(Video above: Former University of Alabama QB and current Big Oak Ranch executive director Brodie Croyle appears on Yellowhammer Radio)
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John Croyle and his wife, Tee, have seen their dream of building the best children’s home in America grow into three separate facilities in Northeast Alabama: Big Oak Boys’ Ranch in Gadsden, Big Oak Girls’ Ranch in Springville, and Westbrook Christian School, Inc. in Rainbow City.
Their mission has been simple:
“A hundred years from now it will not matter what kind of house we lived in, the kind of car we drove or how much money we had in the bank, but the world may be different because you and I were important in the life of a child.”
Forty years later, the Croyles have not only had an impact on the 2,000 kids who have come through Big Oak Ranch, they’ve also passed on their passion for children to their own kids.
Their son, Brodie, was a star quarterback at the University of Alabama who went on to play in the NFL. After retiring from professional football, Brodie returned to the ranch where he was raised to continue to mission has parents started decades before.
“We’re a Christian home for children needing a chance,” Brodie Croyle said in an interview with Yellowhammer Radio this week. “We don’t have bad kids, we have kids that come from really bad circumstances… We take care of about 150 kids on a daily basis… We have ten homes at each ranch. We put a godly man and woman in a home and we give the six to eight boys or six to eight girls and we say, ‘Show them what God intended for a family to look like. Show them what God intended for a man to look like, a woman to look like, what a husband and wife are supposed to look like…’ Because how are you ever going to repeat something if you’ve never seen it? How are you ever going to go change a generation, how are you ever going to break a cycle if you’ve never seen what it’s supposed to look like?”
For the past forty years, every child who has come into Big Oak Ranch has been made four promises:
1. I love you.
2. I’ll never lie to you.
3. I’ll stick with you until your grown. (They’re one of the few children’s home in America that pays for all of their kids to go to college.)
And 4. There are boundaries, don’t cross them.
Brodie, like his father before him, has now made those four promises to hundreds of skeptical children as they entered the ranch’s gates for the first time.
“One of the girls graduating this week came from a really, really rough past,” he told Yellowhammer. “For a long time she kept us at arms length. About a year and a half ago she went to her house parents and said, ‘I don’t know what it is that y’all’ve got, but I want it.’ And they got to share with her how to become a Christian and how to change her life. That girl’s now bought her own car, she’s about to graduate with honors and go to college, and she’s got a hope and a future. That makes you say, ‘God’s doing something special here.’”
Croyle could rattle off dozens of similar stories at a moment’s notice, and almost all of them end with a child breaking the cycle of abuse, neglect or poverty that they came out of.
“Success for us is 20 years from now, did they break a cycle, did they change a generation, did they become the man or woman that God created them to be? That’s success for us.”
Check out the full Yellowhammer Radio interview with Brodie Croyle in the video above or by subscribing to the Yellowhammer podcast.
