Check Out Jonathon McClellan’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathon McClellan.

Hi Jonathon, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Hello, and thank you for sharing my story!

My story begins eighteen years ago. Now I’m 37, then, I was 19 years old working in near total anonymity as a grassroots fundraiser for Children’s International, Save the Children, the HRC, the ACLU, and more. Countless times, I was ignored on busy streets as I stood with a binder raising money. I guess I needed to move!!

After a small lifetime of running, I’m the award-winning, internationally recognized bestselling author of Messages of Hope and The Ant’s Palace. I’ve toured the United States with the Emmy award-winning, Turtle Creek Chorale, and have delivered a call for world peace at the likes of Carnegie Hall, the Morton H. Myerson Symphony Hall, and many prestigious churches. I’ve used art to intersect with impact, writing countless works as a means for activism and change. I’ve spent the last two years, out of seven as a public figure with a global reach, Executive Producing a film entitled, Light in the Darkness: The power of community and one man’s journey to find it–which premiered at Dallas Love Field airport.

This journey has been my Rising Tide, something that Pablo Perez de Rosso, a Netflix Vice President, and Jeff Crilley, an Emmy award-winning journalist–have called a global movement.

There aren’t, however, any individual parts of my journey. Rising Tides is the official name of the global movement that, originally, was just a seed of hopes and dreams. With each blooming promise of triumph, like the lotus which grows from adversity, somehow, the aggregation of all my experience created a legacy that–still, to this day–I’m trying to more fully value and not measure.

I’m no longer on the “stage”; the most recent chapter of the book feels like a good place, now, to set down the pen. Your voice can raise above the noise, and when you have, it’s time to recognize you have and let someone else speak. If this were a memoir, I’d ask, “Aren’t you the next voice to rise and clap like the thunder?”

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I started at the back of the line, the furthest distance from the finish line…

Somehow, this black, gay, schizophrenic man started a global movement–but it began in streets, sometimes, as a homeless child, and later, knocking on doors and barriers.

If by smooth, you mean riddled with snakes, I’d say, yes!

But allow me to touch on what it means to have lived beneath the emotional poverty line, and not the obvious difficulties of the financial one.
The further you are beneath it; the more snakes have successfully managed to bite you over time until the poison has become life threatening.

The emotional poverty was devastating. Trauma lives in the body and everything I had experienced growing up–abuse, neglect, racism, homophobia, and finally, stigma–made the distance to my breakthrough like running a track and field high hurdle race. Because I had to overcome, as an adult, my own institutionalization for the sanity that those in positions of privilege had determined I’d lost… Seemingly unwinnable. Perhaps anyone of the countless obstacles in my path could have prevented me to leap over the next one as they became harder to clear, to leap over, to overcome over time.

But that’s the true power of the human spirit or the universally divine soul of everyone created in the image of God–to win the unwinnable.

Changing the world has always been my greatest wish. In this world made smaller by our connectedness, sometimes, when WE change–the world changes with us. But this is what I discovered, that when we rise, we all rise, and we must rise together. For life, for all the appearance thereof, is not an individual sport.

To share my life and my purpose, meaning that I had to find it, first, means that there were many people along the way who helped, who removed hurdles, and who helped me to rise above them. Because of my many everyday angels, no less extraordinary by their lack of wings and a halo, I’m able to have crossed the finish line and complete this chapter of my journey as an Artist Activist.

Never was the race considered to be mine alone, but ours, and many have crossed with me in the creation of a legacy, our legacy of hope for a better world.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’ve been a storyteller, a truth teller, someone who needed my creative power more than any other kind, except love.

I’m known for invoking and equipping my audience with questions, for they are the keys which unlock the doors.

I’m not as proud of myself as much as I appreciate that those closest to me have told me that they are of me.

And if there’s anything that sets me apart, it’s that I’m quietly very silly. I don’t take myself seriously at all, but I am proud of everything I’ve done.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
Countless, too many to name to not feel as though I’m robbing someone of the honor due to them. But the one who deserves double the honor will always be my husband.

And a special thanks to:

Carlos Carpozi
Deb McCann
Paul Taylor
Pablo Perez de Rosso
Dr. Rich Melheim
Jennifer Crumpton
Lori Landin
Jeff Crilley
Chris Wycoco
Sean Mikel Baugh
Tammy Nash
Rev. Neil Thomas
Dan Peeler
Charlie Rose
Rhiannon Martin
and Terrance Friday

You all have been the heart of the movement!!! I just wish you had time for a hundred more names.

And my family and dearest friends. You all have been the heart of the movement that’s happened inside of me…

All glory to God. Not my might, not my power, but Your Spirit was truly more than enough.

Thank you, everyone dear, you are light and you are loved.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://jonathonmcclellan.org/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathon.mcclellan.9
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@honesttalkswithjonathonmcc2991

Image Credits
Moe Luna
2nd2Nunn Photography