It hasn’t been a smooth journey, but it turned out to be the perfect one to chart Rebecca’s course. Born in Baltimore in 1983 into a turbulent family situation, Rebecca would ultimately move from coast to coast and attend 14 different schools before graduating from high school. It’s no wonder that the subjects she loved and excelled in were those that fed her fascination with people and took her to a world outside of her own…literature (stories) and history (more stories). She loved to play board games with her sister, hamming it up for any audience she could find, making new friends and participating in gymnastics. A precocious child, Rebecca demonstrated an early interest in philosophy and politics and was often at the table with the grownups engaged in a healthy debate. As high school graduation approached, Rebecca confidently declared her major in Psychology and never wavered from it, unlike her peers who changed majors with the seasons. Her love of people, stories and meaning-making is inborn, making the draw to psychology a natural choice. Once her undergraduate work was completed, Rebecca joined the corporate philanthropy team at Microsoft where she worked for several years before heading to graduate school at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. There, she completed the Masters of Arts in Counseling Psychology degree program and became a psychotherapist. As a clinician, Rebecca initially struggled to claim her specialty. At first, she didn’t want to work with eating disorders because they run in her family. Despite so many risk factors, she was lucky to never personally experience an eating disorder, but she was exposed to them, watching her mother, sister and many friends suffer. Rebecca was worried that working with people who suffered from eating disorders would trigger her to develop disordered eating herself. However, she quickly learned that her prolonged secondhand exposure gave her a deep, intuitive understanding of eating disorders, and she eventually found herself reluctantly drawn into an internship at an eating disorder treatment center. That experience was a turning point for Rebecca. She quickly realized that she actually adored working with eating disorders as a clinician, primarily because the very nature of a person being in treatment is an indicator of a commitment and desire to recover…something she had not seen much of in her life. Working in the eating disorder space provided not only an opportunity for Rebecca to help others, but also contributed to her own healing and gave her tangible hope that healing is possible. After several years of working in the field and learning what happens behind the scenes, Rebecca became acutely aware of how severely broken the healthcare system is. Eating disorder treatment is exorbitantly expensive and insurance companies routinely deny coverage, leaving those most vulnerable and in need without a place to turn to for help. That’s when she learned about Project HEAL…a nonprofit organization devoted to providing treatment access support to those who need it most. Rebecca joined Project HEAL in May, 2019 as the Treatment Access Program Director, excited to merge her personal and professional experience with eating disorders and philanthropy to create truly scalable systemic, impactful change to a very broken system. Rebecca was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Project HEAL in April 2020, to lead the charge to reimagine how to break down systemic, healthcare, and financial barriers to eating disorder treatment. Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic began to wreak havoc on the US as a whole, and the nonprofit and eating disorder spaces in unprecedented ways, systemic racism issues in our country were brought back to front and center with the horrific murder of George Floyd and other people of color. From her perspective, it wasn’t hard for Rebecca to correlate these issues with the ongoing issues of Project HEAL’s beneficiaries. Those hardest hit by eating disorders are those least likely to be afforded the ‘privilege’ of treatment. Rebecca is personally committed to fighting for radical body acceptance and fighting against the insidious cultural norms of diet mentality and fatphobia. She identifies as a queer woman and is committed to bring an intersectional lens to her leadership of Project HEAL. Under her leadership, the board, staff and volunteers at Project HEAL are all engaged in standing by and standing with BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled communities in the fight for equitable eating disorder treatment access and insurance coverage. Please join me in celebrating Rebecca for her tireless work on behalf of the 30 million Americans with eating disorders and the 80% of them who have yet to overcome barriers to receiving the treatment they deserve. She is a true champion and change agent who is far from finished with her mission.

click here