with love.

The speech below was shared with MA/MBA cohort members, their families, my family, and Johns Hopkins and MICA staff on MA/MBA showcase day, following our MICA graduation.

To Baltimore with Love

When I look behind me at this virtual gallery of junk journal art, I see more than paper, ribbon, scraps, and discarded materials.

I see a metaphor for this entire journey.

Junk journaling is the practice of taking torn pages, old ephemera, things others might overlook or throw away — and creating something whole and beautiful from them. I originally started doing it to save money on craft supplies. But it became something much deeper. It became a way to process my thoughts, my emotions, and eventually, my transformation.

On our MA/MBA day way back when, as we walked through a MICA gallery, Julia said - Tawni is probably off doing a collage somewhere. You were right, Julia!

At Carey, career counselors like Jacques encouraged us to develop mindfulness practices. Junk journaling became mine.

It pulled me away from the pressure of perfectionism and reminded me to simply create with what I had. To stop waiting for ideal circumstances. To stop believing everything needed to be polished before it had value.

It taught me that even ordinary things can become extraordinary when you give them attention, intention, and care.

And honestly, that lesson carried me through this program.

I still remember my very first day.

After introducing myself, Jo Golden, one of our professors said, "How brave of you to join a design program with no design background."

I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to feel encouraged… or defeated.

But I showed up anyway.

I showed up through one of the hardest seasons of my professional career. Through more group projects than I care to count. Through burnout. Through financial stress. Through losing a job I loved after fifteen years.

I kept showing up.

And somewhere along the way, this experience stopped being just about blending business and design thinking.

Two of the most defining moments of this journey clicked during my trip to India.

I boarded a flight to Hyderabad already exhausted — already grieving something I hadn't fully named yet.

But what I found there changed me.

I found families welcoming strangers into their homes with open arms. Leaders sharing stories with honesty and humility. I even found blessings arriving in the form of a neighbor's cow casually wandering over to greet us.

And in all of it, I witnessed something I was still trying to learn myself:

How to thrive under constraint.

How to find beauty inside contradiction.

How to stay fully present to life, even when life is difficult.

India taught me that resilience is not the absence of hardship. It's the willingness to remain open to humanity in the middle of it.

I came home different.

At the same time, the Center for Innovative Leadership gave me something I didn't realize I was missing: space to process my leadership identity in community with other people.

In a program focused on blending business with human-centered design, I realized I had been missing real life human connection.

That experience enriched my time at Carey in ways I can barely explain.

And yes — I still remember one of my cohort members telling me, "Tawni, just put it on your credit card. We'll never have this moment again. We'll pay it back later.

Well, Lisa… later has officially arrived. And those bills are becoming very real.

But she was right.

Some experiences change you in ways that are worth the cost.

During this time, I also pushed through my fear and started sharing my thoughts publicly — my writing, my photos, my reflections, my story.

One of my CityLab instructors, Lindsay Thompson, once told me: "You have so much to say. Share it."

So I did.

And the more I shared, the more I started recognizing something in leaders everywhere — founders, colleagues, executives, caregivers, high achievers.

People holding everything together while quietly falling apart.

People performing resilience without actually being supported.

People with no infrastructure for the messiness of real life. No middle ground between pushing through and complete burnout.

And eventually, a personal survival question became a design thesis:

What if support itself is the innovation?

Not software. Not platforms. Not productivity hacks.

Support.

Reimagined for a future where artificial intelligence alone is not enough.

A future where the systems that succeed will be the ones capable of holding human complexity with care.

And then, something happened that brought this entire experience full circle for me.

In my final class, my final professor said:

"Watch out for this girl — she's going to be dangerous."

And I laughed because it felt so different from that first moment years ago.

Not because I had become fearless.

But because I finally understood that not fitting the mold was never my weakness.

It was the point.

This program didn't just teach me design.

It taught me that leadership is not about burning yourself out trying to hold everything together.

It's about presence.

It's about alignment.

It's about deciding what actually matters to you and having the courage to build your life around it.

For me, that means love.

Peace.

And preserving humanity in an increasingly digital world.

So to everyone graduating today (and tomorrow): whatever scraps, setbacks, losses, contradictions, or unfinished pieces you carry with you — don't underestimate them.

They may become the very material you use to build something beautiful.

And to those who have been a part of my life's junk journal, my son, my family, my best friend, KIPP STRIVE Primary, MICA, Carey Business School, the amazing team at CIL, design for America, the inner harbor, the people of Baltimore, the Alix Foundation for making all of this possible, and to ma/mba cohort 13

Thank you.