Tanya Hayles: The Storyteller Bringing Black Women Together
Tanya Hayles is an award-winning creative, published author, and #Tedx speaker, telling stories, evoking emotions, creating change, building movements, and coloring in white spaces.
Tanya grew up in Toronto, Canada, and attended the University of Ottawa. She is a writer/speaker who uses her unique and real voice to discuss topics important to her heart, such as parenthood, entrepreneurship, and Black culture.
She knows many ways to tell a story and puts all the puzzle pieces together, using the world’s oldest form of connecting with others. As a true believer in the power of words, she tells stories to bring visions to life.
She handles multiple forms of teaching, including hosting, moderating, keynotes, and panels, as an authentic way of sharing. She believes that people learn best when spoken to and not spoken at.
She understands the potential of content and words, from social media captions to op-ed pieces, to evoke emotion, create change, and sway spending. She writes editorial pieces about pop culture, social issues, parenthood, race relations, and more. In addition, she writes as a ghostwriter and helps clients translate the voice in their heads into books on paper.
She is the founder of Black Moms Connection, an online global village of 20,000 and a non-profit that provides culturally relevant programs and resources to educate and empower black mothers and their families.
In addition, she also launched the anti-Black racism consulting business Color In White Spaces to work on diversifying motherhood, changing the conversation of diversity and inclusion, and making it real and relatable.
Tanya does speaking engagements at conferences, groups, workshops, and events on building online communities, anti-Black racism, and parenting. She focuses on the three core pillars: entrepreneurship, parenthood, and Black culture (diversity, inclusion, and representation). She does this in a way that fans, friends, and followers alike, trust her word because she knows they mean things.
No matter the medium, Tanya brings her fresh brand of authenticity everywhere, using storytelling to change the world.
From community building to freelance writing, from anti-Black racism advocacy to public speaking, Tanya brings her fresh brand of authenticity everywhere she lands.
Building A Global Village
Black Moms Connection is a global village of almost 30,000 moms and an incorporated non-profit providing culturally relevant tools, resources and financial grants to empower and educate Black women.
When Tanya launched Black Mom Connection as a Facebook page in 2015, they started with 12 women in Toronto. By the time the spring of 2016 came, they had gone from 400 to 4000 in 2 months. They were becoming a safe space for Black women to connect, share and unite.
By the fall of that year, they incorporated as a non-profit in Canada to take the conversations offline and ensure everything they do is tangible and has maximum impact.
Today, Black Moms Connection is an online global village of almost 30,000, with chapters in various North American cities and Asia.
Through their initiatives, Black Mom Connection strives to increase the social, emotional, financial, and well-being of the Black family and positively impact the communities and economies we live in.
They envision being a voice at government and key stakeholder tables, building a community hub which includes much-needed child-care facilities and leveraging themselves as media and brand resource to speak authentically of the Black motherhood experience.
Black Mom Connection offers emergency financial grants for moms in need to help them not get caught in the payday loan cycle or add additional burdens to their lives. Their BMC Emergency Fund and BMC Rent Bank allow some breathing room for moms across North America.
In addition, they offer financial literacy programs and events. For example, FinLitU is an 8-week masterclass program and an extension of the BMC FinLit Summit, a 2-day event created for and by the Black community to increase competence and confidence around money.
They also offer wellness workshops and retreats through their new vertical: You Ok Mama. Often the last to be asked if they are okay, this stream focuses on the moms’ physical, emotional, and mental wellness.
They sit on government roundtables and advocacy committees and show up when the media needs a voice for Black parenting.
The Skilled Profesional
Tanya Hayles’ interests include pop culture, social justice, event planning, entrepreneurship, parenting, and social media. She is a professional in op-eds, corporate writing, biography writing, news reports, speech writing, blogging, interviews, sponsored posts, and event planning.
She won multiple prestigious awards that honor her initiatives to better the lives of Black moms. She was the recipient of 2021 Canada’s Top 25 Women of Influence, won the 2020 L’Oréal Canada Woman of Worth Award, and was honored with the 2019 Bank of Montreal Community and Charitable Giving Award. In 2017, she was chosen as one of Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to Watch and was awarded the 2016 CBC President’s Award.
Her words can be found on CBC, Global TV, CityLine, The Globe and Mail, CityLine, The Toronto Star, and more. She has also done panels and sessions for Collision Conference, Unilever Canada, and Facebook, appeared in media such as Today.com, Washington Post, USA Today, The Real, and Associated Press, and written for Teen Vogue, Today’s Parent, HuffPost, and more.
Tanya Hayles speaks about parenthood, entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion, building online communities, and more. For more information, visit the website at https://www.tanyahayles.com/.
The definition of an entrepreneur is redefined by the innovative ideas that small business owners bring to the industry. To read more about their creative concepts, subscribe to CanadianSME Small Business Magazine https://lnkd.in/dbqmSKN. For the latest updates, visit our Twitter page at @canadian_sme.
