Keegan White has spent much of his young career bringing people into the same room.
Sometimes that room has been halfway around the world, filled with entrepreneurs, investors, church leaders and government officials. Other times, it’s much closer to home—a gathering of men in Indianapolis talking about faith, family, work and what it means to serve well.
The setting changes and the people change, but for Keegan, the question is consistent: What could happen if the right people really knew one another?
This is a question he learned to ask long before he knew it would become part of his vocation. Keegan grew up in Sycamore, Illinois, a farming community west of Chicago. His father originally moved there to serve as a youth pastor, expecting to stay only a few years. More than three decades later, his parents remain deeply connected to the community.
When Keegan was young, his father left church ministry to start Neighbors’ House, an academic and literacy enrichment program serving children in low-income apartment communities. His mother worked in public education and later became a business owner.
Keegan remembers sitting across from children considerably older than he was who were reading at roughly his level. Even as a child, he began asking why.
More importantly, he watched what his parents did when they saw a need: They got involved. “They modeled so well just what it looks like to love your neighbor,” Keegan said, “and to know your neighbor first of all before you can love them.”
Looking back, Keegan sees how much that example shaped him—how he thinks about community, his interest in people and his belief that belonging to a place carries responsibility.
That foundation eventually led him to Taylor University, although Taylor was hardly his original plan. Since his older sister was a Taylor alum, he thought he might want to blaze a new path for himself. But as he visited and began to know more about the university, he decided it was worth a try. When he arrived in 2017, Keegan expected Indiana to be a four-year stop.
Instead, though, Indiana became home.
At Taylor, Keegan studied sustainable development and played golf while becoming involved in organizations ranging from Global Outreach to International Justice Mission. His education also took him to Malawi and Zambia for community development work.
Mentors have helped him connect his faith with vocation. Through Praxis Academy, he encountered the idea of “redemptive imagination,” looking at complicated problems and asking not simply what is wrong, but what might be possible. That way of thinking followed him after graduation and is forefront in his life today.
In 2021, Keegan married his wife, Kate, and moved to Indianapolis to work for Sinapis, a faith-based organization supporting entrepreneurs in emerging markets. What began as an executive assistant position quickly became something of a “Swiss Army knife” role as Keegan worked with international partners, fundraising and strategy. He spent significant time in Kenya and traveled to South Africa, Egypt, Romania and Guatemala. He and Kate also lived for several months in Geneva, Switzerland, while he worked on Forge, an international gathering designed to bring together people who support entrepreneurs.
The work gave Keegan a chance to do something he feels naturally wired to do: build bridges. “How do you bring people from different backgrounds into the same room,” he asked, “but really drive toward one goal?”
His work at Sinapis eventually included supporting a network across 15 countries and helping grow a global summit for faith-based entrepreneurial leaders from about 50 participants to more than 300.
Yet for someone whose work became increasingly international, Keegan found himself becoming increasingly invested in Indianapolis. Citizen 7 seemed a natural intersection of those two worlds.
Keegan had known about the organization for several years before joining the staff in 2026 as Director of Community Growth and Engagement. His responsibilities include member engagement, sponsorships, volunteer leadership, events and helping build systems that can sustain the growing movement.
He brings a bridge-builder’s perspective to that work. “I think the people orientation is one of the biggest strong suits that I’ve had,” Keegan said. He has found himself connecting people across different ages, races, neighborhoods, professions and nationalities.
But he also brings something more personal to Citizen 7: firsthand experience with the kind of friendship the organization hopes to cultivate.
Keegan still meets weekly with five or six men he first met at Taylor nearly a decade ago. Together they talk about God, family, relationships, community and the world around them. They have provided one another a place “to be known, to be heard, to be seen.”
Keegan knows how rare that is, and now he wonders how Citizen 7 can help other men experience it. His approach is not to rush growth. He talks instead about relationships, discernment and “playing the long game”—investing deeply in people while building something strong enough to last. To him, the long game extends beyond work and into family.
Keegan and Kate recently celebrated five years of marriage, and family legacy matters deeply to him. His parents intentionally broke a pattern of divorce in previous generations, and Keegan hopes to continue the legacy of faithfulness they began. Someday he would also like to start a business of his own and perhaps live internationally again with his family.
For now, though, he’s learning to be present where he is.
His advice to others reflects how he lives his own life: invest in people and don’t be afraid to say yes. After all, the young man who once thought Indiana would be a four-year stop now calls Indianapolis home. The student who learned about community development around the world is practicing it in his own city.
And once again, Keegan is bringing people into the same room—then watching to see what God will do when they begin to truly know and care for each other.
Q & A
Hobbies: playing golf, backpacking, hiking, fishing
Favorite place to vacation: Door County, Wisconsin and Greystones, Ireland
Favorite Indy Restaurant: the Livery (Latin American food)