Mark Redmond was a finance major in college who ended up working in a lucrative corporate job on Madison Avenue when he was just 23. It was then that he started volunteering once a week at Covenant House, which is a shelter for homeless teenage boys in New York City, and he had no idea that this would change his life forever.

“My family was apoplectic, my coworkers couldn’t understand it… but I knew this was what I should be doing with my life, so I quit my job, gave my car to my brother, and gave my suits to Goodwill,” Mark said. “It felt like I was doing a crazy thing. It was as if I was walking away from everything that I had worked for during grade school, high school, and college. Yet at the same time I had absolutely no doubt I was doing the right thing.”

Mark ended up living at Covenant House with forty other volunteers who were from all different walks of life, and he could not have been happier.

“I didn’t get much training and I really didn’t know what I was doing. We’d help kids look for work or a place to live,” he explained. “One of the young men there, I am still in touch with him, all these decades later—in fact I spoke to him yesterday. He spent decades in prison after Covenant House, and I would visit him and write to him.”

“I went to his 20-year-anniversary of being drug-free recently, it was a great night,” Mark continued. “He was typical of who we were trying to help: teenagers from multi-generational poverty, addicted to drugs, high school dropouts, in and out of prison. But we’d do what we could to make their lives better, and as with the case of this young man, sometimes it worked out well.”

These days, Mark is 61 and the director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, a nonprofit that works with homeless, runaway and at-risk teenagers in Burlington, Vermont. Find out more about him and his incredible journey in the video below!