Em & Sara first met in San Francisco, when they first began raising their eldest children side-by-side in a countercultural connection parenting community. Through cross-country moves, covid, and the world’s general disarray, they’ve leaned on each other. They actively practice queering friendship, or elevating platonic friendship and sisterhood and treating it as a place ripe for reparenting & inner child healing. You can read their Queering Friendship letters and other essays here.
For half a decade, Em & Sara have worked alongside each other coaching, consulting, creating, and educating executives and organizations across industries in liberation-based frameworks steeped in nonviolence and restorative justice.
They are so thrilled to evolve their work together to share with you all their active practice of reconnecting to ourselves, each other, and this home of a planet we call Earth.
EMILY SMITH (she/her)
CO-FOUNDER
Emily has been on an ongoing journey for many years to fill the gap between the contributions she would like to make to humanity and her skill, knowledge, and capacity to do so. It is easy to profess things but quite a different matter to integrate learning so that a person may ring true wherever they are tapped. Her goal is to live a life with a stable tone and to create a resonance with others that can shape our reality into something transformative through dynamic community.
Her teachers on the journey so far have included an education in psychology (which she has since revisited with a critical, inclusive lens), a ten year entrepreneurial journey in human interaction design for digital products, immersion trainings in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and Interpersonal Neurobiology, executive coaching centered both in DEI and NVC, cofounding a transformative forest school alongside Sara and other women she deeply admires, white awareness intensives, receiving extensive IFS therapy including a host of somatically based trauma-healing modalities, BodyTalk therapy, a deep dive into neurodivergence learning, navigating chronic illness and pain, years of joyful unschooling, 22 years of a committed intimate partnership, Reiki 1 and 2 certifications, daily Tai Chi practice, and the many patient and beautiful souls who have been her teachers along the way.
She is a woman in progress and her growth edges are many. She resides on land the Iroquois aptly named “good rivers” or “ohi-yo.” The original stewards of this land were manifold and include Shawnee, Delaware (Lenni Lenape), Potawatomi, Miami, Wyandot, Seneca, Chippewa (Ojibwe or Anishinaabeg), Ottawa, and the Wapakoneta. It is her goal that, as a descendent of settler colonists, she will not rely on the performance of land acknowledgement to clear her conscience but instead develop the range needed to be an active contributor to the healing of this region.
SARA SADEK (she/her)
CO-FOUNDER
Sara is a mother, writer, educator and community builder living on the unceded Ohlone land known as San Francisco with her partner, two kids, and their tiny dog.
Her life’s work is a practice in transforming herself in community from the inside out into becoming the elder of her dreams.
She grounds her work in decolonizing approaches to community-based healing, weaving together liberation-based modalities that meet us all in such compassion, reverence, and care for this journey.
When she’s not working on Rearing Humans with Em or mothering her two children, She writes essays about motherhood in society not (yet) designed for our thriving at radicalmatriarch.substack. com.
Sara holds an M.S. in teaching. Prior to Rearing Humans, Sara spent a half decade a boutique DEI consultancy, served as Senior Advisor to Fenway Strategies, and helped scale non-profit organizations like Girls Who Code and Teach For All.
She is an insatiably curious polymath, and is currently pursuing a three year training program in BIPOC Somatic Experiencing, learning about Compassion with Roxy Manning, and learning about the Topographies of (dis)connection through IDHA.
Sara’s so grateful to be co-creating a world of care alongside Emily and this budding community!
You can learn more about Sara’s other collaborations here.