Pap-Pap’s Porch
Rediscovering Purpose. Reclaiming Life.
Pap-Pap’s Porch is a community storytelling space founded in 2024 by Greg Bicknell. Based in Lake Alfred, Florida, it exists to preserve the stories of people doing meaningful work that larger media outlets sometimes overlook. Then there are times when he just comes across someone interesting and wants to know more…and thinks you would too. And that’s one of the many reasons the Porch was built.
What You’ll Find on the Porch
- 🤝 Community Heroes — Profiles of veterans, first responders, teachers, and neighbors doing extraordinary good without recognition.
- 🏪 Small Business Spotlight — Restaurants, coffee shops, local makers, and entrepreneurs building something real in Central Florida.
- 🪑 Pap-Pap’s Wisdom — Life lessons on leadership, money, faith, family, and service…the kind you used to get from your grandfather on a summer evening.
- 🎙️ Behind the Porch — The creator journey: building the show, the podcast setup, the business behind the stories.
- 🎖️ Veteran Transition — Purpose, identity, entrepreneurship, and recovery after the uniform comes off.
What Makes Us Different
Pap-Pap’s Porch is a veteran-owned, community-first, and mission-always platform. We don’t chase clicks…we try to give a good reason to get a click. We don’t manufacture outrage… in many cases, we try to calm it. And we don’t take pay-to-play stories. Every story we publish is chosen because we think it matters to people, not because it trends or goes viral…but if it does, we won’t be mad.
Where This Started
When Pap-Pap was on active duty, he watched extraordinary people do extraordinary things on an almost daily basis. Most of it was never recorded, except in military documentation. And most of it disappeared once the person or team moved on, retired, or passed. Later, looking back, he wished the families had seen their hero in action.
The fact that families, friends, and the world didn’t hear those stories bothered him. It still bothers him now.
The Transition Nobody Talks About
When a person retires from the military, people congratulate them, shake their hand, thank them for their service, and so on. What they are often not told is what happens after the ceremony ends and the uniform comes off. The identity they’ve/you’ve built over decades…the rank, the mission, the sense of purpose, it doesn’t always transfer. Sometimes it just stops, and then they have to figure out who they are, sometimes for the first time in their adult life.
That transition is real. It’s hard. And for a lot of veterans, it’s the most difficult battle they will ever fight, because in so many cases…nobody else can see it. Many of you reading this can probably relate. I know I can, because I’ve lived it and am still figuring it out.
What Brought Me Back
It took almost seven years, and going back to school. Not for a new career, but to find purpose again. I earned my Master of Arts in New Media Journalism from Full Sail University, and somewhere in that process, I started to understand what had been missing, not just for me, but for the people I’d spent nearly three decades serving alongside.
Their stories weren’t being told. Not the stories of veterans who quietly rebuilt their lives. Not the friendly neighbor doing extraordinary work without recognition. And not the community leader holding things together block by block. That’s more than just a content gap; it’s a moral failure. So, again, that is why Pap-Pap built the porch.
Why Gratitude Changes Everything
The military taught Pap-Pap that gratitude isn’t a weakness, and in many cases, it becomes a discipline. Much of the media of today is built on the opposite instinct: outrage, division, fear, the story that gets the click instead of the story that deserves to be told. He wanted to build something different, a place that asks: Who showed up? Who kept going? Who is doing real good that nobody’s talking about yet?
That question became Gratitude Storytelling. And Gratitude Storytelling became Pap-Pap’s Porch.
How the Porch Gets Built
Pap-Pap’s Porch is produced by Smoke-N-Focus Media, the business behind the stories, and recorded at Pap-Pap Studios, the production home. Think of it as a front porch with a microphone, warm conversation, honest stories, and the kind of wisdom people just like us used to get from sitting with a mentor, at least that’s what we would call them today. Every future podcast episode, every video, every story needs to find its home…because real stories deserve a real home.
Work With the Porch
Available for community storytelling projects, nonprofit partnerships, veteran advocacy collaborations, feature writing, multimedia production, and speaking engagements.
Greg Bicknell is the founder of Pap-Pap’s Porch, produced by Smoke-N-Focus Media, a veteran-owned storytelling platform based in Lake Alfred, Florida. Contact: pappap@pappapsporch.com • (850) 496-6173