Advisers Giving Back: Brad Holdhusen and the Father’s Club

People attending a Kansas City metro area high school football game may sometimes see a peculiar thing: fathers from opposing teams meeting up on the sidelines to talk and have some laughs.

While Brad Holdhusen likely won’t be at that game—three of his four kids are now off to college—he may have had a hand in the camaraderie among opposing sides. That’s because an organization he started at his own kid’s school in 2018, now called the Father’s Club, has more than 25 chapters in the region bringing dads together who might otherwise never have met.

Holdhusen, a wealth adviser and qualified plan specialist with Prime Capital Investment Advisors and Qualified Plan Advisors, started the venture with friend Vince Stephens when their kids attended Blue Valley High School in Stilwell, Kansas.

Holdhusen and Stephens had noticed some issues within the school community, including opioid use, and wanted to get involved. In a meeting with the administrators at the time, Holdhusen says the pair didn’t have an exact plan, but knew they wanted to be more involved, and figured many other fathers may as well.

“I had a vision of fathers locking arms around the school in a literal and physical way,” Holdhusen says.

After that conversation, Holdhusen brought together a group of dads on his back deck to discuss how they could become more involved in their kids’ lives and communities. The first activities of Father’s Club were close to Holdhusen’s original vision: he and a group of dads would show up at the school with food, music, and a few dad jokes.

“We’d surround the school with dads,” Holdhusen says. “We’d bring some type of food—chicken, biscuits, burritos, doughnuts, whatever. And we’d play music, in some cases real loud music on a huge boombox …. We’re all about getting the kids to smile, laugh, and have some food to start their day right.”

Father Days

From that beginning, the Father’s Club began to add elements of engagement and community building. Holdhusen and Stephens would hold meetings to discuss ways of learning about and helping their communities on issues such as mental health, teen suicide, substance abuse, technology addiction, self-worth, and anxiety.

Part of the goal also became helping men to feel confident enough to step up more with their families and communities.

“The goal is not to say we’re better than moms or that we want to outshine moms because, quite frankly, moms have kicked our tails for years in involvement, volunteering and engaging at the schools with the kids,” he says. “It’s more about getting dads involved in a very intentional way.”

The organization formed a board and registered as a 501(c) (3). It now has 25 chapters, with more to be added this year.

The group holds events throughout the year, both as a whole and by region. These include exercise meet-ups, happy hours, and an annual golf fundraiser. It also holds education awareness training in areas related to community building, including mental health assistance, technology addiction and gun safety.

The work has led to real impact, Holdhusen says, with parents in need sometimes coming to them for help. The group has helped families with donations for things like clothing or braces. The dads attend school events and host fun activities for kids. One group of dads put on a halftime show at a basketball game and then handed out pizza to the crowd.

“It might just be impacting a kid who doesn’t have a lot of interaction and friends,” Holdhusen says. “But he looks forward to Friday afternoons when a dad he sees all the time comes in and gives out some candy and tells some cheesy dad jokes. So again, it’s simple things and not over-engineered.”

Showing Up

In some cases, the message to fathers to “just show up” has been as important for the dads as it has their communities. Holdhusen recalls speaking with one man who, seeing the club’s activities, said, “well, that’s not me, I’m just not that kind of dad.”

Holdhusen engaged him, telling him that “none of us are perfect dads. We’ve all screwed up 100 times in our life as a dad, but we’re learning together, and we’re trying to do better together.”

Holdhusen says that now the organization works on its own with him in the background. His good friend and co-founder, Stephens, passed away in March of 2023. Holdhusen recalls the man’s big heart for both his family and his community and sees the Father’s Club as carrying on that memory.

“There’s nothing better in my opinion than to be a catalyst for something good, and be a nameless catalyst by the way,” Holdhusen says. “I tell my board all the time: Our hope and our success will come in 20 years from now when nobody knows any of our names … [and] nobody knows who started this or why it started. But they’re just so glad that they’ve got Father’s Club in their school and in their community. That is the definition of success.”

This story is the relaunch of a series called Advisers Giving Back. If you know of an adviser or advisory doing charitable work, please email us at advisers@issgovernance.com.