Robert Willis

The advice is please, please learn to be kind to one another, that would be the best advice. If you’re kind to one another it’s makes the world a better place to be in.

Robert Willis

My name is Robert E. Willis. I was born September 4, 1962, here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am half Ojibwa Indian and half African American. My family is from White Earth Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. But I’ve been born and raised in the Twin Cities area.

When I was growing up there wasn’t a lot of African Americans or Native Americans that were in the school system. At the age of fourteen, I went to Cretin High School, which at the time was an all-boy, military, Catholic academy in St. Paul. I was basically in the military at 14.

I joined the United States Marine Corps when I was in my early twenties. I was a military policeman in Southern California. Then I got out of military and I had two children. I absolutely love being a parent. It’s probably one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever had, but also one of the hardest jobs because being a parent is kind of difficult. I came back to Minnesota. My daughters lived with their mother, but I moved 1.7 miles away so I could always be part of their life.

When my oldest daughter was in high school she started coming home with Cs, Ds, and Fs. She said, “Dad, it’s the students, the teachers and the staff and they’re not letting me get ahead.” Something seemed fishy about this so I actually took a $14,000 cut in salary and went and worked at my daughter’s school. And you know what I found out? It wasn’t the teachers, the administration and it definitely wasn’t the all the students in school. It was her because she thought that she was in school to socialize, to have fun, to make friends and stuff like that.

Then I went to The Art Institute and they asked me to give presentations at hundreds of high schools throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. I would go out and do these shows and I would get kids all charged up. I started helping students all across the Midwest. That’s when my son was born. I looked down at him and I realized that I had to do everything I can to make this world better for him. I decided to stay at home and be a stay-at-home dad.

Then I realized that I wanted to give back to the community. I went back to Metro State University and in three years, I got my degree in Psychology. When I graduated I worked at Employment Action Center and that’s where I work now. I’m an employment counselor and a workshop facilitator. What I do is I help people looking for jobs; I help them find jobs. But more than that, what I do is I get inside their heads and I get them thinking about things that they wanna do. What I do is I help people find those careers.

In 1998 I ran the Chicago Marathon. And then again, in 2002, I decided to also run another marathon and I ran the Twin Cities marathon.