PHOTO | MAYRA PARILLA GUERRERO

Shereese Floyd owns Witnessing My Life, which encourages women leadership through storytelling platforms.

Shereese Floyd uses her story to help women of color share their own.

Floyd owns Witnessing My Life, which works with corporations and universities to encourage women leadership through storytelling by hosting professional and personal development programs. They encourage women to tell their stories to demonstrate how their personal life can help them evolve in the workplace.

“It can be trainings for a couple of hours a day, or it could be larger engagements up to six months,” Floyd said. “What we're doing is teaching women the skills that they have through their lived experiences. So, it's still storytelling, but it’s leadership storytelling.”

Aside from the programs, Floyd also launched a project within her business called the Witnessing My Life Project, an approach to getting women to share their stories to inspire others to do the same in hopes of impacting their lives with the use of t-shirts.

“I wanted it to be something that was different and unique and innovative. I am a former crafter. I used to make t-shirts and signs and I had the idea to merge t-shirts and storytelling,” Floyd said. The Witness My Life Project memoir shirts, where I'm helping women tell their stories for social media and for promotion.”

The shirt designs read: “Based on a true survivor, love, war, coming out, immigrant or ancestor story.”

Though the shirts are sold in a virtual shop through Floyd’s social media, the goal to obtain such shirts is to participate in her project.

“Right now, the way that people are getting them is by signing on to the Witness My Life Project, because it’s really important for me to tell the stories of women,” she said. “I launched it specifically with Black women and women of color, because we just need it.”

Floyd, a 50-year-old Norfolk, Va., native, launched the initiative last year after a series of events inspired her to hit the reset button.

“I was on the cusp of a milestone birthday, and I was going through a divorce and needed to reinvent myself,” she said. “I opened the map, looked at places where I wanted to live. There's this vision around, a vision of myself that I saw in my head. I wanted it to become a reality. I Googled and found Charlotte.”

Though she has always been passionate about getting women to share their stories, Floyd says her divorce pushed her to continue to launch her business.

“I think the divorce helped me see that I wasn't really showing up as my true self in the world,” she said. “I hadn’t really met who I really was, and I didn't really do that until I got here.”

Floyd hopes to continue to inspire women to tell their stories and increase the social media aspect of her project by hosting monthly photo shoots of women who have told their stories through the shirts.

Floyd also hopes to expand her project to other women, not just women of color, in the future. In the meantime, she continues to focus on women of color, as she feels this is a necessity to this demographic of women.

“I like to call it a wearable memoir experience,” she said. “This is my story. This is me. Come see me.”

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