Ryan Rickel’s libertarian core comes from growing up in the country with a union electrician father and an entrepreneurial mother.

“Both of my parents worked a ton, and we were expected to be self-sufficient,” Ryan says.

He was born and raised in Wisconsin, near Green Bay. (Mackinac Center supporters in Northern Michigan will be pleased to hear that he is a Packers fan.)

His parents divorced when he was young, and he and his sister were raised in a middle-class household. But Grandma lived nearby and helped raise them.

“My Grandma never missed church and directed the choir for 40 years — which meant I sang in the choir,” Ryan says.

He was big into sports, playing golf, football and hockey in high school.

“Like every kid, I wanted to be a professional athlete. But after maxing out at 5’9,” that was not going to happen,” he says with a grin. Still, he ended up as a punter at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, a Division III school, before transferring to Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, where he got a degree in business marketing.

After school, he moved to Chicago while his future wife Luann did her graduate work to become an optometrist. In Chicago, Ryan worked in real estate and got a taste of politicians using the government to enrich themselves.

“That’s the period of my life where I realized the government is not your friend and is mostly there to control your life,” he says. “In almost every industry in Chicago, the government has its hand in your pocket. People receiving the same services pay wildly different rates. Low-level tickets are heavily prosecuted while major crimes go unpunished, and businesses must get politically connected to survive while entrepreneurship is oppressed.”

The Rickels moved to Saginaw to be near Luann’s family. Ryan worked at the railroad in Vassar before going into sales. That experience helped immensely when he came on board the Mackinac Center, where he now sells the concept of freedom.

When asked to describe his job, Ryan says, “Saving the world.”

“We exist to stop government overreach, protect the individual from an overbearing state, promote entrepreneurs who want to compete on a level playing field. In America, you have the chance to make something of yourself through hard work, and the government shouldn’t get in the way of that.”

The core of his job is finding and reaching out to donor prospects — people who believe in the Mackinac Center’s mission, see the problems confronting the state of Michigan and want to do something about it.

Ryan lives in Saginaw County’s Thomas Township with his wife and, as he puts it, four “beautiful, healthy, smart, pain-in-the-butt kids.”