Empowering Youth Through Creative Arts

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Marvelez Beginnings is a charitable organization dedicated to empowering youth in San Antonio to prioritize their social, emotional, and spiritual wellness. We embrace photography and filmmaking, creative arts and music as essential tools for our youth to discover their self-worth and amplify their voices through the transformative power of youth storytelling. Our programs focus on vocational skill-building, relationship development, and faith-based initiatives to support the holistic youth development, growth and wellness of the youth we serve.

“I was the kid your parents warned you about.” 

Growing up, Julio was drawn to trouble and often found it. A series of bad decisions led him to reform school and incarceration, suffering with drug addiction, depression and more. But Julio speaks freely about his past. “I want the kids to learn from my mistakes, how to take negative thoughts captive, how to use their circumstances to develop their resolve and the tools and skills to tell their story.”

Julio grew up in a tough neighborhood, attending an elementary school in the Bronx nicknamed The School of Broken Dreams. At the tender age of nine, he made a zip gun so he could shoot a rival nine-year-old gang member. His father knew their neighborhood was bad news, and he tried to get them out, but life kept pulling them back. Even when they lived for a time in North Carolina, the New York thug life was still in his veins. “I have been captive to drugs, depression, demons, gangs, the state, and even the devil himself,” says Julio. “But I am a captive no longer.”

Julio’s high school English teacher caught him writing on scrap paper and read aloud to the class the thoughts that were burning him up inside: Your homies are pushing time, dope, or daisies. She wanted to know what it meant. To him, it meant his whole life had been poisoned by the hell he called home. It meant his normal was someone else's nightmare. It meant that even though he moved back to the same block in the Bronx time and again, by the time he reached adulthood, he had never again seen any of the kids from The School of Broken Dreams. They disappeared, one at a time, pushing time in prison, pushing dope on the streets, or pushing daisies long before they should have been.

That English teacher told him to write his story, and maybe someday, some young man will read those works and have a better life. Two years later, standing in the yard of the world's largest prison, he remembered her words, began writing and never stopped. Now, decades later, the book she inspired him to write is in print. 

Following a long, successful career as a certified metallurgist for the Department of Defense, as well as an accomplished professional photographer & videographer operating MarVelez Works - Red Carpet Events and author of Half In Half Out in 2019, he is spending his retirement developing the mission of Marvelez Beginnings, founded in 2023, to pursue his passion for mentoring at-risk youth and young adults. Designed to give the kids tools and skills that can not only lead to paying jobs or a lifelong profession, but to help them embrace storytelling as personal development, his goal is to use his early experiences to make a difference in the lives of others.

A man of faith, Julio gives all the glory to God, saying, “It’s not about what I am doing, I am bragging on my God.” With youth development programs at Marvelez Beginnings, he hopes to empower at-risk youth, who need restoration from demons like he did, the strength and the power to conquer them and say - I am a captive no longer!

Julie Dahlberg is a U.S. Army veteran and small business owner of Mission Accomplished!, by Julie Dahlberg O.W.A., specializing in nonprofit and small business organizational development, fundraising, grant writing and public relations, with an unapologetically no-nonsense approach to intellectual honesty, transparency and ethical organizational practices.

Julie has a passion for helping individuals and families work through some of the most trying times in their lives - working hard, healing and reaching success - by taking personal responsibility of creating positive change for successful outcomes, especially our youth, so they can develop a positive, healthy and spiritually sound foundation in their lives.

In 2023, Julie authored Boldly Meek, a book that asks, are you Bold or Meek? and tackles how to improve communication by encouraging direct, healthy conversations that are purposeful and God-centered, so you can be both!  

With a heart for mentoring, she coaches others to be willing to have the difficult conversations in relationships and leadership development and encourages and empowers others to become the purposeful communicators that God intends them to be.

A member of First Baptist Church Sutherland Springs, Julie serves as a trustee; an armed safety officer and training coordinator for the Safety Response Team; leads the church's By His Grace Food Pantry and helps care for the church grounds. She has also served in the women’s mentoring ministry and on the board of directors for a national faith-based security organization.