The work I do is the work I always needed.

I became a single mom before I became anything else with a title. That sequence matters. It's the lens I bring into every room, the founders' room, the funders' room, the community room, the conference stage.

I studied psychology because I loved people. I went back for my Master's in Social Work because I wanted to understand why the systems built to help people so often failed them. What I learned is that systems don't fail people accidentally. They were never designed for them in the first place. The people my neighborhood relied on, the woman who watched the kids, the cousin who fixed the car, the friend who brought the casserole, were carrying entire local economies on unpaid backs. Nobody was counting it. Nobody was paying for it.

Before I had kids, I worked in social work with troubled children and their families, learning what it looks like when systems fail up close. Then my career shifted, and I spent nearly twenty years in fine wine sales and management. I called on the most prestigious accounts in the state, built distribution across three states, and created a collective sales model that brought four wineries to market through a single channel. I learned that revenue follows listening. Relationships are the real product. And that trust, once built, compounds. Those lessons never left me.

Then life got full in the way it does. Two boys. A business. A neighborhood full of people I loved. And a to-do list that never, ever ended.

I didn't start My Panda with a whiteboard or a business plan. I started it because I needed help, and I looked around and realized my neighbors did too. There were people on my street who needed support and people on the same street who had time, skills, and the desire to help. We just needed a way to connect them, built on the trust that only comes from being neighbors. So we did. As word spread through my neighborhood and into the broader community, something became clear: the need was everywhere. People were hungry for this kind of support, not from strangers on an app, but from trusted people nearby. That's when we decided to build it to scale. Techstars Atlanta helped us get there.

Single Mom Founders grew differently, organically and relationally, the way the best things do. As I got embedded in the female founder community through WEI and other programs, I started building real relationships with women who were doing extraordinary things while also raising children and navigating all of it alone. An authentic community started forming. We saw the need, felt the pull, and decided to make it official. SMF became a nonprofit because that's what this community deserved.

SoftEdge came after we launched My Panda for Business. As we brought My Panda into organizations, I started seeing something: companies wanted to support their people's whole lives, not just their work performance. The deeper question was: how do we help people adapt to change, stay resilient, and tap into what makes them irreplaceably human, especially now that AI is reshaping everything? Connection, creativity, emotional intelligence, adaptability. That's the human edge. That's what SoftEdge teaches.

What I've come to understand is that these three ventures aren't separate. The funnels overlap. The conversations weave together. A woman who finds My Panda becomes a candidate for SMF. A company that brings in My Panda for Business often needs SoftEdge too. A SoftEdge client sees the value of My Panda. It's one web, built intentionally but grown organically, rooted in the same belief: people need each other to shine.

I call myself a community architect because founder only describes one slice of the work. I build the structures that community labor deserves.