Our story
It started as a thank-you note.
In 2015, two of the Taylor children were inducted into the first class of the Mountain Home High School Athletic Hall of Fame. They had a podium, five minutes, and their parents sitting in the audience. Instead of a speech, they built something.
Gary and Angela Taylor, Mountain Home, Idaho, 2015. Charles and Alice were in the room.
Where it comes from
Two people who never treated the classroom and the field as separate things.
Charles Taylor
Twenty-seven years, United States Air Force
Wiley College on a football scholarship, then the United States Air Force. He rose to Senior Master Sergeant with the 366th Tactical Unit, stationed for years at Mountain Home Air Force Base, and moved a family around the country and abroad on the Air Force’s schedule before it put them in Mountain Home for good.
He still serves as President of the NAACP Treasure Valley Branch. He has spent most of his adult life being a person other people’s children could go to.
Alice Faye Taylor
Thirty years, School District #193
Salutatorian of her high school class, then Texas Southern University and Boise State. She spent more than three decades as a paraprofessional in special education in the Mountain Home schools, and was recognized district-wide for it more than once.
Order of the Eastern Star. Order of the Golden Circle. Inducted into the NAACP Treasure Valley Heritage Hall of Fame.
“Their emphasis on the importance of hard work, both in the classroom and on the playing surface, was the catalyst for the successful journey we’ve been fortunate to experience over the years.”Gary and Angela Taylor · Mountain Home High School Athletic Hall of Fame, 2015
The house they ran
Three children. One high school. Three sports each.
Every one of them played multiple sports at Mountain Home. Every one of them went on to compete in college. That is not a coincidence and it is not luck — it is what happens when the adults in a house treat sport as part of an education rather than a distraction from one.
Football and track. On to Boise State University, where he walked on to the football team and played receiver and defensive back. He went on to an executive career across telecommunications, computer technology and insurance.
Football, basketball and track. On to Stanford University as a scholarship athlete on the football team. He took an internship in his sophomore year and is a Senior Project Executive at the same company more than thirty-five years later.
Volleyball, basketball and track. Walked on at Stanford and earned a scholarship two months later. Two national championships, an MBA from NYU Stern, and later President and General Manager of a WNBA franchise.
Why we build it the way we do
Our framework is not a strategy document. It is a description of what happened to this family.
Everything this Foundation funds runs on three stages — Access, Retention, Leverage. Said plainly: play, stay, lead. We did not arrive at those in a planning session. We worked backwards from a story we already knew.
They were placed somewhere with a gym
An Air Force posting put the family in Mountain Home. Three children arrived in a town with a school, a field and a coach. None of that was chosen and all of it was decisive.
And the adults kept them in it
Alice worked inside the school district for thirty years. The house ran on one rule, and all three children stayed in sport through their senior year rather than dropping out at fourteen the way most do.
Which turned into everything after
Boise State. Stanford, twice. A walk-on who became a scholarship athlete, a two-time national champion, and eventually a professional sports executive. Sport was the door, not the destination.
The Foundation exists because that sequence should not depend on where the Air Force sends your father. See how we build it deliberately →
How it grew
From a podium in Mountain Home to fourteen scholars across the state.
The Hall of Fame dinner
Gary and Angela are inducted into the first class of the Mountain Home High School Athletic Hall of Fame. During their acceptance speeches they announce a scholarship in their parents’ names, and make a donation to the girls’ and boys’ athletic programs at the school.
The first scholars
The student scholarships begin. Mountain Home High School seniors, chosen for the same four things we still look at: leadership, the classroom, sport, and what they have done for their community.
Nine years, paid for by the family
More than $15,000 to twenty Idaho scholar-athletes, funded personally, before there was a foundation, a board, a website or a tax deduction. Nobody here asks anyone to fund something the family has not already funded itself.
No award
The pandemic year. We say so because an origin story with no gaps in it is not a story, it is a brochure.
No award
No eligible candidates that year. It is on our impact ledger for the same reason it is here.
It becomes a foundation
The Taylor LEAD Foundation is incorporated in Idaho as a 501(c)(3), with a board, a set of committees, and an obligation to report on what it does with other people’s money.
The first Change Make*Hers Gala
Sold out. Three hundred and eight guests, a further forty student-athletes seated among them, and a keynote from Tara VanDerveer — Naismith Hall of Fame coach, and the woman who coached Angela at Stanford. More than $250,000 raised in one evening.
Statewide, and a second platform
The scholarship opens beyond Mountain Home for the first time: fourteen scholars named across Idaho, sharing $17,000. Alongside it, iWIN Sports launches — grants, camps, clinics and the Changemakers Circuit — because a scholarship at eighteen is too late to be the only thing we do.
All six districts
The rollout completes. Every high school senior in Idaho becomes eligible, and Mountain Home remains part of the program every single year, without exception.
Alice Faye Taylor
Matriarch · Educator · Advocate · Legacy builder
Since Alice Taylor has passed, her drive for excellence has been carried forward by this scholarship, and her name is on every award letter a LEAD Scholar receives.
She spent thirty years in a job most people outside a school building could not name, working with the students who needed the most patience. She was a champion of equity in sport and education, particularly for girls and women, and she raised three children while moving a household around the world on somebody else’s orders.
The Foundation is now working to endow the scholarship permanently, so that her name is attached to an Idaho scholar-athlete every year regardless of how any given fundraiser goes. About the endowed fund →
Where we are now
Early, and clear-eyed about it.
Two years into operating as a foundation, we have named fourteen scholars in a single year, funded twenty girls through a season of sport, delivered our first paid speaking engagements, and sold out a gala that paid for most of it.
We have also not tracked our alumni, cannot yet tell you a retention rate, and do not know what a season actually costs an Idaho family. All of that is published on our impact page alongside the things that went well, because a young organization that only reports its wins is asking to be taken on faith — and we would rather be taken on evidence.
The thing that has not changed since 2015. Two people believed that hard work in a classroom and hard work on a field were the same thing, and they proved it three times in one house. Everything this Foundation does is an attempt to make that sequence available to a child whose circumstances put it out of reach — not because nobody around them is trying, but because a registration fee arrives in March and does not care how hard anybody is trying.
Alice & Charles
A thank-you note that got out of hand.
That is genuinely all this was meant to be. Two people got thanked from a podium in a small Idaho town, and eleven years later there are scholars in fourteen schools, girls in seasons they could not have paid for, and a fund being built to outlast everybody who started it.
The Taylor LEAD Foundation · Boise, Idaho · 501(c)(3) · EIN 99-2465893