I founded Sweet Livity™ because I believe that a world of possibilities opens up when you are inspired, happy and healthy in your work and daily life. I believe in the possibility that every workplace can become a healthier space where everyone including someone like me can thrive.
I began working at the age of sixteen and until I launched Sweet Livity™, I was either fired from or quit every job I had. If I quit, it was always because of some workplace injustice that I couldn’t live with. If I was fired, it was because I was the only “one” or one of a few who looked like me and I was so scared to mess up or fail that I was afraid to ask for help. I was flailing and failing. I felt that if I didn’t succeed, I would make it that much harder for the next person who shared my intersecting identities to make it through the door.
I remember how I felt as a child watching my mother, a special education teacher who loved her work and her students, come home stressed out from an incident at work where she felt mistreated or harassed by management or other teachers.
Years later, I found myself doing work that I loved with people that I loved. But somehow in pursuing our social justice mission, we lost sight of how we were treating each other. While we were doing amazing good work in the communities we centered, inside our organization we were co-creating a toxic unhealthy work environment. I became very ill. I realized that if I stayed, I would either literally not survive or I would not like the person I would have to become to thrive in a toxic unhealthy work environment. So, I left a 6-figure job with benefits and went on a healing journey.
Along my healing journey which continues today, I found a purpose to shift how we think about and practice the work of social justice. To shift the workplace cultures from where we do our good work, whether we are for profit, nonprofit, government, academic or grassroots organizations. Everyone deserves to breathe inside the spaces where we work!
