Hi, I’m Natalie. I’m a wife, a mom, a storyteller, a community builder and someone who learned — the long way — that a life worth living has to be designed on your own terms.
For 12 years, I founded and ran Whine & Cheese, Inc., a national organization I built from the ground up for Black professional women. The concept was simple and the need was real: small, intimate gatherings where women could come together to whine about their stress and cheese — smile — about their blessings. No performance required. No armor needed. Just honest conversation in a safe room. At our peak, we had more than thirty branches across the country, and what I witnessed in those rooms changed me. Over and over again, I watched women exhale for what felt like the first time in months. I knew then that safe space wasn’t a luxury, it was medicine.
But after more than a decade of pouring into those rooms, I needed one of my own.
I took a sabbatical. I followed love to Ghana, where I would eventually marry my husband, and in that season of stillness and joy, something cracked open in me. I started writing. The stories that came out became A Return to Love — a collection of short stories based on the true story of how we met and built a life together. It was the most personal thing I had ever made, and the most necessary. You can follow that story here.
Ghana also taught me something I hadn’t expected: how much I had been carrying without realizing it. I write about that reckoning — the lessons of slowing down, the unlearning, and what I found on the other side — in my sabbatical journal, which you can read here.
During that same season, I created In My Own Words, a guided journal designed to honor the elders in our lives by helping us record their stories in their own voices. I made it because I noticed how many stories were disappearing — grandmothers, aunts, community elders whose full, textured lives had never been written down anywhere. The journal gives families a way to change that, one prompt at a time.
When I returned to the States — to professional life, to motherhood, to the relentless pace of it all — I brought everything I had learned with me. And I built something new out of it.
The Soft Life Leadership Academy is where I now teach women how to live and lead softly. Not passively, not without ambition, but with intention, boundaries and a clarity about what actually matters. I also work professionally as a trainer and community engagement strategist, helping organizations build meaningful connections with the people they serve — the same skills I’ve been sharpening since those early Whine & Cheese days.
Everything I create comes from the same place: a belief that women, especially Black women, deserve to be fully, unhurriedly themselves. In community. In love. In memory. In their daily lives.
I’m building a life I don’t need to escape from. I’d love to help you build yours.
