Jennifer Perez has spent twenty years inside some of the most demanding cause organisations in America. The American Heart Association. St. Jude. MADD. The American Red Cross. Now the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

Each move was a different cause. A different kind of human need. A different argument for why this deserves to be funded above everything else competing for the same dollar. She has made every one of those arguments land.

What never changed across any of it was who she was inside it.

She grew up in New York City knowing that no room was too big, no table too full, and no seat already taken. That conviction didn't come from confidence. It came from a childhood that taught her the most powerful thing you can bring into any room is an authentic relationship with the person across from you. That lesson became her career.

In 2018 she moved her family from New York to Texas and built a community from scratch. She is a Girl Scout troop leader. A PTA board member. A monthly donor to the organisation that gave her a professional home when she first arrived in Dallas.

She is now raising her children with the same conviction she carried into every room, reminding them to be exactly who they are. Because that is the only version of themselves worth bringing into the world.

Her story is at the heart of our series "Transition is a Frame of mind."

Series 1/Episode 2 - Purpose Doesn't Need Permission

Martyna Urban is a coach, consultant, and former corporate TA leader whose career reads like three separate lives that, in retrospect, were always the same life. She arrived in London with almost no English, built a career in one of the world's most demanding corporate environments, and then, at the exact moment everything looked most successful, started hearing the signal she'd been ignoring for many years. She listened. What she built next is the most honest version of who she always was.
She is precise, self-aware, and allergic to comfortable answers. She is also, in the best possible way, still working it out. That combination is rare. It's why she's in this chair.

Jeremy Sholl

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