Today we’d like to introduce you to Trevor W. Goodchild.
Hi Trevor, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The rain beat down on the cardboard box in a distinct pattern. Sixteen-year-old Trevor hid inside this box next to a dumpster, feeling like this second would last forever. Memories of shouts, glass shattering, and violence echoed in my mind as I slept in an alleyway behind Hole in The Wall, a popular club on the drag across the street from the University of Texas I would later graduate from.
Roving gangs of the homeless scoured the backside of businesses looking for food, drugs and an easy victim. Day to day life wasn’t just a struggle; it was a fight to survive. To keep feeling, keep breathing, keep living to the next moment even if right now it felt like you were going to die tomorrow.
Just last year, my fifteen years old self had been hit by a truck going 35 miles per hour on Airport Boulevard and knocked into a coma. Stephen, my high school friend was right beside me at that bus stop. To this day, no one knows if he pushed me in front of that Chevrolet truck. It was a defining moment that changed the rest of my life.
I remember standing at the bus stop with Stephen that morning. I had spent the night at his momma’s house, at an apartment behind the Room Store near Airport blvd and 183. I blinked, only now it was three weeks later. I had just woken up from a coma the doctors at Brackenridge hospital weren’t sure I’d survive.
Staring at the ceiling in confusion, I tried to move my arms only to find they were strapped down to contain the violent seizures my body was going through. I was told later, the Chevrolet truck hit me head-on, as I tried to cross the street – or was pushed in front of the vehicle.
I rolled across the hood of the truck and my head went through the windshield. The driver slammed on his brakes. According to witnesses at the gas station across the street at Airport and Bolm road, I flew into the air like Superman almost hitting the telephone wires. When I hit the ground, three things happened:
1. Stephen disappeared never to be seen or heard from again
2. I was knocked unconscious with a closed in head injury
3. The beginning of the rest of my life had started
The hospital lights were bright in my eyes, I squinted trying to adjust. Tubes were trailing me like an ornery octopus with IVs and straps across my chest. The room slowly came into focus.
There were a hundred get well cards from my high school on the floor. Everyone at Johnston High School had heard what had happened, it was announced over the PA system. Teachers, students and counselors wrote get well letters as they waited to see if I was going to wake up from the coma.
Blurry visions of white walls and medical equipment came into focus. I took in my surroundings. A nurse was sitting in the room as I was still in ICU. Doctors weren’t sure if I was going to pull through. I couldn’t believe how high off the ground the hospital bed was. Later it was revealed that my forehead shattered the truck’s windshield, and then hit the pavement. I had a frontal lobe head injury.
The doctors and nurses stood around with the mute heaviness of unexpected visitors who didn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. A new discovery was waiting for my sixteen years old self: I was unable to walk. The part of my brain that controlled my legs was damaged.
Day in and day out, I was pushed around the hospital in a wheelchair. I hated that wheelchair. I should explain here, that my father had hit me since I was three years old and I was accustomed to physical violence. After moving in with him on the East Side of Austin, before it was gentrified, I learned how to duck blows, and walk around on tip toes better.
Austin in the 90s was still an undiscovered jewel to the rest of the world. This was an era before MTV reality show cameras panned 6th street downtown. Before Matthew Mcconaughey taught a course at UT and before white people were brave enough to go east of I-35.
I used to wait at bus stops as the only white kid around for a ten-mile radius. The Bloods and Crypts were active before short-term rental McMansions replaced homes owned by people of color for generations.
Drive-bys, crack cocaine on the corner and prostitutes were all a stone’s throw away. There are lessons in life you can’t learn in a textbook about what it’s like to not be white living in America.
I was in the weird position of being too white to be fully accepted by the Black and Mexican kids and too street to be accepted by my white suburbanite classmates who didn’t live in the hood. They hadn’t lived in poverty like me and everyone around me waiting for the bus to take us to our middle school.
Class warfare was in full play at O. Henry, where the West Side kids resented us East Siders from infringing on their white glove lifestyle and neighborhood. I learned early on what it felt like to be an outcast.
To not be accepted because of where you’re from. Or to lose your life back in the hood because you wore the wrong colored shoe laces. I’d seen kids thrown through windows at Johnston High School, where I later attended in the Liberal Arts Academy, as the only white kid walking to school.
So in that hospital, surviving my father’s raised fists, and my ’25 zipcode’s gang violence, I reflected in anger at my situation in the wheelchair. It was my enemy. I refused to be a victim or limited by external constraints.
It wasn’t self-pity that drove me. That feeling was a righteous fire, burning inside from the sense that I had had a happy childhood already stolen from me. I wasn’t about to let a mere car accident or just a wheelchair stop me from succeeding in life.
Every night, I rolled out of that hospital bed that felt like it was fifteen feet above the floor. SLAM. I’d hit the ground. Still wearing a clavicle brace because my clavicle was dislocated from the impact of the truck’s front hood against my body.
My hand would reach out and slap the shiny tiles of the hospital floor. Pull. Pull. Pull. I moved forward another inch. The other arm reached out and slapped the tiles… Pull. Pull. Pull. I moved forward another inch.
Eventually, the goal became closer, a black boombox my father had left me. Struggling over to it, I fitted a CD into the top and pressed play. The sound of flutes and strings soothed my angry heart as Bach Sonatas played. Shifting my focus to the door of my hospital room in ICU, I crawled towards it.
At first, this would take hours into the night. I finally reached the door and turned back crawling towards my bed while listening to classical music. I did this seventy to 100 times every night.
The funny thing was, no one told me to do this. I was moving on instinct. Pushed by the will to survive. Refusing to give up. Refusing to accept that I had to live my life in a wheelchair.
A month later, still living at the hospital, I took my first steps on my own and they called it a miracle.
I told them it wasn’t a miracle; I just refused to accept their version of who I actually am. I was stronger than the forces that tried to kill me, put me down and tell me I was less than human.
Decades later, terms like neuroflexibility and brain plasticity ring the headlines of brain injury research. And maybe it was a miracle, maybe it was science, maybe it was a little of both. I’m walking today, each footstep is still a sign of success.
Back at my father’s house in East Austin, I was limping heavily and ridiculed daily by him. The vatos at school just thought I was a gangster, pimp walking through the halls with a signature limp swagger. That definitely felt a lot better than my dad making fun of a disability I couldn’t change.
They had my back. I had passed their tests. I was the crazy white boy who wasn’t afraid of anyone. They called me “Big Bean,” and said I had cojones.
Guns had been pulled in my face and I never flinched back then. The sometimes daily beatings from my dad with glass bottles broken over my head had made me immune to the threat of violence. How can you scare someone who has nothing to lose?
I knew all the gang signs and the code of the streets. I had walked the line and been beaten by gang members for my initiation into their world. It was what you had to do to survive. Try being a solo white kid, in a neighborhood that hates your kind and surviving.
Your chances weren’t good. So I adapted. I learned about Black culture. I learned about Mexican culture. Not from a textbook, but living it, struggling every day and seeing what folks went through just to get by in a world that sometimes seemed to hate them just for the color of their skin.
The long hours in construction work had gotten my father in a constantly pissed off mood. He was calling my Black friends the N word and calling me a piece of….well you can fill in the blank. It was hard. One day came where he lost it completely and attempted to kill me.
Slamming my head against the ground repeatedly when just a few months back, doctors told him another hard impact to my brain would likely be fatal given how sensitive my skull was after being broken open by a truck.
That night was a long shadow that stretched into years. I stood up to my father for the 1st time and threw him off me. I think part of me knew if I didn’t, I would die. I ran away that night, to save my own life. To fend for myself. CPS got called, and I was put into several abusive foster homes that I kept running away from going back to the streets.
The streets were safer in a sense: I could control the environment and not be subjected to the whims of adults who were more emotionally damaged than I was.
It was in my twenties before I started to fully process everything that had happened to me back then.
Foster homes I was placed in had secret fight clubs in the backyard. In one we were all literally locked in our rooms, stripped of the freedom to move around unless we dug ditches in our foster parents’ backyard to build them a swimming pool. It was like a sweatshop that makes the sneakers suburban youth wear on their way to school.
I saved up money from doing extra chores and snuck out the window on the Fourth of July one year. I had called Yellow Cab Taxi, faking an English accent, calling myself, “Joseph” in case they tried to track me. This was before smartphones were invented before Uber lobbied millions to stay active in Austin.
My friend from high school I stayed with had a mother who turned tricks for crack and had sold my bicycle to score, so clearly, I couldn’t stay there for long. I ran away again, living at Lifeworks homeless shelter off and on for most of my youth. Still going to high school. Still believing I was capable of something greater than just surviving.
I ended up sleeping in an alleyway on the drag after years of abuse while in Child Protective Services. It is a surreal moment going to class at Garza High School after being kicked out of JHS for punching through a window to avoid a fight with another student.
Classmates next to me were complaining about a scratch on their BMW and how bad life was. The night before, I had been digging in a dumpster for day old bagels. Yet, they were the ones struggling, at least more vocally than me.
Even while living in that cardboard box, I was studying how and why things came to be the way they are. What happened to me had started a chain of events that shaped my perspective and perspective is everything.
As the rain beat down in its uneven melody, when I didn’t feel like dying, I read by the streetlights studying psychology, sociology, and philosophy.
That drive to survive and never give up attitude led me to entrepreneurship and to decide to define who I am inside. My self-image was never helpless. It was never just a homeless teen. It was of a warrior, meeting challenges, passing life’s tests and leveling up.
I went from living in that cardboard box across the street from UT to later graduate from that same University with two degrees.
Going on to work at Apple Computer, I also ended up helping launch the Xbox 360 for Microsoft. Eventually, Facebook reached out and asked me to work in ads, then tech, and later project management.
I started my own business and became an entrepreneur, as a Facebook policy specialist, public speaker and sci-fi author.
What’s incredible about this, is how little most of us question the assumptions we have about ourselves, life and what we are capable of.
Out of 200 kids that were at Lifeworks homeless shelter, I was the only one to survive. The rest ended up back on the streets, doing drugs, dead, dealing drugs or in jail.
The hidden challenges everyone faces aren’t always easy to detect, and in the end, it will serve us well to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. When I began processing what had happened to me – I realized that I had been in survival mode much longer than was needed.
It reminds me of serving time in jail. I had been jumped by three kids at the homeless shelter and was sent to jail for assault at only sixteen years old. I was in the cell with murders, rapists, and people waiting to get sentenced for B&Es (robbery).
When the judge found out I had been jumped, everything was dismissed but while in jail I made observations. People ate with one hand holding a fork, the other hand guarding their plate.
That was my mindset after getting off the streets. I was still in prison, one made from the shadow of my father and the habits to survive. One of the biggest lessons I learned was what survival truly meant.
You aren’t really surviving trauma if you are still creating conflicts just to relive the same trauma and hope for a different result. That isn’t survival, that’s a loop. Many get stuck in that loop for life.
I broke out. Never hit my son or raised a hand to him, breaking a cycle that went back to Plymouth Rock, since my dad was beat by his dad, and his dad beat by his and so on, for a hundred years. That’s the drawback of learned behavior – it defies evolution, the internet, and personal growth.
Survival is about learning to live with who you are and being ok with that, but also accepting perhaps you can do better.
It’s ok to have flaws as long as you realize identity is what shapes everything.
Who I chose to be and become started at sixteen, staring up at that cardboard box in an alleyway as the rain poured down. I decided in that moment that the past doesn’t have to define the future.
Now, I’ve founded a movement called Entrepreneurs That Make A Difference which unites social impact with entrepreneurship to connect the six degrees of separation.
Founders who share a love for startups and aligning purpose over profit create partnerships with impact. The vision that started when I was a kid on the streets, has come together now. I’ve created one hub that do gooders can network, collaborate, create and make this world a better place from.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When you grow up fighting tooth and nail to get by, one of the side effects is competitive scar comparing. Hearing about other people’s adversity, your first response is to scoff and say, “They haven’t had it that bad.”
But honestly? Developing emotional intelligence and the capacity to give others the right to their struggle is a muscle that atrophies if you don’t actively work on cultivating it.
We all hurt sometimes. Rather than have a chip on my shoulder, as I did for years as a teen, I’m looking through different eyes. Using trauma as a compass to show me where other people need compassion, is a game-changer.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
This is a shout out to everyone who has felt like giving up but still managed to make it to the next day. When the world is consumed with stories that make you feel like doom scrolling, keep in mind, perspective is everything.
How we frame what happens to us determines its power over you. When I began Entrepreneurs That Make A Difference, during the pandemic, I had no idea it would attract the people it has who are literally changing the planet every day for the better.
Part of how I view the world a little differently is, having overcome impossible odds, I refuse to believe that it’s impossible to achieve the goals for helping the world heal, improve and come together in stronger communities.
In Entrepreneurs That Make A Difference, I’ve spoken with and worked with SMBs, to celebrities, to multibillionaires to folks who dress up as Batman to give kids in the hospital rides in their dream cars.
We are all united under the banner of simply doing good, for the sake of doing good. To be that person we wish we would have known during some of those hardest nights before the dawn breaks on the horizon line.
By creating one place for entrepreneurs, businesses, NGOs, community outreach programs, or even just VCs with an impact fund to network, and solve the world’s problems together, we 100X the ability to positively affect the world.
If you’re interested in being part of the movement, helping us establish a web presence in a LinkedIn-like site, or have advice for me on this org’s structure, and business development or want to contribute, feel free to visit
https://www.trevorwgoodchild.com/donate
Or simply send me an email at trevor@trevorwgoodchild.com
PS. I’m also a science fiction writer and have published my first two books in the past three months, about a tech that hot-wires a UFO to Alpha Centauri:
Zero Point Horizon: Book One in the Jack Ransom Chronicles
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SXLNBTB?ref_=pe_3052080_276849420
Asteroid City Book Two in the Jack Ransom Chronicles
https://www.amazon.com/Asteroid-City-Book-Ransom-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B09T2F2N8S
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
One of the most remarkable things to consider is that everyone you see had a moment when their mother held them in her arms and looked at them with total love and acceptance.
While working downtown in Austin, Texas, I would sit on a park bench at 6th and Congress and imagine that feeling of love towards everyone walking down the street.
From the janitors pushing trashcans coming out of office buildings to college students, tourists, suits and ties to baristas leaning against the skyscraper’s brick facade, smoking a cigarette on their breaks – everyone deserves to feel loved, cherished and appreciated.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.trevorwgoodchild.com/donate
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trevorwgoodchildinc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trevorwgoodchild
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Startuplifepro
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC83OczPn4we5dUjptx7tGyQ/videos
- SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/syllable
- Other: https://www.trevorwgoodchild.com
