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Rod Kempkes drove past Boys Town’s sprawling, picturesque Omaha campus for most of his life without giving it much thought.
Like most people, he knew the iconic “He ain’t heavy” statue. He knew it was a historic home for troubled boys—a piece of civic identity so familiar, it sometimes goes unnoticed as you breeze down Dodge. Then he took a job there. And a few years later, he found himself running the massive operation with global reach.
“I honestly didn’t know a lot,” Kempkes admitted. “You tend to think about Boys Town as their original flagship—their residential care. It’s really surprising how much we do.”
Surprising is an understatement. In 2025 alone, Boys Town worked directly with 197,000 people across all 50 states. More than 106,000 of those interactions involved mental health support and suicide crisis intervention. Staff led training in 413 schools, reaching over 171,000 students.
Nearly 2 million people visited Boys Town’s digital platforms, including “Your Life, Your Voice,” built specifically for teens in crisis. All the while, a small but formidable research division published findings on early brain development, pediatric audiology, and the neurological footprints of childhood trauma. None of that shows up on the postcard.
“Boys Town has truly become a medical system that focuses on socially, economically, and medically underserved populations,” said Kempkes, president and CEO since 2020. “I can take pretty much all the programs and put them into preventative, primary, acute, and restorative care.”
Kempkes didn’t arrive through the usual doors to oversee Boys Town’s broad and deep scope. He came from the business world—more accustomed to a boardroom than a campus full of kids who have survived things most adults will never experience. He joined as chief operating officer under Father Steven Boes in 2018, learned the organization from the inside out, and stepped up as CEO when Boes returned to parish life.
He became the first layperson to lead Boys Town in its more than 100-year history—a designation he’s quick to deflect.
“I don’t think it’s that special that I’m here,” he said. “[Boys Town founder] Father Flanagan had his trusted friend Henry Monsky working with him for decades. The next director had business people. Father Boes brought me in to work with him. It’s just sort of a partnership.”
What Kempkes brought to that partnership was the financial acumen to manage serious money—a $1 billion endowment, an operating budget exceeding $526 million, and a $298 million capital campaign underway for new research and hospital facilities. Fundraising covers roughly a quarter of operations, a constant pressure Kempkes describes plainly: “The mission’s not money. But there’s no mission without it.”
“It’s humbling,” he added, “because your instinct is to understand where you’re going to augment value. Then you meet the teams, you hear the work they do, and you realize you’re trying to add something to people who already show up and do really hard, unbelievable things, literally all over the globe.”
That fact becomes concrete fast. A short walk across campus leads to the Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility, where Boys Town’s highest-acuity children live and receive care. On any given day, 80 to 100 more are waiting for a bed.
“I can’t walk out of there without crying,” Kempkes said. “You see little kids in there and you think, what happened to them? And then you hear their stories. And you’re like…oh my goodness.”
Around the corner, psychiatrists, psychologists, behaviorists, and pediatricians orbit the same child with the same purpose. That convergence of resources and expertise is what took Kempkes most by surprise.
“I don’t care who you’re talking to—researchers, surgeons, nurses, schoolteachers, in-home family workers—they all have the same purpose,” he said. “They are trying to help youth and families. That’s it.”
The impact of the city centerpiece is wide-sweeping. Boys Town has one of only four hospitals in the United States to have administered a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that, until recently, was usually a death sentence. Kempkes recently met a parent whose child received the infusion at Boys Town and watched them begin to recover.
Then, there are the stories without a medical explanation—the ones that require loads of patience, perseverance, and an army of people who refuse to give up.
One young man arrived at Boys Town after being abandoned by the affluent family that had adopted him from Africa. He cycled through nearly every level of care: the locked psychiatric unit, a family home program, an intervention facility, and back again. With assaults and relapses thrown in during that time, he had no home to return to or family waiting on the outside. Boys Town staff stuck with him until he graduated from high school and got a job. Years later, he still returns to visit.
“That’s not me,” Kempkes is careful to point out. “That’s the family teachers, the psychologists, the psychiatrists. I just get a glimpse of what they do. I’m grateful for the glimpse.”
Kempkes sees the next chapter running on two tracks: technology and research. Boys Town has already deployed AI-powered behavior modification programs in schools and predictive models that estimate ear growth in young hearing aid patients. The larger ambition is extending the mission’s reach to children who would otherwise never find their way to a campus or a crisis line.
The research side may prove more consequential. Boys Town’s labs track neurological development from days after birth through adulthood. An integration is emerging—hearing and audiology issues clustering around the same children who present behavioral challenges. If it proves out, it could change how pediatric care identifies at-risk kids before a crisis develops.
“That’s how we truly innovate,” Kempkes said. “Having that connection between research and real-world application—that’s how we meet people where they are.”
Most people don’t realize that Boys Town’s model went international decades ago. When Father Flanagan began sharing his revolutionary “there are no bad boys” concept, people came from around the world to study it and take it home. By 1959, there were 80 Boys Towns globally. Thirty-one remain—independent organizations connected by mission, operating from South Africa to Japan to Venezuela. Boys Town Nigeria opened in 2023.
Earlier this year, Kempkes convened leaders from six of those global communities to discuss familiar and shared issues of gang violence, social media, drugs, and families in crisis. “Those issues don’t have borders,” he said. “And thankfully, neither do the people who want to help.”
An avid student of Boys Town history, Kempkes keeps a photograph of Father Flanagan on his office wall. Next to it, Mother Teresa. They serve as a daily reminder of what he’s been handed.
“My job,” he concluded, “is to steward this and not mess it up.”
Visit boystown.org for more information.
