impoverished child has great educational resources during the 17 hours a day that that child is at home.

And that was the birth of At Last!

- [J.K.]

At Last!

opened up for the first time in the spring of 2021.

- Well, thank you, ma'am.

I appreciate that.

Because I just asked Greg, so I was like, "Hey, do you have your kid coached here?"

He's like, "No."

I'm like, "Oh, man."

- So what I want you to do is (faintly speaking) .

- [J.K.]

This is essentially the second attempt to start a boarding program for impoverished kids in the country.

- Oh, okay.

- [J.K.]

If you qualify for free and reduced lunch, which is a measure of your socioeconomic status, then you qualify for the program.

- Is it?

(Randy speaks faintly) (laughs) Let's try this again.

- [J.K.]

So if you're a student in At Last!

you are attending your local public school.

They help get you to school in the morning.

(child laughs) - What's up, buddy?

- [J.K.]

And then they pick you up and you come back to their campus.

They have housing there for you.

They feed you.

You do go home on weekends to spend time with your family, but the rest of the week you are at At Last!

- They're here with us every day that precedes the school day, from the time school lets out until they go to school again the next morning.

- [J.K.]

I visited the At Last!

campus a couple of times.

They usually start with academic work, whether that's homework that they've been assigned from school.

- [Randy] If they don't have homework, we know the concepts that they're working on at school that day.

And so we find something that reinforces the concept.

- [J.K.]

Most of them are working one-on-one with counselors and volunteers.

One kid was over on the whiteboard scribbling away.

- [Teacher] Good job.

- [Randy] And then they should like be a kid: go to the park, play, have fun and wait for dinner.

- [J.K.]

They'll have some free time, some playtime, some recreation.

And then they'll all sit down together for a family meal.

They'll talk together as a family, eat together as a family.

They'll talk about what happened during the course of their day.

- It's fine.

I'll get it.

- Alicia Edwards, who's known as the house mom, is a certified counselor, and has this incredibly warm, comforting presence, who really is like a second mom to these kids.

And then they'll clean up, vacuum the living area, do the dishes.

(gentle music) And then it's lights out, and then they'll start again fresh in the morning.

- An educational resource isn't just understanding the concept a teacher was trying to teach you at school that day.

Another educational resource is going to be getting a full night's sleep.

Things were as apt to go crazy at my household when I was growing up at 3:00 in the morning as they were at 3:00 in the afternoon.

So we're trying to make sure that we're giving the child all of the educational resources that are going to impact their ability to learn.

The overnights helps us to do that.

So this is where my childhood home in Dallas was.

It sat right at the end of this driveway.

You couldn't fill a house with more love.

And you also probably couldn't provision it with fewer resources.

It was just my mom and the four of us.

And try as she might, and she did, she just couldn't generate enough income to make it work for all of us.

- [J.K.]

Violence became a routine part of his life.

- When I just take the roll call of the houses across the street from me, a shooting, a murder, a bombing related to a drug enterprise, like, that's the first three houses.

I saw my first person get murdered at the end of the street here when I was 12.

A 14-year-old shot a 16-year-old, like here, from about 15 feet away.

This was an argument over a bicycle wheel.

But that happened with good people around, great neighbors around.

- Whenever he was like 13 or 14 years old, he started getting full-time jobs in the summer.

And then even during the school year, he would work on weekends and in evenings.

And because of his schedule, he rarely did homework.

But he was so gifted academically that he still managed to graduate really high in his class.

He got automatic admission to the University of Texas at Austin.

- At that time in American history, we were one generation out of the civil rights movement.

And it seemed to me that the role was to capture on the gains from the civil rights movement.

And we had a lot of capabilities in a lot of areas, but we didn't have very many African American lawyers.

So I went to law school in battle mode.

- [J.K.]

Randy went to law school at Whittier outside Los Angeles, and then quickly landed one of the most competitive internships in Dallas.

He was living with his mom and caring for her, then driving from the most impoverished parts of South Dallas to work in this high-powered law firm.

- I made $6,000 during that six weeks.

That was more money than my mom had made the prior year.

And she wept.

- After the internship, they gave him an offer to come on full-time, and he jumped at the chance.

While there, he launched this entertainment practice, against all odds, and landed all sorts of famous clients.

- By October of 1989, I'd landed my first client, and it was this guy, Vanilla Ice.

- And then later on, quit that job to help start this transportation logistics company and ended up becoming wildly successful with that as well.

- That was a really good thing for me because it allowed me to, number one, scrape some winnings off the table, which was important to me; and number two, focus on fulfilling that promise I had made to my mom.

In my teens, I told my mom, at some point, I'm going to do something to honor the sacrifices that you've made and all that you've poured into me that's made this possible.

That's me and my mom.

This is my senior year in high school.

My mom always, always emphasized getting an education, and she nurtured incessantly.

That constant gravitational pull, I think, is what kept me in orbit.

This really is about honoring the sacrifice of my mom by helping those moms and by helping the kids who are sort of in the position now that nine-year-old me was in here.

That's what At Last!

is for.

(gentle music) Your environment impacts sort of how you feel about your day and how you feel about your life.

And so I wanted this to be a place where there was lots of light, space, and color so that they became motivated.

For some of them, when they're at home, their view outside the window isn't extraordinarily pleasant.

Here, it's a sunset, it's a grassy yard, it's a creek.

- [J.K.]

It's clear how comfortable the kids feel in the program, how accepted they feel, and how well cared for.

- I came in my third grade year and I left during my sixth grade in At Last!

And they helped me with so much over that three-year span.

They've helped me mature.

And it's really just a lot that they did for me.

If I didn't come to At Last!

I probably wouldn't be the person that I am now.

Mr.

Bowman, he's just a good person.

He helps everybody.

- [J.K.]

But the parents whose kids go to this program are also sacrificing something.

- The hardest part for me of bringing my kids here was the fact that they wouldn't be at home.

But I just though about all the opportunities that they would get.

Also the fact that it allows parents to get opportunities too.

Like I'm now able to work overtime, and I can put my kids in (indistinct) and other things like that now.

- In those initial conversations he has with those parents, Randy tells them his own story.

He shares how much his mom meant to him, about how despite as much effort as she put into providing him a stable home, you know, there's only so much that she could do.

So he tells parents, these moms especially: "Whenever I look at you, I see my own mom.

I see someone who just wants what's best for their kids."

- Everyone, one bite of cake?

- Okay, I'll have a little.

- Mm, you're good.

- [J.K.]

Randy will never forget where he comes from.

He calls himself a Grove boy.

He's from Pleasant Grove.

And rather than leaving that world behind after achieving material success, he's devoted himself to trying to lift others up.

- I want to be involved in this work because I know how deeply and intensely poverty creates pain.

And I refuse to ignore it simply because it's no longer present in my life.

- [J.K.]

Randy is planning to break ground this year on the next phase of the project, which he calls House Two, which is a massive expansion, a dorm that will house something like a hundred kids.

And they plan to open up in 2027.

If you were to only read the headlines about Texas, you might get the sense that our state is a deeply polarized, embittered place.

But I'm always moved whenever I actually spend time on the ground with people across the state who are working every day to make other people's lives better.

- [Lynn] I didn't go out of my way to do any of this stuff.

It's just the way I am.

And I'm proud of that.

- [Randy] What I hope I can bring to this is the presence of empathy, the presence of compassion.

- [J.K.]

I'm really moved whenever I encounter someone who has chosen to devote themselves to a cause greater than themselves.

It's a remarkable thing.

(gentle music)