By the time many young people in San Bernardino are told to dream bigger, they have already been taught to expect less. Classrooms are crowded, resources are thin, and futures are often framed in terms of survival rather than possibility. It is inside these spaces, school gyms, hallways, and community rooms, that Tawon Green does his most important work.
Before stepping onto a stage with a microphone, Green asks questions that rarely surface in institutional settings: What do you want from your life? What has tried to stop you? And what happens if you refuse to give up on yourself?
Green is the founder and CEO of Dreams Training Facility, a San Bernardino based nonprofit dedicated to mentoring underserved youth through structured programming that blends leadership development, mental health awareness, physical movement, and personal storytelling. Built around six core principles, Determination, Resiliency, Education, Attitude, Mental Health, and Success, the program is designed not as a motivational moment, but as a practical framework for growth.
In less than a year, Dreams Training Facility has served more than 550 young people and achieved 100 percent engagement among Tier 3 students, those facing the highest levels of absenteeism, lowest academic performance, and most significant behavioral challenges. The organization has also generated $96,000 in funding through grants and contracted programming. The work takes place in schools, community centers, and youth serving institutions, where consistency matters more than visibility.
For Green, this work is not a career pivot or a passion project. It is the result of lived experience meeting responsibility.
From Lived Experience to Structured Opportunity
Green grew up in San Bernardino, an environment shaped by limited resources, exposure to violence, and few visible pathways toward sustained opportunity. Poverty, instability, and loss were not abstract concepts. They were daily realities that shaped how young people learned to survive long before they were encouraged to dream.
“I share the same lived experiences as many of the young dreamers we serve,” Green has said of his work. “Because of that journey, it’s deeply important to create spaces where they are seen, supported, and given opportunities many of us never had.”
Before founding Dreams Training Facility, Green built a career in behavioral health, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology and rising into executive leadership. By his mid twenties, he had achieved professional stability, the kind often framed as success. But the disconnect between institutional systems and lived reality remained unresolved.
Walking away from financial security, Green began laying the foundation for Dreams Training Facility with little more than conviction, professional experience, and an urgent sense of timing. The early stages were marked by financial strain, personal loss, and uncertainty. Still, the mission remained clear: build infrastructure, not inspiration alone.
What the Dreams Program Looks Like in Practice
Dreams Training Facility operates through tiered programming options, ranging from single day workshops to multi week intensives. Sessions combine storytelling, guided reflection, journaling, goal mapping, movement, and public speaking. Students are not passive recipients. They are participants asked to articulate their own narratives, obstacles, and aspirations.
Programs culminate in Dreams speeches, short, structured presentations in which students publicly share their goals and the steps they intend to take toward achieving them. According to educators and program partners, these moments often mark turning points in confidence, classroom engagement, and peer relationships.
Green’s approach is intentionally relational. He introduces himself the same way in every room, whether addressing high school students or community leaders, as someone from the Westside of San Bernardino who understands the terrain. That familiarity is not symbolic. It establishes trust quickly, especially with students accustomed to outside intervention without follow through.
Who Is Tawon Green Beyond the Program
Beyond Dreams Training Facility, Green served as Chair of the San Bernardino County Cultural Competency Summit for three consecutive years, from 2022 through 2024, helping shape programming, dialogue, and community centered initiatives focused on equity, inclusion, and lived experience. He also serves as Co Chair of the Department of Behavioral Health African American Awareness Committee, roles that place him at the intersection of community voice and institutional systems.
Professional endorsements from figures such as Kel Mitchell underscore his credibility, yet Green measures success differently. He tracks engagement, consistency, and transformation, not attention.
Those who work closely with him describe a full circle journey from youth participant in community programs to builder of systems designed to support the next generation.
The Artist Emerges from the Advocate
It is often after witnessing Green’s community work that people encounter his poetry.
Green began writing poetry around the age of twelve and performing consistently in his late teens. Over the years, he has taken stages across California, Texas, Kansas, and Washington, D.C., while remaining deeply rooted in San Bernardino and the Inland Empire. His spoken word performances are frequently described as unflinching and grounded, centered on advocacy, grief, recovery, and collective memory.
Rather than framing himself as a performer first, Green often describes his role as that of a voice bearer. Many of his poems are not his story alone, but composites shaped by conversations, observations, and lives that rarely reach public platforms. Spoken word, in this framework, becomes an extension of the same responsibility that guides his nonprofit work.
Spoken Word as Advocacy, Not Applause
At the core of Green’s artistic identity is a belief that storytelling can function as advocacy. His poetry does not aim to resolve pain or inspire through platitude. Instead, it insists on honesty, even when that honesty remains unresolved.
This philosophy is evident in Fragments, a deeply personal piece drawn from his upbringing. The poem traces economic scarcity, food assistance, rent first priorities, and secondhand clothing while confronting community violence and repeated loss. Social media becomes an archive of lives lost too soon. The poet returns again and again as a pallbearer.
Listeners often point to the poem’s imagery as particularly striking: broken dreams filling emotional gaps, bodies shaped by their environments, and grief that arrives too early to feel exceptional. Through Fragments, Green emerges not as a survivor seeking validation, but as a keeper of memory.
Performing Through Loss
A recurring theme in Green’s work is the act of showing up despite profound loss. In Fragments, he references performing after the death of his grandmother and after losing close friends to violence. Rather than framing this as resilience for its own sake, the poem exposes the tension between expectation and capacity, the pressure to give while grieving.
Audience members frequently note that this aspect of Green’s work reflects a familiar reality in many communities, the need to remain functional amid unresolved pain. His performances do not romanticize endurance. They reveal its cost.
Reframing Addiction in You Don’t Understand
Another significant dimension of Green’s work emerges in You Don’t Understand, a poem developed in collaboration with San Bernardino County during Recovery Month. Partnering with individuals with lived experience of addiction, Green translated personal histories into collective testimony.
Although he does not identify as someone who struggles with substance addiction, Green has spoken about recognizing other forms of addiction, habits, avoidance, and behaviors that hinder growth. The poem challenges stereotypes, portraying addiction as inherited, environmental, and emotional rather than a moral failing.
One of its most striking assertions is that strength often functions as a disguise. According to audience responses, this reframing resonates deeply with families affected by addiction, inviting compassion rather than judgment.
Grief After the Funeral
Green’s performances also include deeply personal tributes, such as a spoken word piece dedicated to his cousin Elijah, which focuses not on spectacle but on the quiet aftermath of loss after memorials end and routines resume. The poem lingers on unanswered questions and the enduring grief of the family, particularly Elijah’s mother.
Green has also spoken about the death of his close friend Sir Vantii, a football standout whose talent once made him a local phenomenon. After football ended, Sir Vantii returned to the streets and was killed within six months. Green recalls standing at the funeral and struggling to reconcile the body before him with the person he knew, a moment that sharpened a painful realization. In underserved communities, many young people never get the chance to fully imagine a future.
Carrying Stories Forward
What connects Green’s spoken word performances with his nonprofit work is translation. Turning lived experience into language, then into structure, and ultimately into opportunity. Art becomes a bridge between institutions and individuals. Memory becomes a form of mentorship.
Green does not claim to solve the conditions he documents. His work insists on something quieter and more demanding: visibility, presence, and responsibility.
In an era where attention is fleeting and narratives are often simplified, Tawon Green’s impact lies in his refusal to rush stories toward resolution. Through community engagement, mentorship, and spoken word, he continues to carry fragments forward, not to be consumed, but to be held. And in that holding, something begins to change.
Learn more: https://www.dreamstrainingfacility.com/about-5
Diana Murua is a journalist and freelance writer, passionate about telling powerful stories and highlighting people making a meaningful impact in the world.
