Curtis Carmichael played for Queen's Football from 2012-16 and was named the U SPORTS Russ Jackson Award winner, presented to the football player best exemplifying the attributes of academic achievement, football skill, and citizenship, in 2015. Since graduating, Carmichael biked across Canada in the Ride for Promise and wrote a book, Butterflies in the Trenches, the World's First Augmented Reality memoir.
 
Carmichael sat down with Athletics & Recreation to talk about his time at Queen's and in Kingston, his bike ride across the country, his book Butterflies in the Trenches, and his future plans.
 
How did being a member of the football team impact the goals you are accomplishing now?
 
Carmichael: Football was very good at putting me in positions to understand how you can really push the boundaries on what is possible. When I showed up at Queen's I had no intention of going pro but halfway through (my time at) Queen's, I decided I wanted to go pro. In my final year I had a lot of concussions but I still was invited to go to the CFL Combine. I did pretty well at the Combine, was talking to an agent and was talking to a few teams and my mindset was, I knew I wasn't the best of the best, but I was a great athlete. I was one of those guys who just show up and really work and grow and build on a team.
 
I decided to quit. I started to think about my life during the draft season, I moved back to my neighbourhood in public housing. At that time, I had to figure out what I was more passionate about and it wasn't football.
 
I think football really molded me. It really gave me a mindset to get into the future of work and life beyond football. Mostly the mindset of how to strategically plan and reverse-engineer your goals backwards. And in doing that, you can accomplish anything. Football really gave me the idea of how to strategize long-term and be a bit more strategic rather than wishful thinking.
 
What did it mean to win the Russ Jackson Award?
 
Carmichael: That was huge, I never won a national award before. I never did the stuff that I won the award for, to win an award. I was just living my normal life that I had before I came to Queen's. Five days a week I was volunteering in Kingston. 
 
I did a lot of different things in Kingston. For five years while I was at Queen's, I worked with an organization called nightlight. They basically provide a drop-in centre for people who are marginalized or just looking for a safe place. I worked with people who were in the shelter system, people who were panhandling, people who were homeless, people battling addiction, people in the indigenous community, or just older adults or people with physical and intellectual disabilities. I worked with a wide range of people through that drop-in centre, so I was very well known not only in the school community, but literally everyone in society in Kingston knew who I was.
 
I also ended up volunteering at Hart, which is an art school for people with disabilities. I also was able to volunteer a lot with children with special needs, and I also taught physical education in the local elementary schools. 
 
All that stuff I did genuinely because I really cared about people, I cared about impact, and I cared about living a life that's beyond yourself. I just did that stuff and in the end I got the award. I didn't really realize all the stuff I'd done until they listed it at the award ceremony. 
 
I was just doing what I thought I was brought to earth to do. Not only play sports and make money and be successful in school, but also the most important thing is community.
 
How did the Ride for Promise bike ride come about?
 
Carmichael: When you have a mindset of going pro, then you have all this pent-up energy because you're not going pro anymore. I was just like, 'what am I going to do with myself.' At the time I became a STEM elementary teacher, I was working in elementary schools mostly in high priority areas. 
 
At the time I was in the classroom and wanted to see how I could help my neighbourhood. I went to the community centre, checked in with some of the leaders, and asked how I could help. They said 'we just lost funding.' 'Ok cool, how much?' They lost roughly $150K. 
 
I had the right people come into the right corner. They need money, I'm not as well-known anymore because I'm not playing football for Queen's, I'm not going pro, I'm just back in the neighbourhood in public housing. The best thing to do is to do something crazy enough for people to listen. 
 
I decided to bike across the country and I think that was cool because most trips across the country are usually for different things like cancer, Parkinson's, children with intellectual disabilities. But I never saw one riding for people who live in disenfranchised, low-income communities, BIPOC communities, racialized communities. I had never seen that before. Knowing that, I knew it would get attention.
 
Was writing your book, Butterflies in the Trenches, always in your plans?
 
Carmichael: The book was never planned. Back when the ride finished, I had an internal conflict where I was like, 'raising money is not the goal to have long-term sustainable impact.' Raising money was able to fix a specific need at a specific time.
 
I started to think about, how do you actually future-proof a community and allow people to prepare for their future work, a new institution has to be set-up. I had this dilemma for about two years after the ride, just thinking about different models of how to prepare disenfranchised communities specifically for the future work, because they are getting left behind in the digital revolution.
 
I was sitting down one day with my wife, we're in Dominican, the first time I went on vacation, I was sitting there and out of nowhere, I thought 'I'm going to write a book and build an app for the book.'
 
A lot of the kids were asking for books that I was asking for as a kid. When I was a kid, I wanted to read a book about someone who broke the cycle of poverty and came back to equip other people to do the same. I wanted a book for someone who looked like me, someone who came from my environment, someone who had an unforeseeable background. For me I started off as a childhood drug dealer, which is pretty evident in my story, but I was able to show how you can use transferrable skills from your environment to be successful in any industry.
 
That was a different mindset to write a book. A lot of my thesis of writing the book was trying to prove through my life story, and there are 30 other stories at the end of the book, specifically from those in low-income communities, people who are in the indigenous communities, the black community, people of colour, there's different people so they can see that, though you come from this environment, some of the most innovative and talented people in the world are people who live in the hood, low-income communities, disenfranchised communities.
 
To say that the most innovative and talented places in the world are these kind of environments in the world, that's a pretty bold statement, but I wanted to prove it. The ethos of my book was to tell my story in a way where one chapter covers me talking about street stuff, but then on the last page, I talk about the takeaways of design thinking, the engineering design process. Product market fit in the tech industry. 
 
Me looking for that book as a young person and couldn't find it, all the way to my kids that I was now teaching two decades later still looking for a book like this. It became one of those things where, if there's a book you want to read that hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. It's a quote from Toni Morrison. I took that to heart.
 
There's a quote that I model my life after right now. "Success is not making it out, it's making your life and community better." And for kids in disenfranchised communities to hear that, that's the complete opposite narrative of what the world tells them. The world tells them the only way you can be successful is if you become who you are not and if you distance yourself from the environment you grew up in. That's not necessarily true, and that's not necessarily actionable for everyone. If you're a young person living in a neighbourhood at eight-years-old, that's not really a hopeful message. My message is trying to show kids that you can be successful by improving your life and improving your community in real time now.
 
Curtis is in talks to get his book optioned for tv or cinema.
 
Can you share any future goals?
 
Carmichael: Right now, I'm working with a few colleagues and our goal is to build Canada's first culture-focused innovation and entrepreneurship academy, that's able to prepare BIPOC and low-income communities for the future of work. Essentially, it's going to be a K-12 academy that will partner with schools, and we will provide programming for kids focused on STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship, with a holistic focus on mental health and the creative arts. It will be called Source Code Academy. The goal is to set it up as a non-profit. 
 
Our goal is to future-proof disenfranchised communities with that mindset of no child left behind.