MOMentum Moms
By Stacy Nicolau
T
alking to July’s MOMentum Mom, Sherry Bryant, we realized that we have a lot in common. We both are raising teenagers. We both like helping our community. We both got college degrees in helping professions. We both just survived remote learning and working from home while quarantining with our families. How we got to this point in our lives couldn’t be more different. I was raised in the south as a daughter of white Jewish Americans. Sherry was raised in South Florida as a daughter of Black Haitian immigrants. I have followed a life path that was very much expected of me: college, career, family, and achieve a lifestyle similar to or better than my parents’. The same was expected of Sherry.
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She considers herself blessed that, with her parents guidance, she has managed to be the first in her family to reach these goals. Sherry met her high school sweetheart Stanley Bryant in 2000 while they were both students at Naples High School. They married in 2002 and started building a family while both studied at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. They returned to Naples in 2006 to move closer to family after having their second child and so that Stanley could accept the position offer as a Naples High School teacher and coach. After spending several years as a social worker, Sherry chose to take a step back and do both paid and volunteer work for local nonprofits so she could spend more time raising her sons. Her first volunteer
opportunity was with Project Help Naples, followed by NCH, and then Hope for Haiti after she lost family members in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Sherry and Stanley (now a Collier County Public Schools assistant principal) live in Naples with their sons, Stanley III (16) and Isaiah (14), along with their Maltese dog Chanel. The boys currently attend their parent’s alma mater, Naples High School. She laughs that they have been blessed with another son, due to be born in October. Sherry also has started her own digital lifestyle platform called GirlTalkTV and the nonprofit Girl Talk Project, currently awaiting 501(c)(3) status. We met up with the Bryant family on Father’s Day weekend between a fishing NEAPOLITANfamily • July 2020
