Mikey was as far gone
as a man can get.
This is the true story behind Local 3:16. It's not clean and it's not easy. But it's the reason this work exists — and the reason it might be for you.
Three warm beers on the sand
Mikey grew up a surf-punk kid with a single mom who worked herself to the bone and a sister he adored. He had good men around him. But for as long as he can remember there was a darkness — a conviction that he didn't belong anywhere, that he wasn't lovable. He calls it the delusion of inequality.
He was ten when he drank three warm beers on a San Diego beach. Five minutes later the alcohol hit his blood and the noise stopped. For the first time he felt alive — and lovable. He never needed three beers again. He was an alcoholic on the spot, and there was no turning back.
Everything he loved, gone
First treatment center at thirteen. If alcohol worked, he figured meth would work better. It didn't — it lit the fuse on decades of isolation, institutions, and despair. Every dream he'd held for himself, for his mom, for his family, was destroyed. Nothing mattered but the next drink.
"God, help me."
One day he understood something terrifying: he wasn't going to die quick like so many others. He was going to live — through all of it, in constant torment. From a prison cell, he prayed the most powerful prayer he's ever prayed. Three words.
Six months at the Salvation Army in Stockton taught him what no one ever had: God, prayer, work ethic, the Twelve Steps. He accepted Christ. He got sober. And he stayed sober — no matter what — for fifteen years.
The garbage that learned to take out the garbage
Sober, Mikey went to work — as a union garbage man. It's where he learned the value of unity and of doing hard work with excellence: show up, do the job right, and carry the weight alongside your brothers. No one gets it done alone.
He used to be the garbage that needed to be taken out. Now he gets to take it out.
That's why this is a union. Faith with works. Brothers and sisters showing up to do the labor of the Kingdom together.
Found by grace, and a mission
At fifteen years sober, God sent a storm Mikey couldn't outrun — divorce, the loss of his family, his home, everything. But the bottle was the one door he refused to open. He cried out to God one more time, and a friend invited him to church. The moment he walked in, he knew: this is the place I've been looking for my whole life.
They discipled him, saw what he couldn't see in himself, and sent him into the streets asking strangers one question: What can I do to help? The more people he met, the more he learned what made them dream and what made them weep — and that his job was to bring those people together. That's the work. That's Local 3:16.
Someone showed up for Mikey when he had nothing left. Now there's work to do, and people still waiting. Will you show up with us?