How we see the world shapes the world we create. That observation sits at the center of everything we do.
True Connection is a nonprofit organization, media platform, and body of work exploring the ideas, relationships, and stories shaping human life — at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, ecology, philosophy, culture, and lived experience.
The movement at the center of everything we do: from separation to reconnection.
Our Mission
To expand awareness of the relationships shaping human life — between people and themselves, between people and one another, between humanity and the wider world — through research, storytelling, education, and practice.
Our Vision
A world in which people understand themselves and their relationships to one another and to the living world with sufficient clarity to participate in building futures worth inheriting. Greater awareness, and the wiser participation that tends to follow from it.
True Connection began in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Founder Nadine Nicole traveled there to work with orphaned children — running healing arts programs built around mindfulness, meditation, trauma awareness, and creative self-expression. What she encountered in those rooms was the same thing she would later find everywhere she brought this work: when people are given the space to turn toward their own inner experience, something shifts. The children who went through those programs went on to write, to create, to win national arts competitions. Some are still in touch today.
That experience shaped everything that followed. Back in the United States, Nadine developed a social-emotional learning curriculum that was brought into schools, communities, and institutions — including teacher trainings with educators across the country, work with LAPD junior cadet officers, and further international work in Honduras. The through-line was always the same: self-awareness changes participation. Not as a theory. As something she had watched happen, repeatedly, with her own eyes.
True Connection grew from that foundation into a broader platform — one that asks the same question at every scale. The Centered Self. Relational Systems. The Six Pillars. The documentary. Each is a different expression of the same core inquiry: how does the way we see the world shape the world we participate in creating.
Teacher trainings and work with LAPD junior cadet officers — applying the principles of self-awareness and emotional capacity to educators and young people in high-pressure environments.
A curriculum developed over years of education work, helping students examine their inner worlds, develop emotional intelligence, and build the self-awareness that underlies healthy participation in any community.
Community initiatives bringing the tools of self-awareness, emotional resilience, and relational understanding to contexts where those capacities carry particular weight.
Work that confirmed the same pattern seen elsewhere: when people develop greater awareness of themselves and their relationships, their capacity for meaningful participation grows.
When perception expands, participation evolves. And when participation evolves, the future becomes more open to possibility.
True Connection — Theory of ChangeNadine Nicole
Founder, True ConnectionNadine founded True Connection from a practitioner's understanding of what it means to rebuild one's relationship to self after trauma. Her work through PTSD and panic disorder, and her subsequent study of mindfulness and trauma-informed care, shaped the conviction that personal transformation is a prerequisite for meaningful participation in the world.
As an actor, she studies human behavior at close range. Known for her role as Clarissa Mao in Amazon's The Expanse, she brings that same attention to the question at the center of this work: how does the way we see the world shape the world we create. She is also an Advisor to Space For Humanity and the designer behind Yari Designs.
Tenley Hardin
Curriculum Development, The Centered SelfTenley brought 17 years of education experience and clinical training in somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems, and psychodynamic psychology to the development of True Connection's curriculum and The Centered Self journal. She led teacher trainings with educators, schools, and the LAPD, and served as Curriculum Development Manager during the organization's formative years.
Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (#130074).
As a 501(c)(3) organization, we rely on the support of individuals who find value in this work and want to see it continue and grow. Every contribution goes directly toward research, content, education, and the documentary.
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