As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we are highlighting fabulous, kind and successful women who share our vision that kindness is a strength, not a weakness. When women support other women, we all win!
Cheyenne Cobb, a former foster youth knows all too well the difficulties that come with navigating the foster care system. Her journey has been rough at times, including finding herself homeless during her last quarter at UCLA. Instead of giving up, Cheyenne has found a way to keep moving forward. She continues to create ways to make life better not just for herself but for others.
In a bold move, this passionate creative leader and multimedia artist founded the non-profit, Jenni’s Flower, a youth-founded and youth-led organization that empowers young people impacted by the system to bloom at their highest potential. It’s appropriately named after her mom, Jenni, who Cheyenne describes as “a fearless and radiant light.”
Through Jenni’s Flower, Cheyenne maintains a successful program called the Foster Youth Flea Market, reaching over 50+ transition-age youth. Cheyenne realized the lack of youth-led spaces and opportunities for foster youth was contributing to further isolation and an inability for her peers to thrive. She hosted the first ever Foster Youth Flea Market in the spring 2022 to create a platform for her peers to make their own money without having to pay any vendor fees or face any barriers to selling their products. They offer scholarships and free entrepreneurial training for the youth. In the end, the mission is to uplift and nurture current and foster youth to help them on their journey to self-discovery and provide them community centered spaces that promote healing and collaboration.
1. How do you define kindness?
I define kindness as the willingness to open your heart and be vulnerable. In order to be kind to someone else, you must first start with kindness towards yourself. And this inevitably comes with the courage to give yourself and others grace.
2. How do you lead with kindness in your personal life?
I lead with kindness by approaching every person and situation I encounter with compassion and intentional vulnerability. Through the work I do with my community, transition foster youth, I have found that me leading with my heart space open creates a safe space for genuine connection and empathy.
3. What does it mean to you to support other women and to be supported by other women?
To me, supporting other women and being supported by other women means leading with love, holding one another accountable, and creating a safe haven for more support and impact to be made. When I lost my mom at age 16, my older sister (only 21 at the time) was the first women who truly showed me what respect, honor and integrity looks like. If it weren’t for her, and the beautiful village of women I have cultivated in my life ever since, from mentors, to teachers, to friends, to colleagues, I wouldn’t be the woman or leader I am today.
4. Who or what inspires you to be kinder to yourself and others? How and why?
My mom Jenni inspires me to be kinder to myself and others. When I was 7 years old, I made a disrespectful comment to a friend of mine during recess. A school counselor pulled me aside and set me straight, telling me that there was no way I could be a daughter of Jenni’s, one of the most compassionate and kind women she had ever met, with words like that coming out of my mouth. I remember this moment so vividly because it showed me how my mom was portrayed by the world around her, and how so many people looked to me and my siblings to ensure that we were also upholding the same standard of love that she so effortlessly gave out. Since she passed, it has been my mission to make due on the promise I made to myself to fulfill her legacy and continue to keep her name, her kindness and her light alive by pouring into others how she poured into us.
5. What is your superpower?
My superpower is my vulnerability. Ever since I started living in and accepting my truth, I have been able to connect with others in a way that I never could before. I have been able to give myself compassion, grace and love that allows me to give back and impact the community around me. Embracing all of the ugly, the pretty, the good and the bad has shown me parts of myself that I never thought I would be able to love.
