Knowledge is Currency by Taylor

Knowledge is Currency by Taylor - July 2019 Scholarship Essay

Having a passion for education means striving to enlighten and empower those around me. My personal mission statement is to lead others to the intersection of knowledge and creativity through exposure and empowerment. I live out my mission professionally in the innovation center I work in, civically at my innovation camp I started last year, and personally on my social media with my “What I am Watching Wednesdays”.

Professionally, I help facilitate groups think through difficult problems and graphically scribe information around the center from books, TedTalks, and tutorials I read to provide helpful content. In my community, I designed a compounding, project-based curriculum for my camp of 8 workshops in the areas of self-discovery, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, mentorship, vision, and more. Elements of my curriculum, including a cash flow game and solutions designing activities I created, bring our kids together so they can exercise creative and critical thinking while practicing useful, transferable skills. We take the old saying “it takes a village to raise a child” very literally and use our local community to empower and enlighten our campers. We become what we see so we put our campers within arm’s reach of the doers—business owners, community leaders, and organizations—who are vessels of information and representatives of possibility that lead the workshops. Lastly, personally, I educate my social media followers by uploading tutorials, TedTalks, podcasts, sermons, and other informative or thought-provoking videos every Wednesday on my “What I’m Watching Wednesday” highlights. The content is on a variety of subjects that are about our societal issues, business, technology, industry trends, health care, and more.

I am vocal and open about my passion for education in every space I am in. The clients that come into the innovation center, my camp kids, my followers—all feel my passion because its transferable energy. Knowledge is the true currency in our world and it is meant to be shared. I have always had a student mentality and believe in the power knowledge has to heal us, fulfill us, and free us. My passion for education means that as I grow and reach new levels of understanding, I uplift others to do the same.