When Toyia Taylor was in high school, a supportive interaction with her school counselor set the path for her life’s work.
She used to spend her lunches largely isolated: jotting down thoughts and ideas in her journal, tucked away on the lunchroom’s radiator. “I could have really gone down this trajectory where I really stayed closed, siloed and felt alone,” she said. But the high school counselor approached her one day and asked if she’d be willing to share what she was writing.
“I felt as if it was the first time that an adult had ever given my voice permission to be heard,” Toyia said. “So I said yes to this adult who wanted to read what I was writing. And he simply said, ‘If you can find the courage to speak what it is that you’re writing, you’re not only going to allow yourself to heal, but other young people going through the same things as you, permission to do this.’”
From that day on, Toyia made it her work to share her experience and support other young people in expressing themselves creatively.
Speak with Purpose
In 2012 Toyia started off on her own and built a business to offer education and mentorship to young people. In 2018 she secured her first major round of funding from Best Starts for Kids. And in 2020 she officially launched the nonprofit, Speak With Purpose, to shift her work from a one-woman show to a program she could scale with other artists and educators.
Speak With Purpose offers public speaking classes and curriculums to schools in the region, with a focus on supporting students (recognized as scholars in the program) to advocate for themselves using writing, presentation skills, and performative arts.
With the funding from Best Starts, she grew her staff and geographic reach. She hired educators with creative and theatrical backgrounds who integrated a co-teaching model with selected teachers from partnering schools.
“It’s really the best of both worlds because you have a teacher who has these students five days a week for an entire school year that can then partner with (a Speak With Purpose Educator) and really share the stories of our scholars,” Toyia said.
This dynamic helps the Speak With Purpose educators build trust and connections with the students over the course of the program. This leads to students showing up with vulnerability and confidence, speaking about personal experiences of food scarcity, homelessness, and war. And through sharing these experiences, Toyia said, the students are able to find an avenue to building power.
“Many of our students went on to be pre-law, communications, and education majors,” Toyia said.
Using Capacity Building
While the funding helped Toyia get off the ground, she recognized early on that she needed to build infrastructure and systems that could support existing work and expansion of the work. She turned to the capacity building supports that Best Starts offers at no cost to funded partners.
“(We used capacity building for) marketing, board development, accounting, even executive coaching. Currently we are working with someone to organize our Google Drive,” Toyia said. “Capacity building not only allowed us to talk about expanding, but then to do it in a way that was productive and create a strong foundation to build upon.”
Best Starts integrated capacity building into the initiative’s programming, recognizing that if Best Starts wanted to create equitable funding opportunities that reached multiracial organizations and newer organizations doing innovative work for communities, it was essential to support the work that goes into building organizational infrastructure.
This can include systems-building supports such as resources, advice and training about organizational development, fiscal policies and practices, human resources, technology, and other areas.
Toyia said she plans to continually use Best Starts’ capacity building supports to adapt the systems of her organization as it grows and changes over time.
To other Best Starts-funded organizations, she said her best advice for using Best Starts capacity building is to chat with the Best Starts Capacity building team to first gather information. Then identify the top three priority projects you want to kick off.
“Figure out what the top three pressing, high-level tasks are that would really be beneficial in your organization,” she said. “Work on those for the first six months. Then you’ll be able to see how you can integrate other (capacity building projects).”
