For fifteen years, Whetstone Boys Ranch has pursued a mission that can still be stated in six words:
Sharpening the Character of Young Men.
The phrase comes from Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” It gave Whetstone its name before there was a ranch, a resident, a staff, or even a piece of property. More importantly, it gave the organization a standard by which nearly every decision could eventually be measured.
Whetstone today looks considerably different from the organization that welcomed its first resident in 2011. It should. The ranch has grown from one home to two, from three full-time employees to more than twenty, from informal mentoring to integrated professional counseling, from chores to an intentional work and vocational program, from a small basement school to a multi-level academic program, and from an organization largely concerned with survival to one planning deliberately for sustainability, scholarships, succession, and future generations.
But growth has never been valuable merely because it is growth.
The history of Whetstone is better understood as a long process of learning how to sharpen young men more effectively.
Whetstone began long before it owned a ranch.
In 1996, Nate Dahlstrom was a young man trying to find direction in his own life when an older mentor, Gale Loomis, drew him into a relationship built around faith, outdoor life, honest conversation, challenge, and genuine affection. Gale did not merely advise Nate. He shared life with him. That experience planted the central idea that eventually became Whetstone: young men are changed through relationships with adults willing to know them, challenge them, and remain present when those relationships become difficult.
By 1997, Nate had begun putting the idea into writing and had found its defining image in Proverbs 27:17. Over the next decade, Jeremy Thompson and Brandon Maxwell joined the vision, and the men intentionally sought experience before attempting to build an organization of their own. Their years around Timothy Hill Children’s Ranch, Dry Bones, Shelterwood, Lubbock Children’s Home, churches, mentors, and residential programs taught them that caring about young people was not enough. Residential work required training, structure, patience, accountability, and a willingness to live inside the ordinary complications of adolescent life.
The vision gradually moved toward southern Missouri. Whetstone received nonprofit approval in 2006, developed a board, built relationships with churches and communities, raised money, pursued properties, lost properties, and spent years looking much less like a ranch than its name suggested.
In the summer of 2008, Jeremy and Cari Thompson moved to West Plains. Jeremy took a position with the juvenile office, while Cari worked as an elementary school teacher. Those jobs provided stability, but they also helped root the family in the area Whetstone hoped eventually to serve. Rather than arriving with a finished institution and asking people to support it, Whetstone began by plugging in, listening, working alongside others, and becoming known.
A few months later, Brandon and Laura Maxwell also relocated to the area, further establishing Whetstone’s local presence. An office was opened just off the square, and Brandon began the slow work of building relationships—meeting people and letting churches, businesses, civic leaders, and families know that Whetstone was there to serve however the Lord might lead.
Those years established an important pattern: the mission would always require more than a few founders. Families moved. Careers changed. Churches gave. Board members assumed responsibility. Donors supported something that did not yet fully exist. Volunteers offered labor and expertise.
Before Whetstone had a ranch, it was already becoming part of a community.
By 2010, the original leadership configuration had changed. Nate moved in another direction, and Axel Liimatta joined Jeremy and Brandon in carrying the work forward.
Axel came from Kentucky after approximately fifteen years in public and private education, bringing a master’s degree in secondary education, National Board certification, and experience as a teacher and school leader. Joining Whetstone required more than a professional transition. Axel, his wife, and their three children moved to southern Missouri in a leap of faith, leaving an established life for an organization that still had no residents and was only beginning to become what its founders had imagined.
In that sense, the move continued a pattern Nate, Jeremy, and Brandon had already begun—and one that would repeat itself many times over the next fifteen years. Again and again, employees would relocate, change careers, accept lower pay or greater uncertainty, bring spouses and children into the rhythms of ranch life, and invest years of their lives in work whose outcome could not be guaranteed.
Axel’s arrival also reinforced something important before Whetstone ever opened: the organization could not depend upon one personality or one founder. A mission rooted in the idea that people sharpen one another would itself have to be carried by many people, each bringing a different set of experiences, abilities, sacrifices, and convictions to the stone.
Then, in 2011, the long preparation finally found a home.
Whetstone purchased 285 acres near Mountain View, Missouri, from Roy Renegar. Renegar initially helped make the purchase possible through owner financing, carrying the note for roughly the first year before Whetstone transitioned to a conventional loan. The arrangement provided valuable flexibility during the difficult housing-crisis years and gave the young organization time to establish itself financially.
The property included pasture, woods, ponds, barns, outbuildings, and a large home with enough bedrooms, kitchen space, offices, and basement classrooms to become nearly everything Whetstone needed at once.
After years of planning, fundraising, policy writing, and preparation, Whetstone opened its gates on October 9, 2011.
The first resident was a boy named Austin.
Three full-time staff members provided around-the-clock care for one boy. If the school schedule did not work, everyone knew it. If a rule was poorly conceived, there was nowhere for it to hide. If a relational approach succeeded, the result was equally obvious.
During these earliest years, Brandon and Laura Maxwell served as Whetstone’s first houseparent family, helping establish an idea that would become an important part of the residential model: boys should not merely occupy rooms in a staffed facility. As much as possible, they should experience the ordinary rhythms of a home.
That meant meals, chores, school mornings, evenings, celebrations, frustrations, and the thousand small interactions that happen when people actually live together. The physical and relational environment mattered. A boy needed structure, but he also needed belonging.
Those first years established one of the defining characteristics of the Whetstone model: young men must be known in order to be sharpened.
As enrollment grew from one boy to three and beyond, Whetstone deliberately maintained a low staff-to-resident ratio. That choice was expensive, but it reflected the mission. Character is rarely revealed in an appointment. It appears over meals, during school, after disappointment, in conflict, while working, during recreation, on difficult phone calls, and in the quiet moments when a young man finally says something he has avoided saying for months.
Whetstone was beginning to learn that the program was not primarily a schedule of services.
The program was life together.
As more boys arrived, another lesson became unavoidable: relationship was essential, but relationship alone was not always sufficient.
Residents increasingly arrived with complex emotional and relational struggles involving anxiety, depression, anger, grief, adoption, attachment, family conflict, shame, trauma, and patterns that required professional understanding. In 2013, Whetstone hired Matt Foster as its first full-time licensed counselor.
Matt’s role quickly became broader than therapy alone. As the program evolved, he also took on significant responsibility for the daily structure and development of residential life. Around the ranch, the combination eventually earned him an unofficial title: the “Programmathist”—part program director, part therapist.
The name was playful. The role represented an important stage in Whetstone’s development.
Matt helped bridge the gap between what happened in the counseling office and what happened during the other 167 hours of a boy’s week. Counseling was not separated from the rest of ranch life. Instead, Whetstone began integrating professional therapy into the relational model that already existed.
A counseling session might help a boy understand his anger, but supper that evening could give him an opportunity to practice handling frustration differently. Matt might identify a family pattern in therapy; residential staff could see that same pattern emerge during a basketball game, in the classroom, on a work project, or after a difficult phone call home.
Matt’s wife, Jessica Foster, also played an important role in Whetstone’s development. A licensed professional counselor herself, Jessica served for many years as an admissions advisor, helping families navigate the difficult decision of whether Whetstone was the right fit for their son. Her clinical background brought an informed and compassionate perspective to those early conversations, strengthening the connection between admissions, family needs, and the work boys would eventually undertake at the ranch.
Because Matt worked across both the clinical and program sides of the ranch, he helped establish a principle that would remain important even after those responsibilities became separate professional roles:
The boy in the counseling office is the same boy at the dinner table, in the classroom, on the worksite, and at home with his family.
Therapy gave language to daily life, and daily life gave therapy somewhere to be practiced. The “Programmathist” years therefore represented more than an amusing chapter in Whetstone terminology. The ranch was moving toward a more informed, integrated approach—from the first conversations with a family considering Whetstone to the daily work of helping a young man change once he arrived.
That same year brought another important transition in residential life. In 2013, Ty and Michelle Lewis became Whetstone’s second houseparent family, serving in that role through 2016.
Like Brandon and Laura before them, Ty and Michelle did more than supervise a residence. Their family lived inside the rhythms of the ranch. Their children shared space and parents with boys who were away from their own homes. Meals, birthdays, holidays, work, conflict, laughter, and routine all became part of the therapeutic environment.
In fact, many of the families working at Whetstone during these years blended their personal and professional lives to make the ranch work. Their own children grew up alongside one another, sharing the unusual experience of life around the ranch and forming friendships that have lasted into adulthood.
Ty also increasingly helped develop the agricultural side of the ranch. Cattle, gardens, fencing, barns, repairs, and the maintenance required by 285 acres provided another place for character to reveal itself.
Work had an unusual honesty about it. A fence was either repaired or it was not. An animal still needed to be fed. A garden required attention whether a young man felt motivated that morning or not.
But work did more than expose weakness. It built competence.
A boy accustomed to hearing what he did wrong could stand beside something he had repaired, planted, built, or completed and know that he had contributed something useful.
At the same time, the school became more intentional about individualized and mastery-based learning. Agriculture, gardening, maintenance, woodworking, outdoor activities, running, and physical labor became increasingly important parts of daily life.
These areas eventually received more formal names—Emotional Wellness, Intellectual Growth, Joy of Work, Authentic Relationship, Love of Creation—but the values emerged from experience before they appeared in organizational language.
By 2014, Whetstone had reached the practical capacity of its early model and served its twentieth resident. Growth had brought an important warning with it: more beds did not automatically mean more impact.
If Whetstone ever became too large to know its boys well, it could increase capacity while diminishing its mission.
That tension would shape the next decade.
On Good Friday in April 2015, a tornado struck Whetstone.
The ranch temporarily closed. Residents returned home. Buildings were damaged. Enrollment that had taken years to develop disappeared almost immediately.
When Whetstone reopened several months later, it effectively started again: one boy, then two, then three. Recovery came slowly.
The tornado became one of the defining events in Whetstone’s history because it tested in the organization exactly what Whetstone was attempting to develop in its residents: resilience, humility, perseverance, faith, and the ability to build again after something has gone wrong.
Fallen pine trees from the storm were eventually used to construct a cabin on the property. Staff, volunteers, families, and boys peeled logs, cut them, lifted them, and transformed damaged material into something useful. The cabin became known as Ebenezer, after the biblical marker meaning, in essence, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”
It became an unusually accurate symbol of the work.
Whetstone cannot erase the difficult chapters families bring through its gates. It cannot return a young man to an earlier year and prevent every failure, wound, broken relationship, or poor choice. Sharpening is not pretending those things never happened.
It is learning what can be built from what remains.
Those experiences eventually became stories as well. Axel Liimatta, Matt Foster, and Michelle Lewis co-wrote Even the Wind, drawing from life at Whetstone to reflect on boys, families, faith, failure, storms, and restoration. The title grew naturally from the ranch’s experience: after 2015, wind could no longer be merely weather. It had become a reminder of the forces none of us control—and of what can still be built after they pass.
The tornado also revealed how broadly the mission was already shared. Churches, donors, board members, volunteers, businesses, friends, staff families, and supporters from around the country helped repair and restore the ranch.
Whetstone was no longer simply the work of the people on its payroll.
It had become a community gathered around the sharpening of young men.
The years following the 2015 tornado required Whetstone to rebuild more than buildings and enrollment. They became years of refining the program, developing leadership, and learning how the different parts of Whetstone could work together more intentionally.
Matt Foster continued to play a vital role in that development. Drawing on his clinical training and growing expertise in trauma-based behaviors, Matt helped move Whetstone toward a more therapeutic understanding of the boys it served. Difficult behavior could still require accountability, but staff were learning to look beneath the behavior as well—to ask what fear, shame, grief, trauma, attachment, or family patterns might be driving it.
That distinction mattered. Understanding behavior did not mean excusing it. It meant responding more intelligently to it.
Matt helped staff recognize that consequences alone could sometimes address what a boy had done without addressing why he kept doing it. His clinical leadership strengthened Whetstone’s ability to combine accountability with insight, an approach that increasingly influenced residential life, staff training, family work, and the overall direction of the program.
In 2019, Katie Johnson joined the clinical team and worked alongside Matt for approximately one year before assuming full responsibility for counseling. When Matt left Whetstone in 2020, Katie became lead therapist, carrying forward and further developing the therapeutic direction he had helped establish.
Residential life was changing as well. Ty and Michelle Lewis completed their service as Whetstone’s second houseparent family in 2016 after three years. Ty then moved more fully into leadership of agriculture and the work program, helping develop the ranch itself as a place where boys could learn responsibility, practical skills, perseverance, and the satisfaction of becoming useful.
In 2016, Bob and Grace Evans became Whetstone’s third houseparent family, serving through 2021. Their tenure encompassed much of the long recovery and regrowth following the tornado. Bob contributed across school, residential programming, and work projects, while Grace helped sustain the daily rhythms of home—including the considerable task of preparing meals for hungry teenage boys with seemingly bottomless stomachs.
Together they continued a tradition begun by Brandon and Laura Maxwell and carried forward by Ty and Michelle: providing ordinary family life in the middle of a residential program.
Throughout these years, Axel Liimatta continued serving as Whetstone’s first Headmaster, developing the school alongside the growing therapeutic, residential, and work components of the program.
The close proximity of those areas produced one of Whetstone’s greatest advantages. Matt or Katie might recognize the emotional reasons beneath a behavior. Axel might see how the same struggle appeared academically. Ty might discover that a boy who lacked confidence in school became focused and capable while working with his hands. Bob and Grace might see what happened after the structured day ended or following a difficult family conversation.
No single perspective told the entire story.
The post-tornado years helped Whetstone become increasingly intentional about putting those perspectives together.
Staff development also became more systematic. Training in trauma, de-escalation, crisis response, boundaries, communication, and safety continued to deepen. Whetstone’s commitment to a non-restraint approach placed greater emphasis on recognizing escalation early, managing staff reactions well, and using relationship rather than power as the primary means of intervention.
The ranch was learning to use more of ordinary life therapeutically. School could teach perseverance. Work could teach responsibility and competence. Running could teach endurance. Conflict could expose patterns that needed to change. Household life could teach consideration and self-control. Counseling could help a boy understand what was happening beneath all of it.
By the end of the decade, the ranch had regained its footing, but it had also become more complicated. The overlapping roles that had served a young organization well were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
The next stage would require specialization.
The early 2020s marked another significant organizational transition.
By 2020, Katie Johnson had assumed the role of Whetstone’s lead therapist, carrying forward the ranch’s increasingly therapeutic direction. At approximately the same time, Curt Cook became Whetstone’s second Program Director.
For the next four years, Katie and Curt worked closely together. Katie provided clinical leadership while Curt focused on the structure and operation of the residential program. Their roles were more specialized, but the work still depended upon close collaboration between counseling, programming, school, residential life, and family.
That family emphasis became increasingly visible through family therapy, family intensives, and Father-Son Weekends. Matt Foster had begun developing the family-intensive model, and Katie and Curt carried it forward. Today, every resident and his family participates in a family intensive as part of the graduation process, addressing communication, trust, family patterns, expectations, forgiveness, and preparation for life together after Whetstone.
Katie and Curt also helped establish Whetstone’s ongoing twice-yearly Father-Son Weekends, combining outdoor and adventure experiences, guest speakers, group conversations, therapeutic activities, and fun. For many families, these weekends have become a highlight of the Whetstone experience.
Together, the weekends and family intensives reflect an important evolution in the program: Whetstone’s goal is not to replace a boy’s family, but to strengthen the relationships he will return to.
Lasting change has to travel home with the boy.
These practices continue with Whetstone’s current counseling and therapy team, integrating clinical work, residential programming, and family restoration into the same process of sharpening a young man.
Other areas were developing specialized leadership as well.
Jeremy Patton eventually succeeded Ty and continued the evolution from ordinary ranch labor toward more intentional vocational and skilled-trades experiences. Agriculture, construction, maintenance, woodworking, and practical projects increasingly became opportunities not simply to complete tasks, but to build competence and prepare boys for meaningful work beyond the ranch.
Residential leadership also became more defined. Boone Harding’s progression provides one example of how Whetstone itself became a place where staff members discovered abilities and callings.
Boone left a solid career as a graphic designer and moved his family to Whetstone, beginning with hourly evening and weekend residential shifts. Over time, he became a shift supervisor, school assistant, recreation coordinator, and eventually House Manager.
Boone later left full-time employment at Whetstone to help establish Haven686, a foster-care organization. His connection to the ranch, however, continued. He now works with Whetstone on retainer as a graphic designer, bringing the skills from his original profession back to the organization and helping maintain a consistent, professional identity across Whetstone’s marketing and communications.
Boone was eventually succeeded as House Manager by Dylan Tucker, Whetstone’s current residential leader. Dylan also represents a generational continuity in the Whetstone community. His parents, Gary and Kristen Tucker, had invested in the boys for years in the affectionate and unofficial role of “grandparents,” bringing practical skills, woodworking, hospitality, and another kind of adult relationship into the larger Whetstone family.
The school moved into its second generation of leadership as well.
After establishing Whetstone Academy and serving as its first Headmaster, Axel Liimatta moved increasingly into Advancement. In 2021, Gabe Newell became Whetstone’s second and current Headmaster, carrying the school into its next stage of development while preserving its individualized approach.
Gabe brought a different set of strengths to the role. With a math and science background from Missouri S&T, he strengthened those areas of the curriculum while bringing a creative, experiential approach to education. Learning under Gabe frequently extends beyond the classroom through dynamic field trips, outdoor experiences, and the Adventure Week excursions he helps lead.
His leadership style also reflects something Whetstone had learned about educating boys: they generally thrive when expectations are clear, structure is dependable, and adults are willing to hold the line while still making life enjoyable. Gabe leads with firm expectations and consistency, maintaining order while balancing discipline with humor, adventure, and fun.
Under his leadership, the school has continued to mature academically without becoming conventional simply for convention’s sake. A lesson may happen at a desk, on a trail, during a science experience, or hundreds of miles from campus during Adventure Week.
The setting can change. The educational purpose remains the same: sharpening the mind while helping shape the character of the young man who carries it.
Axel’s transition reflected another need that had emerged as Whetstone matured: the mission itself needed to be communicated, sustained, and carried beyond a boy’s time at the ranch.
He joined Brandon Maxwell in hosting the A Time to Sharpen podcast, carrying lessons learned at Whetstone to parents and families beyond its gates and, increasingly, providing a place for alumni to tell their own stories.
Axel also took on a growing role in social media, marketing, communications, and advancement, helping Whetstone explain its work more clearly to prospective families, donors, churches, alumni, and the wider community. That work became another form of sharpening—not directly of an individual resident, but of the organization itself. A stronger public voice helped Whetstone build trust, maintain relationships, attract support, and create the financial and institutional stability necessary for long-term impact.
At the same time, he began meeting face to face with former residents now spread across the country, strengthening Whetstone’s connection with alumni and moving the program toward a more intentional approach to aftercare. Those relationships allowed Whetstone to learn what happened after boys left the ranch, celebrate successes, identify long-term needs, and invite former residents back into the life of the organization.
In that sense, advancement and aftercare became connected parts of the same mission. One looks outward, building the relationships and resources needed to sustain the work. The other looks forward, asking whether the sharpening continues after a young man goes home. Both help Whetstone think beyond the immediate program toward sustainability, accountability, and lasting impact.
Brandon’s role evolved just as significantly. He began as Whetstone’s first employee and, with Laura Maxwell, part of its first houseparent family. His construction background later moved him into the role of Site Director, where he helped oversee the physical development and practical operation of the ranch.
As Director of Development, Brandon increasingly focused on the donors, churches, businesses, foundations, and community relationships necessary to sustain Whetstone’s work. He cultivated donor relationships, represented the ranch in fundraising presentations, helped pursue grants, and connected Whetstone with charitable organizations and community partners.
His role also included finding practical ways to stretch resources—reducing costs, securing donated materials or services, and identifying opportunities where community generosity could strengthen the program beyond what the operating budget alone could provide. His involvement in fundraising events, churches, businesses, civic organizations, donor presentations, and partnerships such as the Price Cutter Charity Championship helped broaden the network surrounding Whetstone.
Development became another form of sharpening the organization. The work might happen in a donor meeting, a grant proposal, or a fundraising presentation, but the result eventually reached the same place: stronger programs, greater stability, and more resources available to serve boys and families.
Brandon’s role changed as Whetstone changed, but the purpose remained the same: building the relationships and resources necessary for the sharpening to continue.
The influence of Whetstone on its staff has extended beyond those who remained employed at the ranch. Over fifteen years, former employees have gone into medicine, education, small business, child care, social work, law enforcement, youth ministry, worship leadership, clinical practice, clergy work, and the National Park Service. Many have married, raised families of their own, and continued serving young people and communities in ways that would have been difficult to predict when they first arrived.
Whetstone’s mission is focused on sharpening the character of young men, but the friction of the work has sharpened many of the young adults who served them as well. Staff members have learned leadership by leading, counseling by listening, patience by being tested, responsibility by carrying it, and service by doing work that frequently mattered more than the title attached to it.
Some remained. Some moved on. Some, like Boone, found ways to do both.
The result is a widening circle of influence: boys become men, staff become leaders, families are formed, new organizations are started, and lessons learned on a ranch in southern Missouri continue showing up in classrooms, churches, clinics, businesses, foster homes, parks, and communities far beyond Whetstone’s gates.
Executive leadership in a small nonprofit rarely means standing above the work. It usually means standing in the middle of it.
That has defined Jeremy Thompson’s role at Whetstone from the beginning.
As Executive Director from day one to the present, Jeremy has carried the responsibility of keeping the organization moving through circumstances that rarely arrived one at a time: budgets, staffing decisions, parent concerns, board expectations, donor relationships, enrollment swings, construction projects, internal disagreements, economic uncertainty, and the daily complications of residential care.
Over fifteen years, he has worked with and reported to more than thirty different board members, providing continuity as leadership around him changed. He guided Whetstone through the 2015 tornado, economic downturns, the pandemic, staffing transitions, periods of rapid growth, and seasons when growth seemed painfully slow.
The Executive Director’s role often placed him where competing needs met: staff and board, parents and program, vision and budget, urgency and patience, growth and restraint.
Through those changing circumstances, Jeremy has continued bringing the organization back to the same central question:
Does this help us sharpen the character of young men?
That question has provided a kind of institutional compass. It does not automatically settle every disagreement or make every decision obvious, but it keeps growth, budgets, staffing, facilities, policies, fundraising, and strategy from becoming ends in themselves. New ideas matter only insofar as they strengthen the work. Growth matters only if the boys remain known. Professionalization matters only if it improves care. Financial stability matters because it allows the mission to endure.
In a history filled with change, that continuity has mattered. Whetstone has been willing to alter programs, restructure positions, build new facilities, abandon ideas that did not work, and create new roles when the organization outgrew old ones. But the central purpose has remained remarkably stable.
The methods have been sharpened repeatedly.
The mission has not been replaced.
By the middle of the decade, the larger organizational change was clear. Whetstone’s earliest years required people willing to do almost everything. Its next stage required people willing to develop expertise in particular things. Recognizable leadership had emerged across counseling, program, education, residential care, work, development, advancement, and executive leadership.
The challenge was no longer simply finding enough people to carry the work.
It was making sure increasingly specialized people continued carrying the same work.
By the middle of the 2020s, Whetstone had reached a new stage in its history.
The original home had served faithfully for more than a decade, but it had reached its practical limits. The question facing the Board and leadership was larger than square footage:
How could Whetstone serve more young men without becoming less relational?
The answer required both expansion and restraint.
A second residence was planned around lessons learned over fifteen years. Boys needed privacy without isolation. Staff needed appropriate boundaries while remaining accessible. Counselors needed professional space without becoming detached from daily life. The ranch needed room for interns, mentors, and future staff development. Most importantly, two homes still needed to feel like one Whetstone.
By the fall of 2025, boys began moving into the new residence.
The new home became The Forge.
The original home became The Foundry.
The names gave physical form to the mission. A foundry gives material shape. A forge uses heat and pressure to strengthen what is being formed.
That image captured something Whetstone had spent fifteen years learning about adolescence. The goal is not to remove every difficulty from a young man’s path, but to help him learn what to do with pressure, resistance, failure, responsibility, conflict, and uncertainty so those experiences become formative rather than destructive.
The second home increased Whetstone’s capacity to approximately eighteen boys, but the purpose was never simply to add beds. Growth mattered only if the ranch could preserve the relationships that make character formation possible.
That new scale also required a new generation of therapeutic and program leadership.
Aaron Hambelton, a Harding University graduate and Whetstone’s most recent therapist, brought additional marriage-and-family-therapy training into a clinical program increasingly attentive to trauma, emotional regulation, communication, adoption, attachment, and family systems.
At the same time, Scot Collins became Whetstone’s third and current Program Director in 2025. Scot brought approximately thirty years of experience in teaching, counseling, and residential work with boys, adding decades of outside experience to an organization that now possessed nearly fifteen years of institutional knowledge of its own.
Together, Aaron and Scot represent the next stage of an old Whetstone principle: different kinds of expertise must remain connected around the same young man.
As the ranch grows, the challenge is no longer simply providing good counseling or good residential programming. It is maintaining one therapeutic culture across two homes, more staff, more communication channels, and a larger program.
Aaron brings the clinical lens. Scot brings the broader program lens. The sharpening happens where those perspectives meet—where therapy informs residential life, where observations from the houses inform counseling, and where both remain connected to school, work, family, and the larger goals of the resident.
Those other parts of the program have continued maturing as well. Gabe Newell’s school preserves individualized learning while treating academics as another arena for perseverance, responsibility, and confidence. Jeremy Patton’s work program has moved beyond ordinary chores toward agriculture, woodworking, construction, maintenance, and skilled trades that give boys the dignity of becoming competent and useful.
Running, weightlifting, athletics, hiking, biking, disc golf, and outdoor experiences provide repeated opportunities to meet resistance, set goals, fail, improve, and discover that difficult things can be endured.
The 285-acre ranch remains part of the curriculum too. Its woods, ponds, gardens, trails, barns, fields, and shops teach patience, stewardship, perspective, responsibility, discomfort, competence, and wonder in ways difficult to reproduce indoors.
Over time, these experiences crystallized into six organizational values:
Biblical Truth. Love of Creation. Authentic Relationship. Emotional Wellness. Intellectual Growth. Joy of Work.
They are not six separate programs.
They are six ways of sharpening the same young man.
The same year also brought a return to an important part of Whetstone’s earlier residential model.
In 2025, Shaun and Jessica Olsen became Whetstone’s fourth houseparent family, the first since Bob and Grace Evans completed their service in 2021.
Their arrival was not simply a return to an older staffing structure. They entered a different Whetstone.
The clinical program was deeper. Residential leadership was more specialized. The school had matured. Work and physical development had become more intentional. Policies, documentation, communication, and professional expectations were stronger. The campus itself was now operating across two residences.
The Olsens brought all of that accumulated experience together with something systems cannot create on their own: home.
Jessica has demonstrated a particular gift for making Whetstone’s living spaces warm, thoughtful, comfortable, and lived in. A bedroom matters. A meal matters. A holiday decoration matters. A couch that looks as though someone actually chose it matters.
Those details communicate something before a staff member ever has to say it:
You are not simply being housed here. There is a place for you here.
Taken together, the arrival of Aaron, Scot, Shaun, and Jessica reflects what Whetstone is trying to preserve as it enters its next era: clinical depth, program consistency, relational presence, and home.
By 2026, Whetstone had grown to approximately twenty-three staff members, two residences, professional counseling, qualified teachers, dedicated program and residential leadership, structured work and physical-development programming, stronger governance, and increasingly mature administrative systems. The ranch had served approximately 174 young men from around forty states, with roughly 65 completing the program. Those graduates finished in an average of about ten months—only three months longer than the average stay of all residents served. That is a meaningful measure of both persistence and program effectiveness, especially given the challenge of engaging adolescents who may arrive either highly dysregulated and acting out or withdrawn and unwilling to communicate. It also matters greatly to families: although every boy’s path is different, Whetstone’s program can be completed in as little as six months, and many boys are able to make substantial, lasting progress without spending years away from
Yet growth has reinforced an equally important conviction:
Professional must never become institutional.
Systems exist to serve people. A boy cannot become a file, a staff member merely a shift, a home merely a facility, or a rule more important than the reason it exists.
Whetstone continues protecting a low staff-to-resident ratio because character formation requires presence. A young man should be known well enough that a teacher notices something a counselor has not yet seen, a work supervisor discovers a strength the classroom missed, or a residential staff member recognizes that something has changed before the boy has words for it himself.
Whetstone has become more professional precisely so that it can remain deeply relational.
The next challenge is making that level of care available to more families. High-quality residential care built around low ratios, professional counseling, qualified teachers, twenty-four-hour staffing, training, facilities, and individualized attention is expensive. The developing Opportunity Scholarship Fund represents an effort to expand access without reducing quality.
Whetstone’s growing alumni network is creating additional opportunities for aftercare, mentoring, internships, long-term evaluation, and continued relationship after graduation. Skilled trades, leadership development, scholarships, improved facilities, and more intentional use of the 285-acre campus will also continue shaping the years ahead.
But growth itself is not the goal.
The question remains the same:
Will this help us sharpen the character of young men more effectively?
If it strengthens relationships, restores families, develops competence, deepens faith, improves professional care, expands responsible access, and prepares young men to become healthy adults capable of sharpening others, then it belongs in Whetstone’s future.
The buildings will change. The staff will change. The names on the organizational chart will change.
The mission should not.
Sharpening the Character of Young Men.
If Whetstone’s history is told only through its employees, most of the story disappears.
From the beginning, the ranch has depended upon a much larger community of people willing to give time, labor, expertise, equipment, money, prayer, and sometimes all of the above. At several points in Whetstone’s history, contributed support represented as much as a third of the organization’s annual revenue, providing the margin that allowed the ranch not merely to improve, but sometimes simply to keep going.
Several churches became especially important parts of that history. Southside Church of Christ in Lexington, Kentucky, supported Whetstone from its earliest years and sent volunteers who helped turn plans into physical improvements. Kaufman Church of Christ in Kaufman, Texas, became particularly important during the rebuilding following the 2015 tornado. Olathe Church of Christ in Kansas and supporters from the Kansas City area returned repeatedly for work projects. Lakewood Church of Christ in Denver, Colorado, continued relationships reaching back to Jeremy and Brandon’s Dry Bones years. Locally, Pomona Church of Christ provided steady friendship, volunteers, encouragement, and a church community close enough to share in the ordinary life of the ranch.
Whetstone’s roots in southern Missouri also grew through people and institutions who gradually chose to claim the mission as their own. Early board members such as Rob Stauffer and Rick Holloway did more than serve a term and move on. They remained advocates, ambassadors, advisors, and financial supporters—part of a larger pattern in which relationships often continued long after an official role ended.
Local businesses and families found their own ways to stand beside the ranch. Community First Bank became part of the financial and civic network surrounding Whetstone. Pizza Americana provided free pizza every Friday for roughly the first five years—an act that may sound small in an organizational history but meant something very real to a house full of teenage boys and the staff caring for them week after week. The Morrison family and The Venue at Pine Meadows helped host gatherings that introduced Whetstone to new friends and supporters.
Bankers, physicians, contractors, pastors, teachers, business owners, civic leaders, neighbors, and families contributed whatever they had to offer: money, equipment, expertise, introductions, meals, event space, labor, encouragement, and time. Dr. Stephen and Betty Coats, for example, spent years working beside residents in the garden, growing vegetables while also building relationships through conversation, patience, and simple presence.
Taken together, those relationships gave Whetstone something no capital campaign could purchase by itself: roots.
They helped Whetstone become known, trusted, and woven into the community around it. And whether the contribution was a board member’s leadership, a banker’s advice, a volunteer’s Saturday, or a Friday-night pizza, each communicated something to the boys in its own way:
You are worth investing in.
Those relationships mattered most when Whetstone was most vulnerable. After the 2015 tornado, volunteers arrived to clear debris, repair buildings, rebuild structures, paint, haul materials, extend barns, restore workspaces, and complete hundreds of jobs that never appear in strategic plans but without which there would have been no strategy left to execute.
The storm demonstrated something Whetstone would rediscover repeatedly: the ranch has always been larger than its payroll.
That generosity continued after the debris disappeared. Churches organized work weeks. Volunteers brought professional skills. Donors provided tractors, trailers, mowers, tools, bicycles, cattle, vehicles, building materials, and equipment. Others taught woodworking, gardening, horsemanship, agriculture, and practical skills.
Their contributions eventually reached the boys in very concrete ways. A repaired shop became the place where a young man learned to use tools. A donated bicycle became an afternoon on the trails. A garden volunteer taught patience beside a row of corn. A renovated room became the setting for a difficult counseling conversation.
Volunteerism was never peripheral to the sharpening.
It helped create the places where sharpening happened.
As Whetstone matured, that circle widened further. The Price Cutter Charity Championship, golf tournaments, concerts, community events, charitable organizations, foundations, grants, and outside advisors brought additional financial support and organizational expertise. Strategic planning, governance, succession, fundraising, and sustainability became more intentional.
The methods grew more sophisticated, but the purpose remained remarkably consistent.
Over fifteen years, nearly every part of Whetstone changed. One boy became a community of residents. Mentoring gained professional counseling. Residential care became increasingly family-centered. A basement school matured into Whetstone Academy. Chores developed into vocational and skilled-trades opportunities. Outdoor life became intentional character formation. Staff training deepened. The ranch survived a tornado and rebuilt. One crowded home became two deliberately designed residences. A small staff developed specialized leadership. Residents became alumni, and some alumni began coming back.
Through all of those changes, Whetstone learned something important about its own name. Sharpening requires friction, pressure, contact, and—perhaps most importantly—someone willing to stay close.
The boys have sharpened Whetstone too. They exposed weak ideas, inadequate systems, assumptions that required correction, and places where good intentions needed better training. Families taught us. Staff sharpened one another. Counselors, teachers, houseparents, residential staff, volunteers, donors, churches, board members, and community partners all added something to the edge.
The names of everyone who contributed could never fit into a history of this length, and perhaps that is fitting. A boy may never know who helped pay for his counseling. The counselor may never know who renovated the room. The volunteer may never meet the donor who purchased the materials. The donor may never meet the church member who prayed for the boy.
All of those efforts converge on the same purpose: helping a young man develop a sharper edge. A dull blade is ineffective and more likely to cause harm; a sharpened blade is useful, controlled, and ready for the work it was made to do. Fifteen years later, Whetstone is finally old enough to see what happens when that sharpening holds—and boys grow into men who carry that edge into their families, work, faith, and communities.
The early Whetstone could speak mostly about hope. Fifteen years later, it can also speak about outcomes.
Former residents are now adults, and their lives provide an increasingly important measure of whether the sharpening held after they went home. Kiernan, who arrived struggling with anxiety, academic pressure, and a loss of confidence, eventually rediscovered his ability and ambition and went on to the University of California and then Harvard Law School. Caleb, who struggled with self-esteem, impulse control, lethargy, and depression, went on to earn a degree in Criminal Justice, marry, and enter the police academy, preparing for a career built around responsibility, discipline, and service.
Their stories are memorable, but they are not the only definition of success. Whetstone alumni have earned high school diplomas, college degrees, vocational credentials, and professional certifications. They have entered trades, businesses, ministries, law enforcement, education, and other professions. Many have married and begun families of their own. For some, that may ultimately prove to be the most consequential outcome: the opportunity, Lord willing, to build healthier homes, avoid some of the patterns that wounded previous generations, and give their wives and children something different from what they themselves experienced.
Not every story has followed a straight line. Two residents returned to Whetstone for a second residency and successfully completed the program the second time. Their stories remind us that growth is rarely linear. Sometimes maturity means recognizing that unfinished work remains unfinished and having enough humility to return to it. In those cases, coming back was not the opposite of success. Coming back became part of it.
Others have returned in a different way. At least five former residents have come back to work at Whetstone as interns, mentoring specialists, residential staff, or in other program roles. They possess a credibility no training manual can provide. They know what it is like to arrive angry, homesick, resistant, anxious, or uncertain. They have slept in the rooms, followed the rules, done the work, run the hills, and argued with adults they later came to appreciate.
Now some of them stand on the other side of those same conversations.
That may be one of the clearest expressions of Proverbs 27:17 in Whetstone’s history:
A boy who once needed sharpening becomes a man capable of sharpening someone else.
The relationship often continues in quieter ways. Former residents text staff, return for visits, follow Whetstone through social media, and comment on photographs of boys working, running, studying, or struggling through experiences they remember themselves. They offer encouragement from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Some have joined us on the A Time to Sharpen podcast and told their stories publicly, describing the ranch with gratitude, humor, honesty, and the perspective that only distance and adulthood can provide. Their voices allow Whetstone to evaluate its work through the eyes of people who once experienced the program as boys and now understand it as adults.
Parents have remained part of the story as well. Families who once came to Whetstone looking for help have later become donors, advocates, volunteers, and members of the Board of Directors, moving from recipients of the mission to people helping sustain it for the next family.
The relationship has begun to turn outward: a frightened parent becomes a supporter; a resident becomes an alumnus; an alumnus becomes a mentor; a young man becomes a husband and then a father. Lord willing, something that once traveled painfully from one generation to the next begins to stop.
That is why the final measure of Whetstone’s work cannot be found only in enrollment numbers, graduation statistics, buildings, budgets, or even what happens while a boy lives on the ranch. The real test comes afterward, when no staff member is standing nearby: when the young man chooses whether to tell the truth, go to work, keep his word, ask forgiveness, remain faithful when life becomes difficult, and become the kind of husband, father, employee, neighbor, friend, and Christian who makes the people around him stronger.
Fifteen years ago, Whetstone began with a proverb and the belief that one life could sharpen another. Since then, hundreds of staff members, parents, volunteers, donors, churches, board members, friends, and young men have participated in that work. Some helped steady the organization. Some provided pressure, encouragement, or resources. Some were themselves changed in the process.
And increasingly, some of the boys who once arrived needing help are returning as men ready to help someone else.
That is the part of the story Whetstone could not have written in 2011.
It had to be lived first.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
A blade is not sharpened merely to possess an edge. It is sharpened so that it can become useful—ready to do the work for which it was made with greater strength, precision, and purpose. In much the same way, Whetstone has never existed simply to help boys complete a residential program. The deeper hope has always been that they would leave better prepared to become faithful husbands, present fathers, dependable employees, thoughtful leaders, good neighbors, loyal friends, and men capable of strengthening the people around them.
The same sharpening has shaped Whetstone itself. Boys have sharpened staff. Families have sharpened the program. Hardship has sharpened the organization. Donors, volunteers, churches, board members, employees, and friends have all helped refine the work.
Fifteen years later, the names have changed, the buildings have changed, and many of the boys have grown into men. The methods have evolved. The ranch has grown.
But the purpose remains:
Sharpening the Character of Young Men.
And as those young men carry what they have learned into families, workplaces, churches, and communities of their own, the sharpening continues far beyond the boundaries of the ranch.
The edge endures.
