The Village We Built

I haven't talked about this much in this space, so let me fill you in.

For over 20 years I've been doing two things simultaneously — coaching individuals, families, and organizations through the nervous system and pattern work you know from this newsletter, and building community-based programs from the ground up for the people the systems weren't built for.

In Colorado, I co-founded the Hope Program — the largest volunteer mentoring program for foster youth in Boulder County. I co-founded the Sage Community Partnership — the first transitional living program for foster youth in the county, the second in the state — designed specifically for LGBTQAI+ youth facing homelessness and mental health challenges. In Ecuador, I created the first weekly reproductive health program in Quito. In Colorado, I co-created the first Spanish sexual assault hotline. As a bilingual trauma therapist, I worked at Oakland Children's Hospital and La Clinica de la Raza with children and families navigating violence, exploitation, immigration, and poverty.

Every one of those programs was built on the same principle: the people closest to the gap are the ones best equipped to fill it. And every one of them taught me something about who gets left out when we design community without listening first.

In 2012, I started applying all of that to young parents. I spent three years interviewing over 100 nonprofits and over 100 Transitional Age Youth parents across the Bay Area — listening to what was actually missing. Not what systems thought they needed. What they actually needed.

What I heard was consistent: services designed specifically for young parents under 25. Real workforce development. And above all — trauma-informed community. Not referrals. Not case management. A village.

So in 2015, alongside Allison Stanton — who I met during the research process — I co-founded Hatch Community in Oakland. And for the next five years, while I was also running my coaching practice, I got to see what happens when you actually build a village on purpose.

Who the Village Was For

I want to be specific about who Hatch was designed to serve, because it was designed to then inform building community and transforming generations for everyone.

It focused on young parents under 25 — many of whom had transitioned out of the foster care system or were sexually exploited minors. Think about what that means for a moment. These are young people who aged out of a system that was supposed to protect them, often without a single stable adult in their lives, and now they're parenting their own children. They don't have the family networks most people take for granted. They don't have someone to call at 2am when the baby won't stop crying. They don't have a mom who shows up with food after the birth. The village that most families can at least partially rely on — even imperfectly — doesn't exist for them. It was never built.

Many of our community members were also LGBTQAI+ youth navigating parenthood without the support structures that hetero-normative families have access to. As a queer woman whose family was influenced by the foster care system, I understood deeply how isolation compounds when your identity doesn't fit the systems that are supposed to help you. My work with LGBTQAI+ and  foster youth taught me that belonging saves lives — and that the absence of it is what puts people most at risk. Not their identity. The isolation around it.

These young parents didn't need someone to save them. They needed what every parent needs: a village. People who show up. People who know your name. People whose nervous systems help regulate yours when you can't do it yourself. The difference is that for these families, the village had to be built entirely from scratch — with intention, with design, with the understanding that what they'd been through required a community that was trauma-informed to its core.

What Intentional Community Actually Looks Like

Here's what Hatch taught me — and what I now bring to every family and organization I work with:

The village is a nervous system. Not a metaphor. The organization itself has a nervous system made up of every person in it. When those nervous systems are cared for — when the fabric of the community is trauma-informed at its core — the whole structure can hold more. When they're not, nothing else works. This is why I talk about organizational nervous systems in our coaching work. I learned it by building one.

Community grows together or not at all. At Hatch, we trained young parents as certified doulas — birth doulas, postpartum doulas, nurturing touch doulas. The people who most needed support became the people providing it. That's not charity. That's a circuit. The act of receiving and the act of giving are not opposites — they're the same loop. This is the same principle I teach you about co-regulation: it's never one-directional.

All parts have to be present. You've heard me talk about this from the physics perspective — structural integrity requires all parts included. At Hatch, that meant all of a person. Every intersection of identity. Race, culture, age, gender, sexual orientation, history, trauma, joy, grief. A young queer parent transitioning out of foster care carries every one of those intersections into the room. The village didn't ask anyone to leave pieces of themselves outside. It found ways of interacting across those intersections — across difference and similarity both — and built shared resource and shared support from that whole cloth. When all parts were present, the structure had real integrity.

Intentional means designed. Community doesn't just happen. Hatch held monthly gatherings with free dinner, childcare, expert speakers, and gift cards so young parents under 24 could always attend. We built a peer mentor pipeline where graduates trained the next cohort. Every piece was designed. Every piece was intentional. That's the difference between hoping for community and building it.

Street Doulas: Stretching What "Doula" Means

I want to spend a moment on this program because it gets at something fundamental about how Hatch thought about community.

When most people hear "doula," they think of someone in a birthing room — and that's part of it. But at Hatch, every program stretched the meaning of that word. Our birth and postpartum doulas were peer advocates — young poeple trained to walk alongside other young parents. Our nurturing touch doulas taught regulation through the body. Our little ones doulas were community childcare providers trained in nervous system regulation. Across all of our programs, "doula" meant accompaniment — someone who listens and walks with you because they want to hear your story or they've walked it themselves.

Our Street Doula program stretched it the furthest — into shelters, onto streets, inside the cracks of institutions that were never designed to hold the people falling through them. Street doulas weren't clinical providers. They were peers. They were people with their own lived experience who understood what it meant to be young, parenting, navigating poverty or homelessness or the aftermath of foster care — and who could walk alongside someone in that because they'd walked it themselves.

Street doulas did outreach, peer education, and direct connection to resources. But more than that, they were the village showing up in places where there was no village. They helped people find their way, their voice, and their strength — not from a position of expertise above, but from a position of shared experience alongside. The doula model at Hatch was never about natural birth or professional authority. It was about accompaniment. Walking with. Being present. Bringing a regulated nervous system into spaces where regulation had never been modeled.

That's why the street doula model is now expanding into a full community health worker program — because the concept was always bigger than birth. It was about building a web of support that follows families wherever they go. Into their neighborhoods. Into the systems they have to navigate. Into the everyday moments where a regulated nervous system next to yours can change the entire trajectory of your day — and over time, your life.

OFFERINGS

NEW — Learn more about HATCH COMMUNITY × LOVE'S PATHWAY: The village is rebuilding. Visit thehatchcommunity.org and lovespathway.org to learn about the rebirth, the programs, and how to get involved or partner.

SELF-PACED PROGRAMS: Two self paced 3 month programs, click links for details Care for Changemakers and Moving Beyond Survival. 

Develop Nervous System Agility in the infrastructure of your Org or Business, Includes Developing Community Oriented Leadership and Mentorship Training Programs: we provide the infrastructure and training to efficiently build the individualized structure your organization needs to prevent burnout, through circles of support. By incorporating how we care for our own nervous systems, the nervous systems of others and the organization nervous system, through incorporating peer mentorship as well as conflict and repair, we build sustainable systems and community, ensuring the outcomes you want in your org or business.

Connect with me for Coaching or Mediation: My intention is to help you build structures that support nervous system agility and exquisite (higher volume) care for yourself, your family, your business and your communities in challenging times of uncertainty, big divisions and fear through finding new options and pathways for outdated patterns and past traumas towards more resilience, joy and even playfulness. I offer Family System Coaching Packages for 7, 14 and 21 sessions. I offer individuals an introductory 5 session package as well as 4 sessions a month for a minimum of 6 months. My business and non-profit consulting is customized to the needs of the organization. For a 20 minute free consultation: Connect

Climbing, Boxing & Fitness: Nervous System Agility through Movement Coaching Find nervous system support through movement and less talking. Face your fears. Get out of your comfort zone. Stretch. Get coaching from me with climbing, boxing or personal training. Individualized for you or your child. Or you can add this to your other coaching packages to embody your or your child’s shifts in a new way. Reach out if you are interested! Check out climbing website.

If you are CURIOUS about my offerings…connect with me for a 20 minute chat.