About Julie Kay
Julie Kay has a B.A. in Psychology, a minor in Counseling and an Advanced Certificate in Life Coaching. She also became an ordained minister in 2017 through her local church that she's been committed to since 2000.
While Julie loves to learn academically, she fully believes that life experience is the best teacher. She has been a faithful wife for 32 years of marriage to Steve Kettles and has devoted many years of her life to raising her four children.
While raising four children is no easy task and takes a lot of self-sacrifice, Julie Kay's most challenging five years of her life were from 2017 to 2021.
During a marriage crisis in the first couple of those years she learned principles to find wholeness and to thrive in the midst of very difficult times. This became crucial when her only daughter and oldest child, Heidi, died suddenly on March 3rd, 2020 from a drug overdose on Fentanyl and Cocaine at the age of 27, leaving behind her four young children she gave birth to.
The methods for resilience to thrive through it all enabled Julie Kay to keep moving forward and to help others more than ever, even through the heartbreak of being denied custody of their grandchildren. So, she chose to turn her pain into purpose by putting on workshops and a large 25 speaker online Summit in the fall of 2021 called "Thriving Thru Troubled Waters."
Through this time Julie Kay's passion for the grieving emerged. She has been running an ongoing, year-round grief support group for both men and women at her church alongside her husband Steve since the beginning of 2022. She also specializes in Grief as a Life Coach.
With the determination to turn her daughter's death into something good, she boldly shares her daughter's story and three key principles to keep people of all ages on the right track to life, success and fulfillment.
Julie Kay speaks to both youth in the school system and adults in colleges and other organizations who may be on the verge of heading down the wrong path in life.
Also, she speaks to parents a proactive message to help prevent their children from heading down the road to drug use or abuse. She shares this from a vulnerable place, knowing it is not easy to be a parent.
Julie Kay has become more and more aware of the alarming opioid crisis through being a part of local organizations such as ASAP in Pasco county where she resides and Live Tampa Bay which is fighting the epidemic in her region of Florida. Therefore, her passion for bringing awareness of the dangers of Fentanyl has grown even more with the primary goal of prevention of drug use, overdose, and certainly overdose deaths.
It is also her goal to unify students, teachers and faculty with a heart for those who are grieving, creating a supportive environment for improved mental health in order for them to thrive. She believes grief support being more widely available also has a dual purpose to help reduce substance abuse and overdose rates due to likely improvement of mental health.
Thus, her acronym G.A.P. sums up her mission–Grief support, Awareness and Prevention.
See Julie Kay Kettles on
You Tube
*Preventative Speech on Loss of Daughter to Overdose on Fentanyl
*Interpretive Sign Language presentations
*"Empower You" Coaching Series
*Signature Speech