Allow me to tell you a story, back to 2023. I was struggling at work, my marriage was going through a really difficult season, I had reached an entirely new level of mom guilt working a full-time job at a hospital that was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and somewhere underneath all of that I knew something wasn’t quite right with my health. I couldn’t put my finger on it yet, but I knew. And I think my husband knew, so he suggested an escape, which sounds very dramatic considering my eventual escape destination was approximately 40 minutes from my house. After a lot of convincing, I finally booked myself one night at a local luxury hotel. No plane ticket, no passport, no Eat, Pray, Love journey across the world. I simply got on the freeway and drove to a much nicer bed than the one I already owned. Apparently this was all the self-care I could manage.

Almost immediately, I regretted it. Instead of relaxing, I started thinking about how ridiculous it was that I had spent this much money to sleep 40 minutes from home. Then, because guilt has always been one of my stronger talents, my mind went directly to my ancestors. What could they have done with this money? They could have dug a well, and here I was spending the night in a luxury hotel because apparently life had become too overwhelming for me to remain in my own zip code. And listen, I like nice things. I appreciate a nice robe, excellent room service and a lobby that smells unnecessarily expensive. But now, instead of simply being overwhelmed, I was overwhelmed in a beautiful hotel room while feeling guilty about being in the beautiful hotel room. Money well spent.

After pacing around for a while trying to figure out what exactly one does alone in a luxury hotel while having a mild existential crisis, I picked up a magazine. It was Modern Luxury Riviera Orange County. This did not initially improve the situation. Everything in the magazine was beautiful. Beautiful houses, beautiful restaurants, beautiful clothes, beautiful people attending beautiful events, and here I was already questioning whether my hotel room could have financed a small infrastructure project in Ethiopia. But I hadn’t flipped through an actual physical magazine in a long time, and the pictures were pretty, so I kept going. Also, I am nosy in a very specific way. I like understanding how people live, what they are doing, where they are going and, perhaps most importantly, how things work. Eventually, I landed on something that made me stop. CHOC. Children’s Hospital of Orange County. The hospital where I worked had a gala. Not a little fundraiser. A gala gala. I remember looking around the hotel room like someone else might be there to confirm what I was seeing. I was a leader at CHOC. I went to meetings. I read my emails. I knew what was happening at the hospital, or at least I thought I did. So why was I learning from a luxury magazine that the organization I worked for had this incredibly fancy world surrounding it?

I started reading the names underneath the photographs and barely recognized anyone. I knew the CEO. I knew the Chief Medical Officer. But I didn’t see the physicians I worked with or the leaders I knew. Then I discovered there wasn’t just a gala. There were guilds, which was an entirely new word for me in this context. I remember essentially thinking, What in the Downton Abbey is a hospital guild? I knew nursing. I knew healthcare administration. I had an MBA. I could talk population health and quality metrics all day long. But apparently there were women gathering together in something called a guild and raising millions of dollars for the same hospital where I worked, and somehow this had completely escaped me. There were donors, sponsors, fundraising events and names that seemed to appear repeatedly around these institutions. I had worked inside this organization, understood its mission, cared for its patients and sat in leadership meetings, yet apparently there was an entire other side of it that I had barely encountered. Forget relaxing. Now I needed answers.

When I returned to work, I asked my boss about the CHOC Gala and, to my surprise, she had never attended either. The only person she personally knew who had gone was her boss, the Chief Medical Officer of our department. Well, now this was getting interesting. How could we work inside one of Orange County’s most recognizable nonprofit institutions, some of us in leadership positions, and know almost nothing about this world surrounding the very organization where we worked? I wasn’t offended that I hadn’t been invited. Frankly, once I eventually discovered what some of these events cost, it became quite clear that nobody had misplaced my invitation. I was fascinated because I had been standing incredibly close to something I didn’t even know enough to recognize. I knew the hospital from the inside, patients, clinicians, administrators, operations but clearly there were people supporting it, raising money for it and gathering around it in ways I had never understood. I didn’t yet know what foundations did, how grants worked, who decided where money went or why certain people seemed to keep appearing in the same rooms. I didn’t even know enough to know those were the questions I would eventually ask. I just knew there was another world here, and somehow I had missed it.

I went to that hotel because my husband thought I needed to rest. Instead, I came home wondering what exactly I had been looking at. I didn’t know then that the question would follow me into 2024, when I left my job and suddenly had both the time and the curiosity to start figuring it out. I certainly didn’t know that by 2026 I would be running my own nonprofit and walking into some of those rooms myself. None of that existed yet. In 2023, I was simply a very tired mother who had spent entirely too much money to sleep 40 minutes from her house, picked up a luxury magazine and accidentally discovered that there was a whole side of the nonprofit world I knew absolutely nothing about. In hindsight, I probably should have ordered room service, poured myself a nice drink and watched television like a normal person. Instead, I went home with questions.

And unfortunately for everyone involved, I have never been particularly good at leaving questions unanswered.

Part Two: Understanding the System

Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie