LaTonia Monroe Naylor

Chief Business Educator, Monroe Naylor Consulting, LLC; President and CEO, Parent Villages

She Has a Passion and Purpose for Helping Others Find Their Own

Photo by Focus Ashely Photos

Mission-rich and Profit-powered.

That’s the title of the book LaTonia Monroe Naylor wrote, and its subtitle — A Guide to Transforming Your Passion Work into a Fully Funded Business — offers further clues to what’s inside.

And to how she helps businesses move purposefully to the next level, through her business, Monroe Naylor Consulting LLC, which seeks to help entrepreneurs build profitable, mission-driven businesses.

But that consultancy, and the book, are just two elements in what has become a life and career of helping others. It’s been a life of a Woman of Impact.

“When I came up with this, the idea was, how do you take your overwhelming passion and structure it in a way that you can be productive?” she explained.

“Most people don’t use the administrative part of their skillset, or they don’t have it, but that was a gift that I’ve always had,” Monroe Naylor told BusinessWest, noting that she was developing business acumen from a very early age, working at her uncle’s store.

While entrepreneurs typically bring the passion and purpose — that’s why they started the business, after all — they don’t necessarily know how to marry that with an understanding of how a successful business works. “Most people are not taught that because they don’t come from environments where people are teaching them that. So I want to teach people that; I want them to be successful.”

At the same time, “I want them to know that starting a business is not the only thing you should be focused on, so how do you sustain what you do and have harmony in your life?” she said, adding that people shouldn’t feel like they need to sacrifice time with their family for the sake of a job that keeps them separated 100 hours a week.

“That, to me, is mission-rich. How do you do the things that you love and embrace the things that you love, but still have enough stability that you can be comfortable and have a nice house?” she went on. “If you can’t have both, then you’re not going to be happy. And who wants to be miserable?”

Essentially, Monroe Naylor works with entrepreneurs, small-business owners, churches, and other organizations on culture, business sustainability, and other key elements of a thriving business. “I provide training on grants, management, strategy, funding, how to start your business, what you need, what kinds of people you need on your team. On the nonprofit side, how do you set up your board, who should be on your board, how do you ensure you stay compliant?

“Then, when I created the book, I literally thought about the last 20 years of my life. What were the biggest challenges and roadblocks that I ran into? And how do I simplify that for people in less than a three-hour read, so that they will actually read it?”

“How do you do the things that you love and embrace the things that you love, but still have enough stability that you can be comfortable and have a nice house? If you can’t have both, then you’re not going to be happy. And who wants to be miserable?”

Ayanna Crawford, president of AC Consulting and one of three individuals who nominated Monroe Naylor as a Woman of Impact, wrote that her story “serves as a testament to the power of resilience and unwavering dedication to making a difference. As a chief business educator, she inspires others to follow her lead and create lasting impact in their communities. She has reached the place she is today by focusing on others and making their needs a priority in light of her own.”

Back to School

Monroe Naylor has long had a heart for the community, which manifested in running for, and winning, a seat on the Springfield School Committee in 2017 — a decision also influenced by a desire to help her young son navigate the challenges of school and life.

“We ran a very grassroots, non-political campaign because we didn’t know any other way to do it,” she recalled. “We just wanted to help our kids. I feel like, if you do things for the right reason, the good will always come back to you. Even though a lot of bad may happen, I focus on the good.”

LaTonia Monroe Naylor says she wants people to be successful in business and happy in life.

Her experience on the committee led indirectly to her establishment, in 2018, of Parent Villages, a multi-faced nonprofit that works to improve educational achievement while also offering assistance for victims of violence, resources for family engagement and parent advocacy, and more.

The educational focus came from a presentation she heard as a School Committee member, about how 7% of kids aren’t prepared for kindergarten.

“I said, ‘70 or 7?’ And she was like, ‘7.’ So I said, ‘so 93% of our kids aren’t prepared for kindergarten.’ She said, ‘yeah,’ and I was floored,” Monroe Naylor recalled. “How can they be successful if they’re not ready for kindergarten? They’re starting off on a bad foot.”

So Parent Villages was born, first through meetings in at places like community centers and libraries.

“At one meeting, about 85 people came, all kinds of stakeholders, to try to understand what it is that we need to focus on,” she said. “And we found there were these disconnects; people just didn’t know about resources or how to access those resources.

“We also learned very quickly that the people who showed up to the meetings were parents like us, who were already in the 7% — our kids were already prepared. So how do we reach the other 93%? That’s when we built the organization and started to get into the schools, started working with Baystate Health and other programs to develop a strategy.”

Now, Parent Villages focuses on youth in grades 6 to 12 and their parents and caregivers — what Monroe Naylor called a two-generation model, which offers educational programming and workshops, but also provides interim support services.

“So if somebody is going through a domestic situation and needs housing, we help them. Over 90% of our folks are dealing with trauma, dealing with some type of violence, and just need help and support. They don’t know how to wrap their minds around where they need to go. We help them to see the end and see the potential they already have and help them grasp hold of the fact that they have a village, and that’s going to help them through it.”

The topic of trauma is personal to Monroe Naylor due to an event during her teenage years that almost killed her.

“I was shot when I was 16, and that changed my whole life,” she told BusinessWest. “I already had trauma dealing with the fact that I grew up in the neighborhood that I did — that was trauma enough. But when I was 16, I found a way to escape my day-to-day through music. I loved music, I used to rap, I used to do poetry; that was my safe space.”

So she’d spent time at local studios, working on her music. One day, while walking out of one, she was struck by a stray bullet from a fight on the street. Recovering from that physically wasn’t as challenging as the emotional aspects.

“It wasn’t just [the shooting] that that haunted me; it was the fear and the trauma after — the fear of going into certain spaces, or the fear of somebody coming after you. Those are the things you live with for the rest of your life.”

Through therapy, self-care, and a commitment to her faith, among other factors, she’s navigated that trauma, but always understood she had a solid support system, while many people dealing with trauma don’t, and need a village to be successful. Hence, the ‘village’ aspect of Parent Villages.

“It was the fear and the trauma after — the fear of going into certain spaces, or the fear of somebody coming after you. Those are the things you live with for the rest of your life.”

“The last couple of years, we’ve helped well over 700 people, and we consistently have about 40 youth that we work with throughout the year, and we have about 80 families that we’re working with, doing case management, throughout the year,” she said. “We have a great staff and a diverse board, and we focus on the important things that matter. We make sure we get what they need.”

An earlier nonprofit Monroe Naylor established in 2006, called VITAL Center, advised several nonprofit startups, sole proprietorships, and small businesses. These days, she’s also an adjunct professor at Springfield College and Worcester State University and volunteers as a mentor to youth and young adults in her church and community, establishing initiatives such as computer learning centers, youth summer programs, and other projects.

Care Starts at Home

Monroe Naylor is no stranger to being recognized. A member of BusinessWest’s 40 Under Forty class of 2016, she was also named a Massachusetts Commonwealth Unsung Heroine in 2020, won the Commonwealth Black Excellence Award in 2021, and was named Community Builder by the Urban League of Springfield in 2022.

But Woman of Impact may be the broadest and most accurate way to sum up her life, which she says has been profoundly shaped by so many of the people in it, from her mother to her husband, Mah’dee Naylor Sr., a pastor who founded Dwelling Place Church in Springfield earlier this year, and their four kids — not to mention community giants like Dora Robinson, who was impactful in her life in her early years.

And make no mistake: Monroe Naylor aims to be impactful every day, whether on the business plans of a budding entrepreneur, the trauma of a victim of violence, or the well-being of anyone struggling to be all things to all people.

“A lot of women leaders are so heavily focused on everybody else that they forget to take care of themselves,” she said. “We talk about all the great things that happen, but we don’t talk about our own trauma that we have to deal with, our own internal struggles. How do you gather the inner courage and the inner fortitude that it takes to be a person of impact, and be able to do it on a continual basis? That’s something we don’t talk about enough.”

At the end of the day, she said, being there for other people requires self-care, so she can wake up the next day and continue to have that impact on the lives of others.

“The model that I live by is, whatever you do, make sure you can sleep at night. And if I can’t, I won’t do it. That’s how I hold fast to what I do and the decisions that I make.”