First Fridays Boise / About
Our story
We built the room we were looking for.
First Fridays Boise didn't start as an organization. It started as a question a lot of us were asking quietly — where is everybody?
Why we started
It starts an hour down the road.
Our founder, Angela Taylor, was born and raised in Mountain Home — an hour southeast of Boise, an Air Force town where her father served 27 years in uniform. Idaho isn't somewhere she moved to. It's where she's from.
She came back in 2015 after a career built elsewhere. And coming home, she noticed something that a lot of professionals of color in the Treasure Valley recognize immediately: in a bigger city, your people find you. Here, you have to go looking. The barber, the church, the friend group, the person who just gets it — none of it assembles on its own.
Then came 2020. Angela was running her own businesses from a home office, and the isolation that hit everyone hit differently for people already short on community. Working alone in a place where you rarely see yourself reflected back is its own kind of quiet.
The question stopped being “where is everybody?” and became “what if we just picked a night?”
That's what First Fridays Boise is. One night a month, a room in the Treasure Valley, and a standing invitation to Black and multicultural professionals — and to the allies who show up for them. No membership to qualify for. No one you have to already know.
We take where we gather seriously. One of our nights, Rhythm and Roots, was held at the Erma Hayman House — the last single-family home standing in Boise's River Street neighborhood, where housing discrimination had concentrated most of the city's Black residents. Erma Hayman and her husband bought that sandstone house in 1948, after being refused elsewhere in the city. She lived in it until she died at 102. Standing in that room, as this community, was not a small thing.
We launched in 2024, and we've gathered nearly every month since — across First Fridays Boise and Sistas Who Lunch — building a community of hundreds of professionals who now have somewhere to be on a Friday. People have found jobs here. Business partners. Friends. A few have told us it's the reason they stopped looking at job postings in other states.
That's the whole idea. You shouldn't have to leave Idaho to find your people.
Who's behind it
Angela Taylor
Founder
An Idaho kid who went out, came back, and got to work.
Angela played basketball at Stanford, where she won two NCAA national championships, and later earned her MBA at New York University.
She spent two decades in sports and entertainment, including serving as President and General Manager of the WNBA's Atlanta Dream — running an entire franchise, from the business operations to the people. She never left the game: she calls women's basketball for ESPN and men's college basketball for FS1.
The rest of her work happens here. She runs Indulge Boise Food Tours, which introduces locals and visitors to the Valley's food and culture, and The DIGNITAS Agency, a leadership consulting firm. Her newest venture, Lead With Listening, is a coaching platform built on the idea that the best leaders are measured by what they hear, not what they say.
In 2015 she and her brother Gary founded the Taylor LEAD Foundation, which works to give youth and women across Idaho — girls especially — the resources, support and access they need to chase what they're after.
She speaks to companies, conferences and campuses about leadership and community, hosts the Unlocking the Club podcast, and turns up on KTVB talking about what's happening around the Valley.
What that adds up to isn't a résumé so much as a set of roots. She knows the venues. She knows the business owners. She knows which rooms in this valley will welcome a crowd and which ones won't. First Fridays Boise runs on those connections — built over a lifetime of being from here.
Interested in booking Angela to speak? Email events@firstfridaysboise.com.
What we run
One community, a few different tables.
First Fridays Boise
Our monthly gathering, usually the first Friday at 5:30 PM, at rotating venues across the Valley. The room everything else grew out of.
See upcoming dates →
Sistas Who Lunch
A monthly midday table created for Black women in the Treasure Valley — to gather, exhale, be seen, and connect over good food and real conversation.
Pull up a chair →
The Vibe
Recaps, member spotlights, partner opportunities and what's coming next — in your inbox each month.
Subscribe →Who builds it
A lot of hands.
There is no big staff behind this. There are students and interns who wanted the experience, family members who got recruited, and friends who kept showing up until it became a job title nobody assigned them.
Every gathering has someone at the welcome table making sure a first-timer doesn't stand alone. That's usually a volunteer. If you've been to a First Friday and felt looked after, that's who did it.
Want to help? We can always use hands — at the welcome table, behind a camera, or with the work nobody sees. Email events@firstfridaysboise.com and tell us what you're good at.
Get in touch
Say hello.
However you found us, there's a way in.
General & community
Sponsorship
Employers
Where we are
Boise, Idaho — gathering across Boise, Meridian, Garden City, Nampa, Eagle, Caldwell and Kuna.
Find us as @firstfridaysBOI on Instagram, X and TikTok — and as First Fridays Boise on Facebook and LinkedIn.