My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in theology and catechetics. After a 25-year academic hiatus involving marriage, numerous moves, and many children, I recently completed my Ed.D. in Interdisciplinary Leadership from Creighton University. Advocating for and participating with grass-roots leaders is my favorite form of leadership practice.

I exercise this leadership practice through being a homemaker, a peer mentor in a domestic abuse survivor group, a supporter of recovery programs, a member of a family engagement team investing in and building up local public education and participating in local charities through time and presence. I often seek to include the spiritual and reflective modalities of "being" more wholly into the leadership paradigm.

I frequently feel a little under-rated and a lot under paid, believing in the lost art of volunteerism, and the often-neglected value of everyday living that exposes where theory deteriorates and the rawness of human experience remains. Embracing this chaos shifts all paradigms back to the necessity of truth (only and always grounded in honesty), beauty (springing from openness), and goodness (founded upon willingness) as ingredients for lasting change and flourishing.

I have had multiple spiritual breakdowns, many of which I attempted to fight off for years. One of which was returning to school after a long absence not having a professional ladder to climb or an end goal in mind. I took the risk of trusting the desire and believing that the experience itself was worth it.

Through that process, I developed Trauma Inspired Leadership Theory and am excited to share it with the world, with its unique focus on how the intrapersonal always flows into and imbues the intrapersonal dimensions and expressions of living and leading. While the germination for the idea is grounded in my own life and observation of life-flow around me, I worked for over 2 years laying the necessary academic foundation that warranted the possibility of such a phenomenon being investigated.

This led to extensively interviewing 20 participants, spending over 200 hours in data analysis, and eventually identifying and defining Trauma Inspired Leadership Theory. I am passionate about honoring the mystery of how this framing of leadership could create paradigm shifts that provide a more whole and full expression of who leaders are, where they came from, and what they’re capable of.