The day my husband and I got married, I lost my job.
We didn’t know it yet, but that collision — the highest and hardest days of our lives arriving in the same 24 hours — would become the origin story of a nonprofit, a new profession and a 25-year plan for the city we love.
My husband Robert and I spent the last decade in fields that look, on paper, like they have nothing to do with each other. I’ve worked in public health for more than ten years as a senior research coordinator at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, as a healthcare education specialist across the city and as a case manager who has watched the same neighborhoods show up in the same disease maps for years. Rob spent his career as a multidisciplinary security professional, achieving the role of an associate chief security officer, with a master’s in information systems. He is also, quietly and for the last six years, a certified holistic nutritionist and health coach.
Techtritionist — technology plus nutritionist, digital plus wellness, the two halves of our household made into one profession.
When we got home from our honeymoon, unemployed and newly married, we did what most people do in a moment like that. We took inventory. What did we actually know? What was actually broken? And could the answers to those two questions, put together, be worth building a life around?
Rob is the one who coined the word, meant to draw from both his tech background and his side passion. Techtritionist — technology plus nutritionist, digital plus wellness, the two halves of our household made into one profession.
He said it as a joke first. Then we said it out loud a few more times. Then we stopped joking.
A wellness foundation the city never poured
Here is what a decade in Philadelphia public health has taught me: This city’s poverty rate is not a failure of individual willpower, and it is not going to be solved by another app, another program or another well-intentioned pilot that ends when the grant does. Philadelphia has been one of the poorest large cities in America for as long as I’ve been alive. The interventions have been many. The needle has barely moved.
What has moved me is a set of facts most Philadelphians don’t know: Philadelphia did not standardize its K–12 curriculum until 1984. The School District of Philadelphia did not approve a comprehensive student wellness policy until March 2026.
Which means that no adult reading this article, no matter how old they are, went through a Philadelphia public school that taught holistic wellness in an embedded, sequenced way from first grade through twelfth. Not one.
That is not a small gap. That is a foundation the city never poured.
Global Techtritionist Alliance exists to pour it. We are building a new profession — the techtritionist — trained at the intersection of wellness, technology and community, and equipped to steward what we call The One Wellness Project: a unified K–12 wellness curriculum designed for the School District of Philadelphia and, we believe, replicable in every underserved city in America.
The curriculum teaches nine dimensions of wellness:
- Physical
- Intellectual
- Emotional
- Social
- Financial
- Occupational
- Environmental
- Spiritual
- Digital
It runs kindergarten through senior year, in a developmentally appropriate spiral that no American public school has attempted at citywide scale.
And because a curriculum without evidence is just a hope, we are pairing it with the Seeds to Success Framework, a 25-year longitudinal study that will follow the students who go through The One Wellness Project into adulthood, tracking whether the wellness they learn as children changes the life outcomes they experience as adults. We believe it will. We intend to prove it.
Calling all who build in tech, work in wellness or teach a classroom
I want to be honest about why this matters beyond Philadelphia.
Wellness in America has been sold to us for more than 40 years as a product, a prescription or a private burden. It is treated as something you buy, something you fix or something you carry alone. What it has never been treated as, in this country, is what it actually is: public infrastructure. As essential as water. As essential as roads. As essential as schools themselves.
That is the argument we are asking Philadelphia to take seriously, and it is the argument we will make in public for the first time on Sept. 10 and 11 at the inaugural Techtritionist Summit, a free family-friendly community night at the School District of Philadelphia followed by a private leadership convening at Fitler Club.
Both nights unveil the Seeds to Success Framework four years before its 2030 launch. Both nights invite this city to help shape it.
If you are a Philadelphian who has ever wondered why the same neighborhoods keep showing up in the same statistics, come. If you build in tech, if you work in wellness, if you teach a classroom, if you fund the future. Come.
We were not supposed to build this. Two people on the worst-best day of their lives are not supposed to answer a question this big. But someone has to lay the pipe. We decided it might as well be us.
The front door is open. Walk in.
