We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ta’naya Miller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ta’naya, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The Shari Foundation was founded by Amire, Ta’naya and Craig Miller in honor of our mother Shari Miller who passed away from cervical cancer at the age of 28 in 2014. With the 10 year anniversary of her passing approaching, we wanted to do something to honor our mom and her story while also assisting others in their battles with cancer. My siblings and I came together and created this organization with the goal of spreading cervical cancer awareness and helping others, but with our main focus being on cervical cancer. We reflected on some of the things family and friends would do to help our mom during her battle with cancer, and we wanted to reciprocate that kindness and help other families in a similar manner. We also want to help children and families who have lost loved ones to cancer, because we understand the difficulties of the grief process and how hard it is to deal with the loss of a parent. My siblings and I were ages 10,8 and 6 when we lost our mom, so we want to share our experiences with other kids and families to provide them with people who understand what they’re going through and possibly help their grief process to be a bit easier if that is possible. We want to turned an unfortunate situation into something beautiful that will have a greater impact on others.

Ta’naya, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My siblings and I founded this organization to bring awareness to cervical cancer and to help out women and their families who are battling this illness. We understand that cervical cancer doesn’t have much popularity, so we want to provide all the facts so women can know what to watch out for in order to prevent cancer as early as possible. We are working closely with women and families battling cervical cancer to relieve some of their daily stresses so they can focus on their health. This is very important to us, because our mom who passed from cervical cancer couldn’t catch her illness early due to taking care of us and putting our needs before her own, as many single mothers do. In this newly assembled organization, we are most proud of us coming together to create something bigger. This organization brought my siblings and I closer together, and we’re together helping others and giving back. There’s no better feeling than to be able to give back to a focus that means a lot to us personally. We want followers and supporters to know the importance of staying on top of your health and always going to the doctor, no matter what always put you and your health first.

Any advice for managing a team?

Our advice is to build a team of people you trust and that share a similar importance of the goal your business/organization wants to accomplish. As a team everyone’s opinion has importance so in our organization we don’t make any decisions without holding a meeting, sharing our ideas, and holding a vote. On the management side of our team, we have ranks i.e president, vice president, head chair, etc. this helps us to run meeting smoothly and keeps things in order.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

For us to start our business, we chose to invest our personal funds along with the help of our uncle and we held our first fundraiser to gain capital to begin our journey as an organization. Using our personal funds did have a risk, but it was a risk we were willing to take for the importance of our cause. Our business started with only $50 and we are growing more and more over time thanks to our fundraiser and the donations from family and friends.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @thesharifoundation
• Facebook: @thesharifoundation
• Other: Our email: [email protected]

Image Credits

Photo Credit: TayShawn Braden