MY STORY
My name means hope. I didn't choose that, but I have spent my entire life living up to it.
From the time I was a little girl I came alive when I could help someone feel seen. I was the kid visiting nursing homes on weekends, sitting with the elderly, reading scripture to a woman named Miss Grace who smiled like the whole world had shown up just for her. I went on mission trips to Haiti. I spent summers as a camp counselor for kids nobody else knew how to reach. I became a teacher. I poured myself into people. It was never a strategy. It was just who I was.
Then my son's struggle with substance use disorder began, and everything I thought I knew about helping people was put to the test in the most personal way possible.
That season humbled me completely. It sent me searching for answers that went far beyond what any traditional system could offer. It taught me that addiction doesn't just take the person struggling, it reaches into the whole family and quietly takes pieces of everyone who loves them. I watched it happen in my own home. And I refused to believe there wasn't a better way through.
What I found on that search became Hopedealers Worldwide. A movement built on the conviction that the opposite of addiction is connection, and that real recovery requires more than a program. It requires community, purpose, identity, and someone willing to walk beside you all the way through.
I didn't find this work. It found me.
“Wholeness isn’t something you find.
It’s something you return to.”
MY JOURNEY
But the lesson I didn't see coming was about myself.
For years I poured everything I had into other people's healing. I counseled families. I built programs. I spoke on stages. And somewhere in all of that I stopped showing up for myself. My health suffered. My body was telling me what I hadn't been willing to hear. And eventually I had to face the very thing I had been teaching everyone else — you cannot love people back to life if no one is loving you back to yours.
So I made a decision. Not to be perfect. To be consistent.
Through a committed shift to plant-based nutrition, brain health practices, and whole-person wellness, I released 67 pounds and reclaimed my health from the inside out. That journey wasn't about a number on a scale. It was about freedom. It was about finally becoming someone who practices what she preaches — and understanding at a whole new level what it costs people to get well, and what it feels like when they do.
That is the work I do now. For individuals. For families. For communities. Helping people find their way back to their identity, their health, and their sense of purpose — one connection at a time.
I am a Board-Certified Addictions Counselor, Integrative Behavioral Health Professional, Licensed Brain Health Trainer, educator, advocate, author, and speaker — and the founder of Hopedealers Worldwide and The Community of Hope Foundation. I am also a mother, a grandmother, a woman of faith, and living proof that the hardest chapters are rarely the last ones.
Loving people back to life, starting with yourself.
Not a before and after. A becoming.
Healing happens through connection. Yours starts here.