‘It’s beyond admirable’: Former Bengal Joe Kelly tirelessly gives kids hope
Matthew Barrera
Published Apr 07, 2026
CINCINNATI – Joe Kelly played 11 years and 163 games at linebacker in the NFL. He started in the Super Bowl for the Bengals in 1989 and made 521 career solo tackles in one of the most physically demanding positions of his generation.
He deserved to kick up his feet upon retiring from the game in 1997. Enjoy his millions, take it easy, invest, play charity golf events, maybe coach Pop Warner football. Whatever.
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For Joe, a blue-collar product of South Central Los Angeles, that never made sense.
He wanted to save kids.
But not just any kids. Cincinnati kids. Forgotten kids. Those whom the state viewed as borderline unsalvageable.
“The last resort,” said Desiree Hopkins, who more than a decade ago was one of those 15-year-old kids.
Joe works with and must use terms that make most cringe. Bestiality and opioid addiction, homelessness and teen pregnancy, mental illness and sexual molestation.
Alcoholism, abuse, incarceration.
Shootings and stabbings.
Murder.
Starting on May 5, 1998, Joe set out to help as many kids as possible when he started Kelly Youth Services (KYS) in Cincinnati, the city where he was drafted No. 11 overall in 1986 and played his first five seasons.
What’s unfolded over the past 21 years defies the odds.
“There’s really nobody left that has been around as long as we have,” said Tiffany Kelly, Joe’s wife and KYS treasurer. “People wouldn’t believe how many accounts he’s depleted to keep this thing going.”
Amid the rubble of others, KYS remarkably remains having taken more than 2,000 of the most troubled youth into a program serving as a final hope.
They set out to specialize in 24-hour supervised, private group homes and independent living facilities and became so much more for those cast off from the foster care system.
“It’s a safety net that only the best societies have,” said Reggie Williams, KYS board member, former Cincinnati city councilman and Kelly’s teammate with the Bengals. “This is one of the best, unknown success stories in Cincinnati of a player making that big of a difference in the individual lives of so many young kids.”
Defining success differs here.
“These aren’t the kids on the billboards,” Joe says, sitting in a Waffle House discussing his pressure-packed daily routine before going to meet with another potential addition to one of his group homes. He’s referencing those seen smiling, pasted above the highways boasting their high school or college of choice.
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KYS has grown to 46 beds across five facilities in Cincinnati for kids age 9 to 21. His staff of 27 employees and three contractors oversee the operations.
The homes are filled with those referred to them by the counties with which they have contracts. Over the years, these referrals are joked about around the KYS office on Compton Road. Despite the other companies also eligible to take on a specific kid, only Kelly will be listed as an option on the top.
“Most of them are when the state comes in for whatever reason — a charge, hadn’t gone to school in 200 days, lot of it is generationally repetitive,” Joe said. “Mom was in the system, kid was in the system. Now, with opioids, lot of times most of the opioid situations you have everybody – mom, dad, uncle – everybody is on it. You are sitting there in the Waffle House and your mom is in the bathroom OD’ing. The county will come in and say, ‘Hey, take the kid out of the home.’ If they send them to a foster home and it’s too much for the foster parent. For the most part, most of the (foster parents) are good-hearted, really want to help but the county didn’t tell them what they are getting. If you want this to work you have to really let them know what they are getting into. There are going to be detachment issues, you name it. We run the whole gamut.”
KYS takes them in, is given a per diem by the county to put them up, teach trades, tutor, counsel, mentor to create a community of survivors who can become self-sufficient, responsible and employable. Essentially, the opposite of what most were walking in the door.
Joe estimates a 70 percent success rate in turning around these lives. Success equals stability and assurance they can get by after KYS, not making $100K and earning a master’s degree.
Perspective is as important as patience in a place where they lock up the silverware to keep anyone from using it as a weapon.
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“Being in this business showed me how messed up adults are,” Joe said. “I can’t imagine my child enduring tying their son up in the backyard like a dog because he had bad grades. Another kid I’m going to talk to today got locked up in the basement in the dark — a 5- or 6-year-old. You name it, you see it on TV, we’ve seen similar situations.”
That’s why the success stories are so impressive.
Joe has walked three young women from the program down the aisle. He saw nine in the program graduate high school this year alone. But most find success in carving out some form of positive life once they are emancipated from the program.
Now 54, still thick as he was roaming the turf at Riverfront Stadium, Joe stares with all the seriousness of a middle linebacker when discussing what it takes to make this work.
“Being a macho football player, people talk about being tired mentally — ‘I’m so tired playing in 100-degree weather,’” Joe said. “That was tired, until I got to this. There were times I didn’t exert any physical exercise, but I get home and I am dead. It’s crazy to see how mentally drained you could get.”
And it doesn’t matter how many tackles you made in the NFL or the fact your uncle Bob Kelly also played for the Bengals, the aura of being a former football player doesn’t last long in this game.
“Now they’ll come in and somebody told them I played for the Bengals,” Joe said. “That part only works for a little bit. Once they get mad, I don’t care who you are.”
People in Cincinnati, New York, Los Angeles, Green Bay and Philadelphia where he played football might remember Joe’s name, but the legacy he created in Cincinnati from those who really know is what’s truly lasting.
“The way he is with these kids, the relationships he has built,” Tiffany said. “I don’t know if he is better at this or playing football.”
After retiring from the NFL, Joe went back to Los Angeles, where he grew up and his father is a local legend of mentoring through a youth football program. He came across a program helping those lost in the county shuffle, shadowed there and knew that’s what he wanted to do.
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He talked with Pepper Jenkins, a friend from his time with the Jets, about his post-football thoughts.
Kelly dedicated himself to learning all about the Ohio codes and laws, endured the nine-month vetting process and then set himself up to start this business in 1998. Jenkins joined him and stayed for 19 years.
It took a first class of teens displaced from a home that shut down in Dayton to get started. They had room for eight and took them all.
“I’m talking about bestiality, schizophrenia, we just said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go for it,’” Joe said. “We took all of them. We did great.”
They added a new facility about every other year after and gradually grew to their current level. They’ve received multiple awards and grants in recent years, including one from the NFL Player Foundation.
KYS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. The ends don’t always meet. Joe makes sure they do and hopes maybe donations will come.
Joe finds himself just about everywhere. From hospital rooms to courtrooms, dilapidated drug dens to county offices. He even was asked to Montgomery Inn for dinner with the Bengals linebackers last month, talking about the game, leadership and perspective.
Mostly, he goes wherever the kids take him. Calls come often. His number has never changed for a reason.
“He gets calls all the time randomly out of nowhere,” Tiffany said. “We will be somewhere, he will just light up when he sees someone or hears a name.”
Joe still hears from kids from that first group to this day. Yet, that’s nothing new when you’ve affected thousands of lives.
Tiffany learned early on when she started dating Joe this would be the case. You can’t do this unless your heart is in it. Everyone who has ever come across Joe knows his heart is fully invested.
“He would pick me up (for a date) and have kids,” Tiffany said. “I’d say, ‘What the hell?’ Then we got used to it and it was just the way of life. He would show up and have a couple of kids with him. It may even be they were spending the night at my house.”
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Tiffany and Joe have three kids of their own together, all college graduates with jobs now. But Thanksgiving, Christmas, you name the holiday, those in the system who don’t have a home to go back to end up part of the family at the Kelly household. Every time.
“There’s always eight or nine with nowhere to go,” Joe says. “So they come to my house. Bring them over and they hang out. They like my cooking and I like to cook. At Thanksgiving, it’s deep-fried turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, dressing. We do it up. Every Thanksgiving is a full house. My wife, she is used to sharing me now.”
Desiree Hopkins classified herself as “a fighter” at age 15 when she entered KYS.
“I was a terrible kid, just running wild. My mom was a drug dealer. My sisters and grandma are alcoholics and stuff. I didn’t come from a great place,” said Hopkins, 28. “If there was no Kelly’s … I don’t know where I would have ended up. I probably would have been locked up somewhere.”
She’s not locked up now. She’s paying it forward. Five years ago, she joined the staff at KYS and is currently a caregiver. On the surface, Hopkins is one of the many success stories. Just like the hundreds of successes, the story behind the story illustrates how hard it is to come out the other side. And how central Joe is to everything.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she said. “You come in here and come to Kelly’s you get a different kind of people. That’s what was great. They were tough, but they cared. A lot of places you don’t get that.”
Even after being emancipated from the program at 18, ready to find her way alone, Hopkins fell back into a bad way.
“Things went downhill pretty fast,” she said. “I was a size 0 at six months pregnant. They took me to the hospital, like, every day.”
By they, she means mostly Joe.
That’s why when she was getting married five years later, the first call also went to Joe. She wanted him to walk her down the aisle.
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“Oh yes, he was the first person I called,” she said. “My actual father was there, but Joe is my dad. This would mean more for me for him to walk me. He’s the reason I am who I am.”
The hard part of this business for Joe are the stories that don’t end up with the deserved ending like Hopkins. Joe reels off name after name wondering what might have been.
There was Demetrius McDonald, from Dayton. He sat down at a piano at the mall and blew everyone away. Never had a lesson, but the only thing smoother than his fingers on the keys was his jump shot on the court.
Soon after, he went on a home visit to be with his guardian for a weekend. He got a gun, shot at someone and robbed them. That was that.
Chris Burks was destined to be a Division I cornerback. He made an instant impression when Joe helped him get in the mix at Woodward High School.
“He went home for the weekend, broke into somebody’s house, armed robbery and went to jail,” Joe said. “We’ve had eight, maybe nine kids I’ve had that have died, been shot, stabbed, running from police.”
The talent and potential of those Joe takes in are what he says motivates him. But when eventual reunification with family has to be part of the goal and trying to undo more than a decade of ingrained behavior, often patience and discipline aren’t enough.
“You can’t save anybody that doesn’t want to be saved,” Joe said. “You can’t help anybody that doesn’t want to be helped.”
A gala was held at the Hilton for the 20th anniversary of KYS last year. Former teammates from the Bengals Super Bowl club came back to town. An executive board filled with Bengals ties attended the event.
Super Bowl safety Barney Bussey’s wife Beverly and longtime Bengals running backs coach Jim Anderson are both parts of that board and were in attendance.
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As was Williams. His presence was a no-brainer. Williams took Kelly under his wing the moment the rookie showed up in Cincinnati. They connected immediately over dominoes and a desire to make a difference.
Williams was on both Bengals Super Bowl teams and on the ground floor of multiple NFL initiatives while receiving the prestigious NFL Man of the Year Award in 1986. He eventually moved to Orlando to lead the youth sports wing of the Disney organization and find a legacy beyond two Super Bowl losses.
The pride in what Kelly accomplished beams from his voice the moment KYS comes up.
“He has a sincerity about him,” Williams said. “That is the one thing that makes you want to support him. It’s beyond admirable.”
While speaking at the gala, Williams spontaneously decided to give Kelly his NFL Man of the Year pin he received at Super Bowl 50.
“You hear about all the work they are doing, you’re meeting the people who work for the organization, you are meeting some of the students,” Williams said of the gesture. “It’s just something that was an item I had that I knew was unique and special and wanted to give to someone doing things unique and special.”
So often players flame out in the lives after football. They aimlessly wander seeking an inspiration like the game provided only to go unfulfilled.
For 21 years now, Joe Kelly found purpose and provided inspiration. He’s spent nearly every waking moment giving hope to those who never received any.
He didn’t need to take on this life. So many live better lives because he did.
Now, the next generation of his unbelievable legacy in Cincinnati begins to build upon itself.
“I love Kelly’s and would like to see it stand forever,” Hopkins said. “I want a group home. I want to do what he does. Eventually, that’s my goal. Who is better to learn it from? Because all he does is lecture me, ‘No, this is the way you are supposed to do it.’ This is one-on-one time all the time. I am going to know it all when I get there.”
(Top photo: Getty Images)
