Seattle’s group homes became his training ground. Foster homes blurred together like cheap wallpaper. He would later say the juvenile facilities felt like “summer camp”, a place he never respected, where punishment didn’t teach him discipline but instead hardened his survival skills.
By adulthood, Kenneth was exhausted. “Drinking, drugging, street life,” he said. The courts grew tired of giving him chances, and he grew tired of wasting them. In 2002, a Nevada courtroom handed him two consecutive life sentences. The gavel fell, and he vanished into an eight-by-ten cell.

Pressed against cold cinderblock, Kenneth whispered a bargain:

If You ever set me free, I will dedicate my life to serving You.

Years passed. He stopped blaming everyone else. “I put the shovel down,” he said. “When I finally started taking accountability, that it was me, my choices, that’s what got me here.”

Then, July 2007. A correctional officer collapsed in a tunnel, seizing, his head cracking against concrete. Many men turned away. Kenneth ran towards him to help.

“It’s somebody that could die. I don’t care if it’s the officer or whoever it is. He needs help.”
That act of mercy opened a door. By 2013, the man with two life sentences walked out of prison gates a free man.

At first, he was just trying to survive. Broke and desperate, Kenneth’s connection to HOPE began with his mentor, Elder Sam. He showed him a newspaper article about HOPE for Prisoners and said it might help. Kenneth went down to HOPE and sat with Jon Ponder, the founder and CEO, he was only interested in a job. Jon looked him in the eye and asked, “What good is a job if you’re still the same man?”

Those words cracked him open. He stayed. He listened. He let strangers plant seeds that would change his life. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2 became more than a verse; it became a blueprint.

Transformation exceeded his imagination:

“My attitude, my transformation of my thinking and my mind, all that changed… choices, tools, workshops, facilitators planting seeds, giving tools on how to deal with people and life out here.”
Kenneth calls HOPE for Prisoners the first program that truly worked. It gave him accountability. It gave him community. Most of all, it gave him belief that change was possible.

Workshops became weapons. Tools for anger. Choices for freedom. A plaque on the wall at HOPE, about habits and character, stuck so deep that years later, his grandson was quoting it to his soccer team.

Today Kenneth introduces himself with three words: I Am HOPE.

He is twenty-three years sober, twelve years free, and nearly ten years married to the woman who once fought to get him food stamps when no one else would. When they argue, they pause and say, “Time out, I’m going to talk to the Lord.”

He spends his days serving, running a youth empowerment nonprofit, he conceived in prison, now alive at the West Las Vegas Art Center. Ten years of music, art, and life skills for kids who once looked a lot like him. He feeds the unhoused. He gives away clothes. He lugs sound equipment into prisons, senior centers, and homeless camps, anywhere he can bring music and hope.

His songs are confessions turned into choruses. “I used to hustle on the street. Now I hustle for the Lord.” In “What More Can I Say” he admits the truth: “I wouldn’t be here if the good Lord hadn’t made a way.”

Last Juneteenth, Kenneth walked back into a prison that once was his home. Not as an inmate, but as a performer. The men inside already knew his music.

“They were singing the song,” he said quietly, still astonished. “That got me. I didn't expect that.”
It was a full-circle moment only grace could write.

And yet, Kenneth’s story is still being written. Though free, he remains on lifetime parole. Recently, he applied for an unconditional pardon, a chance to finally lay his past to rest. With all he has poured back into his family, his community, and the men walking the road he once walked, we pray God shows him favor and allows him to step fully into the freedom he has already been living for years.
Kenneth Dorsey is proof that a man once sentenced to die in prison can come home and become the husband, father, grandfather, leader, and servant he once couldn’t imagine. Proof that HOPE is not just an idea.

It’s a life.
It’s a legacy.
It’s Kenneth Dorsey.
I Am HOPE.