Help The People

For most of my life, masculinity wasn’t an identity  it was a survival strategy.

It helped me endure violence, silence, addiction, and pressure. It taught me how to push through pain, stay in control, and keep moving when stopping felt dangerous. And for a long time, that version of strength kept me alive.

But survival has an expiration date.

In this episode of Help the People, I reflect on what happened when sobriety forced stilln...

In this candid episode of Help the People, host Shannon Riley breaks down the hidden roles Black men are pushed into just to survive systems that were never designed for us. From the street boss to the corporate mask-wearer, the respectability survivor to the politician negotiating impossible choices Shannon unpacks the masks, performances, and survival tactics Black men learn long before we even know we’re learning them.

This ep...

In this deeply personal episode of Help the People, Shannon Riley reflects on the resilience he built while navigating grade school, middle school, high school, and college systems that failed to see, support, or understand him. Through passages from his memoir Letters from the Valley, he reveals how silence shaped his early years, how the mask hardened in middle school, and how he learned to rise not because he was strong, but bec...

Help the People with Shannon Riley

In this deeply personal episode, Shannon Riley opens a tender, unflinching conversation about his father a seventeen-year-old boy who held the pipe more than he held his newborn son. Through reflection, regret, and hard-won understanding, Shannon revisits the wounds of his childhood to uncover a truth many of us never learn:

Our parents were people before they were parents. And most of them were...

In this deeply personal episode of Help the People, Shannon Riley explores the boldness it takes to tell the truth in a world built on silence. Drawing on his novel Murder of Crows, Shannon unpacks the spiritual, emotional, and cultural wounds that keep communities performing faith rather than living it. Through raw storytelling and reflection, he examines how healing begins with confession, how awakening demands honesty, and how w...

Description: In this raw and unfiltered episode, Shannon Riley unpacks the heavy price of authenticity in a world that rewards performance. Drawing from personal experience, he reflects on how the church he grew up in valued image over honesty and how that culture of performance cost his father his recovery and, eventually, his life.

Shannon exposes the illusion of holiness that hides addiction, pride, and pain behind pulpits and...

Sometimes life places you beside your own reflection not in a mirror, but in another man’s story. In this episode, Shannon Riley shares a powerful encounter at A Call to Men Leadership Conference, where he sat next to a man who spent 25 years in prison for the same kinds of choices Shannon once made.

Through honest reflection, Shannon explores grace, guilt, and the courage it takes to tell the truth about who we used to be and wh...

In this episode of Help the People, Shannon Riley takes listeners into a sacred conversation about what it means to stay human in a world that rewards performance.

From nature’s divine rhythm to the quiet death of false identity, Shannon unpacks how the soul is slowly stolen when we live to impress rather than to align. He shares raw reflections on losing himself to titles and expectations and how faith, silence, and surrender brou...

In this episode of Help the People, Shannon Riley explores a deeply personal story about his grandfather’s lessons in labor from junkyards to concrete plants, Shannon unpacks how struggle can become sacred preparation. He reflects on how silence clears the ground, work builds the muscle, and new language plants the seed.

This is an episode about unlearning the language of survival and learning to speak a language of healing instead...

Episode 4 – When Systems Fail, People Bleed In this episode, Shannon Riley exposes how broken systems, such as schools, the criminal justice system, and human services, often fail to recognize the pain beneath the surface and instead too frequently punish rather than heal. From his own childhood fights and encounters with the justice system to decades of working inside human services, Shannon shares how systemic neglect leaves scar...

In this episode, Shannon Riley speaks directly to young men about the lies we’ve been told about manhood that strength is silence, sex is power, and anger is masculinity. Drawing on his own journey of addiction, stillness, and healing, he shares how true strength comes from honesty, discipline, compassion, and humility in the presence of the Creator. This episode challenges us to sit in silence, listen for God’s voice, and pass on ...

Episode Two: Survival vs. Healing In this episode of Help the People, host Shannon Riley unpacks the difference between survival and healing two words we often confuse. Survival is making it through the storm, but healing is learning to breathe after the storm. Drawing from his own story of beginning to drink at fourteen and battling addiction for nearly four decades, Shannon shares how survival once became his only language. But s...