Help the People is more than a podcast—it’s a movement. Hosted by Shannon Scott-Riley, a writer, consultant, and mental health professional with over 15 years of experience, this show creates space for truth, healing, and action. Each episode blends storytelling, community insight, and critical conversation around the issues that shape our lives mental health, justice, culture, and resilience in underserved communities.
With a background in psychology (MA), CASAC certification, and current pursuit of an LMHC, Shannon brings both professional expertise and lived experience to every conversation. Expect raw honesty, grounded wisdom, and practical guidance that speaks directly to the challenges—and the hope—of everyday people.
Whether you’re here for inspiration, knowledge, or just to feel less alone, Help the People reminds us that kindness knows no enemy, and change begins with us.
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Help the People is more than a podcast—it’s a movement. Hosted by Shannon Scott-Riley, a writer, consultant, and mental health professional with over 15 years of experience, this show creates space for truth, healing, and action. Each episode blends storytelling, community insight, and critical conversation around the issues that shape our lives mental health, justice, culture, and resilience in underserved communities.
With a background in psychology (MA), CASAC certification, and current pursuit of an LMHC, Shannon brings both professional expertise and lived experience to every conversation. Expect raw honesty, grounded wisdom, and practical guidance that speaks directly to the challenges—and the hope—of everyday people.
Whether you’re here for inspiration, knowledge, or just to feel less alone, Help the People reminds us that kindness knows no enemy, and change begins with us.
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 wholeness is found when faith, truth, and purpose finally align.
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 pews, revealing how systems built to save often end up silencing. He also shares the truth behind his upcoming novel, Murder of Crows (releasing this December), a haunting mirror of the modern church and its fear of truth.
This episode is an invitation to stop performing and start living. To choose honesty, even when it’s inconvenient. To believe that authenticity is not rebellion it’s redemption.
Follow, share, and leave a comment about what authenticity means to you.Because healing begins the moment we stop pretending.
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 who we’re still becoming. He speaks about image, redemption, and the responsibility of using freedom to lift others.
This is an episode about second chances, about the man you could have been, and the purpose that still calls your name.
This episode explores the relationship between fear, faith, and childhood trauma, how the monsters we once imagined never really left, they just changed faces. Shannon revisits the darkness of his childhood through a letter to his younger self and reflects on how different cultures have understood darkness not as evil, but as sacred, mysterious, and necessary for growth.
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 brought him back into rhythm with the Creator.
This is an episode about becoming whole again: learning to let old identities die, reclaiming your divine rhythm, and refusing to trade your peace for performance.
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, about seeing how even the most challenging moments are part of the Creator’s plan.
Rising From the AshesFrom an early age, we’re taught the language of survival, how to fight, how to endure, how to carry silence like armor. But survival is not the same as healing. In this episode, Shannon Riley reflects on what it means to rise from the ashes of struggle, to lay down the survival script, and to discover the fearless becoming that only comes when the fire strips everything away.
Episode 4 – When Systems Fail, People BleedIn 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 scars on children, families, and communities. He challenges listeners to push back, advocate, and demand better because when systems fail, people bleed.
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 a new definition of manhood to the next generation.
Episode Two: Survival vs. HealingIn 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 survival alone wasn’t enough it numbed the pain without ever mending it.
Through honest storytelling, he reflects on the losses, broken ladders, and God’s interventions that led him to sobriety. This episode challenges us to ask: Are we just surviving, or are we truly healing? It’s a call to move beyond resilience as a finish line and step into the deeper work of recovery, presence, and joy.
help the People Podcast, Shannon Riley, community healing, mental health, youth empowerment, social justice, nonprofit leadership, domestic violence awareness, trauma informed care, human services, personal storytelling, dignity, compassion, kindness, faith, and justice
Help the People is more than a podcast—it’s a movement. Hosted by Shannon Scott-Riley, a writer, consultant, and mental health professional with over 15 years of experience, this show creates space for truth, healing, and action. Each episode blends storytelling, community insight, and critical conversation around the issues that shape our lives mental health, justice, culture, and resilience in underserved communities.
With a background in psychology (MA), CASAC certification, and current pursuit of an LMHC, Shannon brings both professional expertise and lived experience to every conversation. Expect raw honesty, grounded wisdom, and practical guidance that speaks directly to the challenges—and the hope—of everyday people.
Whether you’re here for inspiration, knowledge, or just to feel less alone, Help the People reminds us that kindness knows no enemy, and change begins with us.
