Bob Woodson had a rule for the people he looked for.

They weren’t in the press release. They weren’t at the conference. They weren’t applying for the grant or crafting the narrative that would attract the foundation funding.

“The quality that makes them effective,” he said in Episode 3 of Resilience and Renewal, “makes them invisible. They’re not whining and complaining. They’re not pointing an accusing finger at anybody. You gotta be like a Geiger counter and find them because they’re not looking for you.”

Bob called these leaders “Josephs” — a reference to the biblical Joseph, who was treated unjustly and unfairly but never succumbed to bitterness, never lost his faith, and ultimately became the instrument of his community’s salvation. There were two types of Josephs in Bob’s taxonomy: those who, like Joseph in Genesis, were blameless victims of circumstance; and those who were fallen — the addicts, the former gang members, the incarcerated — who found redemption and became, in their transformed state, the most powerful witnesses and healers their communities had ever had.

In Episode 3, Bob described the listening sessions that formed his deepest understanding of these leaders. For a year, he traveled to five cities and asked one question: what works, and why does it work? He wasn’t looking for policy papers or program evaluations. He wanted testimony.

In Hartford, a woman arrived in a business suit. She had been a prostitute, a drug addict. She had lost her children to foster care and gone to prison. She told her story in five minutes: “Psychiatrists didn’t heal me, nor did jail turn me. But Christ changed me.” She was in school. She had her children back.

This was the pattern Bob found everywhere: redemption through faith, restoration through relationship, transformation through the witness of someone who walked the same road.

Episode 3 also introduced Will Crossley — now Bob’s successor at the Woodson Center — and the Piney Woods School, the 115-year-old boarding institution in rural Mississippi that Will credits with saving his life. Will grew up in Inglewood on the south side of Chicago, changing schools every year as his family moved from house to house. At twelve, someone at his church told him about Piney Woods. He arrived a week after his thirteenth birthday. “It was a new community,” he said, “that gave me a new lease on life.”

Both Bob and Will were convinced of the same thing: the answers are already in the communities. They just need to be found, resourced, and held up. That conviction doesn’t end with Bob’s passing. It lives on in everyone he spent 45 years trying to reach.

Watch Episode 3 of Resilience and Renewal. And consider: who are the Josephs in your community? Are you investing in them?