Maya Hill | One Year Later

Video Credit: Kevyn Tapia

Maya Hill is a past mentee from Forest Park. Maya first got connected with TFD through workshops hosted in the Firehouse space back in 2020. Shortly after, the idea for a mentorship program came to life, which Maya then began in Spring ‘21. Now, she is our Executive Assistant here at TFD and is in school to become a physicians assistant! We are so proud of Maya and we are excited to continue to support her in her journey!

“No matter who you are or who is impacting you at the moment, you should do what you want to do.”

- Maya Hill

Photo Credit: Mya Rose

Restorative Economy

Photo Credit: Mariah

It was so exciting to welcome Xochitl and Gabriel of Co-op Ed Center to TFD this past Wednesday to lead a restorative economy workshop! Our mentees kicked it off with an ice breaker where they were given a question or statement and if they agreed to that statement, they moved to stand in the middle of the circle. It was fun to learn so many new things about our mentees! We love how involved our mentees were and how many new conversations were started around restorative economy.

Our mentees discussed how a cooperative works and made a list of what a cooperative means to them. One of the groups shared, “A group of people working together to accomplish or achieve a goal”. Afterwards, they came together to combine their ideas.

Photo Credit: Mariah

Budgeting 101

Photo Credit: Mariah

After an amazing spring break, our mentees returned this week. We started the first day of week 7 mentorship with an ice breaker asking, “What are two things that make you unique?”. Afterward, we discussed ideas for community projects. During our Summer 2021 mentorship, we had two groups create a community project. This first group project was Conversation Food Desert, where a group of mentees started up a conversation about Maywood being a food desert. The second group project was Maywoodian Families, this group found families in our community and photographed them, along with a series of questions and answers. These projects were shown to our current spring mentees to get inspiration for their community projects.

After our dialogue on community projects, we welcomed Stephanie, a TFD board member, to lead a workshop on how to budget. It was so great to see our mentees engage in a dialogue about financial wellness; one of our three pillars at TFD. Stephanie shared tips & advice on how to understand the process of budgeting, practical budgeting tools, and encouraged budgeting.

As a group, our 8 mentees created a mock college student budget of $2,000 along with a list of expenses. This individual was responsible for: car insurance, gas, textbooks, food, wants, household items, savings, credit card debt, cell phone, rent, and investments. It was amazing to see how invested our mentees were in this workshop. We cannot wait for the next one!

Photo Credit: Mariah

Milkshakes to Marketing

Have you tried the Milkshake app? Well, our mentees did on Saturday! Lu’Cretia, our Creative Project Manager, led a workshop with our mentees and each individual created a free mini website on their phones. After taking some time to design their websites, our Mentees shared their websites with one another. Milkshake is such a great and inexpensive tool for our Mentees to create a website that will benefit them as they create and build their brands.

Photo credit: Mariah

Understanding Your Brand

To start a brand, you need to understand the brand that you want to build. On Day 2 of marketing Lu’Cretia, our Creative Project Manager, initiated a dialogue with our mentees about how to better understand their potential brands. Different videos were played to demonstrate how different celebrities use their values to establish their brands. She discussed how Lil Nas X uses his platform to create music, but also partners with other brands, like Nike, to create products that target his audience.

Our Mentees created their own social media selfceare manifesto that included: what they want to gain from social media, how long they want to spend on each platform, and what they want to share on their platform. This workshop was a success and super informative!

Photo. Credit: Mariah