TAF Varsity Lunchbreak 2022: 25 Years of TAF Excellence, and We're Not Done Yet!

TAF Varsity Lunchbreak 2022: 25 Years of TAF Excellence, and We're Not Done Yet!

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[Music] [Music] [Music] after 25 years the three of us are sitting here together and we have a lot of memories together i want to take us back to the early early days yes on edmonds and rainier right location um right in the middle of the hood where all the kids were that we wanted to serve there's this thing about running after school programs that at some point you forget kind of about about the program itself and you focus on the kids and the families right and that to me is the fun part of it those very first conversations that you and i had when we were thinking about taff and what it was going to be we were looking at a holistic approach right not just your kid's going to sit here for a couple hours and this is what we're going to teach them yeah we were looking at the whole child and that's ideally what education would be right is looking at each individual child and the whole child what do they need to succeed as a whole person i will just say as um your co-founder that part came from you right as a social worker like that's the thing you're thinking about i was thinking more about the tech side right what do we want to teach them and you were thinking about the whole child and all the things that come with growing up in our communities and just growing up period and that's what made this the start of this work be a strong foundation it was so exciting yeah i mean it was good stuff it was good stuff yeah i think we learned to not let anything else distract us which is why we're here 25 years later right because if we would have listened not everybody was ready for tap no oh a whole lot of people weren't ready for that you gonna bring that up so you know you don't have everyone cheering for you so you have to stay steady and we did it was like we are always going to keep kids at our center [Music] i will never forget the taff academy conversation i was just like trisha has completely lost it she wants us to manage a co-manager school and i'm like i can't keep up with the children we have now right like how are we going to do that what does that look like trisha's like okay think about it like this what if we took all of our best practices everything we've put into our programs and we were able to give kids that every day six hours a day monday through friday what would be the impact of that right and we were going to be very deliberate in making sure families of color knew this opportunity was for their children and so that's what we did and we were like listen you want something greater than what you're already getting come check out this school we built such strong relationships i think the families never really left us they stayed in contact kids stayed in contact even going through college we knew how they were doing they stayed re connected to us and then wanted to figure out how to help which was always a part of our big plan right the full circle yeah right college get those good jobs and then come back this it is such an incredible thing that is unlike anything else yeah because it is child and community centered and you guys have maintained and stayed true to that mission and that ideal you know despite some some huge huge challenges and a lot of a lot of entities trying to pull you other directions and you just know this is yeah right we are about the kids and we're about the family and you guys have have always always stayed true to that when we hire we're looking for yes do you have the skills to do the job but also more so do you have the passion right because what's going to carry you on the hard days is your passion right and so if you don't have that and you have lots of credentials and all of the things this is not going to be the nonprofit for you right if you're not passionate about students kids and racial equity then we appreciate your time but this one's not for you yeah yeah there was one summer we actually decided we were going to hire our own kids to do a project the job was um to take our donor database and volunteer database which was built on microsoft access so you had to have a standalone file and all that and move it to a sql server backend which was my product at microsoft sql server back-end and then a net front a web-based front-end using the microsoft.net technology which was new at that time it was still in when we started to use it it was still in beta form i looked at it and thought about okay can we the kids know how to program they've never programmed a client server kind of thing how long would it take for them to learn to do it and then um i knew at that point exactly who i wanted to do it and because it was dot-net we just called them and they were all young women we call them the.net divas [Music] you all started at taff in its early days i think i might have been part of the second or third maybe fourth yeah um cohort but y'all were ahead of me so talk to me about your experience deciding to go to school all day and then saying i'm gonna go work on computers on the afternoons and not hang out with my friends when i joined i was 14 and trish was our teacher and she used to call us chatty cathy's because we talk a lot and i had no idea what i was signing up for literally like i just i knew i wanted to try something different and we took apart a computer the first day and i was like yes i want to do this and i did it all four years and i can't imagine not doing it like it was something that i just wanted to spend all my time doing so i went to boys singer club to get tutor right for my english and and whatnot and so that's how they tap recruited me i had no idea what i what that was and sign up i had no clue what it was all i thought in my mind was oh maybe this program will help me with my english right and you know i just signed up for whatever people tell me to sign up i love that will i actually mai is the one who actually got me to come to pass oh well i remember that yes we were in we were taking classes we i think we were in math class together yes how come i can't remember it yeah you and the other mine uh and you recruited us to come to taft wow and you were like there's this great program and they give you scholarship money and an internship you should join and you gave me the application and everything we were in i think we were in pre-calculus together she kept on telling me like did you sign up did you sign up and i remember going in for the interview and sherry was there and everyone was like talking to us and i was thinking oh my god they're not going to pick me i have no clue about technology i'm really just here for the scholarship i want to be a doctor that's what i want to be wait so you you plan to be a doctor yes i was going to be our cardiothoracic surgeon and not much i was very specific yeah at that age i had already decided and technology was the farthest thing from my mind but maya was like it's really cool just come just come and we can catch the bus together because we were going to roosevelt so we would catch the bus from roosevelt funny all the way to columbia city and then once they moved to the central district we would catch the bus from the roosevelt to the central district so that's how i got to taft because of her it changed my life it changed my clearly i did not become a doctor i went into technology specifically a cardiothoracic starter that you were thinking about like 14 15 years old that's right yes you were focused i was definitely focused my mind was set and she changed my whole trajectory by introducing me to taft it was crazy that's amazing i love that story so do y'all remember the project you worked on as interns it's half we got the dot-net diva yeah uh and it was us three working together um building a sql database and i remember running into some problems and tristan well let you always are really good at solving the really difficult things why do you always get hung up on the simple things and i was like i don't know she was like you're cause you're overthinking it go back in that room think about it and then come back and tell me what you come up with that was we always had to figure it out was exposing us to all of that stuff very early on it was like hey yeah you're only in high school but you're going to do this and solve a real problem yeah it wasn't just a fake thing we were solving a real problem so and so we all had to deliver yeah yeah and and just to speak just to speak to the level of trust and belief that trish had right right at that level yeah like some new thing and here's this three girls high school you gotta figure it out but we figured it out we did figure that we had a working product at the end we started that from the ground up designed to test build to test testing the whole entire thing we went through the whole development life cycle which was really cool did all of you intern at taft first or did you go to other companies what was that process like i went to network commerce my first internship it was downtown and i went there and i interviewed and i kept on thinking they're not going to pick me i i'm once again the technology thing it's not my thing i did really well in the classes while we were at taft learning everything but in my mind technology still just wasn't my thing just yet okay but i got there and i thrived i actually met this lady her name was janetta waterbury she was an african-american lady and it was the first time that i saw anyone like outside a taft that looked like me that was working in technology and she took me under her wings i remember we went to um palisades it was like the entire restaurant was closed down it was just her and i having lunch she was like this is what you can do if you just put your mind to it you can have all of this stuff don't let them tell you that you can't have the fancy stuff or you can't be successful or because you're black or a woman that you can't do technology you can do this and you're really great at it having that relationship with taft and then having that relationship with her through taft it was so profound it allowed me to really think that no matter what no matter what room i stepped into no matter how many people looked or did not look like me i could be successful and i had a right to be in the room yeah i think obviously as people of color we're not we're not always at the starting line and i think uh taft gave us the opportunity to be at the starting line i had no idea that technology was a career that i could go into and taft truly changed that it changed my life i i love my job i love being in tech i love talking about it i love hiring people i love all of that and i honestly don't know what i would have done if i had not gone through jeff one of the things that was so fascinating to watch was taft go from this program to see it really grow into what it is today yeah which is one of the leading award-winning stem training academies in schools my my younger cousins actually got a chance to attend taft and graduate from taft and i was so jealous because i thought to myself if i could have done this every day monday through friday yes i would be absolutely i'm great now but like it would have been like exponentially incredible and i i want you all to to share you know a bit about what your hope is for taf in the next you know we're celebrating 25 years for like the next 25 years and how students really look at the opportunity that is in front of them and get to that point where you know in 25 years they're sitting here in these exact same chairs yeah i have uh three daughters and one of my daughters she says tells me all the time mommy i want to go into tech like you i want to be a woman in tech and in 25 years i hope that she can sit in a meeting and not only be like one of many black women in the room but those people be touched by taft in some capacity as well and you can look and say like yeah we're taf alums in a variety of ways when you invest in taft you're not investing into a check box what you're investing into is real humans real people people that really can change the world you if you invest into diversity what you're seeing is you're investing into innovation you're investing into creativity you ain't you're investing into your company to make your company better it gives folks like us a chance and so that that is kind of what i i want to leave with with our supporters um because it changes all of our lives yeah absolutely this future right we're building our future that's it yes that's the most important thing yeah thank you thank you [Music] [Music] it's been what 14 years since i was a teacher at taft at ttip at the technical teens internship program yeah probably more like 20 since i was your instructor yeah and then um going back even further when you first started at it feels surreal that we're kind of like sitting here because i feel like time has flown by but i still remember a lot of the lessons you've taught me and and having that accessible to me was really kind of crucial in me following kind of my career path and you know working at the same company as you do now so you know when i was 16 years old i was already able to work a full-time job at like a technology you know kind of area and and i felt like um ttip really gave me that chance i really like that taft just came in at the right moment in your life that you know if you think about the entire course of your life and all the things you learn taffle is just a small part of that giving you that lift right at the start it just builds and builds and builds i actually remember you hosting a college event at google um where you know we did like a campus tour and talked about the different roles uh that you know that people can work on or different projects that they can work on and it really showed me that hey this could be kind of my next step in my career so i think taft really gave me some you know empowerment around like hey i have a choice and here's what my future can look like you know having access to computers and programming from an early age is just something that for the kids who really enjoy it just lights them right up yeah i my experience was my dad bought a radio shack computer way way back in the day trs 80 if you can believe it um and that's where i learned to program if you don't have access to it like you can't really explore you can't really learn as well as you know having something available and and that was one of the unique things about chaff is like hey here are devices here are things you can actually get really hands-on spend time with it it kind of like snowballed to where you know it's like okay i have some of these experiences i can actually do these things and you know it really kind of gives you a little bit more confidence you know having kind of gone through text art and ttip um and having good instructors such as as yourself it uh it really was something where my parents were like oh we have to get you know my my other siblings um into this program because whether or not they end up pursuing these types of careers it gives them a good foundation right and at the time my my dad was like pretty much like yeah i'm i'm here for the three of you whatever you need it's after school so he would literally drive the three of us to you know um to it was text art or ttip at the time um and it would drop us off and then he would actually like wait in the car until we were done with our lesson and then you know drive us home and and i think he got to know you know some folks uh like sherry and and trish like just because you know they would see them sitting in the car and they're like is that is there your dad outside um and so yeah it was one of those things where my parents trusted taft to kind of provide me with and my siblings with the additional education looking at it now actually like myself and my siblings are all working in stem related areas right um so it's one of those things where my dad was like he knew what was right for his kids and i felt like taft also knew early that stem is going to be important right and like how do we get more people into stem and so it's one of those things where it kind of worked out so what's happening with taf in the next 25 years i can really see taf being embraced by companies and and kind of being like an apprenticeship program or something where it's like hey you might not necessarily have the background but through taft you can kind of get that and transition i would really like to see a lot of people figure out how taff does what taft does so it can really start scaling start helping people out not just in washington state but anywhere really i've been really impressed with the kind of tenacity of people working at taft to be able to continue uh this mission that started you know 25 years ago [Music] i remember there was one time where a parent was like i'm gonna take my child out her grades are slipping and it's just i'm not doing this and i said can you give me a quarter can you give me one more quarter with her and if it doesn't work and her grades are still slipping i will you're her parent you do what you have to do and i remember her just excelling and getting into programming and i'd have to remind some of our girls like if you can make it through this you're going to be able to make it through anything so when it gets hard just remember that you got this and then the parent came back and thanked me and you know she's a mom now thriving and doing incredible community work so those are the moments you think back you're like okay i made a difference i gave my best advice i had at the time and now look a parent knows that when they come and start being a part of the community the taft community no matter what school they're at and they start to watch this shift in their child and they come back and tell us about that i just got a really nice quote from a parent over the weekend who's just like this is a part of my family taff is a part of my family two of my children went to taft academy taffet sahali and they're doing amazing things we were with you for seven years you are part of our family like that's huge and when i think about other schools how many people get that back right it comes back to us [Music] [Music] [Music] well how did you all find out about taft because we came you know when it was really brand new right yeah so my kids had the pleasure of starting really i don't even remember what year was but my daughter's 30 something now and she she works in the field but um kylie yeah this was a long time ago wow uh when they started and it was the taff was on rainier rainier avenue was in this older building and we'd drive them up there and they loved it i had two girls who started now i have six kids but the two girls started two and actually all five of them were involved in some way or another yeah nice yeah a friend invited me to a luncheon and trish was the keynote speaker oh and so again so that was probably maybe about 15 years ago or so yeah yeah and so at the luncheon trish was just a magnifice magnificent speaker and was just sharing uh the programs talking about the success and what the kids were working on and uh what they was teaching them and how they were you know it was just amazing work and then trish shared uh with us that her new vision and the vision was to actually uh expand that after school program into actually being inside the classroom inside the school itself yeah and i kept thinking i would love for at least one of my three oh to be a part of this program uh yeah in which case then uh it was the right choice for cameron my youngest i see yeah i know for maya my daughter at she was about 12 or 13 and uh she would want to help set up the vcr and i looked at her like you want to do this you want to set up this you don't just want to put the tape in and play it you want to set it up so um i gave it to her and and from that point on i would always let her set up any sort or anything electronic in electronic you know i think it was the phone answering machine which we don't even have right right right but she always took to that sort of thing and um so taft was just a perfect uh place for her to be it was an amazing opportunity to be able to find that uh with cameron he went from um again being in the high school the internship with the fred hutch going on to university getting his bachelor's degree again working with others because that was a key focus in college so it wasn't foreign to him yeah then from there he came back and got a job at the fred hutch yeah and worked for them for a few years then he went on to pursue his master's degree in public health and the university that program for public health for that master program was case-based learning plus project-based project and to the today he's uh like i said he's in toronto at a hospital with project-based learning collaboration because he's meeting with the president the you know the ceo of the hospital collaborating with doctors in all the different fields yeah so i feel like his journey has come full circle yeah you know just with what he learned yeah yeah it's like the learning to work in projects and with groups is is is what happens in the work world that's the you know right that's just the way that uh things get done if i have to say anything to parents now uh of what i've learned back then yeah it's pretty much to say just be patient because i you know anything good like an opportunity right like this when it comes around take that chance yeah take that risk tafts just stand so unique and so special and we we literally reap the benefits of that with our children who were able to learn and and grow as a result and find employment as well as friends and just you know it impacted their lives in such a way that it made sense that we need to support this organization because it's doing the real thing it's doing the real work [Music] one of the most unexpected things that happened over our history was when we inherited the martinez fellows program that was another one of those days where you came in and said what do we think about managing the program taking it over and i remember hearing about all the good work because we had been we had attended some of their uh fundraisers and were very excited about the work they were doing with teachers and supporting teachers specifically teachers of color and i thought well wouldn't that be incredible for us to have that resource and for our our schools to be able to tap into that resource and it aligned really well with the work we were already doing right teachers that look like the students that are being served that was going to be incredible opportunity so i was actually really excited about that when you you came and talked to me because it felt really natural yeah i know we had to think about the process of inheriting another program because it was not in the plan right right so it was new but i remember just being really really excited about it yeah it was it was not definitely was not expected right so i had met holly um back in 2008 the first year at taft academy i think it might have been early 2009 like the 2008-2009 school year and um got to know her i wanted her to see what was going on at taff academy and the relationship went from there and and before we know it i think maybe two years later we had four martinez fellows on that taft academy campus yes it made a huge difference right um and then uh one day this is in early 2015. i'm pulling up in the parking lot

here and i get this call from holly and she's like trish you know i need to talk to you so i pulled into my little parking spot and i'm sitting there and she goes edgar and i are going to um we're going to fold the foundation but we want the work to keep going can taft take it and i immediately say yes and then i said but you know i have to ask my board right so and that's when i came in and i was talking to you um about it and um it was a good fit you know the thing that i worried about more than anything is how would other people see how it fit for us like we knew that it fit for us um and then there's also the logistics of okay it's one thing to inherit a program it's another thing to understand how it runs and so how long is it going to take us to understand how it runs how much does it cost to run it so thankfully they gave us two years worth of funding so that we can focus on the program itself instead of just um also having the fundraise for it we have over 300 fellows right which is pretty cool uh and we made a decision to grow the fellowship an additional 10 fellows per year so when we started we were bringing in 25 fellows then the next year we brought 35 and then 45 and 55 so we finally got ourselves on that clip and i think this coming year we're supposed to bring in 75. yeah that's going to be the largest it's going to be the largest and the thing that people need to understand is that the fellowship is not just the three years that you do with us it's your entire career right so we're responsible for providing networking opportunities you know beyond that three years and then moving people into leadership helping them get into leadership and all that so when all is said and done by 2036 we will have 2 400 martinez fellows wow 2400 that's a big number and i think we're on track i think we're on track but what it's gonna take is for us to be able to um and deliver that personal service is for us to be able to have the resources to expand the team to support these teachers [Music] when i think about trying to get a school going and trying to build a building and then having the economy tank and all this stuff and all the you know we've been through two layoffs right we've been through two layoffs and we have seen a lot together i think about the interview with the two of you 25 years ago walking into the building and feeling like i had completely bombed it and calling my mom after i interviewed and she's like well how'd it go and i was like yeah i'm pretty sure i didn't get the job and then two days later getting a letter in the mail and i remember after at the time my son was eight allen was eight oh my gosh that's crazy and i remember i was like this this is the moment we get to jump on the bed and i remember us jumping on the bed with the letter like celebrating and now you fast forward 25 years later i stuck with it and i stayed and i can still get up and say i'm excited about my work i have an uncle my uncle ed that i adore and he he will always ask me how's it going at work when i see him or i talk to him and we talk about it he's and he always says you're so lucky you found it you found your spot that you could be you you could be passionate and you can keep going i'm so proud of you and like [Music] you're good moments like that where you know my mom will tell me like i'm so proud of what you're doing like you make a difference i want to hear the stories about your day and the people you work with feeling great about the tomorrow of taft there's going to be a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that and um i get to be part of something great you know for me having you be as much taff as i am makes me feel really good it makes me feel really comfortable it makes me feel like the best decision i ever made in my life 25 years ago was hiring you oh so thank you thank you i'm done because i'ma start crying [Music] so jamila here we are 25 years later 25 years 25 years and you have been on the board for five years you're in the second year as board president thank you very much um but i'm curious if you would share like um in your five years the growth that you've seen at taft and and what your hopes are for for the future of that absolutely and i've been a big fan of taft even before my five years on the board i have to say and from what i've seen taff evolve from of being an after-school program to where we are today of not only educating kids but helping to educating kids in stem to be specific to increasing the number of teachers of color throughout the state of washington to just how we've connected more with companies as seattle's become a tech hub of them getting first-hand experience of the students and the magic that taff is helping to accelerate um it's it's just been huge and phenomenal success and i'm really excited to see what the next 25 years would bring so trish why don't you talk to us a little bit about the impact that we have had these first 25 years and where we're going well you know when we turned 20 we set a 20-year goal of opening three school partnerships or transformation bringing in 2 400 new teachers of color right this is by 2036. and i'm happy to say that we're actually on track so when we look at our transformation program our partners with schools over the next three years we will educate over 5000 students that's amazing and we will also bring in 255 teachers of color into washington state public schools and they will impact 23 000 plus students so i'm really excited about our growth um i'm excited about the work the work is just so important it's important to continue to build equity and education it's important to build pipeline that tech companies are always saying they're suffering with these are the types of things that taf is helping to do and overall build and continue to build diversity that we all know is very important so to think that for just 350 dollars we can take a child through a full year program at taft so my ass to you is to think about the importance of this work and do you have 350 dollars that you can give us to continue to make impact for the next 25 years i hope everyone decides to support the work of taf it is very important absolutely but the other thing that's also important is that we celebrate the last 25 years and also recognize that we're not done yet that's right we're not let's raise the glass though let's do it all right everybody raise your glass with us and let's toast taft's 25 years and wish us a healthy 25 more cheers cheers [Music] [Music] [Music] you

2022-03-18 03:05

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