Our team
Forty-one people, one salary, and nobody here by accident.
Most organizations describe their team in a way that makes it impossible to tell how big they are. Here is ours, stated plainly, because you should know exactly what your money is funding.
Forty of these leaders are not on the payroll, which is not remotely the same as getting nothing out of it. Ask any of them why they stay and you will get one of two answers: they have met the scholars, or they were in the room in February.
Leadership
Who answers for it, and who they answer to.
One paid chief executive, one board chair she reports to, and one co-founder. The line between the first two is the most important thing on this page.
Angela Taylor
Angela walked on to the women’s basketball team at Stanford and earned a scholarship two months later. She won two national championships, took an MBA at NYU Stern, and went on to become President and General Manager of a WNBA franchise.
She grew up in Mountain Home, and this Foundation is named for her parents. She leads its strategy, its fundraising, and most of its speaking — and she is the person who replies to hello@ more often than not.
- Status
- The Foundation’s first employee
- Board
- Director, non-voting · Executive, Governance, Programs, Fundraising & Events, Scholarship
- Also
- Partner and Co-Founder, The Dignitas Agency
Dr. Lindy Crawford
Lindy began her career as a special education teacher, earned a PhD at the University of Oregon, and held tenure at two universities as an associate dean, department chair and endowed chair of special education. She now leads nonprofit work at the Lee Pesky Learning Center in Boise.
She chairs the board, which means she chairs the body the CEO reports to. That distinction is not decorative — in a family-founded organization with a paid founder, somebody independent has to hold the other end of that line.
- Status
- Unpaid, voting director
- Board
- Chair · Executive (Chair), Governance, Finance
- Also
- Executive Director, Lee Pesky Learning Center; affiliate faculty, Boise State College of Education
Gary Taylor
Gary played football at Stanford as a scholarship athlete after three sports at Mountain Home High School. He is a Senior Project Executive in commercial construction, running project teams and multiple sites at once.
He stood beside Angela at the podium in 2015 when the scholarship was announced, chairs the Scholarship Committee, and is a co-signatory on the Foundation’s formal documents.
- Status
- Unpaid, voting director
- Board
- Director · Executive, Scholarship (Chair)
- Also
- Senior Project Executive, Rudolph & Sletten, Inc.
Why the CEO does not vote. Angela is a director, but a non-voting one. A paid chief executive who also votes on the board that sets her pay is a governance problem waiting to be found, and it is far easier to design out than to explain later. Twelve independent directors vote; the thirteenth runs the organization and answers to them.
Director of Programs & Operations
Almost everything this Foundation has delivered — fourteen scholars, twenty girls funded through a season, a sold-out gala, three speaking engagements — was done by volunteers around full-time jobs. That works, and it does not scale to a statewide program.
This role runs the programs day to day: camps and clinics, IX Grants, the scholarship cycle, and the operations underneath all of it. Seasonal camp and clinic roles follow it.
- Idaho-based, with travel across the state
- Reports to the CEO
- Works closely with the Camp Director
- Programs, Scholarship and Operations
It is not posted yet. If you would like to see it the day it is, put your name down — we will send it to you before it goes anywhere else.
Who actually does the work
Forty people who are not on the payroll.
This is not a founder and a website. Committees meet monthly and carry the programs between board meetings, which is the only reason one employee and a board can run a statewide organization at all.
Directors
Governance, fiduciary responsibility, and the awkward questions. Every director sits on at least one committee — this is a working board, not a letterhead board.
Meet the board →More on committees
Seven standing committees running scholarship review, programs, fundraising, finance, communications and governance. Twenty-five people who are not on the board, most of whom joined by volunteering once.
See the committees →LEAD Fellows
An advisory body of scholar-athletes in college and early career, drawn from more than a decade of LEAD Scholars. Founding cohort seats this autumn.
About the Fellows →They meet the scholars
Sooner or later everybody on a committee ends up in a room with an Alice & Charles Taylor Scholar-Athlete. People arrive expecting to be moved by a story and leave slightly rearranged by how composed these young people are — the leadership is not aspirational, it is already there, and you can watch it in how they carry a conversation with a room full of adults.
They were in the room in February
At the first Change Make*Hers Gala, Muffy Davis, Kristin Armstrong, Tara VanDerveer and Kaya Evans made the case from the stage. But the thing people describe afterwards is not the speeches. It is the girls leaning over the balcony rail with their eyes wide, and a young soccer team walking into a room they had plainly never been in before — not quite sure they were allowed to be there, and staying anyway.
Those two things were in the same room. Kaya Evans grew up in Pocatello, played soccer at the College of Idaho, and is a Rhodes Scholar. Somewhere in that soccer team was a girl doing the arithmetic.
Why we publish this rather than a stock photo of people in a meeting. A funder deciding between us and a larger organization should know they are funding a forty-one person operation with exactly one salary in it. It explains our overheads, it explains our pace, and it means forty people get counted rather than hidden behind the word “team”. The count is people, not committee seats — thirteen directors sit on committees too, and we would rather understate than inflate.
And the family
Five Taylors, three of them honorary.
Charles Taylor and Greg Taylor serve as honorary board members. Alice Faye Taylor, whose name the scholarship carries alongside her husband’s, has died. Angela and Gary you have already met above.
Their story is not a bio page — it is the reason any of this exists, and it is told properly elsewhere.
Forty-one, and hiring
The shortest route onto this page is to volunteer once.
Almost everybody here started by showing up for one thing — a gala shift, a committee somebody asked them to sit on, an evening they nearly skipped. Then they met a scholar, or they stood in that room in February, and the thing stopped being a favor they were doing us. There is no other route in, and there never has been.
The Taylor LEAD Foundation · P.O. Box 8744, Boise, ID 83707 · 501(c)(3) · EIN 99-2465893