Building The Better Good Project

There is a version of this story where The Better Good Project looks neat and inevitable.

That is not the version I lived.

It grew out of a messier question: what happens when the life you’ve carefully built no longer feels sustainable, honest, or fully your own?

On January 6, 2023, I left the highest position I had held in my career up to that point. I’d spent years building toward it through education, work experience, and a network of colleagues I valued deeply. And yet when I stepped away, I didn’t have a polished next move waiting for me. I didn’t even have clarity. What I had was a partner who told me, very plainly, “We can afford for you to take a break more than we can afford what this work is doing to your mental health.”

It was the truth I needed to hear.

For a long time, I had been living inside a familiar rhythm: do more, prove more, carry more. That pattern showed up in my work, especially in mission-driven spaces where people care deeply and often stretch themselves past what is sustainable. And it showed up in more private ways, too — through grief, health challenges, and the kind of compartmentalizing that can make you look fine long after you have stopped feeling whole.

Looking back, I can see that my yoga practice had been tracing a similar arc for years. I came to it through intensity and effort: Bikram, long streaks of daily practice, vinyasa, teacher training. For a long time, even yoga became another place to achieve. Another place to distract myself. Another place to disconnect from a body I was asking to keep going without enough care.

And then something started to shift.

I think often about one moment during a hard season. I was standing in my home office in the middle of a practice. And I realized that Tree Pose was not going to look like the version photographed at sunset. It looked like two feet on the floor. Hands by my sides. Doing the most grounded thing I could manage. That moment gave me something I had been missing: a felt sense of stability, personal agency, and the possibility of another way forward. The yoga philosophy I was studying at the time helped me understand that stillness was not the absence of movement. It was part of the path.

Throughout 2023, I became both the teacher and the student of a life built less around proving and more around paying attention. Boundaries. Rest. Walks with friends. Classes that had nothing to do with productivity. Contract work that let me stay close to mission-driven work without being consumed by it. Podcasting, which gave me a way to stay near public-interest storytelling from behind the scenes. Sound bowls, which opened another way into listening. And yoga itself, which began to change shape for me, becoming less about doing and more about being.

That year did not hand me a blueprint. What it gave me was something better: a clearer understanding of what I care about and how I want to contribute.

That’s what The Better Good Project was built to hold.

These days, that takes a few forms. Research and fact checking. Support for nonprofits and funders. Sound baths and yoga. On paper, those things may not seem obviously related. But to me, they are all answers to the same question: what helps people do good better?

We do good better when we’re informed. We do good better when we have strong systems and honest support. We do good better when we’re in community. And we do good better when we’re restored enough to keep going.

The Better Good Project is what happened when I stopped trying to make my path look linear and built a home for the work that feels most true to me.

If you’re in a season of untangling, reimagining, or returning to yourself, I hope something in this story meets you there.