I’ve spent my career working for nonprofits as the quiet force in the background, optimizing systems, juggling details, and balancing books creating calm in chaos and order in the overwhelm. In my personal life, it was the same. Conditioned to a life of service by virtue of birth order, firsts and gender–born in America, first college graduate, first to offer help, self-sacrificing, never saying no, never stopping.

But after two decades of holding it all—at work, in community, and at home—I found myself completely burnt out. I was ready to pack my bags and walk away from the social sector and my life entirely.

The Sanctuary Fellowship came from that crossroads. From the deep knowing that we can’t keep building systems of care while abandoning ourselves. I co-founded the Sanctuary Fellowship to create what I always needed but never received: a space to exhale, to be seen, and to remember that we are worthy of care, not for what we do, but for who we are.

I’ve spent my career building organizations and initiatives at the intersection of gender justice, health, and systems change. I believed deeply in the work but for years, I ignored what it was costing me. Like so many women and change-makers I know, I poured everything into the mission, without tending to myself.

A cancer diagnosis forced me to stop. In that stillness, something shifted. I realized that if we want to build a more just and livable world, we have to start by caring for the people doing the work. Rest isn’t a reward for burnout it’s a foundation for everything we hope to sustain.

That belief led me to co-found the Sanctuary Fellowship. It’s my offering back to the community I’ve been part of for decades: a place to pause, to replenish, and to remember that we are more than what we produce. The Sanctuary Fellowship is where we reclaim rest as a strategy and as a right.

I’ve spent my career working in television, building campaigns, family offices and organizations, and supporting artists and activists throughout it all. In every role, I worried about how the people inside these organizations were being treated: long hours, demanding expectations, little downtime.

As I built my life around deadlines and outputs, I worried if I was “doing enough.” My therapist asked me, in response to this concern, “Who are you when you’re not trying to please everyone else?” My inner world shattered–I had no idea who I was when I didn’t put the needs of others ahead of my own. That was what I was born and raised not just to know, but to be. 

Through lifestyle and job changes and, most importantly, changes in my own mindset and behavior, I made a new commitment to myself. A reminder that I am more like nature than I am the cycles of productivity. The Sanctuary Fellowship grew from that place—from a deep belief that rest is our origin story. We’re to mirror the pace of nature. I co-founded the Sanctuary Fellowshlp to help others, and myself, continue to learn and live this truth.