We will soon be opening registration for our fall, virtual Cards for Connection Conference. So, I wanted to introduce you to my friend, and colleague, Georgia. She offered the following testimonial about her journey with our program. This has been created with her permission.

Some people take Cards for Connection once, get their certificate, and move on.

Then there’s Georgia. Georgia (she/they) is transgender. She’s an educator who works primarily with hetero parents raising queer kids — the parent-coaching counterpart to the work PFLAG does. She’s gone through Cards for Connection twice. The second time, she didn’t just retake it — she rewatched recordings, paused, took notes, and texted herself voice memos mid-dog-walk because something in the training had landed too hard to wait until she got home.

This summer, I sat down with Georgia to talk about what two passes through the training surfaced for her — as a clinician, as a queer person, and as someone who has spent years helping families learn to love their kids without conditions attached.

Here’s what she told us. We think it’s exactly why this work matters, and exactly why you should be in the room with us this fall.

“You Always Come Back to Hope”

The first thing Georgia named wasn’t a concept. It was a rhythm.

“You keep going back to talk about ACEs, and you keep introducing positive experiences as well… here comes the celebration,” she said. “I’m seeing a trend here.”

By her second time through, she could anticipate it — discomfort, then nuance, then a deliberate turn toward hope — and she pointed out that this isn’t incidental. It’s the architecture of the whole training.

That structure — name the adversity, sit in the hard material, and don’t leave people there — is the throughline of every Cards for Connection training. Georgia’s read on it: most trainings either minimize trauma to keep people comfortable, or sit in trauma without ever offering a way through. This one does neither. It does both, in order, on purpose.

“I Now Do This to Honor Everybody Else”

Georgia named something that we think is the real engine underneath Cards for Connection, stated more plainly than we usually say it ourselves:

People in this field rarely arrive untouched by what they’re trying to heal in others. The work becomes meaningful not when you’ve moved past your own story, but when you’ve turned it into something that protects someone else from repeating it.

She connected this directly to the training’s core assumptions — kids do well when they can, families inherently have the ability to heal — and to the unconditional love framework specifically. Her read: unconditional love isn’t a value families either have or don’t. It’s a practice most people have never seen modeled, which is exactly why a room full of professionals — not just parents — needs to practice it too before they can teach it.

“Trust Them in This Other Space”

The single-story Georgia said “nailed it” for her was simple: a small child, three years old, who understood his own home well enough to refuse to leave it — and the question that followed naturally from that: if a three-year-old can understand this is my home with that much clarity, why do adults assume children can’t understand the same thing about themselves?

Georgia stopped mid-walk to write that down. Not because it was a new idea to her professionally — she does this work — but because she’d never heard it stated with that particular clarity, connecting a concept she already believed to language she could now hand to other people.

That’s the thing about good training material: it doesn’t just inform people who don’t know something yet. It hands new language to people who already knew it, so they can finally say it well.

So, Why Come to the Fall Conference?

If you’re already doing this work — in pediatrics, early childhood education, parent coaching, foster and kinship care, school counseling, or community health — you already know the adversity. You’ve lived the burnout of carrying other people’s trauma without a framework for your own.

What Georgia’s experience points to is what’s different about sitting in this room: it doesn’t ask you to choose between the clinical and the human, the evidence base and the felt experience, the hard material and the hope. It insists on both, every time, in the same breath.

Here’s what the room will feel like this fall:

• You’ll be challenged kindly. Expect moments of discomfort — that’s not a flaw in the design, it’s the design. And expect every one of those moments to resolve into something usable, not just something named.
• You’ll bring your own lens, and it will matter. Whether you walk in with lived experience of marginalization, a faith tradition, a clinical background, or all three — the training has room for your “why,” and asks you to use it rather than set it aside.
• You’ll leave with language, not just tools. Like Georgia, you may already believe everything we teach. What changes is having the words to say it clearly, to the people who need to hear it most.
• You’ll be part of something ongoing. This isn’t a two-day credential and a goodbye. Our Community of Practice continues the conversation year-round — including bringing in voices with lived experience that no two-day training could ever fully represent on its own.

One Last Thing Georgia Said

Near the end of our conversation, almost as an aside, Georgia said this about the work itself:

“Did we just solve world problems?”

It’s a joke. It’s also not.

That’s the experience we’re hoping to build for you this fall — not because we’ve solved anything, but because for two days, in a room full of people doing genuinely hard work, it might feel like you’re finally close enough to see how.

Waitlist for the Fall Conference →

This piece reflects feedback shared with us by a Cards for Connection participant. Shared with permission.