We are reimagining how to care for people who care for the world.

Our Vision

We envision a future where sanctuaries are woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Not as escapes, but as waypoints. Places to pause. Places to begin again. Places to remember what matters most.

Why Rest

Rest can sound small. Soft. Like something you get to once the important work is finished.

We don’t believe that.

Rest runs against the culture of the work. The social sector has built an entire identity around sacrifice. We call it passion. We call it commitment. Women are praised for giving everything and quietly penalized for needing anything back. When they burn out, we offer a yoga class or a long weekend and call it a failure of resilience.

If we keep treating burnout as personal, we will keep losing the very people we most need to build a more just future. The fix must be structural. Sanctuary is one piece of that structure: not an act of kindness on the side of the real work, but a repair to the foundation itself.

Our Anchors

Our three anchors are what rest returns. Renewal for what was drained. Reconnection for what was severed. Reciprocity for everything that only ever flowed one direction. They ground every sanctuary we steward and every experience we design.

RENEWAL

noun | re·​new·​al

The space and time to do the things that allow you to reclaim, recharge, and rest.

RECONNECTION

noun | re·​con·​nec·​tion

With oneself, place, community, and nature.

RECIPROCITY

noun | rec·i·proc·i·ty

Centering mutual care, shared wisdom, and giving back.

Founder Story

Hi. I’m Sarah.

The Sanctuary Experience is the culmination of my life’s work, and of everything I learned the hard way.

I started my career as an occupational therapist, helping one person at a time recover the ability to do the things that make a life feel like their own. I learned that care is not soft. It is skilled, practical, and deeply human.

I joined the Peace Corps and it showed me how much of a woman’s health, safety, and opportunity is decided long before she ever walks into a room. It illuminated for me that systems are not designed to be equitable and just. So I decided to pursue a master’s in public health, to understand how to fix systems instead of the women. I entered the workforce and spent nearly two decades inside some of the biggest philanthropies and institutions in the world and it taught me where the money goes, and where it never arrives.

Everywhere I went, the women held an entire system together and almost nothing held them. We funded the campaigns, the research, and the policy fights. We almost never funded the people carrying them.

I was one of those people. I burned out, and I kept going, because that is what we are taught to do. It took a cancer diagnosis to stop me.

So I built this, though not alone, alongside amazing women. Two sanctuaries, a Fellowship, and a model designed to reach the women who need it most. Because being is enough.

Sanctuary Stewards

  • Nionne James

    Nionne

    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. The Sanctuary Fellowship is 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.

  • Smiling woman with dark hair, wearing a colorful scarf, in front of a wooden wall.

    seema

    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. The Sanctuary Fellowship is designed to help others, and myself, continue to learn and live this truth.

Our Partner

The Sanctuary Experience stewards the land. Wild Seed Liberation Land, a 501(c)(3) organization, receives charitable gifts and funds the programming that happens on it. Together the two make something neither could alone: permanent places to rest, and the means for women to get there.

  • Wild Seed Liberation Land is a 501C3 committed to creating domestic and international spaces that support the sustainability, longevity, and thriving of healers, caregivers, educators, activists, and artists engaged in the fight for our collective freedom and vibrant future. Our goal is to nourish communities while building a model that others might follow toward greater communal, national, and global liberation.

    Our mission is to support sustainability and longevity by creating the conditions for rest, healing, imagination, joy, and connection. We desire to center Black and Indigenous women too often forced to struggle for survival, rather than thrive. WSLL offers retreat, education, and programming grounded in spirit- and land-based liberation so that our communities can experience restoration, rebalancing, and recovery. At the same time, we offer non-Black, non-Indigenous people the opportunity to support community wellness as learners, contributors to, and sustainers of the WSLL effort.