A La Porte County Life in the Spotlight: Taylor Baima

TaylorBaimaSelflessness is a word that describes the best of us. Taylor Baima is one who fits this word’s description quite well. She strives to impact the lives of others by making people happy and inspiring them through community events. She only hopes that her hometown of La Porte will continue to grow stronger as a community, bringing people from all walks of life to come together as a whole.

“They are doing a lot more things downtown, and that’s pretty exciting [having] the community brought together,” Baima said.

One of her favorite things about La Porte is that there are not a lot of people in La Porte, that “everybody looks familiar.” It’s something that has given her comfort, because big cities have a lot of people, and they don't have a lot of familiarity.

Baima attends St. Joseph College in Rensselaer, IN, where she is currently majoring in Elementary Education with a minor in Communications. Baima enjoys working with little kids. Becoming a teacher has been a dream of hers ever since her middle school days. As a teacher, she not only hopes to teach her students the required curriculum, but also hopes to make a lasting impact on their lives.

She said, “I feel like it’s a pretty big impact on their life to teach them when they’re younger. I want them to enjoy school, not to hate school.”

She works at the Purdue extension office, and helps get things set up for 4-H during the La Porte County annual fair which is from July 12 through July 18. She helps with getting the project booklets printed for incoming projects. She is also still involved through her brother and sister who are both active in the 4-H community. She also helps out with the mini 4-H, which goes hand-in-hand when working with little kids. She previously was a 10-year 4-H member and started this journey in second grade.

“My mother did 4-H so it was a given that my sister and I were going to do it,” Baima said.

At home in La Porte, she is a member of her Relay for Life Team, which is an organization that stages relays in order to help raise money for cancer charities. During high school, she was active in sports which made a strong impression on her life. She first began playing softball when she was five years old, and continued to play throughout her entire high school career.

“It taught me a lot about patience and how to work well with others. It’s a way to learn how to be dependent on others and carry your own weight at the same time,” Baima said.

Her parents and grandma are her biggest inspiration because they are always there for her and are willing to do anything for her. When her and her siblings were younger, her grandma was one of her primary caretakers. Her grandmother nurtured her, cared for her and was always there to take her and her siblings to places whenever they needed or wanted to.

“I’m twenty,” she said, “and my parents are still there for me, and they help out in any way they can” Baima said.

Due to her grandmother’s loving nature, she has learned an important motto that she continues to live by.

“It is important to put others first,” Baima said. “Making someone else happy makes me happy because then I know I’ve impacted someone else’s life.”

Selflessness is a word that describes the best of us. Taylor Baima is one of the best of us. She wants to have an impact on people, and she has already begun such a dream.