We caught up with the brilliant and insightful K-Rahn Vallatine a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi K-Rahn, thanks for joining us today. Let’s go back in time a bit – can you share a story of a time when you learned an important lesson during your education?

I learned that education is a tool. I needed to be clear about what I wanted in life, and very intentional about how I chose to pursue and use my education.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s in the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, I was a kid who was heavily influenced by the culture around me. I was influenced by the music, the imagery in movies, my peers, and the social norms of the day. This culture molded my ambitions, behavior, and overall self-identity. It told me who I was and who I should become in the world – a low life. So as a teenager that’s what I aspired to be. I thought staying high, street hustling and degrading young ladies was the path to true manhood.

I was raised by a very supportive mother who always spoke life into me, in spite of what the culture taught me. Through her guidance I was fortunate to make it into college. It was there that I was exposed to life changing information about my history and the transformation began. Taking multiple Africana Studies courses, I came to the realization that I was a part of the problem. I was behaving far below my potential and was encouraged to do so by the culture. I, along with countless others, had been duped into believing that success could somehow be found through underachievement and disengagement.

At this point, I took my studies more seriously and became a scholar. After graduation, I returned to my community in Pasadena, California and started my career as a teacher, motivated by the fact that I never had a single male teacher of color in my entire public-school experience. After teaching middle school for five years, I moved on to working with incarcerated youth in Los Angeles. It was in these juvenile facilities that I recognized that the same cultural indoctrination I experienced as a child was taking effect on most of the young people who are incarcerated. I then created a life skills curriculum called Live Above the Hype to help young people critically think, make healthy life decisions, and properly analyze culture and its effect on the human psyche. As the curriculum began to gain support and notoriety in school districts and community-based organizations across the nation, I then developed a trauma-informed youth engagement training series to help service providers better understand the culture, psyche, behaviors, and motives of the youth they serve.

After successfully offering this training series, I founded a training consultant company, Inner Sun Consulting, that supports the personal development of youth and young adults and the professional development of educators, service providers, leaders and other corporate staff. We provide socially relevant educational and training content that encourages critical thinking and explains multiple perspectives through organized curriculum, dialogue & storytelling, entertainment and multimedia. We at Inner Sun have a profound ability to facilitate conversations on complex and uncomfortable topics.

I have also authored a book entitled “Beyond the Crack Generation: Surviving a Trauma-Organized Culture” that is used as a training tool for professionals and is also offered in curriculum on a collegiate level and developed an online academy that focuses on the mindset needed for successful workforce development.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Beginning with my role as a schoolteacher twenty years ago, each step of my professional journey is a step of resilience. I’ve never allowed lack of support from others or lack of formal education to stop me from pursuing and achieving the impact I desire to make with excellence. Despite being a very disengaged high school student, not having an example of a Black male teacher or even an official teaching credential, I became a teacher that made lasting impact in the lives of my students. Despite having no formal training on curriculum development or an organization to back me or validate my work, I am a curriculum developer whose life skills curriculum is making positive impact in the lives of both incarcerated and nonincarcerated high school students, young adults and individuals needing support in workforce development. I am a training consultant whose client list often comes with formal education that well supersedes mine. The key to my success has been authenticity, transparency, and connection. Hopefully hearing my story inspires people to give themselves permission to be great and act on their passion.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://liveabovethehype.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liveaboveit
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvallatine/