My journey into entrepreneurship was deeply personal and rooted in becoming a mom. My path to motherhood and my experience in parenthood was not easy. I struggled a lot with postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, as well as perinatal OCD – which I didn’t even know was a possibility until it happened to me.
I had built my career as a fundraiser working in non-profits and charities, and as soon as I had my first parental leave, I knew that I couldn’t go back to that job and be the mom I wanted to be at the same time. The long hours, the expectation of martyrdom and giving more of yourself and your time for the cause, were incompatible with motherhood. I was facing compassion fatigue and high levels of burnout among my peers in the sector, and I knew we needed new approaches to support working parents.
In 2018, just as I was about to return to work after my second son, I launched Balanced Good. I started as a consultant supporting non-profit teams to find balance in their fundraising strategies, and that evolved to our core offering which is to cover parental leaves in the non-profit sector.
What drives me every day is my desire to create better work cultures for working parents, for new mothers and parents, and for everyone working in non-profit teams. I have grown Balanced Good into a team of seven full time salaried staff and we are putting into practice many of the changes we want to see become norms in our sector: we use a four-day work week, we offer flexible hours so someone can block off time on their calendar to go pick up their kids, we focus on high ROI activities to help avoid burnout and martyrdom, and we see our team as whole people who have lives outside of work.
Together with the Balanced Good team, we’ve built the kind of business that I dreamt about while on parental leave with my first baby. We support working parents and employers by treating parental leave like a celebrated life milestone and not a feared employment gap. We all know mothers who spent their time on leave looking for another job because they feared returning to a role where they would experience burnout, unattainable targets, rigid schedules – a role that was incompatible with being a new parent.
At Balanced Good we are hired by an organization to cover the deliverables for someone that is going off on parental leave. We meet with the new parent before they go on leave to learn not only about their work but also about their career goals, priorities, and interests. We then do the work of covering their tasks and deliverables while they are off. We welcome them back after the leave so that they have a supportive re-entry and we also provide a report to the employer about changes they could make to make the role (and the overall work culture) more friendly and supportive for new parents.
It’s important to me that we see staff are whole people, that we look holistically at the people on our teams and understand that their life outside of work is always more important than their work.
When we take this holistic approach, we’re ensuring people are supported both in work and outside of work, which means they’re going to show up to work more productively, happier, they’re going to drive things forward.
If we’re seen as whole people, when somebody has to step away from work, one of the most valuable things you can do is fill that gap so then they’re not coming back to work that’s been ignored. As employers we are communicating that you are valued, we need you, you’re helping us drive our mission forward. While you focus on yourself, we’ll support your role. And I think that that’s so powerful. It’s what I wish I had when I was a new mom and I am so proud to be able to provide this service for others.
