Intellifluence's video: Rickard Jean-Noel Influencer Spotlight 102

Join as an influencer for free! https://intellifluence.com/influencers Browse Marketplace offers: https://intellifluence.com/offers View our top influencers: https://intellifluence.com/influencer-lists Rickard Jean-Noel is the founder of Real Word Ministries and The Real Word TV. Rickard has a Bachelor's degree in Law and Paralegal Studies from CUNY New York City College of Technology. Rickard worked on a successful political campaign before working at a prominent law firm then a nonprofit. Rickard currently works for another nonprofit called CAMBA. Rickard is also a preacher, motivational speaker, husband and father. You can learn more at therealwordministriesinc.org and follow Rickard on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, to name a few. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, including how you got into ministry? So I came to America at the age of two from the Island of Haiti. During that time my country was going through social and political distress. They always had coops in Haiti where the military and rebels would take over the country. So we came to America at a young age. When I came to America, I lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn that was during, I guess, post crack era. So we started at very humble beginnings. We used to live in a room in the basement, the five of us, my mother and my father, my sister, my brother and myself. And from those humble beginnings, my parents had always told me that the best thing to do is to stay with education. Don’t be a follower, be a leader and so with those principles, we always stayed intact, but as we got older, I always was in a church, but I didn’t really take church seriously, because of many different things, because of the social construct of church where it’s like they treat people that got money in church better than people that don’t have money. People with money, they’re able to tied more than people that don’t have money. And at the time growing up, we grew up on welfare, on food stamps. I didn’t see my real dollar up until the age of 10. And so all those things, that was part of my growing up. Things I had to deal with. My parents, they struggled a lot, but they worked hard and eventually they bought their first home. That was when I was maybe… I think 10 years old, they bought their first home. And like I said, I was always in church, but I didn’t take church as seriously as I do now. As I got older I was caught up in I guess the street life, because at one point I was incarcerated. I was working at a place of business. I was working in a retail business and one of my friends and I, he committed a crime and I was there when he committed the crime. And because I did not tell on him when he committed the crime, we both ended up going to jail and we ended up going to central bookings. And after we went to central bookings, I ended up losing the job. So I was placed on probation and then I had time to think. So I took that time to reflect on life and everything that was going on. I started taking school more seriously. When I started school, I was studying dental hygienist in college, but I wasn’t really interested in college. I was just going to college because my dad said if I was going to live under his roof, I had to go to college. So I was just going, just to go, just like I was going to church, just to go. And I ended up on academic probation. I ended up taking some classes, almost dropped out of college, but I stayed there taking one class a semester until I got my GPA back up and I ventured even deeper into the streets because I was more addicted to fast money and it wasn’t until I had this pastor that gave me the opportunity to preach one day, he said, “I’ll let you preach because you have a lot of leadership qualities in you. And because you have leadership qualities in you, you just need someone to believe in you.” And so he gave me the opportunity to preach and my first sermon was called “The Reincarnation of Rickard Jean-Noel” because I felt like it was a first start from where I came to where I’m at now. So I used the pictures in my mother’s photo album to basically record my life from start to finish. And I did a PowerPoint presentation in the church and they was like, “Wow, we didn’t know you had this amount of talent.” And from there I did another sermon called “He Who is Without Sin”. And then after my third sermon, honestly can’t even remember the name of it. I think it was called “Reborn in Christ”, but that one went viral. Well, to me it went viral. It hit 50,000 views and that’s when people started paying attention to what I was doing and then I became one of the youth ministers at the church and then I got ordained as a deacon. And then the rest is history like they say. Read the full transcript: https://intellifluence.com/blog/rickard-jean-noel-influencer-spotlight