By Diccon Hyatt
Published in Diversity in Action | Summer 2022
Corrections note: The following article states that The Young Women’s Leadership School (TYWLS) of Staten Island launched last year; TYWLS Staten Island will launch in fall 2022. Young Women’s Leadership Network (YWLN) is one of the three life-changing programs provided by Student Leadership Network, not a separate non-profit organization. The article also states that Yolonda Marshall was named CEO of SL Network four years ago; she became CEO in 2019.
When Yolonda Marshall was growing up, her parents never wanted her to make a career in education. It wasn’t that they didn’t see the value in education–quite the opposite. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, both were the first generation in their families to get formal schooling, and they made the most of what little resources were available to them.
“Neither my maternal or paternal grandparents were formally educated,” Marshall says. “Yet they understood the value of education and insisted that their children focus on their educations, even if that meant sometimes studying by kerosene lamps because they didn’t have electricity.”
Both earned graduate degrees in education and became college administrators. But education hadn’t been either of their first choices – at the time, the paths available for Black graduates were limited.
“My parents grew up in the segregated south, you know, all the things most of us read about in books, like drinking from separate water foundations and learning from second-hand books, unable to eat in certain restaurants – that was my parents’ lived experience,” Marshall says.