The Love is Greater Than Hate Project is a nonprofit aimed at ending interpersonal violence and promoting forgiveness. Executive Director Buck Blodgett first joined me on Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz in Season One. The organization has grown and expanded since then. He joins me this week to talk about their new Forgiveness Program where they promote the idea of forgiveness to prison inmates. They are also expanding with the new Love > Hate Chapters Program, and they have a great event coming up at the Schauer Arts Center called, "The Butterfly Legacy: Tales of Resilience."

• https://www.theloveisgreaterthanhateproject.com/
• https://www.theloveisgreaterthanhateproject.com/event/talent-show-the-butterfly-legacy-tales-of-resilience/

This week, Buck talks about some exciting new initiatives from the organization. He'll And with that, here are 15 minutes, 15 more minutes, on the Love is Greater Than Hate Project, with Buck Blodgett, on 15 Minutes with Fuzz.

Buck, welcome back to 15 Minutes with Fuzz. It's been a bit since the last time we spoke, you were one of my Season 1 guests, Season 1, Episode 35, and here we are now on Season 4, so it's great to have you back.

When I, when we started, emailing back and forth, I thought for sure it was, you know, Last year, and it, you know, time just kind of flies in this kind of post ish COVID world, so. For those who maybe haven't listened to every single episode of Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz, but for those who have, I appreciate it.

Could you please give us a summary of what the Love is Greater Than Hate project is all about? How it got started and why and also the mission that your organization serves.

It's basically domestic violence, sexual violence, bullying, human trafficking. Intimate partner violence, dating violence, one on one, the things people do to each other. So, ending interpersonal violence, promoting forgiveness, and presencing love. Great. That's our mission. It got started, through tragedy.

Eleven years ago, we lost my daughter, Jessie in Hartford at age 19 to the unexpected and unpredicted violence of a friend, who was also 19 years old, who went to high school with Jessie. And something happened inside of me when that happened, and I don't know if I can still explain it, but I had to do something.

Sure. And I've been trying to do something for 11 years, and it's Jessie's legacy, The Love Is Greater Than Hate Project.

So that's what I'm trying to teach anywhere and everywhere. We're not a, a service organization, we're a message organization. So yeah, we do live programming, in the prisons and in schools and on podcasts and wherever

And, your mission and your, I guess your organization is starting to expand a bit and get that message out into more places. So now one of the new programs that you have is a prison program, right? Can you explain what that is and how it got started?

It's a forgiveness class. It's a 10 session, class, and we're doing it in three state prisons and, the Adult Rehab Center at the Salvation Army in downtown Milwaukee. So four venues with about 20 guys in each class, each week for 10 weeks. The, the, there's a few core themes and the main one is, again, that forgiveness stops the generational cycle of abuse.

And over 90 percent of the guys and the women in our state system, Fuzz, have experienced trauma and abuse themselves. That's why they're there. So we're trying to interrupt that. We're trying to get, another of our core themes is that the forgiving, forgiveness isn't a one time thing. Like, I forgive you, boom, done.

Let's not think about it, talk about it anymore. It's a process. And the bigger the wound, or the trauma, or the hurt, the longer and deeper you have to go to, to complete the process. And these guys, most of them, have a lot of coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms to avoid or deny their anger and their pain.

So it comes out in, explosive and random ways sometimes. And where we're starting with the class is to get at your real pain and your anger and to be able to, express it and heal it. And that's where the forgiveness process begins.

I said, is that good? And Stacy said, she's the program supervisor. She's been there seven years, done hundreds of programs. She said, that never happens.

I show up, I go in the lobby, lesson two, guy comes running up to me, Dr. Blodgett, Dr. Blodgett, I called my mom. I'm like, you called your mom? He said, yeah. He said, My mom and I haven't been close. I said, well, tell me. And his story, the short of it is that he's been basically estranged from his mom since he was a kid.

Like they've had no relationship his entire life. This guy's almost as old as me. He's in his fifties now. And he called his mom after one class. And then, one more quick story.

And that night, he was snoring like crazy, driving me nuts, I couldn't sleep, I was getting madder and madder, I started throwing things at him. At one point in the middle of the night, my new roommate said to me, this guy tells us in the group, if I had a gun, you'd be dead right now. And the guy tells us all in the group, as I laid there in the middle of the night after that, and we had just done lesson one that morning, it occurred to me, I gotta find a new way to deal with people.

I've gotta, I gotta change me. And he said, long story short, that guy and him are now good friends. That's just a dumb story about snoring.

I have all kinds of stories like that. That'll be the last one I tell, but that's the power of forgiveness.

Are you looking to expand that then out? And, and also, If so, there's only one Buck Blodgett, so how do you, how do you get that out to everyone? Oh,

With this forgiveness Class two, we'll see we're gonna need more facilitators. And I'm conspiring with somebody behind the scenes a little bit right now who is, who, who literally wrote the book on forgiveness. Like literally. He founded the International Forgiveness Institute and, and I'm hoping that.

We can train up a group of facilitators.

We also, if this is really going to make the kind of difference, we. Want it to and need it to. And fulfill our vision. Our vision's a little different than our mission. Our vision is the end of interpersonal violence by the end of this century. If we're going to deliver on that one, we're going to need people all over the planet.

So we have this idea for a chapters program. We're prototyping it right now, and it's going really great. The people in the prototype chapter seem to love it and be getting great value out of it. If you're a chapter member in a future Love is Greater Than Hate chapters program, you will pledge, you'll, you'll basically adopt our mission.

That's where we need to get, and that's the purpose of the chapters program.

Where is your prototype chapter right now?

Sure. Sort of like AA has the 12 steps, and you know, there, there are people who've been in AA for 20, 30, 40 years, and they just keep doing the 12 steps over and over. Why? Because there's endless, there's, it's a bottomless well of value for people who, you know, you know, are committed to growing into it.

There's a connection with butterflies and my daughter's death that began the morning after her murder at the bottom of my driveway. I had a weird experience with a butterfly and then I had a bunch of them and so did other people and so there's this butterfly thing. I even have a butterfly on my arm except we're on a podcast so I can't show people.

So that's why it's called the Butterfly Legacies. The project is Jessiee's legacy, but it's not for her. It's too late for her. It's for everybody else who it's not too late for. Tales of Resilience. We're going to have seven programs at the Shower Arts Center. Okay, here's what I should be saying. It's at the Shower Arts Center.

It's Thursday night, September 26th. There's a cocktail meet and greet, happy hour at five, and then the show starts at 630. 6. 30, September 26th, the Shower Arts Center, open to the public, everyone's invited. We'll have seven performances, by six different people, and they will be victim survivor thrivers of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, interpersonal violence.

And they're going to tell their stories through art, through music or dance or poetry, some kind of live performance. And we're partnering with, the West Bend Music Academy, Jay, He's an amazing guy who's just taken this on and he's, he's providing professional musicians to help our people tell their story in music and, Jesslyn Jesslyn's gonna train the people who want to share their story through dance. And so, we hope to pack the Schauer Arts Center, it's a fundraiser for the project. You know, the, we need resources to do our work, we need money to build out chapters programs and prison programs and get new facilitators and stuff like that.

So we hope people come to the Schauer Arts Center on September 26th. There's not going to be a dry eye in the house. It's going to be powerful. It's going to be tragic stories that are a little heartbreaking, but incredibly empowering because people have overcome their trauma and they're making a difference in the world.

And they've been funding us and partnering with us, providing not only an annual grant, but tech training and. Online coaching, just all kinds of resources, and they've been out here three times and they're coming again in September. And Lori, the executive director of the Mr. Ballin Foundation is going to present a grant for the Jessie Blodgett Music Scholarship Fund to end in her personal violence.

Jessie wouldn't have wanted one really gifted university student to get a big grant from us to help with their scholarship. She would've wanted. A whole bunch of little scholarships for middle schoolers who are just finding out about band and orchestra and like she did. And so, we're going to give out our first couple scholarships, the, the criteria for the winners will be, they show a natural talent for music.

They, have a need, their parents don't get it, or their parents can't afford lessons or an instrument, or their dad's into sports like I was and not into the arts, whatever. So they have a talent, they have a need, and then they're going to have to do a little brief little essay with two questions.

What is love is greater than hate? mean to you in middle school? And question two, how are you going to use music to change the world? So we'll hand out our first two scholarships that night at the talent show.

But right now, we're going to give out just two scholarships this year before we grow the endowment. And Jay at the West Bend Music Academy is going to help us find two worthy students from Hartford, where this all began.

So, again, that event at the Schauer Art Center is Thursday, September 26th, right? Yes. If people want to attend, what's, how do they, how do they do so?

Right. Where there'll be a link to register, but that should be happening any day now. So the website is ligth. org. That's short for love is greater than hate. It's not light. Watch it. Your device might autocorrect.

That's where you can register.

That's exactly what's going to happen. Our next newsletter will have an announcement and a description of this event with a link to register.

And that means everything to her dad and I think to her, but especially to the work we're trying to do so that people know. Thank you.

If you ever have an idea for the show, suggest the guest. You can email me. fuzz@fuzzmartin.com. That is fuzz@fuzzmartin.com or go to fuzz martin.com/guest. That is fuzz martin.com/guest. You could also text message me if you want. 2 6 2 2 9 9 FUZZ. New episodes come out on Tuesdays next week. I'm joined by Jay Tamez from the West Bend Music Academy.

You can listen to all the episodes of the shows on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever app you like to listen to podcasts on. This podcast is basically on every platform. You can also listen at fuzzmartin. com. And with that, I will talk to you next Tuesday, right here on Fifteen Minutes with Fuzz.