Meet Donovan Taylor Hall | Youth Mental Health and Empowerment Advocate, Speaker, Content Creator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Donovan Taylor Hall and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Donovan Taylor, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Thought process: I got into this work with young people because of my own experiences and struggles as a teen and how they impacted the ways I showed up in the world. I was on paper a typical student growing up. I had pretty decent grades, had friends, got along with the adults in my life, participated in lots of extra curricular activities. But underneath what looked good on paper, I struggled deeply with how I viewed and treated myself. I did the “right” things but felt so unhappy with myself. Without the tools to take care of myself, I got to the point where no matter how good I was doing in my life, I was always undermining it and using it against myself. My relationship with myself got so bad that by the time I was in college, I was dealing with suicidal thoughts. What stopped me from going forward with it was loosing a friend to suicide, one that no one ever expected. Around the same time I started working with kids in positive youth development programs and used that opportunity to be someone who supports young people in how they feel about themselves. As my studies in grad school continued I learned more and more about things like motivation, self-determination, and different ways of learning. I combined those learnings with my own research around mental health and self-care. Within this time period, I made a commitment to become someone that young people chose to learn from. Someone who can offer them opportunities to talk about their struggles in a productive and safe way. That desire to help young people became central to my work and helped me craft the dream of becoming a public figure for young people.

As a youth advocate I felt very frustrated with the lack of public figures that are directly talking with youth about their experiences around mental health and youth empowerment. I was teaching my curriculum in schools but knew that I wanted to have a bigger reach and do it in a way that was accessible and relevant to the young people I helped to serve. I decided to leave teaching to teach my curriculum in speeches and content because it felt like I could meet young people where they were instead of the traditional teacher/student hierarchy. I was very fortunate to have The Today Show do a story on my work, which allowed me to jumpstart this new part of my career. Now I am trying to use my platform and business to be of service to the young people in our society, as well as offer support to those that care for them. I also looked at the lack of actual skills and resources being offered in “motivational speaking” so I wanted to create presentations that actually gave students tools to empower themselves. My main goal was to become someone that talked to young people about the importance of taking care of themselves mentally and emotionally as they are growing.

There is a big focus on mental health for young people right now but we mainly only see education around things like depression and anxiety. While these are crucial conversations that need to be had, I felt we could do more for them by talking about proactive skills that will allow them to promote their mental health, not just what to do when things get really bad. There is a lack of knowledge around resources and skills for kids so I wanted to offer both of them in the work that I do.

I have found that most of my career has involved risk. The main one being that I share my own story of mental health struggles, including a time period in my life where things got so bad that I no longer wanted to be alive. Sharing that kind of emotional story has been a risk for me but it has paid off through all of the students who have shared with me that my story resonated with them. We live in a time where pushing our successes is a big part of how people identify, especially in the motivational sector. I believe that there is great value in sharing our authentic stories of struggling because it allows young people to feel validated in their own. There is also another layer of risk added in pushing back against some of the common limiting beliefs our society has around young people. It is rare to see their voices elevated but its crucial that they are because we cannot offer them the help they need if we are the ones deciding what their struggles are. My work with social and emotional health has often been devalued by education systems but rarely is it invalidated from the students who are receiving it. I aim to also help adults recognize the ways we and the systems we are involved in cause harm to young people and how we can be of better service to them as a society.

As I leaned into the content creation side of my work, I began having conversations around creating a television program for young people. Unfortunately I was met with an insistent request to create something that was fundamentally problematic and harmful to the emotional health of the people I cared the most about helping. Thankfully through sticking to the core of my work, I have connected with an amazing production company and am currently creating a documentary that focuses on youth activists in Chicago. I am also traveling around the country speaking with students from middle school to college about the importance of building a good relationship with themselves. I also stream video games on Twitch because several of the skills I talk to young people about (self-talk. growth mindset, self-compassion) can easily be applied to video games. My hope is to continue to grow my impact by connecting with young people though in person presentations, online content, and video game streaming.

What should our readers know about your business?
Navigating my career has been quite difficult and has involved a lot of courage and self-determination. I have been committed to helping young people for over ten years now but I have had to go through many programs and systems before I felt like I was able to really go at it on my own, I try very hard to help young people feel seen and appreciated for who they are. That includes the ups and the downs. When I share with them, I do not come from a place of “the expert” but more of someone who wants to be of service to them and is coming from a place of care and love. Although there have been jobs and opportunities with organizations to align my work, I have found that in order to really stay true to the message, I would have to build something new of my own. I specifically looked at who was talking to young people on social media and what were the messages they were sharing. I pushed my message of lifting young people up for years and often times it felt like it was falling on deaf ears. However, when I started sharing my work with students on social media I found that there were a lot of people who understood the importance of that work and why it is so crucial right now. I have been so lucky and fortunate to have the support of people and organizations to help further my message. After I left teaching I planned on trying to start my own speaking business and understood how long that would take but thanks to the media exposure I got from social media, I was signed to Active Minds, a mental health speaking bureau for schools and universities. I built my own speaking business as I worked with them and have been very fortunate to have bookings through my bureau and my own company as well.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My biggest shout out would be to the Everforward Club in the Oakland, CA area. The founder, Ashanti Branch, is someone who really helped me understand the impact that my work can have. They work with young boys around emotional growth and have impacted so many lives in the Bay Area. Ashanti also offered mentorship to me when I first wanted to start speaking. I watched him do a presentation at a high school in San Francisco that really helped me see how much good we can do for young people as they are growing and learning to be themselves.

Website: https://www.donovantaylorhall.com

Instagram: @donofriend

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donovan-hall-0230b0109/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@donofriend1267

Other: https://twitch.tv/donofriend