Tyler Cady

Hey everyone! My name is Tyler Cady, and I am the co-founder and CFO of the Medellín Children's Foundation. I work in research and development for artificial intelligence/machine learning and have been fortunate enough to be able to travel the world for extended periods of time. Throughout these travels I've always maintained that it's not the place that you are in, but the people that you are with that make your experiences so special.

In 2021 I was working from Medellín, Colombia and was blessed with the opportunity to go to a soup kitchen in Santo Domingo Savio II (a neighborhood here in Medellín) to help teach an English class to some underprivileged children. The kids were amazing, smart, and incredibly curious about this gringo that was visiting their neighborhood. At the soup kitchen we had a remarkable time together, eating a bowl of rice and soup, learning how to say the names of animals in English and later playing some soccer (spoiler alert they kicked our butts). I instantly fell in love with these children, their families, Sneider (the Colombian man that started this soup kitchen), the cooks and the community.

What was supposed to be a one-off adventure to help some kids at a soup kitchen in a neighborhood that not many foreigners have the privilege of visiting, quickly became a near-every day happening. The children and the community welcomed us into their lives with open arms and treated us as their own. They welcomed us into their homes, introduced us to their families and friends, we ate together, laughed together, played soccer together, sang and danced together. They made it feel like home and I'm forever grateful.

Being an American traveler, most of us are used to going places and taking our experiences home with us to tell our friends and families though pictures and stories and then continue with our daily lives. When the day came that I was about to head home, our co-founder Christian and I had the conversation that we were not willing to simply take this experience home with us, go on with our daily lives, and relegate our experiences, the children, and the community to our memories. We knew we could do more, that we must do more, so we decided to start a foundation in the US to raise money to help feed these children, empower the community, and hopefully provide a future with more opportunities for these kids. Before we knew it the Medellín Children's Foundation was born.

This project went from a vague idea of "helping", where none of us had any idea what we were doing, to funding the soup kitchen for that first year, and has now become the most central and important part of my life. The children, their families, the community, Sneider, the wonderful women that prepare and serve the meals, and this team are worth every moment spent working on this project and I am profoundly grateful to have them in my life.