Now and then I get to meet someone who absolutely inspires me.

Kielin Blackwell is that person. He grew up in an affluent neighborhood in

Wisconsin, set on the path to go to college and get a good career, but he decided to leave it all, to follow his own path, one driven by faith and conviction, one driven by a desire to serve.

His story is filled with ups and downs, trials and tribulations. He ended

up homeless at one point, but always driven by this faith he never gave up. His story is absolutely inspiring. He turned his life

around and became a social entrepreneur now giving back to the very community that helped lift him up.

His story and he are absolutely magical. This is a bit of optimism.

Kielen, so good to see you.

Kielen, so good to see you. Thanks for joining me. The reason I wanted to talk to you is I'm kind of in awe of some of the life decisions you've made to be honest. You made decisions to give back to your

community to live a life of service which I admire and love but you have done so with this intense

conviction to go and live in the world that you work in, which is not the world that you grew up in.

That's correct, yep.

Just give me a little bit of background about how you grew up, where you grew up, and how and why you find yourself where you are today.

Yeah, so I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, I'm a proud Wisconsin Badger. You know, my parents had like both really good jobs. You know, I grew up upper

real class. I didn't want for anything. I had a very, very good childhood. Yeah, where I am now, I'm in Inglewood on the

south side of Chicago, so it's like really the antithesis of what my experience was growing up. You know, but like while I was a child my dad, he was the first one to really instill me this idea of community service, you know,

because I was getting a little too big for my bridges as a kid.

You know how it is when you're that pre-teen, teenager phase, you can challenge your parents

and, you know, particularly my dad. I just started, you know particularly my dad I just started you know telling him hey you know like I'm I'm some hot stuff so I don't need you you know I felt like I was grown before I was grown and he felt like he needs to knock me down a few pegs and he was like you know what

Keelin I think it's time for you to understand that the world's bigger than just you.

So what he did is he actually had me volunteer at a community center where there had a lot of refugees from Southeast Asia.

So like at that time, you know, there's like a lot of refugees from the Vietnam War, this is like, you know, late 90s or early 2000s, you know, it's like me in middle school.

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