Tonya Porter Woods · 2019 Spark Award Winner

Tonya Porter Woods grew up in Southeast Washington, the youngest of three daughters raised by a widowed dad, also a Washingtonian, a Navy veteran who worked at the Government Printing Office. She was a tomboy who ran track and played tennis. In the spring of her 9th grade year at Carter G. Woodson Junior High School, Tonya found that she was pregnant and had to leave school immediately. No, she was told, she could not graduate. Help from her family and her own energy allowed her to cope. Her dad retired from the GPO and soon was walking her daughter, Crystal, to the same elementary school Tonya had attended. After a couple of courses, Tonya took and passed her GED exam, bypassing high school completely. She did well in college courses in English and journalism at UDC but left school because of the pressure of work. At one time she had thought about becoming an English teacher but, instead, a career in child development found her.

A friend of Tonya’s was Executive Director of Friendship House, the community center that for many years occupied a historic mansion near Eastern Market on D Street SE (now part of a complex of apartments and townhouses). As a volunteer at Market Day (the annual Friendship House fundraiser), Tonya impressed the staff with her hard work. When they opened a satellite day care center on Minnesota Avenue SE, Tonya was hired as a teacher’s aide. She loved the work and went on to become a pre-school teacher and then an administrative assistant, developing
and implementing programs, both academic and recreational, for children. Many of the children at Friendship House came from Hopkins Public Housing and in 1997 Tonya was hired to work there as Education Director for the Greater Washington Boys & Girls Clubs.

At Hopkins, Tonya met the late Jan Eichhorn, who would come to pick up children for the after-school tutoring and mentoring program she had created (first as Friends of Tyler School, then as Jan’s Tutoring House). In Tonya, Jan saw the combination of professional skill and warmth of personality that she admired, and in 2004 Jan hired her as Executive Director. Since then, Tonya has done everything from hands-on tutoring and mentoring to running book clubs and teaching computer skills, to supervising staff and volunteers, to writing grant requests, to cleaning the office. It’s absorbing, draining, deeply satisfying work. As Tonya explains it, “I’ve expended a lot of my soul.”

Tonya’s love and care for children isn’t just her profession, of course. She and her husband, Darrick, have raised and cared for many – her daughter, his son from a previous marriage, the son they had together, two children her sister left when she died young and many grandchildren, some of whom join Tonya at Jan’s after school.