About

Some people find their purpose in a classroom. Others find it on a stage, or in a book, or in the middle of a conversation that changes everything. I found mine at the intersection of all of them.

I am Dr. Isaac Yao Addae, a first-generation Ghanaian American, educator, entrepreneur, and the founder of the #BlackBoyFly movement. I grew up navigating a world that did not always make space for the fullness of who I was. A world that offered narrow definitions of what a Black man was supposed to look like, sound like, and aspire to. And like so many Black men before me, I spent years trying to figure out how to fly in a sky that did not always feel like it belonged to me.

What I discovered on that journey( through engineering, through business, through academia, through faith, through fatherhood, and through the communities I have been privileged to serve) is that the barrier was never ability. It was belief. The moment I began to truly believe that I was born to fly, everything changed.

That conviction is the foundation of Black Boy Fly. Not just a book, not just a podcast, not just a hashtag, but a movement built on the belief that every Black male, regardless of where he started or what he has been through, carries within him the capacity to soar.

I have spent my career putting that belief into action. As a professor at Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University. As a consultant to businesses, governments, and communities. As an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. As a speaker who has stood in front of audiences from Nashville boardrooms to Ghanaian village squares. As a father raising a son who will inherit the world we build today.

Every role I occupy is in service of the same mission: awakening the consciousness of Black men everywhere to the truth of who they are and what they are capable of becoming.

Welcome to the movement. You were born to fly!