Meet Our New Executive Director, Tyreesa Reeves
Dear PW Family,
It has been a pleasure to serve you for the last three years. For the last 17 years, I have committed myself to servant leadership, cultivating hospitable spaces for Black and Brown female identified folks and envisioning a world where we are able to lift young women into their dreams with ease. It is with abundance and joy that I announce my journey into the role of President and Executive Director of Phenomenal Women, Inc.
As a product of the community of Denver, I am immensely grateful for this opportunity to serve and continue to build a better community and ecosystem that aims to nurture all. As an educator with well over a decade of experience, I have been fortunate to see the ways the community can create and lead sustainable change. It is the people, not the systems, that move mountains and build the cities that we dream. Born 3 months premature as a product of the drug epidemic in Washington D.C in the 90s, I spent 2 months in ICU before transitioning into foster care for the first 18 months of my life. Despite incredible adversity at the beginnings of my creation, I was still able to dream of the unimaginable. 30 percent of Colorado youth are in foster care and of those 30 percent, only 13 percent make it to college and only 3 percent graduate. The statistics are even smaller if you consider a young Black girl from a low-income community with ADHD.
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I stand before you today as a first generation college student with two undergraduate degrees and a master’s that has been nationally and locally recognized by academics and corporations alike, simply for the ways I dream. This is an iota of what we can accomplish when we are allowed the space to dream for ourselves.
As a product of the compassionate community and a powerhouse of a widowed, single mother, I was fortunate enough to have the space to dream which made creating my reality that much easier. My community was the shield I needed from the reality I was facing. I was nurtured and challenged in my education early on because my foster parents gave financial support to my private education. I was loved and admired in my individuality because the school staff where my mother worked embraced me in all my creativity. I found connection and accountability through mentors who challenged me and my thoughts. I found compassion and purpose in watching my mother completely change lives by simply seeing people for their hearts and not just their circumstance. Without the love of community, I would not have been afforded the gift of moving past surviving into dreaming.
Though I come to this role humbly, I do not come lightly. With this year’s theme of “Evolving You”, I am able to celebrate the ways folks have poured into my evolution while also continuing to dream of ways to push the needle forward. Our founder, Joshalynn Green- Turner dreamed of an organization that would operate through an abundance mindset and not one of scarcity. Through scholarship, mutual aid funding, corporate partnerships and community connections, we can be the change we wish to see. I stand as a living testament. When we dream together, we are freed from what is and invited to envision what could be.
I invite you all to dream with us. Our evolution has begun.
Yours in service and in love,
Tyreesa M. Reeves