Just a Good Conversation: Richard Kee by Just a Good Conversation (2025)

Just a Good Conversation: Kevin Jones Part 2

Kevin Jones never expected to graduate from college. In fact, after graduating from high school in 1988, he made the conscious decision not to pursue higher education – even though his three sisters had all gone on to university studies.

“School and I were not friends,” recalls Jones. “All the way through elementary school, then in high school, I just wasn’t the typical kid. I was the nerdy type that wasn’t accepted. So by the time 1988 came around, I had made up my mind. I was done with school.”

Jones went so far as to hold a mock funeral in the backyard of his mother’s house, digging a hole and burying his textbooks in it. He had decided that the blue collar lifestyle suited him best, and spent the next three decades drifting from one job to the next. “Truck driver, security guard, nurse’s aide – I did anything you can think of that’s underpaid and undereducated.”

It wasn’t until 2014, when the Los Angeles native found himself unable to pay rent and ended up homeless on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, that Jones decided to turn his life around.

“It was March 14, 2014,” he says. “I’ll never forget the date. That’s when I had the revelation that life was getting serious. All of a sudden, the light bulb came on. I asked myself, ‘What are you doing with your life? What happened?’ From then until now, I was on a path to change things. I didn’t know that the path would include about four and a half years of homelessness…” “I thought I would be stuck in that lifestyle forever,” he says. “And now I’m considering options for graduate school. It’s amazing.”

Upon losing his home in Atlanta, Jones drifted along, sleeping in his car or abandoned warehouses before adapting himself to living in local homeless shelters.

“I had to learn the system, because every shelter has one,” he says. “For example, you have to be in line for bed every day at the same time. You really have to figure out your life based on that system.” Jones moved from shelters in Atlanta to those in San Jose, Calif., before ending up on Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

It was while on Skid Row that Jones dedicated himself to self-improvement. “I told myself I had two options,” he remembers. “I can stay here at rock bottom or I can go in the opposite direction. I started working on a plan of growing up.”

While staying at the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles, Jones enrolled in a program there aimed at helping get clients off the streets. “They have a program for anybody that’s serious about not being homeless,” says Jones. “It’s a one-year program. If you go through the program, by the end of it, they guarantee you an apartment and a job. They don’t just kick you out and say, ‘You’re on your own.’”

He started working at the shelter while still living there. Within a few months of starting the program, Jones was able to move into his own apartment. Again, it’s a date he’ll always remember.

“I moved out of the Union Rescue Mission on June 18th, 2018,” he says. “I jumped in a taxi over to the apartment that they had for me in Compton. I’ve been off the street ever since!”

Jones’ return to school happened almost by accident. He was walking through Lueders Park in Compton while a career fair was going on. As he walked past the Compton College booth, the woman working there asked him if he wanted to enroll in school.

“I looked at her, and strangely, I considered it,” says Jones. “I walked over to the booth and I thought, ‘You ain’t got nothing to lose, right? I signed up, and the next thing you know, it’s Fall 2019 and I’m enrolled in junior college. Then I started seeing some good grades—grades that I wasn’t even getting in elementary school.”

“All of a sudden, my brain turned on and I could do the work. As I kept seeing those A’s and B’s coming in, I thought, ‘I can do this, and I’m going to keep working and see how far I can go.’”

Just a Good Conversation: Richard Kee by Just a Good Conversation (2025)

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