The Courage Coalition

Solocasts and Guest Interviews for inspiring, educating and empowering listeners to embrace courage in all aspects of their lives. Fostering a coalition of individuals who are committed to living authentically and fearlessly in their dreams! This is not a polished highlight reel it’s real stories, raw truth, and the kind of courage that changes lives. Each week, host Corree Roofener brings you unfiltered conversations and heartfelt solocasts that remind you you’re not alone in the climb. From navigating money and mental health to breaking cycles in foster care and redefining success, every episode is about choosing faith over fear and taking your next brave step. The Courage Coalition is more than a podcast it’s a community of dreamers and doers who are ready to live authentically, even when it’s hard.

The Courage Coalition is a education podcast hosted by Corree Roofener, with 182 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Corree Roofener hosts The Courage Coalition, a education show with 182 episodes published.

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  Episode #40

  Everything We Do Is a Choice

  Aug 24, 202622 minS2

  Here is the thread that runs through all of it. Everything we do, from the first blessing of breath each morning, is a choice, and our life is a reflection of those choices. They are not easy choices. Sometimes they feel overwhelming. But they are choices all the same, and no law written anywhere says you have to stay in the job, the relationship, or the version of success that is draining you. The hardest one is refusing to put yourself in a box, because we are taught the opposite. We are taught that following the status quo makes us accepted, safe, successful. My daughter Ema came home from a sports camp recently and told me her coaches said they want to see her stand out, not fit in. That stopped me, because how often do we ignore that exact lesson. We run with the masses when standing in our own originality is the only thing that builds a life that actually feels like us. The cost is real. Slower days, statistics you never meet, parents and peers who may not agree, a driven culture that may never celebrate you the way it celebrates everyone else. But that is what it takes to build the house that is you, and that is where a courageous life is lived. None of this unfolds when we walk in fear or demand to know what comes next. It unfolds when we surrender to what will be and keep walking toward the dream anyway. If I had kept my grip so tight, kept trying to be who others thought I should be, I would never have stepped into Fostering the Summit. It has required a hundred and fifty percent flip of the person I was, and honestly, if I could have imagined everything it would ask of me, I might have walked the other way. But that is the point. Our biggest dreams, sometimes the ones we did not even know we carried, ask for things we cannot picture yet, and it has rolled out in front of me like a sleeping bag unfurling, all I have to do is keep walking. What keeps me moving is knowing these children deserve someone to dream for them until they can dream for themselves, to hold hope until they trust that hope is even possible. So if you are longing for a life that feels more aligned, more purposeful, more full, I will leave you with the same question I keep asking myself. What can you do today to begin? Because a delicious life does not arrive all at once. It comes in baby steps, like a silver lid lifting off a plate so your senses can finally take it in. We all get to choose it. These children get to choose something different. And we get to be the first rock in the ripple that becomes the wave. Love you, mean it. Contact Corree or find out more about Corree and learn about all the ways she does not choose to stay in one lane go here: https://correeroofener.com/ To Purchase Emotional Money click here: Emotional Money Are you ready to walk with us for https:/ https://fosteringthesummit.org Join us as we change the statistics for children aging out of foster care. Also, follow me on https://www.instagram.com/correeroofenercoach/ for more inspiration and practical wisdom for your business and life. Until next time, keep shining bright! - Corree

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  Episode #39

  Handed Over to the Bear's Den

  Aug 17, 202619 minS3

  This morning we are seven days deep into the backcountry of Glacier, carrying everything we need on our own two shoulders, tired in a way that reaches the bone. Before we left, I posted a poll asking how many bears we would see, and people worried. They let the fear of a bear question whether we should go at all. But here is what I keep sitting with out here. Yes, the bears are predators. They could harm us. But we came prepared, with the knowledge and the tools to protect ourselves from the very thing that could hurt us. Now picture a child in foster care who has none of that. Picture the ones who age out at eighteen, turned over to the bear's den with nothing. Every decision was made for them for years, and then one day we hand them a new reality and pretend some magic number made them ready. I look at my own eighteen year old, nowhere near ready, and yet we do this to these children every single day. So let me talk about the power of one. There are more than three hundred million people in this country and fewer than four hundred thousand children in foster care. Even if half of us cannot give right now, that still leaves an enormous number of people who could each choose just one. Your one is the first rock thrown into the water, and that ripple becomes a wave, and a wave changes the whole landscape of the sand. What if you and ten friends wrapped around one child, or ten small businesses supported one foster home and the respite it so desperately needs? We get stuck in the too big and tell ourselves there is nothing we can do, so we do nothing. But that has never been true. And if you are fighting your own battle right now, with addiction or mental health or the weight of your own story, then hear me, because what if the one is you? Six years ago I could not have dreamed of any of this. What made it possible was the slow, uncomfortable healing work of facing the beliefs I claimed as mine even though I never chose them. Fear is not a stop sign. Fear is evidence. Ashana, a former foster child I interviewed recently, said something I cannot shake. Hope meant you were not safe, so you never even reached for it. Imagine a childhood with no maybe someday, only can I get through today without being labeled, can I even want tomorrow to come. That is what we can change. So I will end the way I always do. I am not daring you to change the world. I am asking whether you have the courage to do it for one, and whether the fear standing in your way is the very thing worth looking at. Love you, mean it. Learn more about Fostering the Summit here: http://www.fosteringthesummit.org Contact Corree or find out more about Corree and learn about all the ways she does not choose to stay in one lane go here: https://correeroofener.com/ To Purchase Emotional Money click here: Emotional Money Are you ready to walk with us for https:/ https://fosteringthesummit.org Join us as we change the statistics for children aging out of foster care. Also, follow me on https://www.instagram.com/correeroofenercoach/ for more inspiration and practical wisdom for your business and life. Until next time, keep shining bright! - Corree

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  Episode #38

  The Question That Changes the Answer

  Aug 10, 202624 minS3

  For years I have been quietly playing small in my own story. I have brought you experts and foster parents and former foster children, and I have let their voices carry the weight, because it felt safer than standing all the way up in my own. But there is a Muhammad Ali quote I keep returning to: impossible is just a word people throw around who believe the life handed to them is their only choice. What if instead they believed in the power to change it? So this month I am stepping fully into the conversation, and I am starting with the question that is the whole heartbeat of Fostering the Summit. If I put one child in front of you and told you their story, and asked you to help that one, you would say yes. Almost every one of us would. So why can't we do that same thing for the ones we simply cannot see? Here is what most people never learn until it is too late. When a child in foster care turns eighteen, they age out. The state is no longer their guardian, and if they are not in a long term placement, they are truly on their own. No halfway house waiting. No guaranteed door. Often not even a single adult to list as an emergency contact on a job application. Think about that against your own eighteenth year, or your child's, and how many times they called for advice or a shoulder to lean on. These kids have no one to call. And we act surprised when the cycle repeats, when a young person walks right back to the only people who ever knew their name even if those people were never safe, because at least there they are seen. Fifty percent of all children who age out are homeless within one year. Have you ever been one of the people who complained about the homeless crisis in your town? These are not separate stories. They are the same story, and we keep asking why nothing changes while doing the exact same thing over and over again. We keep putting duct tape on a wound that needs bypass surgery, and then we wonder why it will not heal. We recruit more homes every ten or fifteen years, but not better training, not more support, and so foster families burn out in twelve to eighteen months, as fast as they signed up. Chad and I fostered for fifteen years, and I watched that cycle turn more than once. Fostering the Summit is not about waiting until a child ages out to help. It is about the two, three, four years before that moment, when we still have time to build stability, to give a teenager tools for the complex trauma adults left on them, to let them feel adventure and awe through a child's eyes for the first time, and to help them see that the belief handed to them was never theirs to carry. It would be easy to say six or eight children at a time will never move a national number, so why bother. But that math is exactly the trap. Systematic change never happens in a blink. It happens in ripples, in a couple hundred people becoming a couple thousand becoming two hundred thousand, each one saying yes, I will. So I am not asking you to open a nonprofit or become a foster parent, though you can. I am asking you to sit with one question until it gets brave enough to move you. Would you do it for one? Because if one child standing in front of you is worth everything, then so is the one you cannot see. And if enough of us answer yes, there is not a single statistic in foster care we could not rewrite. Contact Corree or find out more about Corree and learn about all the ways she does not choose to stay in one lane go here: https://correeroofener.com/ To Purchase Emotional Money click here: Emotional Money Are you ready to walk with us for https:/ https://fosteringthesummit.org Join us as we change the statistics for children aging out of foster care. Also, follow me on https://www.instagram.com/correeroofenercoach/ for more inspiration and practical wisdom for your business and life. Until next time, keep shining bright! - Corree

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  Episode #37

  Hope Was Guaranteed Pain with Ashana Kaiulani

  Aug 3, 202648 minS3

  We tell ourselves a comforting story about children. We believe that if a little one is ever left alone in this world, surely someone would step in. Surely a neighbor, a teacher, a stranger with a soft heart would look at a seven year old, a ten year old, a child with a whole life still ahead of them, and say, I will take this one home. But my conversation with Ashana Kaiulani cracked that story wide open. Ashana went into foster care at seven, and by ten she was placed in a group home to await a family that never came. Not because she was unlovable. Because she was loud. Because when the system split her from her baby brother, the one she used to sing to sleep, she refused to go quiet. In her words, he had four mamas by then and he was not old enough for therapy. Her only crime was advocacy. The very thing we beg our children to become, a voice for the people they love, was the thing that got her labeled and left behind. What has stayed with me most is the way she reframed what it means to raise yourself. We love to say a child grew up too fast, that they were mature beyond their years, as if that were a badge instead of a wound. But Ashana asked us to consider not who raised her, but what raised her. Book characters. Movie characters. She built an entire personality out of fictional people because there was no attuned adult left to show her how to be human. And in a home where children wandered the streets until dark and fended for whatever food was left, she learned a survival math that broke my heart. She told me that for years she believed hope was the stupidest emotion a person could have. Hope was guaranteed pain. If you never dreamed, you never had to watch the dream get taken. Sit with that. There are three hundred and seventy thousand children in this country right now, and so many of them have quietly decided that hope is a luxury too dangerous to hold. Think of what our world goes without when a generation of children never learns they are allowed to dream. So here is the question I keep coming back to, the one I now ask everyone. Would you do it for one? Not the whole broken system. Not all three hundred and seventy thousand at once. One child. Ashana reminded me that the research is clear on this, that one consistent, believing adult can change the entire trajectory of a child's life. One person willing to look a child in the eyes and say, I believe in you, and mean it. We have the manpower for this many times over if we stop waiting for the fix to be big enough to feel heroic. So before you decide you are not the person for this, take a walk back to your own younger self and ask what you dreamed about, and who, if anyone, believed you could reach it. Then ask whether you might become that person for someone who has never once been asked what they hope for. Because you are more than worthy of that, and you are more than capable of it. It just takes you believing it first. Find more about Ashana here: https://www.instagram.com/wayhomewellness/ Contact Corree or find out more about Corree and learn about all the ways she does not choose to stay in one lane go here: https://correeroofener.com/ To Purchase Emotional Money click here: Emotional Money Are you ready to walk with us for https:/ https://fosteringthesummit.org Join us as we change the statistics for children aging out of foster care. Also, follow me on https://www.instagram.com/correeroofenercoach/ for more inspiration and practical wisdom for your business and life. Until next time, keep shining bright! - Corree

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  Episode #36

  What if We Changed the Way We See with Guest Danielle Lemottee

  Jul 27, 202642 minS3

  One of the greatest misconceptions about foster care is that healing is simply a matter of making better choices. If someone truly wanted to change, we tell ourselves, they would. But what if the very systems designed to help have also become places where shame, power, and survival quietly replace safety, connection, and hope? This week's conversation reminded me that trauma is not always the event itself it is often what happens when someone reaches out for help and is met with silence, judgment, or disbelief. Danielle's story challenged me in ways I didn't expect. As someone who has lived on both sides of the foster care system, she shared something I can't stop thinking about: It is not a child's responsibility to regulate their emotions for adults who cannot regulate their own. Those words reach far beyond foster care. They ask every one of us to pause before we judge behaviors we don't fully understand and to recognize that survival often looks nothing like healing. What struck me most wasn't simply Danielle's resilience it was the realization that breaking generational cycles doesn't begin with more policies or more programs. It begins with people willing to do their own inner work. Foster parents. Caseworkers. Therapists. Teachers. Mentors. Parents. All of us. Because we cannot offer safety that we have never created within ourselves. We cannot lead someone toward regulation while operating from our own fear, frustration, or need for control. Healing grows in spaces where connection comes before correction, where accountability exists without shame, and where people are finally seen as humans instead of problems to solve. Maybe that's the invitation for all of us today. What would happen if we packed away our judgments long enough to simply sit with someone else's story? Not to compare it to our own. Not to decide what we would have done differently. Just to listen. True empathy asks us to set ourselves aside so another person can finally be heard. And perhaps that's where real change begins not with louder opinions, but with quieter hearts that are willing to see the person standing in front of us. Find out more about Danielle here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-lemottee/ Contact Corree or find out more about Corree and learn about all the ways she does not choose to stay in one lane go here: https://correeroofener.com/ To Purchase Emotional Money click here: Emotional Money Are you ready to walk with us for https:/ https://fosteringthesummit.org Join us as we change the statistics for children aging out of foster care. Also, follow me on https://www.instagram.com/correeroofenercoach/ for more inspiration and practical wisdom for your business and life. Until next time, keep shining bright! - Corree

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