Travel has always been who I am.

I have been to over 52 countries. I've gotten lost in places where nobody spoke my language, faced more setbacks than I can count, and found my way home every single time. Travel made me open minded, resilient, and genuinely capable of connecting with any person in any place. It built a confidence in me I didn't know I was capable of.

Pillars started with a baby girl growing in my stomach and a feeling I couldn't shake. I traveled to eight countries while I was pregnant with her, so in her own way she was there for all of it. When Lola was growing inside me, Pillars was growing too, and somewhere in all of that traveling and dreaming and building, I realized that Pillars was ours.

Every destination I choose, every pillar I name, every detail I obsess over, it all comes back to her. I wanted to create the spaces I would want Lola to be part of one day, surrounded by the kind of women I was drawing in, doing the kinds of things I would want her to experience for herself. Every lesson baked into these trips is something I have lived, am still learning, or desperately want her to carry with her through her life. That is why this will always be, above everything else, a labor of love.

Lola has already taken her first Pillars trip and witnessing both of my babies existing simultaneously was everything. The vision I hold for her, the one I can see so clearly when I close my eyes, is of her walking down a street in some beautiful far away place, holding the hand of a woman she met through Pillars. Surrounded by people from different countries and different lives who love her and show up for her, women who became her aunts somewhere between a shared meal and a late night conversation. That is what I believe Pillars can be at its biggest. Not just a trip, but something that ripples out. Something generational. Something that changes not just the women who come, but the people those women go home to.

Welcome to Pillars.