Meet Our Speakers: Rest as Infrastructure
✨ Meet the Speakers ✨
When people who are newer to Beloved learn about our sabbatical practice, they often ask for resources. We have anecdotes and lived experiences, but we have yet to develop a resource to share about how to create your own sabbaticals. Enter our Rest as Infrastructure speakers. Not only have they been intentional about their design, commitment, and research on rest, but they’ve literally created the blueprint for how to invest in our rest. We’re in good hands.
Register today for “Rest as Infrastructure: How we can all invest in leader sustainability”
Monday, March 16, 2026 11amCT - 12pmCT
GABRIELLE WYATT
Gabrielle Wyatt is an investor, futurist, strategist, and founder of The Highland Project, an ecosystem designed to build and accelerate multigenerational wealth in Black communities and beyond. Rooted equally in imagination and infrastructure, her work sits at the intersection of legacy, rest, radical possibility, and community wealth creation.
A trusted leader and architect of change, Gabrielle is known for designing ecosystems where leaders, especially Black women, can lead from abundance rather than exhaustion. Through capital investment, cultural storytelling, curriculum design, and strategy, she shapes environments where leadership becomes sustainable, intergenerational, and liberatory.
Gabrielle is the co-architect of one of the nation’s largest polling archives capturing Black women voters’ views on wealth, democracy, and the economy, research that now informs narrative, policy, and investment decisions across the country. Her work expands how we understand economic power and how communities build enduring, intergenerational assets - not only for Black women, but for all communities committed to a more abundant future.
As the creator of Meet Me at the Highland™ and writer behind The Stillness Ranger, she explores the inner life of leadership - rest, lineage, nature, creativity, and the long arc of becoming. Her creative practice is deeply influenced by liberatory imagination and Black women’s wisdom traditions.
Gabrielle is an emerging leading voice on rest as a leadership strategy, legacy as daily practice, and visioning as political, cultural, and spiritual technology - offering a new blueprint for how communities build power, belonging, and prosperity across generations.
Through the Legacy Studio and her broader body of work, Gabrielle is shaping a future where leaders, particularly Black women leaders, no longer have to make a way out of no way, but inherit ecosystems intentionally designed for their flourishing and the flourishing of all.
Abby Siegel Hyman is a Program Partner at The Healing Trust. In this role, she manages The Trust’s work beyond grantmaking that supports the care and capacity of grantees, including technical assistance, leadership circles, and Healing for the Healer retreats. She manages The Trust’s Culture and Care Fund and the Sabbatical Fund in collaboration with other funders at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. She holds dual master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University in Theological Studies and Community Development and Action. She is an Honors Program alumna of Murray State University and completed undergraduate studies in Nonprofit Leadership, Public Relations, and Organizational Communication. Abby is an alumna of Nashville’s Young Leaders Council and Nashville Emerging Leaders and is a founding member of the Nashville Rotaract chapter. She is the former board chair of Tennessee Higher Education Initiative, where she continues to serve. Abby is happiest sitting seaside or hiking a mountain, and is rarely without a cup of coffee and a book in her hands. Crafting, cooking, and being cozy are some of her favorite things to do.
Stella Chung (she/her/hers) is currently serving as Director of Programs and Operations at the Durfee Foundation, a family foundation serving Los Angeles County. In her role, she oversees the foundation’s grantmaking initiatives and manages the Sabbatical and Stanton programs, which support extraordinary leaders advancing a brighter future in Los Angeles. She also co-created the Lark program, a grant dedicated to the collective care and renewal of staff at small, Los Angeles-based nonprofit organizations.
She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Communications in 2016 and her Masters of Public Administration in 2017 from the University of Southern California. In 2017, she was a recipient of the U.S. Fulbright Award to serve as an English Teaching Assistant in South Korea.
Jodi Nishioka has worked for over 30 years on behalf of low-income communities, particularly women, children, and immigrant and refugee communities. She started her career as an attorney advocating for immigrant domestic violence survivors and single mothers fighting for child support in legal aid organizations in Boston and Honolulu. Jodi continued her work on behalf of women and children within state and city governments in Hawaii and Seattle, and later with grassroots nonprofit organizations.
Jodi enjoys her work at Ile Kimoyo because it combines her legal skills with her dedication to building power in communities, and especially in communities of color. Jodi also serves on the board of directors for JustLead Washington.
