Natalie Kelly

First of all, I give any success that I have, I give credit to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I definitely thank him and give him the honor and the glory for keeping me afloat, even when things are just really, really tough personally. My faith in him is my biggest inspiration. But just, you know, just not giving up. I've had a lot of challenges in my life, but in all of that, I never allowed myself to get so discouraged that I would give up. I've always tried to let helping other people be the first thing, the priority. That's the reason why, with the careers that I've had so far, most recently, it's always been centered around nonprofits and helping, because I want to help myself and learn as much as possible, but my main priority is to help people.

I've never really had anybody sit me down and just give me career advice - I wish I had somebody that would do that a long time ago. But the best advice I've ever gotten, really, and this is just kind of something I've heard from different people, is to just keep doing what I'm doing - don't give up and don't stop. Don't ever be discouraged in what you're doing. Even if things in your career are not working out the way you want them to, there's always a way to work around that. Sometimes you have to be creative, and sometimes you just have to think outside the box. And that's easier said than done a lot of times, but I've just had people, during times when I felt personally discouraged in certain situations, there's always somebody to tell me not to give up, not to ever, ever give up, just keep working hard towards your goals. Set a goal and don't move away from it, just keep working towards it, no matter what.

Being that I work with a nonprofit, I would say if you have a heart to help people, don't let that fade away, because a lot of people need help. If you're gonna be in the nonprofit industry, make sure that you continue to keep a passion for helping people. As far as the mortgage industry, in spite of how challenging it looks, even if people are doing it on the commercial end, people still want to buy houses. I would say just be encouraged and don't give up, no matter how tough the market looks. You're always going to have people that want to buy homes - they don't want to keep renting and deal with rent increasing each year. If you're in the mortgage market, don't give up, just keep going. Don't ever stop, because you're always going to have a market for it.

Working with housing and helping people purchase homes, obviously the biggest thing is affordability. Even with a program like Habitat for Humanity, where it's obviously more affordable than people buying houses in the market, it's still getting more expensive for the organization to purchase the materials to build the home. Because of that, even the amount that a lot of our low to moderate income folks would have to pay each month is still increasing because the materials are getting more expensive. At some point, property taxes are increasing, insurance is increasing, so a lot of our people that are in the program are still going to be stretched, even though wages are not increasing. Previously when I worked with NACA, a lot of the folks there were probably more in the middle income, but because the market is so expensive for the homes and property taxes, that's the biggest challenge - the increase in home prices and the wages not increasing.

As far as my values, I think that having integrity is important. Definitely having integrity - being a person where if you say something, that's exactly what it means. People can trust you, so I want to be trusted in my workplace, I want to be trusted in my relationships, and vice versa. I want to be able to trust people, but I definitely want to be the one that's trustworthy. I believe in making myself available to be of assistance in any way I can be, professionally and also in relationships.