Rachel Douglas

What is inner work? How can doing something for myself help me show up for my community? Isn't meditation just a selfish act - ignoring the problems and issues in the real world?

Rachel Douglas, Executive Director of The Innerwork Center, shares her story of finding her resilience and how it evolved her own life and her community activism through deep inner work.

Before becoming Executive Director of The Innerwork Center in 2015 (when it was Chrysalis) Rachel served as Director of Nonprofit Learning Point and founding leadership for the Partnership for Nonprofit Excellence, a joint program between VCU and the Community Foundation of Greater Richmond. In this role, she worked to build the capacity of Richmond’s nonprofit sector for almost a decade .

She has also volunteered for many formal and informal grassroots organizations and believes the issues, while vast, are all connected. Rachel earned a BIS (now known as Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies) and MSW from VCU and considers herself a lifelong learner, holding multiple personal and professional development certificates. None of her formal education compares to what she has learned by doing her inner work through The Innerwork Center.