For schools & youth-serving organizations
Former school administrator · 25+ years in public education
A 45–60 minute live experience for students, schools, and youth-serving organizations — on belonging, identity, and moving forward when life does not go as planned. Not another lecture. An experience they can feel.
Spoken & featured in
Why Yaya
Twenty-five-plus years in public education, including years as a school administrator, means Yaya understands students, schools, and what happens after the speaker leaves the building. She is not selling a moment on stage. She is building something students can carry into Monday.
In the room
The experience
What it takes for a student to feel like they belong in the room before anyone can ask them to grow in it — and how to keep standing back up when things do not go as planned.
Helping students recognize their own voice as something worth using, and start picturing who they are becoming instead of only who they have been told to be.
A difficult chapter is not a verdict. It is information. Practical, felt tools for taking a setback and using it as direction instead of a dead end.
Results, not just a resume
In public education — classrooms, school administration, and student services, not consulting from the outside.
Reduction in discipline issues in the first year of school administration.
Increase in family and parental involvement, through a family engagement framework built at the middle-school level.
Who this is for
K–12
Assemblies, advisory blocks, and student leadership days built around belonging, resilience and reducing the patterns that show up as discipline referrals.
See the K–12 page →Higher ed
Orientation, first-generation and student-success programming, and leadership cohorts — for students figuring out who they are becoming outside of home for the first time.
See the higher ed page →Events
A keynote or breakout built for student leadership summits, youth conferences and educator professional-development days that want something felt, not just heard.
See the conference page →Community
For organizations investing in the young people they serve or sponsor — mentoring programs, youth nonprofits, foundations and community initiatives.
See the corporate page →Welcome home. Stay awhile.
Yaya spent twenty-five years inside schools watching students get told, directly or otherwise, that a hard chapter meant the story was over. It is not. It is information. It is direction. It is the very thing they will build on. That belief is the engine behind every version of this talk — and behind Yaya’s own story, before it was ever a talk at all.
More about Yaya →
In their words
Bring this to your students
Tell us a little about your school, organization or event, and Yaya will follow up to talk through fit, format and availability.