My name is Khali Sweeney and I'm a mentor at the Downtown Boxing Gym Youth Program. How did I reach my journey? I how did I get to this point right now? I saw a need for it in my community, I stepped up to the plate, it was an empty space that nobody was taking care of. I started out with just me taking a chance on it. I quit my job one day because I really don't want to put my life on the line. I was at a job where I was making good money. I didn’t want to die on that job. I was working a real dangerous job and a guy was forcing me to do something that I didn't really want to do - and I say, let me put myself in a position to do something that I'm actually willing to sacrifice myself for and so I asked myself the question, what is it that I would like to be doing? What I like to do is, work with the kids and the people in my community, because I see a lot of kids going through the same things that I went through as a kid. 

I was pushed through the Detroit public school system from third grade on, I knew I couldn't read or write, I made it all the way to the 12th grade before I dropped out. People would tell me that I’d be dead or in jail before I was 21. So I said, why wait? Live fast, die young... I'm gonna die anyway. So I hit the streets running and I became a gang member and became a product of a broken home society and all other things you could wish upon a person. And one day my older brother told me, he said, “Man, you know this is not the way life really is. You know, this is the way the rest of the world don't live – You do know that, right? A lot of guys don't die young, you know, you have no resources.” So he asked me to come to his house and I went to his house one day and he showed me a picture of all my friends. He pointed them out. These guys are dead. These guys are all locked away, and he said – “don't be the next guy in this picture” and so I went home and I asked myself the question, what is it that I want to do with my life? Then I ended up quitting that job and seeing that there was a lot of kids in the same position that I was, and they can't read or write. They‘re getting pushed through school. So I came up with the idea, Books Before Boxing, and I started my program and here we are today.