The Taylor LEAD Foundation · Idaho
Money should never decide which Idaho kids get to play, stay in the game, and lead beyond it.
We fund the specific, unglamorous things standing between a young person and a season — and then we keep going until they are leading.
One mission, two platforms
A scholarship that started in 2015, and a sports platform built around it.
One recognizes young people who already lead. The other makes sure a girl gets far enough to be recognized. Neither works properly without the other.
The Alice & Charles Taylor Scholar-Athlete LEAD Scholarship
Open to young men and women · Statewide by 2028Named for two people who never treated the classroom and the field as separate things. Charles served twenty-seven years in the Air Force; Alice spent thirty in special education in the Mountain Home schools.
Idaho seniors are recognized on four counts — Leadership, Educational excellence, Athletic achievement and Distinguished community service. Anyone can nominate a student, and it takes about ten minutes.
In 2026, fourteen scholars across twelve Idaho high schools shared $17,000.
iWIN Sports
Girls and women in sport · Four programsBuilt on one finding: girls leave sport at twice the rate of boys by the age of fourteen, and family finances are the barrier they name most often. Four programs, each aimed at a different point in that drop-off.
IX Grants pay the registration fee, the shoes, the travel. Game On! camps hold girls through the years they most often quit. The Changemakers Circuit takes the argument into schools. The Networking Collective carries women from athlete into professional life.
Get girls in the game — so they can change the game.
How we build it
Access, then retention, then leverage. In that order, because that is the order it happens in.
Play, stay, lead. Said properly, that is Access, Retention and Leverage — and it is not a framework we wrote in a planning session. It is a description of what happened to the family this Foundation is named for, written down afterwards and rebuilt deliberately for other people’s children. That story is here →
A girl does not get to play if her family cannot cover the registration, the shoes or the ride. We pay for the specific thing that is in the way.
Girls leave sport at twice the rate of boys by fourteen. Getting somebody in is not the same as keeping them in, and the second one is harder.
Sport is the door, not the destination. What it teaches shows up in a classroom, a first job and a boardroom — if somebody keeps the door open long enough.
is what a season cost the last twenty girls we funded. Not an estimate and not a rounded-up example — it is what each of those Mountain Home awards actually costs, and for many of them it will be a first organized sport.
Every figure we publish works like that. If we do not know what something costs, it is not on our website.
Where we are
Early, and clear-eyed about it.
And here is what we cannot tell you yet. We have not tracked our alumni. We cannot give you a retention rate. We do not know what a season actually costs an Idaho family. Those are on the impact ledger next to the figures that are, with what we are doing about each one. Read the ledger →
February 10, 2027 · Boise Centre West
One night a year, Idaho girls are in the room.
Three hundred and eight guests sold out the first Change Make*Hers Gala, with a further forty student-athletes seated among them. What people describe afterwards is a girls’ soccer team walking into a place they had plainly never been before — and staying anyway.
Start here
Six different people land on this page. Find yours.
Or if you would rather just see who is behind it — that is here.
The whole argument
We all win when girls are powered to play.
Somewhere in Idaho a girl is deciding whether to sign up. She is not deciding whether she wants to play — that part she already knows. She is waiting to find out whether it is affordable, and that is a question somebody else answers for her.
The Taylor LEAD Foundation · P.O. Box 8744, Boise, ID 83707 · 501(c)(3) · EIN 99-2465893