Growing up, KCM Partner Tamaira “Ms. Tee” Sandifer, was no stranger to the welfare system. Raised by a single mother of five children, she knew firsthand the struggles and triumphs of growing up in that cycle of survival mode. As an adult, she became determined to offer others the same tools that helped her family graduate from welfare dependency.
One way she has had a major influence in her community—and beyond—is through the avenue of arts, media and entertainment. Dance has been her primary engagement tool for connecting with diverse youth for many years, and it has allowed her and her team to serve those in the cycle of poverty, hunger and a systematic lack of opportunity. Their mission is to provide financial education, life- and social-skills training, and entrepreneurship development and empowerment.
More Than Just a Dance Class
Sandifer shared that she and her team are extremely privileged to serve young people and their families in the educational system, not only in California, but nationally as well. They began as a small dance studio; however, over time it became very clear to Sandifer that the students needed more than just a dance class. She and her team began learning things about the students’ families and about the community, and their dance company evolved from solely offering dance classes, to offering social services through the arts.
A Net To Land In
Sandifer stated that they have become a “net” for many young people – a safe place to land. “They fall, and we bounce ’em back up,” she said. They’ve had many students come through the program that have given their lives to the Lord and are serving in the ministry. Those young people are now doing for other young people what was done for them through Sandifer’s company. “The ripple effect through dance, the arts, media and entertainment was monumental before [the pandemic of] COVID, but it has exploded since,” said Sandifer.
A Ripple Effect and Monumental Growth
Their company went from serving 7,000 young people and their families locally, to 192,000 nationwide. “It’s amazing what happens when you give people an opportunity to see that life for them can be bigger and can exist for them outside of their 5-to-10-mile [neighborhood] radius,” said Sandifer. She and her team went about helping students develop hope in who they could become; a vision for a better future, much like Jeremiah 29:11 speaks of.
“When all you see are the challenges going on around you all the time, you don’t have a ton of options but to repeat it, and our kids didn’t want that,” said Sandifer. So, Sandifer and her team kept giving them experiences. “The Holy Spirit is so innovative and so creative; He would gift us these ideas and He would tell us things to say and things to do that would take even the most ‘challenged’ kid and transform them into a leader.”
Because of the Holy Spirit giving her team the ability to identify, OK, there’s your change-agent right there, this enabled them to give those students transformative experiences, causing a ripple effect to happen. Sandifer can’t even count the number of times this has unfolded in the communities. “It’s not just the kids who are transformed, it’s their families; and then the families transform the communities,” she said. This means it’s having not only an individual impact, but a communal impact statewide.
The Impact of a Lifestyle of Obedience
Sandifer’s goal as she has developed her faith life over the years has always been to obey the Lord. “[Obedience] is a setup for something or for someone,” according to Sandifer. “You just never know who’s on the brink [of your obedience].”
She went on to share that many people have taken their own lives through suicide in recent years because they didn’t have hope, yet many of those people looked like they had everything going their way, “so you never know [when] your step of obedience is going to be life or death in somebody else’s life,” she said. Because of this understanding, whenever the Lord commissions Sandifer to do something, it’s always her practice to fight to be obedient, because she knows that lives depend on it.
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From Welfare Mama to Impacting Thousands
Sandifer’s encouragement to believers is to be very sensitive to the voice of God and be quick to obey. She knows firsthand that once you allow Him to invade your life in that way, it’s possible to go from a “welfare mama living in a hotel, praying over her gas tank, just so she can find a job” to being able to help hundreds of thousands, with countless miracle stories of healing along the way. “Not just once, not twice, but again and again and again He’s showing Himself [faithful],” she said.
According to 2 Corinthians 5:17, when we allow Christ to come into our life, we become a new person on the inside, and a better life becomes possible. Said Sandifer, “I think when He does that kind of transformation in one person’s life, it makes people stand up and take notice— not [of] the great ‘Tee,’ but the great ‘He’ that’s in me.”
For thousands of youths and their families nationwide, the transformation of this one former-welfare mama has had a widespread impact, and that impact continues to have a ripple effect through the engaging avenue of the arts, media and entertainment, because she found her new way of life in Christ.
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