About the Founder

I'm Courtney Trevino — founder of Mindful Advocacy and creator of the Self-Advocacy Bill of Rights.

For nearly 20 years I've worked inside education, including 13 as an educational diagnostician. I hold a Bachelor's in Finance and a Master's in Education. But the credentials are only part of why I do this work.

I learned self-advocacy the hard way.

I grew up in a family that taught me, the way many families teach their daughters, that being agreeable was the way to stay safe. That my needs were a burden. That speaking up would cost me more than staying quiet. I carried that lesson into adulthood and into rooms that demanded more of me than I had been given language for — meetings, marriages, hospitals, schools, every place where a smaller version of myself was the version that got rewarded.

Then life did what life does. Adverse events, hard losses, a childhood I had to reconcile in pieces over the years. And somewhere in that reconciling, I discovered something the books and the scripts and the well-meaning advice had never given me: I had rights I'd never been told about.

Not legal rights, necessarily. Human ones. The right to disagree. The right to take up space. The right to change my mind. The right to ask for what I needed without justifying why I needed it. The right to be wrong, and the right to be right, and the right to walk away.

I built the Self-Advocacy Bill of Rights (SABOR) because once I named those rights for myself, I started seeing the same pattern everywhere — in the IEP meetings I sat through with families who loved their children fiercely but couldn't find their voice, in the doctor's offices where smart women were told they were imagining their symptoms, in the workplaces where capable people kept being asked to make themselves smaller. The problem was never courage. The problem was that nobody had ever told them they were allowed.

You've probably tried before. You memorized a script. You promised yourself the next conversation would be different. And then the moment came and you watched yourself slip back into the old pattern, the old smallness, the old apology. You're not weak. You're not broken. You were taught that pattern by people and systems that benefited from it.

You can be taught something else.

That's what Mindful Advocacy is. A framework, a community, and a body of work designed to teach you what nobody else has: how to advocate for yourself and the people you love as a right, not as something you have to earn. I built it because I needed it. I teach it because it works.

I'm glad you're here.

— Courtney