This is not a polished narrative about a charitable executive. It is an honest account of how I became someone who believes, with every fiber of her being, that we are each responsible for the suffering we have the power to prevent.
I grew up in a home where kindness was not performed for public approval - it was simply how we operated. My mother would stop the car for an injured street dog in the rain without hesitation. My father believed that how you treated someone who could not benefit you was the only honest measure of your character. These were not lessons they taught me. They were things I watched them live.
I was perhaps eight years old when I first understood that not everyone operated this way. I saw cruelty - deliberate, gratuitous, unmotivated - directed at an animal who could not understand what they had done wrong, let alone defend themselves. I remember standing there, frozen, not from cowardice but from the pure incomprehension of witnessing a worldview so foreign to my own.
That moment never fully left me. Not in the way of trauma, but in the way of clarity. I knew, with a certainty that has never wavered, that I was not built to look away.
When I entered technology - driven by a love of problem-solving and the intoxicating sense that systems, handled well, could change everything - I did not imagine it as a departure from my values. I imagined it as a different arena for them.
The enterprise world rewarded a certain kind of ambition. I had it. I rose through program management, business analysis, automation leadership, and eventually into global executive roles. I built things that worked. I was good at building things that worked. And at every step, the question that drove me was not "what will this do for my career?" but "what will this do for the people inside this system?"
"Leadership without care for the people you lead is just management. And management without compassion is just control. I was not interested in control."
In 2018, I stopped waiting for the right moment and founded EarthSouls. There was no right moment. There was only the accumulated weight of years of encounters with suffering that I could have responded to and did not, because I was "too busy," because it was "not the right time," because I told myself I would do something meaningful "later." Later arrived when I decided it had to.
People often ask me how I balance the two: the AI executive and the animal welfare activist. I understand the question, but I find it slightly puzzling, because for me there is no balance to strike. There is only one underlying orientation: that every being with the capacity to suffer has a claim on our compassion, and that leadership - real leadership, not the performance of it - requires making decisions that reflect that claim even when it is inconvenient.
The AI programs I run are built around a conviction that automation should expand human dignity, not diminish it. The EarthSouls sanctuary operates on the same conviction directed at a different population. The throughline is not a policy or a framework. It is a refusal to accept that efficiency, profit, or convenience are acceptable justifications for the suffering of those who have no voice in the decision.
I do not believe I am an unusual person. I believe I made a decision - incrementally, imperfectly, over many years - to act consistently with values I had always held but not always lived. That is the story. It is continuing, and it is not finished.
A dog with a broken leg on a highway, three calls to municipal services that went unanswered, and a decision to stop waiting for someone else to act. EarthSouls was born in that moment, years before it had a name.
The moment I realized that the organizational resistance I managed at work and the human indifference I managed in welfare advocacy were the same psychological phenomenon - and required the same response: patient, persistent, evidence-based persuasion.
The first time I was invited to speak - not as an AI executive, but as an animal welfare advocate - and discovered that the two identities made the message more powerful together than either would have been alone.
"I am not remarkable. I simply decided that 'I care' without action was just a comfortable lie I was telling myself. The discomfort of acting on what I believed was less than the discomfort of not doing so."- Jeny Joseph Leon