I Am the Voice

This month, we are holding
the theme A Place to Exhale.

The women in this issue have built something the culture has not yet learned how to describe. Not businesses in the ordinary sense. Not communities in the ordinary sense. Something closer to shelter. Rooms where women can put down what they have been carrying and be met by other women who understand the weight without needing an explanation.

Dr. Nicole Odom-Hardnett has been building these rooms for over fifteen years. Her company began in 2010 with a single behavioral health practice. It has grown into a franchisable model, an EMR system built for the women running these kinds of practices, and a footprint that continues to expand across the country. What she has been doing, in her own quiet way, is naming a truth that the broader culture has been slow to acknowledge. Women need places to exhale. The places have to be built on purpose. The building is significant work.

The rest of the issue expands the conversation outward. To the women in behavioral health, in wellness, in community organizing, in the small daily practices of care that hold each other through what would otherwise be unbearable. To the essays about what it costs when the spaces do not exist, and what happens when they finally do. To the writers and researchers documenting the gaps and the women closing them.

If you have been looking for a place to exhale, this issue is a place to begin.