Former Cardinals Pitcher Makes Off-the-Field Impact in Haiti and St. Louis
If you ask Kyle McClellan what his greatest accomplishment has been, he won’t cite being drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 2002 or serving as a relief pitcher on the Cardinals’ 2011 World Series championship team.
Instead, he’s most proud of the positive impact of his community organization: Brace for IMPACT 46. The foundation, whose name bears the number McClellan wore on his Cardinals jersey from 2008-2012, focuses on enhancing people’s potential to lead healthy, productive lives.
“My baseball career was great, it was fun, but I would say being able to impact hundreds and thousands of lives has been way more important to me,” says McClellan, who launched the organization in 2014 with his wife, Bridget.
Cardinals teammate Adam Wainwright played a key role in helping McClellan discover his lifelong mission.
“Adam was someone I leaned on a lot with things that he was doing and his experience as a giver,” he says. “During a conversation, he invited us to join him on a trip to Haiti. We didn’t even hesitate, we were just like, ‘Sure we’re gonna go.’”
That trip was a life-changing experience for McClellan, and one where he got to witness firsthand the lack of resources and opportunity in Haiti that most Americans take for granted.
“Just seeing the lack of infrastructure and other things that we experience every day and don’t think much about, opened our eyes as to where we can plug in, where we can help and the things we can bring to the table,” says McClellan, who has returned to Haiti dozens of times in the last few years.
Brace for IMPACT 46 actively supports the IDADEE Children’s Home in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. In 2015, McClellan’s organization employed 55 Haitian construction workers to build a second level for the home, which now provides 40 orphaned or abandoned children with healthy meals, clean water, medical care, a solid biblical foundation and a loving home environment.
Through the years, the organization has attracted about 900 supporters and volunteers, including Brett Israelson, who learned about the foundation through a conversation with McClellan.
“I was actually reading a book called Miracle on Voodoo Mountain, which is about orphans and children living in Haiti,” recalls Israelson, who is vice president of operations at Kaldi's Coffee and Frothy Monkey Roasting Co. “When I met Kyle and told him about the book, one thing led to another, and two months later I was on a plane to Haiti. I met all the kids, and once you meet the kids, it pretty much takes care of itself.”
Bringing it Home
Though McClellan loved working in Haiti, he also wanted to find a way he could help his hometown and the place where he experienced his greatest baseball success.
The valuable lessons he learned in Haiti influenced his approach to serving in St. Louis.
“If God wouldn’t have led us to Haiti first, with the wisdom and experience that we gained down there, we would have failed in St. Louis,” McClellan says. “What we learned in Haiti was the value of local leadership—to find people you trust, elevate their platform, support them and allow them to make decisions.”
Andre Alexander, president of the Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, is a beneficiary of McClellan’s St. Louis outreach.
“We had formulated a housing program for residents in north city, but we were in need of funding to get it off the ground,” says Alexander. “After talking through our idea of what it would look like to bring affordable housing to help people, it was a vision that aligned with what Kyle had already done in Haiti.”
Brace for IMPACT 46 provided funding for Alexander’s organization to hire local contractors to renovate neglected homes into affordable houses for people in the community.
“At the end of the day, if a family doesn’t have quality housing, things will come apart,” Alexander says. “It’ll impact a child’s education if they don’t know where they’re going to sleep, if a person is trying to find a job, they’ll need a proper address. Brace for IMPACT provided us with the capital to be able to provide better housing for the people here.”
McClellan believes his life has now come full circle in that he’s able to give back to a city that has given him so much, while also being able to help disadvantaged youth who live in an impoverished country.
“Sometimes you have to step back and look at your life and figure out why a lot of these stars are aligned,” says McClellan. “When you sit back and say, ‘I was born in St. Louis, raised in St. Louis, drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals, won a World Series here and been successful here, what does it really mean and what do you do with that? That first trip to Haiti was perfect because it gave me a purpose after my career to go out and use the platform that I’ve been provided with.”