Turning Pain Into Purpose

How She Found Smiles for Jake

My name is Katie Baier. I live in the Pillager community, and I got involved with Smiles for Jake through an initiative I was running called Community Bridgemakers, focused on mental health, workforce development, and social cohesion.

At one of our community gatherings, I met Sarah, and we developed a friendship and a working relationship around mental health in our region. One day I just told her—my heart was really calling for youth involvement. I asked her what I could do to get involved with Smiles for Jake. She told me there were two board positions open. Something on my heart told me that was exactly what I needed to do. I filled out the application, and about a year and a half ago they welcomed me in.

Why She Said Yes

I think I really missed being involved in our younger generation’s life. In the past I’d coached volleyball, taught leadership and resilience curriculum in classrooms, worked with different initiatives that build youth development skills. Then I became a mom—I have three kids now, five, three, and six months old—and I started thinking about leadership differently. If I can build leadership at home, I can carry that into leadership in our communities too.

Starting the Conversation at Home

For me, these conversations start as early as I can start having any conversation with my kids at all. At home, we constantly normalize struggle. If mom’s having a hard day, or the kids are having a hard day, or dad’s having a hard day, we talk through it as a family. The more we normalize those conversations at home, the more kids internalize that it’s normal—and the more comfortable they’ll be having those same hard conversations at school, with their friends, and in their community as they grow.

A Faith Passed Down

A lot of how I show up in this work comes from how I was raised. I grew up in a very strong Catholic family. My grandmother was basically the grandmother to our entire community—she loved everybody she came across, and people would save her a seat at every sporting event, that’s how known and loved she was. She raised thirteen children on a Catholic farm, and through everything that life threw at her, she was a praying mother. That praying mother became a praying grandmother to somewhere around a hundred grandchildren and great-grandchildren combined.

One of the things she taught me was to lean on prayer—to lean on my faith the way she leaned on hers. She built her whole life around that. I’ve carried that into my own household now, and I try to instill those same values of faith in my boys and my little girl.

It shows up in small ways too. Kids are often afraid of monsters, and one of the things I’ve started normalizing in our house is calling on Jesus when they’re scared—because He’s the one who can truly take that fear away. I never want my kids to feel unheard, like they’re just making something up. I want them to know: I hear your concern, and there’s something greater than that concern that can carry you through it. That’s not so different from the bigger challenges we all face in everyday life.

The Cross We All Carry

One of the things I come back to again and again is this: we all have a cross to carry, and none of us were ever meant to carry it alone. It doesn’t matter how big or small the struggle looks from the outside—whether it’s a kid upset that someone took their toy, or someone walking through postpartum depression, or something far heavier. The cross is the cross. What matters is that we normalize talking about it, and that we let people help carry it with us.

For me and my family, the way we get through our struggles and help carry each other’s crosses is through prayer, and through recognizing that we were never meant to walk through this world alone. I believe Jesus Christ came to take away our sins and to take away those burdens, and that He’ll always be there to help us through even the most difficult times.

I’ve had my own struggles in life. But I’ve always felt the need to reach out—whether that meant leaning on my faith, seeking spiritual guidance, or leaning on the people close to me. It makes a real difference. You stop feeling so alone. Because the moment we start keeping it inside is the moment we start to isolate—and isolation is where the negative voices get loudest. The more we surround ourselves with life-giving people instead, the more we can spread that same hope and light back out into the world.

Turning Pain Into Purpose

If I had to tell one story to someone who’s struggling, it would probably be the story of becoming. Not everyone becomes a mom, but my story is really this maiden-to-motherhood journey. As a maiden, you’re young, and you’re beautiful, and you’re vibrant, and you’ve got a ton of energy—you’re just zestful for life, and you feel like you can do anything you want. It’s a very self-fulfilling kind of culture.

Then you get married, and you become a mom, and all of a sudden, as you’re pregnant, you start to realize your body is no longer just yours. It’s making room for somebody else, and you’re giving your energy to this other thing inside of you, and you’re not quite sure what it is yet. You have this weird transition—grieving your old self, the version of you that could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted—but yet you’re looking forward to what you’re becoming, and who you’re nurturing. And then, boom, you’re into motherhood, and you’re still in this weird transition.

I think everybody goes through some version of that weird transition in life—a place where something in their past feels unfinished, or something they regret, and they get stuck there. They forget about who they’re becoming. They forget that their pain can be transformed into purpose.

I think about it like planting a seed. You put it into a dark, uncomfortable, damp place, and it’s completely covered up, with no idea what’s coming next. But there’s water. There’s light. There’s someone tending to it. And eventually, that seed becomes the flower it was always meant to be. That’s exactly how I think about struggle and about Smiles for Jake. The more we can pour onto somebody—resources, a smile, a genuine “how are you doing today?”—the more we help them grow into who they were always meant to become.

The Smile Is the Beacon

When people see that smile on a t-shirt, I think it becomes a beacon of hope. No matter what you’re going through, a smile can transform someone’s entire day—waking your kids up with one, smiling at the person ringing up your groceries, smiling at a stranger on the street. The smallest act of kindness you can offer somebody is just a smile. I think it’s one of the easiest, most impactful things you can bring into this world, and we don’t do it nearly enough.

Why We Sat at Pillager High School

We chose to do this conversation at Pillager High School on purpose. This is our future. Schools are filled with the next generation, and with over fifteen-plus years working in community health and well-being, I’ve come to believe that whatever we build today, we’re not really building for ourselves—we’re building for the people who come after us. A sidewalk that’s accessible whether you’re eight or eighty. A grocery store that brings healthy food within reach. A healthcare system that opens its doors to everybody, insured or not. It’s all the same idea: access for everyone.

Schools are exactly the place where we can build that legacy—Jake’s legacy—for generations to come. It’s about weaving leadership, resilience, and this normalization that we all have a cross to carry, right into how kids grow up. If we can look at somebody and know that, deep down, there’s a cross they’re carrying too, we can offer a smile, offer kindness, be the friend who helps carry their tray to the table. We’re all connected. Helping your neighbor creates a ripple effect that doesn’t stop with just the two of you.

I didn’t know the phrase “We Are All Jake” before I got involved. Now I think about it constantly.

Where This Is Headed

I hope Smiles for Jake creates that same ripple effect on a much bigger scale. I truly believe this has the ability to grow into a national movement—normalizing the cross we all carry, and transforming our communities into places willing to genuinely help people in need.

Personally, I’d love to see something as simple as a prayer chain built for people who are struggling—something anonymous, where nobody knows whose name they’re praying for, but the prayers still reach them. I think that alone could help transform communities. Our prayers can be quiet, and still create a ripple that carries someone through their hardest days.

It’s already growing here at home. Our SMILE Advocate Sessions have expanded beyond schools and bus drivers into businesses and community organizations. We’ve also just started Smile Clubs, aimed at middle schoolers—grades five through eight, which can be such a hard transition for kids. The message we want them to hear is simple: we’re here for you, we care about who you are, and we want to teach you the skills to get through hard times, not just tell you to push through them.

But it also takes people who’ve done their own work first—people who can show up as something life-giving for the kids and communities around them, instead of adding to the weight. It starts with us. It starts with taking responsibility to talk about our own struggles, get help when we need it, and then tell that story of getting through it, so it might resonate with somebody else who needs to hear it.

Why This Conversation Matters

Silence is deadly. The more we silence the conflict going on inside each of us, the more we isolate—and isolation just breeds more of that same negative, despairing inner spiral, especially when we’re already going through something hard. The more we can get out into our communities, be around people who affirm who we are, and remember that somebody can always help carry the weight—the better chance we have of actually reaching people before it’s too late.

How You Can Help

Talk about it in your own home, the way we try to at ours. Normalize the hard days, out loud, in front of your kids. Offer somebody a genuine “how are you doing today?” and actually wait for the answer. Support Smiles for Jake’s work in schools and communities—through a SMILE Advocate Session, a Smile Club, or simply passing along a resource to somebody who needs it. None of us were meant to carry this alone, and none of us have to.

Smile on,

Katie

If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out. None of us were meant to carry our struggles alone. Support Smiles for Jake’s mission by donating, volunteering, or bringing a SMILE Advocate Session to your school, business, or community.