Meredith Pericles

I founded the Do Good and Shine Brightly Foundation to do what I'm most passionate about - facilitating collaboration between nonprofits. In my role as founder and executive director, I handle everything from the ground up: administrative tasks, phone calls, data entry, social media marketing, fundraising, creating sponsorship packets and graphics, volunteer recruitment and management, and extensive event planning and vendor coordination. There's no typical day - it's a myriad of all these tasks coming together. My nonprofit specifically focuses on bringing organizations together, like the event I'm organizing with 54 nonprofits participating. Before founding Do Good and Shine Brightly, I spent a decade as a stay-at-home mom to four children, and before that I worked as a pediatric cardiac intensive care nurse. That intensive care experience honed critical life skills - a calmness in chaos, the ability to prioritize, and critical thinking skills that are easy to apply to anything, whether it's being a mom or working in the nonprofit industry. But really, service has been my calling since childhood. I grew up in rural North Carolina where my nana was on the board of every organization you could imagine in the 80s, which meant my mom was also involved, and we kids just tagged along to all the meetings. I remember riding in the backseat when my mom was driving Meals on Wheels. My parents started an international mission trip when I was around 5th grade, and I helped start one myself when I was in college. It's truly been a lifelong journey of service - whether through hospitality and restaurant service, nursing, motherhood, or now leading my own foundation. When you boil it down, it's all about serving people, and that's what I like to do.