Make space. Create hope.

Create Hope did not begin as an abstract idea about creativity or community. It began inside one of the hardest stretches of my life.

Someone I deeply loved went through a serious mental health crisis while we were living in Colombia. It became one of the hardest experiences of my life and changed far more than one moment or one person. It changed the way we lived, the way we planned, the way we understood our future, and eventually the course of our marriage.

When someone you love is struggling that deeply, the crisis does not stay neatly contained inside one person. It changes the room. It changes the rhythm of a home. It changes how you sleep, how you work, how you make decisions, how you talk to each other, and how you imagine the future.

It touched almost everything in our lives. It changed our home, our plans, our sense of stability, and eventually the course of our marriage. There were long stretches where I was frightened, confused, exhausted, angry, heartbroken and completely unsure what the right thing to do was.

One of the hardest things I learned was that mental health struggles can be isolating for the person experiencing them, but they can also be deeply isolating for the people who love them. You can care enormously and still feel powerless. You can want to help and still have no idea where to put your own fear, grief or frustration.

Through that entire period, I kept returning to the same things I had returned to throughout my life: a guitar, a camera, writing, drawing, making something with my hands, turning an emotion into a song, turning a thought into a photograph, turning something I could not explain into something I could see or hear.

Creativity did not fix the crisis. It did not replace therapy, medicine, professional care or real mental health support. But it gave what I was carrying somewhere to go.

The fear had somewhere to go. The anger had somewhere to go. The grief had somewhere to go. The questions I could not answer had somewhere to go.

And eventually one question would not leave me alone: what if creativity could give somebody else somewhere to put what they are carrying too?

That question became Create Hope.

I cannot rewrite what happened. I cannot make every painful part of that chapter disappear. But I can decide what I do with what it left in me.

I can help create rooms where people do not have to arrive with the perfect words. I can help put cameras, paint, guitars, notebooks, clay, film, conversation and other forms of expression within reach. I can help bring people together around the simple idea that whatever they are carrying, they do not have to carry it in complete isolation.

That is why I am personally committed to this project. Not because I think creativity solves everything. Because I know firsthand what it means to desperately need somewhere for difficult things to go.

Create Hope is what I want to build from that experience: something useful, something generous, and something that gives another person a place to begin.