A former high-ranking corporate executive in Fortune 1000 and publicly-traded companies, Shelly left Corporate America in 2016 to focus on one of her passions, mindfulness and meditation, and soon thereafter began fusing this passion with her purpose – community organizing and dedicating her energy toward ensuring equity, social justice and access to wellbeing for all. Featured on the cover of Mindful magazine in 2019 and named one of the “12 most powerful women in mindfulness” by mindful.org, Shelly grew her meditation class in her then-home of South Florida to a community of 15,000 meditators. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Shelly founded the global, grassroots mutual aid organization, Pandemic of Love, which has helped match millions of people and has facilitated over $100 million of direct aid.
Shelly was honored by CNN Heroes in 2020.
Shelly has published two books: In 2021, “Sit Down To Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World,” honored as a Gold winner of the Nautilus Book Award and a finalist for the Fall 2021 Big Idea Book Club; and, in 2023, “How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation,” co-authored by Justin Michael Williams, a #1 Bestseller on Amazon. Shelly holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Miami and a Master’s Degree from Columbia University. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Philanthropic Leadership at the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, focusing her dissertation on mutual aid and the decolonization of philanthropy.