Paul Wilkes is a journalist, writer, and documentarian who has written extensively about individual spirituality as well as the role of religion in public and personal lives. As a social entrepreneur he has worked to aid the poor and marginalized both in America and in India “Trying Out the Dream: A Year in the Life of an American Family,” one of Wilkes’s early books, published in 1974, chronicled a prototypical average family. It was the basis for Wilkes’ television series, “Six American Families,” which won a DuPont Columbia award in 1976 for documentary excellence. The book and series were among the first to tell a larger story of the interplay in human lives by intensely focusing on one subject family. A practicing Catholic for much of his life, Wilkes wrote about epochal changes in the lives of Catholics and the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965. His book, “In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest,” which began as a New Yorker profile, won a Christopher Award in 1990. Sensing a disconnect between rigid Church teachings -- which stressed uniformity and obedience to clerical dictates -- and a newly enfranchised Catholic laity, he created the New Beginnings series, which thousands of parishes and churches employed to bring congregants into a more socially involved and spiritual life. His work as a social entrepreneur began when working on a story about delinquent youth for the Boulder (CO) Daily Camera in 1966. He wrote “they needed attention, not detention.” Attention Homes observed its 50th Anniversary in 2016. After he was inspired by the Catholic Worker and met its founder, Dorothy Day, he saw the needs of the poor and underserved close at hand, as they lived just a few blocks away in otherwise fashionable Park Slope in Brooklyn. In 1971 he gave up his material possessions and co-founded a social service center named CHIPS, Christian Help in Park Slope, which continues to this day, serving food to the poor and providing a home and support for homeless mothers. Later in life, after coming upon an abandoned child in India who was cruelly blinded, he founded Homes of Hope India, which has raised over $4 million and built 25 homes for orphaned, abandoned and neglected girls in India. Paul Wilkes was born September 12, 1938 to Paul and Margaret (Salansky) Wilkes in Cleveland, Ohio, the last of seven children.