What Is Rockside Ranch? A Life Restoration Program for Men in Crisis
People ask us all the time: Is Rockside a rehab? A mental health facility?
These highlights are from an episode of Restoration Matters, Rockside Ranch’s podcast, where co-founder Craig answered that question directly.
A working ranch for life restoration
Rockside is a working ranch. We're on about a hundred acres, and we raise chickens and pigs and turkeys and sheep and all kinds of different animals. But the whole point of the ranch is to provide life restoration for men who are in some kind of a crisis. Something about their life is not going the way that they intended or would like it to go. And they have made a decision to come to a place for eight months, to live here on the ranch and to work on certain habits, certain skills, that are going to help them get to a place in their life that they want to be.
Who it's for
That crisis could be some kind of an addiction: drinking too much alcohol, smoking marijuana, some kind of a drug, or a technology addiction like video games. But not all of our guys have an addiction. Some guys are dealing with some kind of a mental health struggle that they're wanting to have a little bit of time and space to work through. Some guys are having a hard time finding or keeping a job.
More and more, we're getting guys who everything was going really well in their life. They graduated high school, they went to college, and then they realized, you know what, this path really isn't for me. Now I'm lost. I need a new pathway.
The biggest thing is whether they want to be here or not. If a guy is being pressured to come by family or friends, that can be a good catalyst. But if that is not met with a personal, internal desire for life restoration, then this is not going to work, because this is a really difficult program.
Why a farm?
There are rhythms in farming that are incredibly healthy and restorative. There's challenge. There's a realness to farming. Students often tell us that one thing that motivates them to get up and out of bed in the morning is that if they don't go and feed the animals, they're going to die.
I think many guys right now are craving that purpose or that meaning. They're wondering, what about my life is making any difference? On the farm, it is much easier to identify the answers to those, because it's right before your eyes.
On the farm, there are endless opportunities for problem solving, and many of those skills are along the lines of the trades. Guys are exposed to everything from carpentry to mechanics to electrical and plumbing, to drywall, tile, roofing, painting, all of which open up new pathways for careers that they might not have considered in the past.
Where faith fits
We are a Christian program. But that really applies to the staff and the community that the guys are coming into. It's not an expectation that the students subscribe to that belief system. We're trying to love and care for each other, to honor each other, and to live by what the Bible says. But we're never going to ask you or expect you to say you believe something that you don't.
Some of my favorite Bible studies are when guys say, "That's weird," or "I don't agree with that." It just shows how much they feel safe in that environment to challenge something. The worst thing possible would be for them to fake it. What we want is a genuine, authentic life restoration.
How it started
I graduated college in 2008, right when the economy was crumbling. I went back and was helping my dad, who's a rice farmer, and started thinking, man, we produce a lot of food. I thought about guys who are in crisis, who might not feel like they have much good to contribute to the world. If you just came and were doing what I was doing, you would have taken part in providing food to literally thousands of people.
It was an idea for maybe two years before my wife, Jen, who at the time wasn't my wife, told me that she had this idea of using farming or ranching for life restoration. And so it was really what brought us together.
Know a young man who's stuck?
Almost all of us know a guy in his late teens or twenties who is having a hard time. And almost every guy that comes to the ranch comes here because he was told about it by a friend or family member. Those friends and family members are heroes in their own right.
And it isn't only young men. Rockside Great Lakes, our ranch in Allegan, Michigan, serves men ages 28 to 45 who are ready for the same kind of restoration.
Rockside now has ranches in Etna, California; Black Hills, South Dakota; and Allegan, Michigan. See our locations, or apply.
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