Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece, and welcome to Berks County Living’s Get Inspired! Project. Today I have Nathan Brant with me. Hi, Nathan.
Nathan Brant: Hi there.
Toni: How are you?
Nathan: I’m doing well. How are you today?
Toni: I am great. It’s a beautiful day, and I can only imagine how beautiful it is on the mountain today.
Nathan: It really was spectacular. The last couple of days we finally hit spring. It’s in its stride now.
Toni: So, Nathan, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Nathan: I came to Berks County five years ago as the CEO of the South Mountain YMCA camps, which is Camp Conrad Weiser and Bynden Wood up on top of the mountain above Wernersville. I am privileged and honored to be able to work with all the children and families that we serve right here in our community.
Toni: It’s a beautiful facility, and I know you guys do a lot of amazing work up there. Let’s go into the Project. What does inspiration mean to you?
Nathan: I looked at this yesterday, and I tried to ask myself the question without answering it immediately, let it simmer a little bit, and then this morning, I woke up and in my email inbox was a quote from Andy Warhol. It was, “They always say time changes, but you actually have to change things yourself.” That certainly is what inspiration means to me. It’s what moves us. It’s what causes us to act. It’s what causes us to change things in our community or grow personally.
Toni: Can you actually feel that happening?
Nathan: Certainly, I can. I think we all do. There’s a moment when we look at our children get excited about soccer for the first time or about art or music, and we get inspired to get them more involved, to help them learn, to help them grow. There’s certainly moments we can feel when we get that push to do something more.
Toni: When’s the last time that you felt that?
Nathan: Last night, actually. I was working with my daughter, Dahlia, and she was doing a project for school. One of the pieces we had to do together (she’s in first grade at St. Ignatius) and we were working on something that impressed us about her. When she was five, she wrote her first song. The melody and the words, she would sing the words to me, I’d write them down, and then I found it on guitar. Just again last night as we were sort of reliving that, I was moved again to try and invest in her and what she’s passionate about, which is music, songs and lyrics, and to help her learn more.
Toni: What a great story!
Nathan: I think as parents we get pushed differently, inspired differently.
Toni: I would have to agree. How do you put that definition of inspiration into practice here in Berks County?
Nathan: It’s a great question. I think for me and for a lot of folks that I know, I think we all give of ourselves to things that we’re passionate about, things that move us. We give of our time and our wisdom to our children. We give of our time and our talents and our treasures to organizations that we believe in and causes that move us.
I’ve been lucky enough to make my passion my career. Not everybody gets to do that. I live to help kids and families grow, both interpersonally as well as individually. I get to do that as my job. I’ve been very lucky.
I’m also inspired to bring the community together to make it stronger, and in my little corner of the county, my 600 acres on a mountaintop, that means I get to bring families together to play. I get to get my family involved in that, meet new people, and weave the fabric of this community a little bit stronger than maybe it was last week, last year, or five years ago.
Toni: Nathan, how do you see inspiration moving from you to others in the work that you do?
Nathan: I think the things that I am individually passionate about, the things that inspire and move me, I definitely feel moved to then share with others. My wife and I both love theatre and performance and the arts, and we share that with our kids; but I also share that with the kids I get to work with.
I get to make rock camps happen, and I get to make arts camps happen. I get to send kids abroad to learn about different cultures, and I get to bring kids from all over the world together in this one beautiful spot in Pennsylvania and have them learn about each other.
The things I’m passionate about I definitely get to share. I think it starts with how we share it with our family, our loved ones, our friends, and then beyond that, we want to try and share that with the people in our community.
Toni: Isn't it amazing that the work that you’re doing, and you do feel inspired, and you’re moved to action, you create possibilities for people that go to the mountain, and then they are inspired to do other things, correct?
Nathan: I hope so.
Toni: Absolutely! Don’t you see that all summer long or all year long?
Nathan: I do. The sad piece is that August 15th comes and kids go back to school, and then you don’t get to follow up necessarily with them as much as you like and hear about what they’re trying in the rest of their lives, until they come back the following summer.
I first was a camp director when I was 22. I was passionate about music since I was a young child, and when I was in college, I wanted to take up guitar. A girlfriend in college, when I was visiting her family, they said, “You know, in the attic we have this broken guitar.” They brought it down, and it was this beautiful Alvarez guitar, and it had a broken string. They had given it to me. I took it back, I changed the strings. I played the thing for 10 years.
When I was in my mid-20s (30s, maybe?), I was working at a YMCA in Carlisle, and I was working with a kid who had no money and loved music. He would, every time he could, pick up one of my guitars and play it. When I was leaving that job, I gave him that guitar, and I asked him to write a letter back to the family who had given it to me.
Toni: Wow.
Nathan: Hopefully, we all have the opportunity to pass tangibly that passion on and that inspiration on to somebody else. I think about him often. I still follow him on Facebook. He has given the guitar to somebody else.
Toni: That’s amazing! What a great story that is. That’s an inspired story. That’s why I love this Project. Who in Berks County inspires you?
Nathan: I sat down and wrote about this this morning, because in a vacuum, sitting in your office or sitting at your house, it seems like maybe no one inspires you. Then, you sit down and you start to make the list and you say, “Oh my – there are way too many people to talk about in a few minutes!”
I certainly am inspired by everyone that we come in contact with that serves others. Our teachers and our school administrators and our police officers, our doctors and nurses, our armed forces – these folks give of themselves to make the place we live better, and that’s inspirational.
I think the Boscov family, first Albert and now Jim and many other folks in our community that try to make Reading better, they are inspirational.
I guess the thing that moves me is young people who do something amazing and unexpected. I think the first time I heard a story like this, I was learning about the man who founded the YMCA in the 1800s. He was a young factory worker, George Williams, and he went out and he asked the factory owner when he was 22 if he could hold a Bible study on the factory floor after it closed. Seven years from his first Bible study meeting, the YMCA was an international organization, and 150 years later, it’s all over the world. It’s omnipresent in our community here in the United States. I look for stories like that story. I want to be able to do that sort of thing, and I like to see other people do it.
In our community, we have a couple of young people still in their 20s that founded their own business that now stretches from New Jersey to California. They have over 20 offices all over the country. Conor Delaney and Courtnie Nein, they founded the Good Life Advisors Group. It’s a financial wealth management group. Right out of college, they were partners together at Waddell & Reed, and in less than two years, they had founded Good Life. They had a dream. They wanted to make something better for the advisors that they worked with and their colleagues. They wanted to make something better for themselves and their families, and they went out and made it happen from nothing to their own offices here in Wyomissing, and offices in New Mexico, in South Carolina, in Delaware, in New Jersey and all over the place. It’s truly astounding, because they are not 30. They tackled this at 25.
Every morning I get up and I look at my list of things to do, and I think, “Well, I could put that off until tomorrow.” I think about those two and what they managed to accomplish at 25, at 26, and I think, “If they can do that, all of our kids in high school have something really amazing to look forward to if they want to put their dreams into action,” and it certainly pushes me, too.
Toni: That is fantastic. What do you want your legacy to be?
Nathan: I started thinking about this as, “What do I want on my tombstone?”
Toni: No, no, no. That’s totally different!
Nathan: I think we all want to leave the world a little better than we found it. We want to leave the people we come in contact with better than we found them. We all want to leave our families better than we found them. Certainly, I want to make the Berks County community a little stronger than when I first got here. If I look back in five, 10, or 25 years and it looks like we brought some people together and we shared a story of community and we made the community a better place, then I will feel pretty darn good.
Toni: I believe you’re living your legacy already.
Nathan: Thank you.
Toni: Thank you so much for showing up for the Get Inspired! Project.
Nathan: Thank you.
