The big kid from little Wiggins in northeast Colorado left home in 2014 knowing he was pretty good at football. Dalton Risner was bound for a decorated career as an offensive lineman at Kansas State University.

“But in high school, I wouldn’t say I really knew who Dalton Risner was,” he said one recent evening, wrapping up another day of training camp with the Denver Broncos.

Risner (pronounced rise-ner) was the second-round choice of his home state team in the 2019 NFL draft. The now 25-year-old started every game for the Broncos as a rookie, maintaining his streak from Kansas State, where he started all of his 50 contests.

But as he continues his rise on the gridiron, he does so knowing he has a higher duty than blocking for quarterback Drew Lock and his Colorado native buddy, running back Phillip Lindsay.

Risner discovered this duty in Manhattan, Kan.

He volunteered for a Special Olympics baseball game, where he met Michael Carpenter, a man with developmental disabilities.

He was one “who showed me what kindness and honesty and true happiness looks like,” Risner said. “That showed me like, man, this is the people I want to be around. This is what I want to be more like.”

He and Carpenter have stayed friends.

“I love you, bro,” Carpenter said in an NFL video chronicling the relationship.

Also that freshman year at Kansas State, Risner met kids with cancer at Camp Hope.

“I remember coming back the next year, and a lot of the kids weren’t there anymore,” he said. “That was extremely hard. That showed me how much I wanted to give back to kids like that. I wanted to show them I loved them and cared for them.”

So he has, serving on the board of that camp. He also serves as an official “champion ambassador” for Special Olympics.

And now Risner has his outreach team: Risner Up Foundation, “created quite simply to positively impact others through love and kindness,” reads the website.

Also posted on the site is a favorite Bible verse of Risner’s: “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in various forms.”

Risner believes God gifted him with size; he’s listed at 6-foot-5 and 312 pounds. “I have a platform in football,” Risner said. And he’s using it, he said, “to be that positive light in a world that can be really dark at times.”

In May, Risner’s foundation raised $16,000 for Denver organizations helping families hit by the COVID-19 crisis. While other such checks have been cut since Risner created the nonprofit his senior year at Kansas State, he likes to say the foundation is there for smaller, no less important, acts: more Special Olympics games, for example, or grocery deliveries, or visits to lonely residents of nursing homes.

He’s come to call one resident Grams. “He takes time to come see me,” she said in that NFL video also featuring Carpenter. “It really warms my heart.”

Risner considers himself directed by faith. His family went to church in Wiggins, but when he left home, “I was at a time in my life where I was like, ‘You know, God doesn’t talk to me. He talks to everybody else.’”

Then there were those community service events. “I saw how God was trying to talk to me,” Risner said. “It just reinvigorated my faith, sparked my faith.”

Over the summer, he’s left his house where there’s a mat with a message at the front door: “Jesus Christ is the head of our home.” To and from Broncos headquarters, he listens to Christian music. He’s prone to tweet prayers.

The days start around 6 a.m. and end around 7 p.m., and “it’s easy to get lost, especially when things are going good,” Risner.

But he tries to keep focus with simple acts of kindness, such as the jerseys he signed this summer and mailed to people he’s met over the years. That included Carpenter and Grams. “I love you,” Risner wrote on each.