Kenny Williams Choosing to Be of Service

When Kenny Williams was a child, he noticed a large vacant building in the Bronx and asked his aunt why no one bought it, fixed it up and gave apartments to homeless people. His aunt probably chalked that up to his being a naïve kid from Windham, Maine. But, at 58, Kenny is an influencer in the fight against homelessness in Los Angeles.

“I thought I’d become an actor, get rich and famous, and use that fame to start a charity and help people,” Kenny says.

He was on step 1, becoming an actor—landing small roles on shows like “90210” and “Blossom”—when he got swept up in the party scene and became addicted to casual hookups fueled by drugs.

A decade into this lifestyle, Kenny—exhausted and emotionally depleted—tried to just stop on his own. He made it a month, which was long enough for him to know in his core that he wanted a life of sobriety. But he also knew he needed a support network—which he found through the 12-step community. He also needed therapy to get to the root causes for his addictive behaviors, which went back to not having processed the death of his mother.

“I was afraid that if I love you, you’ll leave me—like my mother did,” he says.

Through counseling, Kenny came to recognize what had become a longtime pattern of avoiding true emotional intimacy. And he observed that the people he met at recovery meetings who were living vibrant lives got there not by guarding themselves from rejection but by opening themselves up to others and being of service. So that is what he did.

In 2001, Kenny became an active member of a recovery community and found long-term recovery. He was happy and healthy. He even had a rent-controlled apartment in West Hollywood, where he was a model for a fragrance company. What more could he want?

To be of service.

At five years sober, Kenny met with Cedar Sinai Medical Center’s volunteer coordinator, who assigned him to sit with cancer patients and, later, with people in the emergency department. “If I could take their mind off what they were going through at the moment, that was my job,” he says.

Next, he became a Crisis Response Team volunteer, responding to suicides, homicides and natural disasters and just being with those families.

The retail job that paid his bills, though, required frequent travel and eventually made it impossible to volunteer. Several years into that corporate lifestyle, Kenny deeply missed being of service. But it wasn’t like he couldn’t just quit his job. So he prayed to God to help him find a way to get back to meaningful work.

God provided: Kenny was offered a severance package, followed by a cash buyout on the rent-controlled property. These modest windfalls freed Kenny to find not just a volunteer gig on the side but a career in homeless services.

In the first year alone, he found permanent homes for 25 people who had been on the streets. Then Cedar Sinai, which has 200 to 300 emergency department patients a month who are experiencing homelessness, hired Kenny to advise patients on housing, substance use, mental health and medical care. “I still can’t believe I get paid to help people,” he says.

Meanwhile, Kenny studied psychological spirituality at the University of Santa Monica and is finishing writing a book about “God moments.”

“God, for me, is love and the energy of love that is in each of us,” he says. “That energy is what answers prayers. It’s the synchronicities. In my life, there have been so many exciting things that have happened, none of which would have happened if I hadn’t gotten sober, had a spiritual connection and taken a leap of faith.”