When you're in survival mode, dreaming feels like a luxury you can't afford. Every ounce of time, energy, and attention goes to getting through the day. There's nothing left over to imagine a different one.
My childhood came in waves of stability and instability. The unstable stretches pulled me into survival mode early, before I was old enough to know that's what it was.
I was lucky in one way: I went to schools that treated the arts as seriously as the core subjects. I made media the whole way through — running the school news in elementary, middle, and high school. I wrote TV scripts, before I knew what they were called, using Microsoft Word with my friend Curtis and posted them in Yahoo's Groups. It felt natural. It felt like play. What never once occurred to me was that the thing I loved could be a life.
So I did what made sense. I landed in education — and it changed my life. The work was demanding and often heavy, but it was real, and it was fulfilling. I told myself I'd traded the media dream for something stable, and that the trade was worth it.
By my late twenties, though, something was still missing. So I went looking for it. And it was in my deeply buried childhood memories and the current intersection at which I found myself in life, that pushed me to write my first pilot. From there, I assembled a team, with no experience, and tried to film it. It fell apart — but the attempt wasn't wasted. It taught me a valuable lesson: never be in a position where I don't know how to do something. I didn't necessarily have to be a master at everything, but I needed to know every aspect of the job to ensure I could make decisions from a place of knowledge instead of ignorance, and if worst came to worst, be able to execute on my own. To finish anything at all, I'd had to learn every single job a production needs. I didn't know it then, but I was teaching myself the exact thing I would one day teach other people.
By 2019, I'd left the classroom for good. Or so I thought. I moved to Los Angeles and stitched together a patchwork of freelance gigs that kept me afloat while I sharpened my craft.
Then came the 2023 writers' and actors' strike.
It lasted months. When new contracts were finally ratified, so many of us celebrated. But history is clear about who pays for these fights: strikes in Hollywood always land hardest on the communities already holding the least. Entertainment work dried up. Costs climbed. So many people had turned to gig work that even the gigs grew scarce.
Then it got personal.
Around my thirty-fourth birthday, I totaled my car. My relationship ended. And the media career I'd spent years building — a successful screening, millions of views, real relationships — still wasn't paying off, because the industry itself was flailing. It forced me back into the one thing I was sure I'd left behind: education.
At first I felt sadness. Then shame — I'd already done this once; I'd already left. Then the shame turned to anger. Not at anyone — at the lost time. At how much further along I could have been if someone had handed me the tools early, if I'd known back in high school that a media career was even possible. What would my life look like now if I'd been given the chance to start when it counted?
That's usually where people stop. I didn't. I wrote it down.
What had teaching taught me? What had film taught me? Where did the two overlap? The answer came fast, and it was obvious the moment I saw it. I had only ever finished a project two ways. Either I taught myself — YouTube, trial and error, mistakes as my teachers — or I rallied the people around me, taught them the skills I needed, and we built it together. For years, without ever having a name for it, I'd been training filmmakers. Friends. Beginners I met online. That's how I made anything at all.
Which brought me right back to the ache I couldn't shake: what if someone had handed me the tools sooner? How different would all of it have looked?
The strike had made the stakes impossible to ignore. As the work vanished, consolidation accelerated — an industry folding into fewer and fewer hands, an emerging monopoly shaped increasingly by conservative interests. Too many of us, myself included, had been dependent on the Hollywood machine. Those freelance gigs were a safety net, and the net was gone.
So I decided two things. I would never be that dependent again. And, more importantly, I would make sure the people who grew up like me — where survival crowded out everything else, or who'd been shut out of the system entirely — got more than access. They'd get tools. Community. The support to build a career that actually lasts.
Because media is not a small thing. It shapes how we see each other, and how we see ourselves. When more creators from underrepresented backgrounds have what they need to tell original, honest stories, all of us are better for it. And when the same few people control all of it — that is dangerous ground.
That's where HEARTH™ was born.
The room I couldn't find is the room I'm building.
HEARTH™ is a community-powered talent development studio. We work through four interconnected practices — talent development, community building, content production, and professional services — partnering with underrepresented creators to build sustainable creative careers while producing culture with institutional reach and commercial viability. Put plainly: we develop the talent, build the room, make the work, and open the doors.
I've spent two years building and refining this vision. For the last seven months, I've had the privilege of doing it alongside Matthew Guthrie, our Chief Operating Officer. Together we've survived two name changes, more than fifty versions of our website, and countless hours of building, breaking, and rebuilding — and we've reached a milestone that once felt impossibly far off: completion of our youth production program and our digital launch.
Our Youth in Film program wasn't a "learn to film" class with a volunteer project attached. It was a production operation with embedded learning. The distinction matters. When young people see their work treated as real work, with real standards, real stakes, and real outcomes, everything shifts.
If any part of my story sounds like yours, this is the part where I hand you the door.
Subscribe to The Glow, our newsletter. Follow us on social. Explore the site and see for yourself the why, the what, and the how of a studio that has already started changing creators' lives. None of us arrive here alone — and you don't have to build alone either.
I'm so glad you're here for it.
None of us arrive here alone.
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