Susan Binkley has dedicated her life to helping women and children overcome addiction, trauma, and abuse. As the founder and president of Blue Monarch, a long-term residential recovery program, she’s empowered nearly 1,000 women and children, reuniting over 350 families and breaking cycles of hardship.
A key element of her mission is Out of the Blue Granola, an on-site business run by women in recovery. Each bag carries a personal story of redemption, providing job skills and income to support long-term independence. She even has a bestselling book, From My Front Row Seat, featuring inspiring stories of recovery and resilience. Please welcome Susan Binkley!
What inspired you to establish Blue Monarch?
Blue Monarch was birthed from a powerful dream I had one night in 1995. In that dream, a large book was placed in front of me, and I was required to read it. It was basically a detailed business plan for how one might create, develop, and operate a recovery program for women and their children. It even described how the women in the program would be employed by producing a product.
When I woke up, I made jokes about how I must have intercepted someone else’s dream because it had absolutely nothing to do with my life. I was a professional visual artist and ran a large horse-boarding operation. So, it didn’t seem to have any relevance to me personally.
Not to mention, it was all about helping women and children, and both got on my nerves. (Thankfully, I have healed from that.) I thought groups of women could be challenging and only liked one child — my own. But years later, the plan in “the book” fell into place exactly as described on those pages.
The Blue Monarch is a symbol of recovery and empowerment. Can you tell us about it?
Many of the women we serve have never earned an honest wage or successfully held down a job for any length of time. I teach a 10-week work ethics course, and our on-site granola business is the perfect environment to test workplace integrity in action. Earning a job with Out of the Blue Granola has become a rite of passage in our program.
The women are excited to have an opportunity to earn an income. They love showing their kids they can be successful at a job and enjoy learning new job skills. After all, the women of our program run every aspect of this business: sales, customer service, invoicing, shipping, receiving, baking, and packaging. The granola is sold through major retailers like Publix and Whole Foods, and the manager of Out of the Blue Granola is even one of our graduates.
Since so many of the granola bakers have felony charges, these jobs provide a chance to establish a positive work history and healthy résumé, which will help them once they leave our program and look for employment elsewhere.
Your book, From My Front Row Seat, offers an intimate view of your experiences. What do you hope readers take away from your stories?
I’m a fairly private person, so it stretched me to share some of the more intimate pieces of this journey. A few I had never shared in public, but I felt it was important to do so to keep the entire story raw and authentic.
The most common thing readers tell me is that they “laughed and cried at the same time.” I love to hear this because it tells me they really grasped the Blue Monarch world through my eyes. There are plenty of days when I’m laughing one minute and wanting to cry the next. It’s an emotional roller coaster because we deal with such huge life-changing issues.
How do you maintain balance while dedicating so much of your time and energy to helping others?
Sometimes, I think my 45-minute drive home and my driveway, which is almost a mile long, are blessings. Both provide great opportunities to decompress after an intense day at Blue Monarch, during which I may have dealt with tremendous heartache, frustration, or stress. In fact, there have been times when I’ve parked my car halfway down the driveway so I can just breathe before coming into the house to greet my husband.
My home is also my sanctuary. It’s perched on the side of a mountain and is incredibly quiet, with no lights in sight. The solitude it provides has helped me tremendously through the years.
I love to cook, which is very therapeutic for me. My kitchen becomes my workshop, and I’m in my element in that environment. The process is helpful because it gives me an opportunity to do something where I can see tangible results in real time. So much of what we pour into each day has delayed results that we may not see for years — or maybe never.
Creating something with a beginning and an end provides a chance to make progress and see it. And after owning a restaurant for 12 years, I have an appreciation for good, quality food. If I make it myself, I know what’s in it. I also love to take little day trips by myself to small towns and find interesting, locally owned places to eat. That’s probably my favorite getaway on short notice.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
By far, that’s a message I received years ago when I took a month-long sabbatical after suffering burnout from my work at Blue Monarch. I wandered the beach one day, asking God for help because I knew I couldn’t continue our work if I couldn’t recapture compassion for the women and children we served. I was also concerned about how to protect my staff from experiencing the same thing.
As clear as day, I heard God say, “Your job is to serve, not fix. Love, not judge.” This advice was a game-changer. I suddenly realized that was the key to my burnout. I was beginning each day trying to “fix” people and ending the day feeling defeated because I couldn’t. But I could certainly serve and do it well. And I could always do a better job of loving the people I served.
I brought this message back to our team, and none of us have ever reached burnout since. When we begin to feel exhausted, we ask ourselves, “Are we trying to serve or fix?” This always puts things back into perspective.
Name three things can’t you live without.
My dogs, Rita and Anna, who are mixed-breed rescues, my yoga mat flip-flops, and my vehicle’s sunroof.
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