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Wednesday in Nashville, Brad Paisley and his wife, actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley, break ground on their new non-profit, known as The Store.
It’s based on Unity Shoppe in Santa Barbara, California, a place that lets people in need shop in a regular environment without having to visit a food bank.
Brad and Kim discovered Unity Shoppe as they were trying to teach their sons a lesson.
“It was one Thanksgiving,” Brad recalls, “when Kim, she said, ‘These kids are spoiled. They need to understand there’s hungry people out there. And where should we go?’ And a friend of ours said, take ’em to Unity Shoppe.”
“And the next thing you know,” Brad continues, “we went back a bunch — so much so that there’s an area of Unity Shoppe that’s Huck and Jasper‘s Creative Nook.”
Brad remembers that Huck and Jasper, who are now twelve and nine, respectively, almost immediately understood the importance of what they were doing.
“A friend of ours asked them once, ‘How does it make you feel to do that?'” Brad explains. “It was Huck who was actually manning the register. He was checking people out, and he loved that, scanning and checking them out at the register as they’d come through.”
“And he said, ‘Well, I felt great.’ He said, ‘I felt like I was helping.'”
“And they said, ‘Well, how do you think they felt?’ And he thought about it for a second, and in his own words, he said, ‘I think they felt normal’ — which is an interesting thing. I mean, he gets it. That was back when he was seven.”
Brad and Kim are set to talk more about The Store Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America. You can watch for them starting at 7 a.m. on ABC.
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