People are always looking at me as an example

Family

I grew up with both my parents, and I love being the oldest and being the most responsible one. My two youngest siblings are 10 and 11 years younger than me, and I would babysit them. They love hanging out with me, even now. It can be challenging growing up in a big family, especially because the house we live in is kind of small. But we learned how to share the space... I look up to my parents because they raised me. They sacrificed a lot so that I could have a better life than they did. My family kind of grew up in that area (Franklin Avenue), well my parents did, and they were really familiar with that area and the Phillips community. It was kind of an important area, but I didn't know much about it since I lived in Bloomington.

Work

My first job when I was 14 was at a daycare. Working at the daycare, for me, was almost an extension of my home life. The daycare was a home daycare, so it had a familiar feeling. The owners knew my family, so that made the experience comfortable. In that job, I interacted more with the kids. I played with them, and helped prepare home cooked lunches. I was able to lead group activities… My first year of college, I was looking for a work study job, and I originally went in for a different position, but it didn’t work with my schedule. So the person I got interviewed with told me to talk to DHOP. We kind of talked about that position at Hope Community, doing the literacy program, and I was like “OH, that’s cool.” So that's the job I chose. I had a lot of experience over the years working with kids, so this job was perfect for me. And just after I started working at Hope Community, I realized that my aunt actually does some programming with them, she works with the food program, so like that's really cool. My family is a little bit connected to the program.  Even though Hope Community is a little more formal, and I don’t get to interact one-to-one with the kids as much as the volunteers do, I do oversee the activities and plan out the themes for the week. That’s similar to the activities that I lead at the daycare. I’m a lot more behind the scenes at Hope Community than I was at the daycare.

Source: Nexus Community Partners

Obstacles

(Speaking about scheduling) Hope Community is pretty flexible, but in order to get enough hours for the work study that was a big thing at first. But with my new position it doesn't really interfere since I work Fridays and Saturdays. But the most challenging thing in our program so far is integrating the IPads with our program. We’ve had these IPads probably since spring 2015 (a year and a half). We can’t seem to get the system into place, but seeing the kids improvements in literacy, as you know a lot of them come from a different background and English might not be their first language, it's inspiring to see them excel in that area.

The Future

When I was in high school, I took a marketing class, and I thought it was really cool. But at the time I wanted to go into advertising, which this major doesn’t quite focus on itself, but it gives me a general overview of the different areas of businesses. I wanted to get into business and marketing education because I wanted to have the freedom to work in any industry. Pretty much every field needs a business manager or knowledge of business. So I was thinking about going into digital marketing because that's kind of in my major. I was also kind of thinking about, since I'm learning about how nonprofits are setting up programming, I was thinking to myself, “huh! I could maybe do an arts program for kids later on down the future and set that up” and basically combine what I'm doing now, and my knowledge with my degree. My major has really inspired me to look at the nonprofit sector because you still need marketing and I kind of wanted to do digital advertising, but you could still do stuff like that at a nonprofit. There’s programs being developed all the time at Hope Community, based on what the community needs. They have listening sessions to figure out what do for the people in this community and what they want to do. So say if they wanted to have a business program or even a college preparatory program, I could use the knowledge I have with my degree, and kind of help set that up because I already know how to run a program at Hope Community. I could look out for the resources and be a part of setting up the program or maybe even teach a workshop, or something like that. I try to be a positive example because I know that people are always looking at me as an example.

Interviewee: Kiaria Taylor

Interviewers: Helena Brody, Mai Xiong, Kyson Moua