Female Founder

Weaving her diverse background and lived experiences navigating transformation, Rae Carter shines an elemental and timely medicine into being for the benefit of how personal and collective healing influence cultural transformation.

She is the founder of EmpowR Transformation, an associate with The Creative Discourse Group, a practitioner in the University of Vermont Integrative Practitioner Network, and stewards Grandmother Cherry Sanctuary in Plainfield, Vermont. 

Rae’s career background spans mental health and youth services work in Massachusetts, program management and equity work in Tennessee, communication and music education in New York, and many years serving Vermont businesses, nonprofits, institutions, and government in community and economic development, education, financial services, food systems and sustainable agriculture, health care, recreation and tourism, renewable energy, and social impact.

20 years building expertise in grassroots marketing, organizational communication, public relations, project management, and strategic planning are distinctively transferrable to Rae’s current work in personal, organizational, and cultural transformation. 

Just as she was fully establishing herself as a Vermont leader with a respected voice, in 2018 Rae experienced acute burnout, was diagnosed with cancer, and suffered a health crisis and public fall from grace. This experience, while traumatic, also served as a catalyst for realizing her soul work and reclaiming her sovereignty and power as a woman change maker, activist, truth speaker, and facilitator of change. 

Rae lives the path of healing justice and has been nurturing her gifts in holistic health, intuitive arts, and intentional disruption of dominant systems throughout her lifetime, with considerable unlearning and relearning since receiving a cancer diagnosis. Her approach to advocacy for personal wholeness and collective belonging originates from her lived experience learning to live in balance with her own energy, cultivating reciprocity in relationships, and practicing different ways to engage with space and time that are aligned with the cycles of nature. 

Rae is active in trauma-responsive, national somatic abolitionist, anti-racist culture building work with Resmaa Menakem through both Education for Racial Equity (ERE) and ongoing studies in racialized trauma with the Cultural Somatics Institute. She completed the Art of Navigating Change program with Rockwood Leadership Institute in Oakland, CA, is trained in The Circle Way—a global equity and justice facilitation process, and completed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program—used in healthcare settings across the country; all of which support her ability to unpack discomfort and fear in healing, anti-racism, and transformation work. Continuing education also includes dialogue facilitation that intersects race and class, facilitating white accountability spaces, and unlearning practices to decolonize relationships with women and nature.

She completed Rosemary Gladstar’s Science and Art of Herbalism program, is a Reiki I and II certified practitioner in the Usui System of Reiki Healing, creates music with the Hygge Den music collective, is an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church, and is a Pagan practicing Earth-based spirituality based in ancestral recovery.

Rae holds space in all facets of her work to untangle the web of disconnection and weave new pathways to co-create cultural conditions of healing, equity, and belonging in the evolution of our consciousness–with a lifetime of experience speaking truth to power.