****** Over the years, my work has extended beyond speaking and training into advisory and collaborative roles with organizations committed to youth mental health, suicide prevention, and community-based care. These relationships matter to me because they reflect shared values, long-term trust, and a willingness to do the work thoughtfully and responsibly. I have served on advisory boards and coalitions that focus on prevention, connection, and systemic change, offering both lived-experience perspective and professional insight. These roles are not symbolic. They involve contributing to program development, strategy, and education in ways that honor the populations being served. From 2016 to 2020, I partnered with Transitions Mental Health Association in San Luis Obispo, California, where I developed and delivered a youth mental health curriculum designed to support early intervention, education, and community awareness. That work remains a meaningful example of how collaboration, when done well, can create sustainable impact beyond a single event or presentation. In addition to curriculum development and advisory work, I have been trusted to represent and collaborate with organizations working at the intersection of mental health, youth advocacy, and suicide prevention. These partnerships reflect not only alignment of mission, but confidence in how I hold space, represent complex issues, and engage communities with care. Boards, Advisory & Coalition Involvement include: Semicolon Society Arizona Advisory Board Breaking the Chains Foundation Advisory Board Teens 4 Teens Help Advisory Board Scottsdale Youth and Community Coalition Transitions Mental Health Association (Curriculum Partner, 2016–2020)

For the full story Before I ever stood on a stage or stepped into a clinical setting, I was a dancer. I trained as a pre-professional classical ballet dancer, raised in a world that rewarded discipline, perfection, and silence. When a career-ending spinal injury at seventeen abruptly closed that chapter, it wasn’t just the loss of dance that followed. It was the unraveling of an identity built on performance and control. That rupture became the doorway into an eighteen-year battle with bulimia and the long, non-linear work of recovery that would follow. During treatment in the early 2000s, I was asked to draw what was happening beneath my surface. What emerged was a ballerina suspended from the ceiling, bound by chains I didn’t yet have language for. At the time, I couldn’t fully explain what those chains represented. Years later, I would understand them as trauma, silence, expectation, and the pressure to appear “fine” while slowly disappearing inside. Recovery did not pull me away from dance. It transformed my relationship to it. I went on to found Dancing with ED, a nonprofit serving the dance community, where advocacy, prevention, and recovery became central to my work. One of those projects, Pointing to Recovery, gathered pointe shoes from dancers across the country who had battled eating disorders. Each pair was signed and sent in as a testament to survival. Those shoes remain a reminder that healing is rarely solitary, and that stories carry power when they are shared. Living with mental illness, trauma, and recovery has never been a footnote in my work. It has shaped how I listen, how I lead, and how I understand pain that hides in plain sight. Long before I had clinical language for it, I was learning that what we see on the surface is almost never the full story. That understanding became the foundation for everything that came next.