Everybody holds a key.
We help them turn it.

I was not supposed to make it. The scars are why I stayed.

I was born a sickly, asthmatic child in Baltimore housing that did not care if a child could breathe. That is the first fact. Not a diagnosis on a chart. A small chest that already knew how to panic.

Running water was not always a given. Sit with what that means in a body that needs clean air and a clean throat. There were days the tap gave you nothing, or a trickle that was rust-colored and cold, or a kitchen you could not wash a pot in. You cannot rinse a face. You cannot wet a cloth to put on a wheezing child. You cannot wash the night off your skin. Asthma does not wait for the water to come back on. It sits on your chest while you wait for a pipe to remember you exist.

The heat did not work when it was supposed to. Winters I remember being cold inside the house, not just on the street — that dry, tight cold that makes a sick child pull for air and get less than he asked for. Summers the air did not move. July sat on the block and on my lungs at the same time. Thick air. Dirty air. No breeze through a window that did not help anyway. Lights went out. Plenty of nights we went to bed hungry. Hunger and asthma will share a bed. Neither one lets you sleep.

I learned early that the city does not come check on you because you are a child, and that a house can starve you of food, heat, water, and air in the same week. I grew up thinking my parents hated me. I grew up thinking I was cursed. That is not poetry. That is what a boy tells himself when the people who are supposed to cover him are the reason he is afraid to come home, and when his own chest feels like the curse is living inside it.

My father was a monster in the house. He was not a hard man with a temper. He was a man who put his hands on a child and did it constantly. I was terribly abused. He beat the hell out of me — not once, not as a story people tell to sound tough, as a pattern. The police eventually got involved. He was arrested for beating me. That did not make the house safe. It just proved what I already knew: nobody in that house was going to protect me.

So I ran. I left and I did not go back. They never came looking for me. Sit with that. A sickly child leaves home in Baltimore and the people who raised him do not come down the street. That is how I learned I was on my own.

At fifteen, after the ninth grade, I dropped out of high school. There was no counselor with a plan. There was no second-chance classroom. I ran the streets. Most of my teenage years I was couch surfing — a night here, a floor there, a week if somebody’s mother was kind. When the couches ran out I still had to eat. I sold drugs to survive. I am not proud of the product. I am telling my truth, sharing the facts that a child with no house still has to live.

The street did what the street does. I went to prison. The state labeled me a felon and a habitual offender. I wore those names. I do not hide the scars or the mistakes. They made me stronger. They also showed me exactly who I refuse to become for somebody else’s child.

Then I found the Most High and I turned. I gave Him my life and I meant it. I got ordained. I started showing up for other people’s children because I know what it is to be fifteen, hungry, wheezing in a hot room, beat in your own house, and already written off. I know what it is when nobody comes looking.

In 2019 I built Key Community Solutions. In 2021 The Papp App was named a Fast Company World Changing Idea. From 2022 to 2025 I served at Grow Home Baltimore as a youth case manager, financial-literacy teacher, and workforce instructor. Baltimore Magazine named me a Game Changer. I stood in court with families. I taught money and work to young people who looked like the lost youth I used to be.

In 2025 my wife and I lost our daughter. She had the same cursed lungs I did. I will not dress that up. It was tough. It rearranged me. A man can survive his own childhood trauma and not be ready to watch that same fight in his child. This continued pain and grief is not some talking point about a program. It is the reason I refuse to treat anybody’s child as a data file.

I clung to my faith. I held my wife close. I got back to work. The same year I stepped into Workforce Development at City of Refuge Baltimore in Brooklyn. In March 2026 I organized Key Community Foundation. In July the IRS recognized us as a 501(c)(3). Access. Literacy. Legacy.

If you come to us hungry, I have been hungry. If you come with a father who failed you, I had one. If you come sickly, battered or broken, in a house that doesn't see and/or support you, I know that struggle and I know that fight. If you come with a record or prison time, I have worn that label. If you come after a tragic loss — We are here for you! I will not rush you. The scars are not the shame. They are the reason we stay, stand and do this work.

Daniel Burgess, Founder · Key Community Foundation, Inc. · Baltimore, Maryland