 I'm really honored and blessed to have at least even had this time period beforehand to get to talk to Shay. She's got some really cool, awesome stories to share. I hope you guys will be inspired and empowered to do things here at Science and Math. Also, if this is sponsored by the Food Drive, hopefully this will encourage you to do for the Food Drive so that we can continue to help others like Shay does. Because as you'll find out from Shay, the power of one person can do many, many things. So I'm going to turn it over to Shay. But first, tomorrow is Shay's birthday. And Shay is turning 25 years old. Yeah, that's old. So we have cake, if you would like cake. And I'm not going to sing because I don't sing. But you guys can sing Happy Birthday to Shay so that she'll get a Happy Birthday song to her. So who knows where she'll be at tomorrow. So on the count of three, you guys can start singing. All right, ready? Are you going to videotape it? I am. I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. All right, ready? One, two, three. You can open it later, but there's a gift from the Food Drive committee for you. And of course, some dolls and bones for Zuzu. And you guys, Zuzu's in the truck. So, you know, you want to go for a pet afterwards. You know, I don't think she'd be opposed to any loving. Right. Thanks. Okay, yeah, just wave at me. Hi guys. Okay, so like she said, my name is Shay Kelly. And first I want to thank you guys so much for all of this. Like this is amazing. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I was told 204 pairs of socks and about 300 canned food items. So like, give yourselves a round for that, because that is awesome. Like, that's really good work. Thank you so much. So I want to tell you like a little backstory about me and who I am. I don't know, some of you might know, like you might have seen some stuff about it online. But for those of you who don't like, I want to tell you kind of how I got here and what I'm doing. I'm going to all 50 states in the U.S. in 50 weeks. And I do things like food drives and I distribute socks to the homeless, like in different communities. And to kind of tell you why I decided to do that. In 2009, like she said, I'm about to turn 25, some old lady. But I graduated college in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. And I worked in marketing. I went into marketing corporate America, climbing the corporate ladder and all of that. And I did that because when I was young, when I was in high school actually, so about your guys' age, I made, I was given some kind of, I guess, wrong information. And I was given the impression that for me to like do any good in the world, that I had to be really wealthy, that I had to be really rich. Like, I don't know if any of you have ever felt that way, but we kind of are told that like, we see philanthropists like on TV, like I'm sure some of you know what that means, like people who are out there saving the world. And there are people like Bill Gates and like Oprah Winfrey. There are people with tons of money. And it kind of gives you the impression that you have to be that if you're going to help anybody. And I've always had to save the world complex. Like I've always wanted to help everybody and do whatever I can anywhere. But I always thought I had to be rich first. So based on that idea, after college, I decided to go into corporate America and I took a job in marketing that I thought would basically get me rich as quickly as possible. So I took a job in South Carolina and from there I relocated to Jackson, Mississippi. And I was climbing this corporate ladder and I was doing really well. I was really successful. By the time I was 23, I was the partner of a marketing firm. So I was doing good and I was making good money, but I wasn't very smart and I didn't save any money because I was young. And so I made some kind of stupid financial decisions. But right around in 2009, shortly after I relocated to Jackson, my firm went bankrupt. The economy took a nosedive, you know, and the recession hit. And it was like one bad break after the other. And by February, the firm had collapsed, which basically meant that I lost my job, just like that. And my roommates were coworkers of mine. So we all lost our jobs together and they all went back to their respective hometowns. And I was left trying to pay the rent on a four-bedroom apartment by myself, which doesn't work with no job. And I ended up getting evicted. My car got stolen because I was in Jackson, Mississippi, which isn't necessarily a safe place to be. But my car got stolen and it was a whole bunch of like, if you've ever had like one bad thing happen and then a bunch of other things, like sometimes it just kind of seems to keep coming. And that's really what happened to me. And before I knew it, I was 23 and I didn't have anywhere to stay. And I didn't have anywhere to go. And I kind of experienced homelessness firsthand. The crazy thing is some people look at me and they're like, you're not the face of American homelessness. But actually I am. Like, you just never know. It can happen to anybody. Like here I followed like this perfect American equation for success. You know, I graduated high school. I went to college. I got the bachelor's degree. I graduated top of my class. I got the good job. I climbed the corporate ladder. I made it to a partner of a marketing firm. I was making good money. And I still at the end of it all ended up homeless. So it can happen to absolutely anyone. So if you see people like out on the street that are like sleeping on the sidewalk and stuff, refrain from judgment. Because you just don't know how many bad breaks that person had before they ended up in that situation. But at that point in my life, like when you like lose everything, you have a couple choices. And look at your life and you can say, oh whoa is me and have this big pity party and say like my life is terrible and this isn't fair and you can feel sorry for yourself. Or you can kind of look at it as an opportunity to make a different choice. Like you always have another choice. You always have another option. Like a really intelligent person told me once that like there's no shame in falling down. It's laying on the floor that makes you look bad. And I totally agree with that statement. Like I wasn't going to lay on the floor. I wasn't going to just like wander around the streets of Jackson, Mississippi for the rest of my life. Someone gave me a skateboard. I was very blessed with a skateboard. And I started skateboarding around town. I met a guy that let me, a kind guy that I made friends with that let me sleep on his couch. I just started taking like one leg up at a time. And slowly but surely I found a waitressing job. I started saving my tip money. And I decided I was going to take this really bad situation and I was going to figure out how to turn it into something good. I guess I was also looking at the fact that I had been trying to get rich for so long and that was my focus was getting rich making money. Me, me, me, take, take, take. And I lost everything. So I figured maybe I needed to shift my focus to instead of take, take, take maybe I needed to focus on giving. Like how much can I give? How much can I give and what will happen to me when I do it? Kind of like a social experiment. Like I was, I had already faced the fear of losing everything. Like we, we make a lot of decisions in life based on the fear of losing stuff. But I had already faced that fear. Like I already knew what it was like to not have a bed and to not have a place to take a shower and to not have a car. So I figured like I faced that like what else can really happen? Like how much worse can it get? I'm just going to try, I'm just going to like toss the routine up in the air and I'm going to try to do something off the wall. And I had this idea to go to all 50 states in the US in 50 weeks and help people along the way. It was kind of like a, my dream meets very real needs of the people in, in America. Like I understood homelessness because I was in it. So I knew what we needed. Like homeless people need things like socks, which is amazing. Like socks are like gold on the street. That might sound crazy, but if you talk to like a military person they'll tell you the same thing. Like nobody wants to have wet feet. It rains, they live outside. So their feet get wet, it's not a good situation. So socks, I swear, like try it sometime. I don't know, just take a thing of socks, go into an inner city somewhere, find some homeless people, go to a shelter, go to a soup kitchen, see what happens. Like when you take socks, like everybody needs a pair. It is literally, it's like currency. So I figured out what things people needed and also food. I understood what it was like to go hungry. You guys are doing that food drive thing constantly, which is really, really cool because hunger should not be something that we deal with in America.