I grew up in Dallas, Texas and earned both my undergraduate degree and Master’s in Elementary Education and Curriculum Development from the University of Missouri. While teaching second grade, I co-founded my first nonprofit, Project Wake Up, alongside friends after losing several people close to us to suicide. That experience shifted my path and led me into the development and fundraising world.

In 2016, a love for travel and global work brought me to Zambia for what was supposed to be a six-month stay. Nine years later, I’m still here in Africa, now raising my daughter with my husband and building a life rooted in community, impact, and meaningful work.

Working inside international nonprofits across East and Southern Africa, I kept seeing the same thing: fundraisers who were doing extraordinary work — navigating complexity most people never see, building trust across cultures and continents, running programs that changed lives — trying to apply fundraising advice that was built for a domestic food bank. Every resource. Every webinar. Every consultant. Built for a different kind of organization. And every time the advice didn't work, these fundraisers absorbed a message it never intended to send: that the problem was them. It wasn't. The gap was in the support that existed. I built FBB to close it.