My name is James Feagin. I'm a Detroiter, father, husband, entrepreneur and platform builder. When I was young, I always had a big heart. I remember when I would drive around with my mom at a young age and I see homeless people. And I would say, like, why? Why is no one helping them? My mom never just said, because I said so. She explained why to me. So I became a child of reason. So how do you connect the two? How do you connect people who provide these resources with the people who need them? And that was just a natural passion I had. And at some point I had the opportunity to do it professionally. It's been really cool just to spend years now at the table with foundations, with government, with folks who build these solutions or investing at a very high level, who have that vested interest in saying, how do we best deploy these resources? 

My first job was teaching in a juvenile detention facility. I had a real passion for, what you could now call socio-economic mobility... that's the fancy term for it… but it was really like, if kids are in poverty and kids are faced with challenges, how do we break that cycle? How do we help people do better? Education was a big part of that. I had a passion for and a gift for it. Talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity isn't. And so when Detroit started to get cute and sexy again, you had a lot of folks that could either come in and participate in that or were better equipped to just take advantage of things and a lot of folks that weren’t... it was like, why should they have less of a chance than anybody else to follow their dreams? 

For me, my goal is how many other people can I empower? That's the only real way you're going to create the scale necessary to change some of the things that are happening here. I can't create every job. I don't even have all of the ideas and gifts necessary to do everything needs to get done. It's like, how many people can I touch? How many people can I help?