Compounding Interest
How a Personal Crisis Led to a Mission to Make Resources Visible and Accessible to Those Who Need Them Most
The Work That Found Me
I was working a temporary assignment at a philanthropic organization when I discovered my own neighborhood had been holding out on me.
Not the neighborhood itself, but the system built around it.
There were programs just a few blocks away, separated from me by nothing more than a zip code. Organizations and resources existed to help people doing exactly what I was doing: raising two children and rebuilding a life from a foundation someone else had cracked.
I had asked for help. I had asked more than once whether there was somewhere to turn, someone who could help, or a program that could hold some of the weight. Sitting inside that office, I finally understood why the answer had always been no.
The people I had asked had decided I did not need them.
I was the smart girl. I was not as bad off as the others. I was not destitute enough. That was the verdict, with some people even saying it directly to my face in subtle ways.
I learned something in that office that has driven my work ever since:
For many families, the barrier is not that help does not exist. The barrier is that someone decided they did not need to know it existed.
That discovery left me with questions no one had answered and, worse, questions no one had thought to ask me. I have been chasing both ever since.
People talk about finding their purpose as if it sits at the end of a difficult road, gift-wrapped and waiting. Mine did not arrive that way.
It slowly compounded.
Every venture paid me back with a lesson, and every lesson earned interest against the one before it. The more time passes, the more of the statement I can read and the bigger the vision I see in fewer words.
The First Deposit Was a Book
I won a writing contest, and the prize was publishing my first collection of poetry, Universal Colloquies Inside of Me.
Nobody warned me that authorship would require me to become a marketing and promotional expert overnight — and that I would have to become visible while I was still healing in private.
I was not ready for that kind of exposure.
So I did what I could do.
I built a presence online through independent circuits, BlogTalkRadio, and features in small magazines across the country. I allowed my work and my voice to travel farther than I was ready to travel myself.
The lesson was quietly banked.
My voice could go ahead of me. It could enter rooms I was not standing in and open doors I would eventually walk through. I did not have to be everywhere at once to be somewhere that mattered.
I was offered opportunities to lend my voice to all kinds of writing projects, but even that did not pay all the bills.
The temporary job came from ordinary necessity. It is easier to find work while you still have work, so I accepted temporary assignments while the book found its readers.
That necessity is what walked me into the office where I learned the truth about what was available right in my own backyard.
Once I knew, I could not unknow it.
I became involved in my community because I had encountered a version of the problem I never knew existed, and I knew I was not the only person who had experienced this betrayal.
What I understand now — that I did not understand then — is that many people are not living in desperate circumstances because resources are unavailable. They are struggling because knowledge of those resources is limited, leaving those who are trying to avoid crisis to fall through the cracks.
Apparently, there is a look you are supposed to have when you need help. A demeanor. An image assembled from someone else’s assumptions.
Families who do not fit that image are often sorted out before they are ever offered a seat.
Their need is decided for them by someone who mistakes composure for comfort.
Through every season and every obstacle, one thing remained a part of me: art.
I have always been an artist. I have always been the nontraditional student. I have always been the person who reached for a pen, paintbrush, or camera when the ground began to move.
Art kept my mind intact and my family together long before it was something I would ever put on a résumé.
That is not a quip.
It is an unwavering truth.
I know what art does for a person under pressure because I am the person it did that for.
How Do People Fall Through the Cracks While They Are Watching Their Step?
Chasing that question took me deeper into community work. Community work led me into nonprofits and philanthropy, which became the foundation my consulting practice was built upon.
For a long time, I treated the previous versions of myself like separate people:
The artist.
The businesswoman.
The mother.
The advocate.
I am all of them at once, not one at a time.
Then arts in health came into focus, and the connection I had been circling finally became clear.
It gave every part of me the same work to do.
Art was not a break from the healing work.
Art was the healing work.
That clarity sharpened into something I could build — supported by extensive research and evidence. I created a social enterprise, Healing in Color, to help artists intentionally do what many of them had already been doing instinctively.
Arts in health is an emerging field, and many artists from inner-city and redlined communities whom I meet have been practicing this work for years without knowing the name for it, the language to claim it, or the title, credentials, and compensation that should accompany it.
I train them to become arts-in-health practitioners.
I put art back into places where disinvestment tried to remove it — in neighborhoods where red lines were drawn and people walked away without looking back.
I do this in a city that named racism a public health crisis in 2020, a truth that existed long before it was made official.
Compounding is the language of wealth.
It is what money does when it is allowed to remain somewhere secure and grow.
I do my work in communities that were denied the ability to compound anything:
Not homes.
Not capital.
Not health.
Not art.
Everything was blocked from accumulating — intentionally, systematically, and by design.
So when I tell you my purpose compounded, I am telling you that I learned how to build the very thing many people were denied.
Now I build it for us.
Need does not have a face.
Someone is always deciding what it looks like and deciding who gets told the truth about what is available to them.
I decided a long time ago that I would be one of the people who meet others where they are.
Every lesson I have banked since then continues to build interest on that decision.
