When Jana Wilder left her role as Chief Executive Officer of one of the world’s most influential leadership development organizations, she could have done anything. Instead, she built a nonprofit.
While leading that organization, and well after, Wilder took part in a great deal of personal and professional development herself. She discovered that many of the brilliant facilitators and practitioners she met were struggling to make a living despite work that had a huge positive impact on the people it touched. She got curious about what wasn’t working in their models, and discovered it was just about everything.
“There are a lot of incredible practitioners and artists whose work lives outside of formal institutions,” Wilder explains. “There is no natural home for it. No structure that handles operations, ensures fair compensation, maintains standards, and creates real access for people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. No structure that produces the work well, so facilitators aren’t forced to choose between a venue worthy of what they do and getting paid fairly for their hours. They struggle to price their work in a way that keeps it within reach for the people who want to access it. It’s stressful to carry all of that alone, and most can’t afford a team to support them. These are brilliant, highly qualified people, and it burns them out. That is the gap Meet Your Magic was built to fill.”
Meet Your Magic (MYM), the California-based 501(c)(3) Wilder founded and now directs, is something genuinely rare. Part nonprofit infrastructure, part creative advocate, MYM identifies and supports exceptional facilitators and artists, manages the operational complexity their work demands, and builds the financial pathways that make participation possible for people who would not otherwise reach it.
MYM isn’t built around a single discipline. It’s built around a standard: offerings that genuinely change how people live.
Before founding MYM, Wilder spent over a decade in senior leadership at The Optimism Company, the globally recognized leadership and education platform founded by Simon Sinek, ultimately serving as Chief Executive Officer. She was there at the beginning, helping build the organizational infrastructure that would allow its programming to reach audiences around the world. She brings that same expertise, and that same instinct for recognizing work worth building around, directly to MYM.
What makes MYM unusual is not just that it provides infrastructure, but that it understood something others hadn’t: the reason exceptional artistic and facilitative work so rarely scales, or survives, is not because the work is weak but because the people creating it were never meant to be running organizations. They were meant to be directing the work itself. MYM takes everything else off the table so they can be.
In just over three years, MYM has established its flagship US program, the Self Mastery Trilogy, a progressive body of work helping participants develop greater awareness, agency, and purpose. This fall, MYM will expand that offering with Lead the Way, a professional development course designed to help professionals to build the leadership skills needed to reach their next big goal.
Separately, and in a category of its own, MYM serves as the organizational home for Sapience, an interdisciplinary somatic arts practice founded and directed by UK-based creator Tom Slater, supporting workshops and retreats annually across Europe, Asia, and Central America.
It’s the body of work that first drew Wilder to this problem. She experienced it herself in 2017. “I walked in as the narrator of my own life and walked out as the lead character in it,” she says. “This work gave me access to a new lease on life at a time when I thought life was already going great. I want everyone I know to experience this work.” In the years since, she developed a close working relationship with Slater, whose work became foundational to MYM’s creation.
Sapience occupies a distinct space in the arts: immersive, residential works that draw on somatic, emergent physical practice to create experiences rather than simply deliver content. Over more than a decade, Slater has directed and developed the practice across dozens of live iterations internationally, building a body of work with a devoted following and a reputation built almost entirely through direct experience. Each retreat functions as a distinct production; designed, staged, and directed as a singular immersive work, with its own arc and creative intent. Sapience is now planning its expansion into the US, backed by the organizational expertise and infrastructure MYM has built.
That MYM chose to support Sapience speaks to the calibre of both. MYM provides the operational backbone that allows Slater and his team to focus entirely on what they do best: creating exceptional immersive work. MYM ensures the people who need it can get there.
“Tom’s work is among the most rigorous and original in this field,” Wilder says. “Sapience demands an exceptional level of artistic vision, direction, and organizational care to deliver well. That is exactly what MYM exists to provide.”
“What MYM has made possible goes beyond the practical,” says Slater. “The work is properly resourced and supported in a way that reflects its quality. Participants who couldn’t otherwise afford to attend are finding their way in through scholarship support, and we’re planning to bring it to US audiences. That kind of growth simply wasn’t possible before.”
MYM’s financial model reflects its organizational values. The nonprofit has attracted significant philanthropic support, including donations designated specifically for participant scholarships across both programs, reducing the financial barriers that keep people out of these programs. “I would not have been able to afford to participate at this point in my life but for this scholarship,” one recipient notes. “This fund made it possible.” Another, a new mother attending her first retreat since giving birth: “I could not have been there without the generosity of this gesture and Meet Your Magic and Sapience’s vision to offer scholarships.”
“There is a lot of content in this space,” Wilder says. “MYM is not interested in volume. We are interested in exceptional artists and facilitators with original methodologies, work that moves people, shifts something real, and stays with them long after they leave the room.”
With its 501(c)(3) status confirmed and both programs growing, Meet Your Magic is building something the arts and facilitation spaces in the US have rarely had: an organizational home genuinely dedicated to this work and committed to supporting it properly.
Visit meetyourmagic.org for more information