National Co. Helping Justice: Harley Blakeman’s Journey from Struggle to Second Chances

Harley Blakeman and I got connected through his TEDx talk, and when I heard his story, tough childhood to homeless to prison to Ohio State valedictorian to creating a national company, I knew I had to get him on the podcast. What happens when you beat every odd, graduate at the top of your class, and then can’t get a job because of your record? Harley didn’t just figure it out. He built the solution.

Growing Up in the Woods

Harley grew up in Keystone Heights, Florida, about 25 minutes outside Gainesville. “Everything north of Orlando is not what you think of when you think of Florida,” he told me. “When you think of Florida, you’re thinking of like Miami beach and Orlando, but everything north of Orlando is just kind of woods and trailer park and prescription pills and people scrapping it. And, you know, everyone goes to jail. Nobody goes to college.”

His parents worked at a steel manufacturing plant, his mom as a receptionist, his dad as a welder. Money was tight, but there were good moments. His dad loved music, so Harley grew up with drums, guitars, and a bass. They’d record songs together on an eight track. “Those were like the best memories in my childhood,” Harley said.

But when Harley was 15, his mother divorced his father and disappeared. It turned out she was heavily addicted to drugs and suffering from mental health issues. His dad wasn’t equipped to handle it well. “He like was like, you know, talked about about her and was like, you know, I can’t believe she did this. She doesn’t care about you guys,” Harley explained. Looking back as an adult, he realizes his father was hurt too, but at 15, those words cut deep.

When Everything Falls Apart

About a year and a half after his parents’ divorce, Harley’s dad died in a motorcycle accident. Harley was called out of school and brought to the hospital to say goodbye. “He was in extremely bad shape. I mean, like, it was scarred in my mind, like seeing my father the way he was, because it was a motorcycle accident, and it was really, really bad,” he said.

His dad’s family came down from Ohio for the funeral, and his mom showed up promising to take care of him. But within a month, it was clear she couldn’t. She didn’t have her own place and was staying with some guy she’d just met. When Harley went to live with them, he was sleeping on a couch in a house with no food and beer cans everywhere.

“I ended up basically leaving after like a week because I was like, this isn’t, you know, I’m enough of a double to know that like this isn’t going to be good for me,” Harley said. At 16, he chose homelessness over that chaos. He bounced from friend’s couch to friend’s couch, sometimes sleeping in cars when he had nowhere else to go.

The Drug Trade

Without clean clothes or a consistent place to sleep, Harley dropped out of high school. To survive, he started selling weed and whatever else he could get his hands on. A registered nurse who knew his brother started fronting him prescription pills, Roxycodone, the blue pills that were flooding Florida at the time.

“She’d be like, well, here’s 50 of them, just like pay me back when you get the money,” Harley said. This woman became his main supplier, and he’d visit her house once or twice a week to restock.

Eventually, he discovered the pills sold for three times more in Savannah, Georgia. He started making regular trips, bringing hundreds of pills at a time. The money allowed him to get off the streets, he got a car, an apartment, all the trappings of success. But he had no plan, no purpose. “I had nothing to live for. So I was just blowing all the money on drugs and partying,” he said.

Harley admits he got reckless. He’d get blacked out on Xanax and OxyContin and break into cars for no reason, he didn’t even need the money. “I never even got anything from a car. Like nothing of value. I think I broke into three or four cars. I’m looking for stuff,” he said. Looking back, he knows how lucky he was to survive those years.

The Arrest

The end came when a 16 or 17-year-old kid who was buying from Harley’s contact got caught selling to an undercover cop. Someone gave Harley’s name to the Chatham County narcotics department. They set up a sting where the kid’s mom woke Harley at 5 a.m., claiming the cops were coming. She followed him as he fled with a trunk full of drugs, leading the police right to him.

“I was just sitting at a red light on Abercorne Street in Savannah, Georgia, when I was surrounded and arrested,” Harley said. After the initial adrenaline, something unexpected happened. “As soon as I saw them step out, I literally just laid down in the back of the car car and went to sleep,” he said. “This like piece of like, um, like it’s like I’ve been trying to control myself for two years, three years as a kid, but no, like, items or anything. And like, now I can just like go like I’m in their control.”

Making Sense of It All

What strikes me about Harley’s story is how a series of losses, first his mom, then his dad, sent a smart kid into survival mode. He wasn’t making rational long-term decisions because he was just trying to get through each day. The adults who should have protected him either disappeared or became his suppliers.

Today, Harley runs Honest Jobs, the nation’s largest fair chance employment platform, helping people with criminal records find work and helping businesses access overlooked talent. He went from that red light in Savannah to graduating at the top of his class from Ohio State to building something that matters. But getting from arrest to Ohio State? That’s where we’ll pick up next time.