What Happened When I Went Back to Western Washington University to Teach Digital Advocacy (And What It Made Me Realize About My Own Story)
I wasn't planning to make a documentary about it.
I just brought my camera, walked through campus before the talk, and started talking. What came out was something I didn't expect: a story about where I started, what I actually built, and why a room full of digital marketing students at Western Washington University left me feeling more certain than ever that the work I do matters.
This post is the extended version of that. If you watched the video, here's everything behind it. If you haven't, this gives you the full picture — and the video is embedded above when you're ready to see it.
Let's go back to the beginning.
Fairhaven College and the Degree I Almost Didn't Get
Fairhaven College is a small, interdisciplinary college within Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. You design your own degree. There's no rigid major structure telling you what to study — you build the thing yourself around what you actually want to learn and do.
I don't know if I would have gone to college at all if it hadn't been for Fair Haven.
That's not hyperbole. I was in a place where I needed flexibility and freedom to explore my education in an unconventional way. A traditional program would have pushed me out before I found my footing.
At Fairhaven I could do things like volunteer at the child development center every week, bring my guitar, and lead kids through music and movement sessions — acoustic freeze dance, song learning, just play. And that wasn't extracurricular filler. It tied directly into what I was studying: creativity and the transformative arts. Creative expression as personal alchemy. The idea that how we create things changes us from the inside out.
That philosophy has never left me. It lives in every piece of work I do now at NYLEAR.
My original plan at Western was actually to build after-school programs for kids — specifically programs designed to help children metabolize stress. I was inspired by the research of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris on ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and by my own time moving through the American mental health system. I thought I could design a community model of care that would have helped kids like me.
That plan didn't survive the pandemic.
How the Pandemic Redirected Everything (And Why That Was Actually Right)
I was in college during COVID-19. I did a year of Zoom school. My brain, as I put it in the video, melted a little.
So I took a break.
And in that break, I started building a TikTok channel where I told stories from my time in the American mental health system — also known, by those who've experienced it, as the troubled teen industry. I wasn't doing it as a career move. I was doing it because the stories needed to be told and I had been inside the system long enough to tell them clearly.
My channel grew to 100,000 followers in about a month. And then kept growing.
My videos started making national headlines. Organizations and journalists started paying attention. What began as personal testimony became something that contributed to real policy conversation at the federal level.
That was my first real education in how digital systems actually work — not as a marketer, but as an advocate. I learned that when you build genuine trust with an audience, when you tell the truth consistently and let people see themselves in your story, something compounds. Attention becomes community. Community becomes movement.
That lesson never left me either.
The Pivot: From Advocacy to Building Digital Ecosystems for Others
Here's the part I want to be honest about, because I've been asked about it more than once.
Why did I go from building a 200,000-follower advocacy platform to helping restaurants, realtors, and small businesses with their digital presence?
The short answer: I realized the same skills transfer everywhere. Building trust with an audience, creating content that earns attention rather than buying it, designing systems that compound over time — these aren't advocacy-specific capabilities. They're communication fundamentals. And they're desperately needed across industries.
Through the process of trying to launch that after-school program (which locked down before it ever launched), I had taught myself web design. That opened a door. I started freelancing — local restaurants, realtors, personal brands. Photography, social media, strategic communications.
Then I started working with a local agency as a social media specialist.
I still remember my first week. We were working with coaching clients, and I helped them develop thought leadership content that went viral immediately. I also booked a world-class whiskey blender onto podcasts — which sounds random but required exactly the kind of media relationship-building that advocacy work had taught me.
Those were wins. Real ones. And they made me feel something I hadn't expected: that I was genuinely good at this whole communications thing.
Eventually, my role went from social media specialist to Managing Director. I took the agency's systems and made sure they worked — really worked. Revenue went up. Our team was recognized with major local awards including Best Marketing Agency and Best Creative Company in Bellingham. I got to work alongside some of the brightest strategists I've met.
And through all of it, the same question kept coming back: How do you turn an audience into advocates? How do you activate the trust that makes someone say — I believe in what this person or organization is doing?
That question is what NYLEAR is built around.
What NYLEAR Actually Does (And Why It Exists)
NYLEAR is a certified woman-owned digital marketing agency based in Bellingham, WA, serving organizations across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
We work with nonprofits and advocacy organizations, local and regional businesses, civic institutions, founders, and personal brands. The industries look different. The underlying problem is almost always the same: good work that isn't being seen, or isn't being communicated in a way that moves people to act.
Our approach is built around what I call the IMPACT Framework — a six-part model I originally developed through advocacy work that eventually helped pass federal legislation. It's now used by national nonprofits, local businesses, and civic institutions to turn digital visibility into real-world outcomes.
IMPACT stands for:
Intent — What are you actually trying to change?
Message — What do you need people to believe?
Platform — Where does your audience actually live?
Audience — Who specifically needs to hear this?
CTA — What do you need them to do next?
Tracking — How do you know if it's working?
It sounds simple. Most frameworks do. The difference is in execution — and in understanding that the framework only works when the message is true. When the work behind it is real.
The common thread across everything NYLEAR does — whether for a nonprofit running a fundraising campaign, a restaurant trying to become impossible to ignore for the right 15,000 locals, or a founder building their first real platform — is one thing:
Creation and connection.
That's it. That's always been the motto.
Walking Back Into Western Washington University
About a year ago, I started coming back to Western to speak.
Specifically, I've been speaking to digital marketing students at the College of Business and Economics — talking about digital advocacy, the IMPACT Framework, and what it actually looks like to build something that moves people online.
Walking through campus before this particular talk, I was struck by how much had changed and how much hadn't. Fair Haven still has its trails — seven miles of them winding through the arboretum. I used to spend every day up there. The stairwells in the old buildings still have that wild reverb if you find the right one.
But I'm different. And I think the students I talk to are different too.
This generation of digital marketing students has grown up inside platforms in a way that previous generations didn't. They've watched trust get manufactured and destroyed in real time. They're more skeptical of polished content than any audience before them. And paradoxically, they respond more deeply to authenticity when they encounter it.
That's not a soft observation. It's a strategic reality that shapes every recommendation NYLEAR makes.
What Happened in the Room
I'll be honest: this was the best session I've had yet at Western.
I've been refining my approach to public speaking. The first few times I spoke, I drilled the material for weeks. I treated it like a TEDx talk — something to be performed perfectly. This time, I walked in knowing the material lived in my gut more than in my slide deck, and I tried to treat it like a conversation instead.
That shift made all the difference.
The room was engaged in a way that felt different. Questions came faster. The conversation went places I hadn't planned. One student told me something that I'm still thinking about: that when I shared how I test AI avatars against my own face on TikTok — and how my face actually outperforms the AI — it gave her hope. She'd been feeling despair about the state of content in an AI-saturated world.
The professor who hosts these sessions said something after the talk that I've been sitting with. He described my interest as digital anthropology — the study of what human behavior in digital spaces reveals about people as people.
That framing is accurate in a way I hadn't put into words myself.
My presentation wasn't really about tactics. It was packed with stories: what do we learn about people when they share, when they trust, when they ignore, when they act? The platforms are just the surface. The humanness underneath is what I'm actually studying, every day, in every client relationship and every campaign.
The thread of what interests me in this work — what has always interested me, going back to the kids at the child development center and the troubled teen survivors on TikTok and the coaching clients and the local restaurants — is the humanness of it all.
What I Want You to Take Away If You're in College Right Now
If you're a student at Western Washington University, or anywhere, trying to figure out how to navigate the digital world without surrendering your values — this is what I want you to hear:
The skills that make you a good communicator and a good human being are the same skills. They're not in competition. Authenticity is not the enemy of strategy. In fact, the most durable digital strategies I've ever built have been rooted in something true.
Your face will probably outperform an AI avatar. Your story, told honestly, will probably outperform polished brand content. The people who are winning in the current digital ecosystem aren't doing it by being louder. They're doing it by being more trusted.
And trust is built the same way it has always been built: by showing up consistently, telling the truth, and caring about the people you're trying to reach.
That's the IMPACT Framework. That's NYLEAR. And that's the lesson I keep learning, every time I walk back onto that campus.
Want to Talk About What This Looks Like for Your Organization?
NYLEAR works with organizations across Bellingham, Whatcom County, and the Pacific Northwest who are doing meaningful work and need the digital infrastructure to match it.
If you're a nonprofit, a local business, a civic institution, or a founder trying to build something real — we'd love to talk.
Or start with the free IMPACT Game Plan — a diagnostic that shows you exactly where your biggest gap is and the first moves to close it.
