At 14 Felipe Lopez was nicknamed the “Spanish Michael Jordan”, a basketball prodigy who worked his way from the Dominican Republic to the big time in the NBA. A bad knee injury derailed his career but he continued to play across Europe and South America.

Back in his college days he set up the Felipe Lopez Foundation and spent a lot of his free time giving back. Every time he visited the Dominican he traveled giving basketball clinics and campaigning for putting health on the agenda.

Then he stepped up to help New York, a place where he became a star when at Rice High School in Harlem.

As a Buzzfeed profile wrote:

In 2014, Lopez returned to New York to give back to the community that gave him so much. He started working with kids at the Bronx Spanish Evangelical Church to support efforts to take them off the street and give them a safe haven from the rampant drug abuse and gang scene in the neighborhood.

It’s here that Lopez started getting more recognition for all the amazing community work he was doing. In fact, his inspirational story and heartwarming relationship with one of the campers was recently featured in a profile for State Farm’s Neighborhood of Good.

With all the kids he helps, Lopez tries to offer guidance for their future.

“I’m not trying to build the next superstar,” he explains. “I’m trying to build the next best citizen that is going to go all around and take all the opportunities that’s going to be given to them.”

That’s why he’s trying so hard to set kids on the right path towards college — to him, it’s the key to unlocking a world of possibilities.

And to help them get there, he stresses one thing: preparation. “When you talk about preparation,” Lopez says, “you talk about readiness, you talk about being on time, you talk about doing your homework.” These are the things, he says, that help them not lose sight of their goals.

Lopez also shares his faith with the kids to give them another source of guidance. In fact, that’s a big reason why he renamed the Felipe Lopez Foundation to the Ministry of Faith this past year.

Today, almost 20 years since he first launched his foundation, Lopez has only found more ways to give back — earning him a new nickname: “Saint Felipe.”