Speaking for the Voiceless
Eric Basye invests in the community and in people
More than a decade ago, Eric Basye, then executive director of Community Leadership Development Inc. (CLDI), began a weekly ritual. He’d walk the streets of Billings South Side, strolling through the neighborhood. While many probably figured he was out for fresh air and exercise, deep down he was covering every neighbor, every home, in prayer.
“I’m not a very idle person,” Eric says. “So, for me, the practice of walking made me slow down in a way that I saw things that I wouldn’t normally see.”
Instead of seeing blighted buildings or crime-ridden sections of the city, he saw the faces of those who lived here. Some became dear friends.
“Had I been driving, I wouldn’t have had these exchanges,” Eric says, noting that from time to time he’d get invited inside for a cup of coffee and some conversation. He often found himself asking the question, “How can we claim the streets and the lives and the homes? I don’t know their stories. I don’t know the pain.” In his prayer, he’d ask, “How can we be used by God to be a light to this community?”
It took more than a decade, but Eric discovered the answer to that question, at least in part. His fingerprints are all over the economic development projects that have helped lift sections of the South Side.
Eric says he got a crash course in urban development when he was fresh out of graduate school at seminary. He was newly married, and his wife, Shelly, was attending medical school at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. Eric took a job with Service Over Self (SOS). The nonprofit was an inner-city home repair camp for young people. Kids who signed up worked in the heart of Memphis providing critical home repairs to those most in need.
“They’re putting on roofs, rebuilding floors, redoing kitchens, using volunteers to help improve the homes of homeowners who couldn’t afford to make the changes themselves,” Eric says. “Being in the homes with these families, it was just heartbreaking. A lot of times it was a grandma who was raising her grandchildren who maybe made $20,000 a year. She didn’t have the $7,000 to repair the roof, so every time it rained, it poured buckets into the house.”
SOS worked in Binghampton, one of the roughest neighborhoods in Memphis. It was No. 2 in the nation for both poverty and crime.
“It was just transformative to be in this place where I was literally the only white guy in the entire room. I’d never experienced this my whole life,” Eric says. Having grown up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, diversity was somewhat new to him. For one thing, he says, it was a challenge to understand the residents’ thick Southern accents. “Then you add in the urban context and it was a double whammy,” Eric says with a laugh.
When Shelly picked Eric up from work each day, there were times when he’d have her make a detour.
“I’d say, ‘Oh Shelly, on our way home, we’re going to stop by Ms. Kitty’s house,’” Eric says. “Ms. Kitty was this infamous lady in the neighborhood, and we worked on her home a few times. She had bleached blonde hair, and it was never really kept. It was just as wild as she was.”
With each introduction, Eric chipped away at any uncertainties.
“As I began to do these intentional touch points with Shelly, introducing her to some of the people I had a privilege of meeting, it was this idea that, ‘Wow, these are people who are just like us.’”
The Basye family eventually moved into the heart of Binghampton, giving the family a lesson in what Eric calls “the power of proximity.” All the while, Shelly says, the Holy Spirit was working on her heart. It wasn’t always easy.
“There was a time when Eric literally walked down from our house, because a kid was getting beat up by eight to 10 gang members. Eric single-handedly walked into the middle of it and defused the situation,” Shelly says.
“It was crazy,” she continues. “He walked into the middle of them and just started praying. He put his hands up in the air and these 10 people looked at him, turned around and walked away. That’s who Eric is. He walks into difficult places and stands up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.”
He had an awakening when a neighborhood drive-by shooting shattered the lives of a family who lived two doors down. It was a Friday night, and the family was hosting a cookout. The lively music that often blared on weekend nights went quiet after gunfire erupted.
“Our neighbor was shot eight to 10 times,” Eric says. “Miraculously, he lived.” Not long after, Eric got a phone call. “Through broken English, the man’s wife said, can you come to the hospital?” Eric did. The man was the primary breadwinner for his wife and six kids.
During the man’s year-and-a-half recovery, his wife took up cleaning houses to make ends meet.
By this time, Shelly was just finishing medical school and starting her residency. The woman would watch her come and go, leaving early, coming home late. One day, Eric remembers the woman paying him a visit.
“She said to me, ‘Your wife is busy and you have your newborn son. I would like to come clean your house, and I would like to do that every other week. Can I do that for you?’”
Eric was stunned. She wouldn’t accept payment.
“Here’s someone who seemingly has nothing and has given us everything.” He adds, “When I think about what love of neighbor looks like? Patricia just loved us in service. It was so humbling. And here we thought we would be the blessing to the neighborhood.”
After living in Memphis for eight years, Shelly wrapped up her residency and the Basyes wondered what their next chapter might look like.
“We really felt compelled that wherever we’d go, we’d continue to live in among low-income neighborhoods,” Eric says. As they were contemplating their move, Eric says a flash of a memory popped into his mind. He was 12 years old, riding with his dad as they dropped off his older sister at what was known then as Eastern Montana College.
“As we were driving in off the Interstate through the South Side, I was just thinking, what a dirty city,” Eric says. It was a section of the city pockmarked with rundown homes and industrial eyesores. “Seeing the factories, seeing the people who were begging on the streets with signs. I saw what looked to be a prostitute. I had never seen that,” he says.
Within minutes, he was on his computer, pulling up census data.
“There were two really poor neighborhoods in Billings — the South Side and the North Side,” he says. He started making calls trying to get a read on both sections of town, he says, but “I really couldn’t get a pulse on much of anything.”
It wasn’t until Shelly came to interview for a job as a hospitalist at the Billings Clinic that Eric got the nudge he needed. He was driving down the 400 block of South 31st Street when he found his family’s home.
“In my mind, it was like the clouds parted and the sun shown down,” he says with a laugh. It was a mint-green house that had been boarded up after a house fire. “It was literally burnt out. It couldn’t be saved. It was condemned,” he says. As he told his wife he found the house they should buy, he says, “We pulled up in front of it and she’s like ‘Great. Sounds good.’”
“Our eight years prior was saying ‘yes’ to difficult things,” Shelly says. “I knew our life was not going to look like everybody else’s. I knew that we were going to be living in an area of town that was not going to be where my colleagues were living. I could see the potential.”
During the calls Eric made with those active on Billings South Side, he eventually connected with a man who had been in the thick of urban renewal for decades. Eric remembers calling Dave Hagstrom, the founder of CLDI.
“I’m moving to Billings and all we really know is that we're supposed to move into the South Side to buy this house, renovate it, and then we really desire to start a church like we've been a part of in Memphis,” Eric remembers telling him. When Dave inquired about the house, Dave told him, “I remember the house burning. I watched it from my front porch.” Turns out Dave lived across the street.
That phone call sparked what Eric calls a “crash course” in CLDI.
“Dave said, ‘You know, we hire guys coming out of prison. We have a job training program, and we’d sure love the work,” Eric says, adding that he ended up hiring CLDI to not only demo the burnt structure but to build a brand-new house in its place. The two became fast friends, and before Eric knew it, he created an internship program officially under CLDI modeled after his work with SOS.
About eight months later, Dave walked across the street with a proposition.
“Do you have any interest in taking over CLDI?” Eric remembers Dave asking him. “He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for God to send someone to do this work. I think you might be the guy.’”
Since 1981, CLDI has been pouring time and energy into transforming the South Side. The heart of CLDI’s work is a Gospel-centered desire to invest in such a way that residents can thrive financially, spiritually and relationally.
“Dave’s been here since the late 1970s with a whole bunch of other people doing really amazing work,” Eric says. Instead of uncharted territory, Eric says he realized, “Man, there have been people that have been pulling stones and making the ground fertile for years.”
If you ask Dave what he sees when he looks at the South Side today, he sees progress.
“Everywhere you walk, you can see improved properties, and you know what good that does for the neighborhood. It raises taxation values. It brings police presence. That’s what community development is, and it works,” Dave says. On a deeper level, he says, by loving your neighbor and taking responsibility for your life, “People start to break the cycle of poverty and break the cycle of sin. CLDI understands this.” He adds, “I’m really grateful that God brought Eric along.”
While many had “tilled the soil” on the South Side, the statistics when Eric took over as executive director of CLDI in February of 2011 were still, by all accounts, bleak. Three out of every 10 households were in extreme poverty. Nearly half of South Side residents never graduated from high school. Many rented homes, being unable to afford to buy one.
“We saw the Lord do really amazing things,” Eric says. “He is still doing amazing things.”
Within Eric’s first year, Hannah House was established, giving a home to women coming out of prison or recovering from addiction. Over time, the women leading the home were women who once walked through the door to receive care there.
Eric asks, “Who better to lead this house than the women who have been down that path of recovery and addiction, having lost their children, now living on the other side to help draw people out of that?” Since 2012, hundreds of women have transformed their lives there, and the program is readying itself for a major expansion to serve even more.
A year before Eric arrived, CLDI had purchased an old row house near Riverside Middle School. It was used for differed purposes but eventually, Eric envisioned it as a place to reach at-risk kids. The 316 House became an after-school hangout where kids connect, grab a snack and play video games together. Eric knew that hundreds of kids lived nearby. The home could entertain what he called “a captive audience.” He longed to “give them examples for a different way to live.”
By 2016, Eric was starting to look for a new home base for CLDI, to give it a bigger, more visible presence. Multiple times, he looked at the building on the corner of South 29th and First Avenue South, and multiple times, he walked away.
“It was condemned,” Eric says, having sat vacant for years. He remembers an architect telling him, “Eric, this is a can of worms, you need to run far away from this.”
In the end, CLDI bought the building for $200,000. “The only thing we were able to really keep on the building was literally the shell, the brick exterior,” he says. A mix of private funds and grants helped launch the $3.3 million project. “We saw crazy story after crazy story of just incredible generosity.”
The organization moved into the building in 2018. It provided a community gathering space and 24 studio apartments for those looking to build a rental and credit history, along with CLDI’s offices.
“As you drive by, it’s just this statement. There are good things in this community,” Eric says. “This idea of fostering community, fostering jobs, a gathering place and then right behind it being Mosaic Cottages for seniors. There’s now Tapestry Apartments, literally millions of dollars invested in just in that little corner.” The projects have helped provide more than 100 units of low-income housing to a community desperately in need. While some of the work began with Dave, Eric had a hand in a lot of it.
Across from CLDI there used to be an old gas station that the organization transformed into a vibrant coffee shop. Rail Line Coffee might look like a hip place to get a latté, but it also serves as a job and leadership training program for at-risk youth.
When you ask Eric about what he’s most proud of during his time with CLDI, conversation drifts from buildings, programs and projects to people.
He points to 44-year-old Josh Kroll, a man he calls a mentor and friend. He met him while Josh’s wife was living at Hannah House, trying to rebuild her life. At the time, Josh was trying to rebuild his as well.
In 2018, Josh and his now wife, Tabitha, were charged with a combined 17 felonies for possessing and trafficking drugs from their Billings home. It was the end of a multi-agency sting operation known as Project Safe Neighborhoods.
Josh says the dealing started after his recreational drug use got out of control.
“Methamphetamine was our drug of choice. That’s a soul taker,” Josh says. “Our lives spiraled out. I lost my job. I said, OK, I will sell a little bit to make up for the lost income.” Before long, he says, “I couldn’t look myself in the mirror. By then, we lost our children and we couldn’t get clean.”
Being threatened by real prison time didn’t faze him.
“It’s a strange thing when you have DEA agents with assault rifles kick their way into your house and take you to jail,” Josh says. “You’d think that would be enough to change your ways.”
After their conviction, both Josh and Tabitha received deferred sentences, meaning if they followed the court’s guidelines, their criminal records would be wiped clean. His wife entered sober living at CLDI’s Hannah House. The couple was desperate to get their seven kids back.
“If you don’t have support, it’s near impossible to change your life or get clean on your own. That’s a big part of where Eric steps into my story,” Josh says. “He invited us over to his house, which I thought was really strange. Does he know all the trouble I’ve been in?” He added, “He accepted me. He wanted to know me.”
When Josh joined one of Eric’s Bible studies, he discovered God, learned how to pray for the first time and discovered what an authentic relationship looked like.
Today, Tabitha and Josh have their kids, ranging in age from 9 to 24, back. Tabitha is a case manager at Hannah House. Josh works with the nonprofit Love and Sonshine ministries in donor development as well as community and cultural outreach. He leads a Bible study, started a sober living home for men and looks forward to launching parenting classes with his wife.
“Eric has shown me a path of life that I didn’t even know existed,” Josh says. “To have somebody like that who is willing to take the time out of his life and invest in mine, I cannot pay that back. I truly love that guy.”
“The Lord did amazing things in their lives,” Eric says. “We were honored to be a part of it.”
By 2022, Eric looked at all CLDI had done and wondered if it was time for someone else to take the reins.
“When I stepped into CLDI, if you think of it like a horse corral, there were a few horses in the corral,” he says. He was able to grow the organization, the staff, add new initiatives and new programs. “I was actually on a prayer walk and I came to the conclusion that our horse corral was full,” he says. He felt CLDI needed a different kind of leader, one who could sustain what had been built.
After taking a year to do consulting work with nonprofits all over the Pacific Northwest, Eric got a call asking if he’d be interested in leading a statewide nonprofit known as Child Bridge. The privately funded charity works to find and equip families to care for children who have suffered abuse and neglect. According to Child Bridge co-founder Mary Bryan, if just 7 percent of today’s Christians cared for a single orphan, every child would have a home.
For Eric, the cause was close to his heart. He and Shelly have four children, two biological and two adopted. Their daughter was adopted in Memphis as a newborn baby and their son, from China. Elijah is 18, Ellie is 16, Kai is 14, and Aida is 13.
“As we think about our family, it’s hard to imagine it not being as diverse as it is,” he says. “It’s this tapestry of a family with different stories coming together as one.”
At Child Bridge, Eric knew he wanted that for every one of the 2,200 children in the state’s foster care system waiting in need of a loving home.
“Man, if you could spare a child of a lifetime of hardship by capturing them as a kid — if they had a safe, loving family, how different could their lives be?” Eric says. He calls it an upstream solution to prevent severe trauma from fully taking root in a child’s life.
He’s been on the job a year and already he’s forging new partnerships and has been able to add staff. The organization is literally spending millions of dollars to find and equip foster families. “It’s going to have a generational impact,” he says.
While new seeds are still being planted at Child Bridge, Eric loves looking at the sprouts of growth that continue on Billings South Side thanks to CLDI. He vividly recalls a conversation he had with his eldest son eight years ago.
“We were driving through the neighborhood and he was like, Dad, the neighborhood is getting better. There’s been change. Good things are happening. The houses are nicer and it’s safer,” Eric says.
Don’t ask him to take credit for any of it. He points instead to a strong team and a higher power.
“The older I become, the more trained I become, the more experiences that I have, the more I realize I’m just depending on the Lord to do good things,” he adds, “I’m just grateful to be a part of it.”
