Charles Benson

Community raised me before I ever built one professionally. My great-grandparents' home in Charleston, South Carolina, where I was raised for much of my childhood, was open to anyone who needed one: family, neighbors, strangers, it didn't matter. There was always another plate at that table, another chair pulled up, another person given somewhere soft to land. That's the earliest lesson I ever learned about care, long before I had a name for it.

Professionally, I've spent 11 years in nonprofit and human services work between Georgia and New York, including time at the Director level building programs from the ground up. I helped write two grants totaling $8 million in behavioral health funding, both awarded. From there, I built nearly everything the program needed myself: the Standard Operating Procedures and safety plan, the marketing and community-engagement strategy, the team, the website, and the operational infrastructure behind it. I led that program from a blank page to a 24-hour operation, the first program of its kind built from the ground up in New York City. Underneath all of it: quality assurance, health-information systems, and the regulatory relationships that keep a program accountable, the parts a client should never have to think about.

This work is also personal, though maybe not in the way people assume. I don't carry a diagnosis myself, but I deal with anxiety and depression like a lot of people do, and I've navigated the mental health system up close through family members living with documented severe mental illness: sitting in appointments, learning the language, learning exactly where the system fails people. I'm also a survivor of intimate partner violence, a story I'm not ready to tell in full yet, though I'm working on it. None of that is incidental to the work. It's a large part of why I understand a peer-led model from more than one side of the table. I started Window Seat Collective at a point in my life when I knew I needed to take care of myself, and to get away from the environment that was making me sick. So now I'm building the thing I needed. For myself, and for the people who need it too.