Guest Blog: Turning Survival into Service

Whenever I introduce myself, I say it the same way every time. My name is Dorris Walker-Taylor, and I am grateful to serve as Senior Ambassador–Graduate Advisor at Thistle Farms.

I say serve on purpose, because service is not a title to me. It’s a responsibility. It’s a posture. It’s a way of honoring where I’ve been and why I’m still standing.

For many people, Black history is something you read about - like names in a textbook, dates on timelines, moments frozen in the past. But at Thistle Farms, Black history is not just something we remember. It’s something we live.

Black history lives through women who turn pain into purpose. Women who took what was meant to break them and used it to build something new. Women who didn’t just survive…but chose to serve.

That’s what turning survival into service really means to me.

I am a 70-year-old Black woman. I am a survivor. I am a graduate of Thistle Farms. And I now have the honor of training other graduates to carry this story forward to understand not just our success, but our humble beginnings.

Living Black History means we are not just observers of the story, we are part of it. My story. Their stories. The healing. The leadership. That is history in motion.

I often tell our youth and our community: never forget where you came from. Not because it defines your limits, but because it reveals your strength. Our stories matter and our history matters. And when we share it with intention, it becomes a form of service. Because healing is not just personal. Healing is powerful.

When one woman heals, that’s beautiful. But when she turns around and helps another woman find her way? That’s transformation. That’s leadership and legacy. That’s Black history continuing in real time.

At Thistle Farms, we don’t just talk about transformation, we practice it. We see it in the women who come through our doors carrying trauma, addiction, incarceration, violence, and loss…and leave carrying confidence, skill, and purpose. Not because life suddenly became easy, but because we discovered we were not alone and we are not done.

Survival taught us how to endure. Service teaches us how to lead.

And when survivors become leaders, that’s how history keeps moving forward. Not in headlines or monuments. But in everyday acts of courage. In mentorship and truth-telling. In women choosing to stay, grow, and give back.

Living Black History is not just people like Harriet Tubman and  Rosa Parks, or Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King. They are all examples of people who took survival and turned it into a way to speak for and serve others, but they’re also all people who can sometimes feel so removed from the world we live in today.

But at Thistle Farms, Black history isn’t something that happened back then. Instead, it’s something we live. Something that is still created right now through real people and real stories.

It is the strength you see today in our Thistle Farms graduates like Katrina, Terrie’, Ty, Josette, Kim, myself and every woman who turned survival into service.

This is what Black history looks like to me now. It looks like, women standing in their power. It looks like, remembering the past without being trapped by it. It looks like, carrying the story forward so someone else can see what’s possible.

Because survival kept us alive. But service is what makes our lives matter.

Dorris Walker-Taylor is Thistle Farms' Senior Ambassador & Graduate Advisor, and a 2012 Graduate