ConnectUs Youth Spotlight EP 6 - (Nicholas Kehl: Faith, Service, and Leading from the Front in Austin, Texas)

In Episode 6 of the ConnectUs Youth Spotlight, we spoke with Nicholas Kehl, a junior at St. Dominic Savio Catholic High School in Austin, Texas. Nicholas leads the school's highly selective campus ministry team, co-runs a service club focused on homelessness and community need, and spent last summer counseling middle school boys at a faith-based summer camp.

For those new to ConnectUs, our podcast puts a spotlight on ambitious high school students who are actively working toward something meaningful. Nicholas's episode is one of the more personal conversations we have had, built less around a single project and more around the daily practice of showing up for the people around him.

Meeting with Nicholas Kehl, ConnectUs Youth Spotlight Episode

Moving to Austin

Nicholas grew up in Belmont, California before his family relocated to Austin about five years ago. He is the fourth of seven children, and is an avid baker and a soccer player.

He chose St. Dominic Savio for two reasons: the academic rigor and the faith-focused environment. The school has around 420 students and operates as a private Catholic institution in northern Austin. Nicholas is Roman Catholic and has been his whole life, and he wanted a school where that would be taken seriously alongside the academics.

Samples of the variety of things Nicholas Baked himself

Helping Others

One of the major traits that characterizes Nicholas is generosity. When Woosung, the podcast host, arrived at Savio as a new student from a public school in Korea, Nicholas was among the first to approach him, offer him a seat both at class and lunch, and help him figure out how things worked. As it was Woosung's first time settling in a new country and a brand new education system, he describes that he was truly thankful for Nicholas's help, as it aided him not only in academic matters, but also helped him grow in faith of Catholicism, as he served as a role model in what a true Christian ought to be: helping others in need.

TIM Team

Nicholas has been part of at Savio is TIM Team, the school's campus ministry group. As a part of a competitive process, each year, about 100 students apply for roughly 10 spots. Nicholas was selected as a junior and has been leading retreats and facilitating faith experiences ever since.

TIM Team manages the spiritual life of the school, organizing Mass, confession, adoration, and the school retreat program. Nicholas has served as an emcee for the sophomore retreat and has led the freshman retreat as well. He describes being selected as one of the proud moments of his time at Savio, both for the community he found within the team and for the opportunity to give his classmates something real.

He attributes getting in to two things: the relationships he had built with teachers over time, and a quality he describes simply as consistency. What you see is what you get. He does not adjust his personality depending on who he is talking to, and he believes a lot of people, teachers included, noticed that and respected it.

Photo of Savio Faith Group , St. Dominic Savio HS website

Mats for the Homeless (MFH)

Outside of TIM Team, Nicholas co-leads a service club called Match for the Homeless alongside a classmate named Matthew. The concept is practical and hands-on: members weave plastic bags into mats for people experiencing homelessness.

The club's most recent initiative is a diaper drive at Savio, benefiting Catholic Charities. The reasoning is straightforward. Diapers are expensive, and many low-income families cannot consistently afford them. Nicholas and Matthew identified the need and organized the drive to address it.

Leadership Camp Texas and Camp Enterprise

Last summer, Nicholas served as a counselor at Leadership Camp Texas, a Catholic summer camp for middle school boys built around teaching virtue. He is returning this summer. He describes it as genuinely enjoyable, a place where the goal is to help younger students grow in character while also having a good time along the way.

Earlier this year, he attended Camp Enterprise, a business camp hosted by the Rotary Club of Austin. On this camp, he further developed his interest in Business. He had always assumed he was heading toward engineering, but the more he thought about what actually energizes him, the more he kept coming back to people and the work of building things alongside them.

He is also a part of the Summit Philosophy and Leadership Club at Savio, another place for thinking through bigger questions with peers.

What He Is Thinking About Next

Nicholas is preparing for a makeup SAT with a target score of 1500 or above, and is beginning to think seriously about college. He is leaning toward a business major, though he says he has not settled on anything specific yet.

His long-term goals have little to do with a title or a salary. He wants a good family life, wants to be a genuine representative of his faith, and wants to meet as many people as he can along the way. He put it simply, when asked about his long-term goal: be a saint, get to heaven.

His Advice

Nicholas was asked what makes relationships with peers and teachers actually work, to which he answered with one word: honesty.

Teachers do not want to be lied to. Neither do friends. If something is not done, say so. If you disagree, say it respectfully. He added that attitude matters just as much: stay upbeat, build people up rather than tear them down, and be respectful to teachers even when they are wrong, because there is rarely anything to be gained by doing otherwise.

He closed with a quote from Pope John Paul II that he clearly keeps with him: "You are not the sum of your faults and failures. You are the sum of the Father's love for you."

Photo of Nicholas Kehl and his friends

Final Thoughts

Nicholas Kehl's episode is not built around a startup or a platform or a product. It is built around a person who has spent three years in high school looking for ways to be helpful to the people around him, and doing it consistently enough that he ended up leading some of the most competitive programs at his school along the way.

For students who feel like they need a dramatic origin story or a recognized project to have something worth talking about, Nicholas is a useful counterpoint. The work he has done, from campus ministry to service clubs to summer camp counseling, carries weight not because of scale but because of how seriously he has taken it.

We are glad Nicholas made time for this conversation and grateful to have him as part of the ConnectUs community.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the ConnectUs Youth Spotlight, available on Spotify and across our social media platforms.