Family is worth fighting for.
Charlee Tchividjian
Founder & CEO, Every Mother’s Advocate (ĒMA)
Charlee Tchividjian is the founder and CEO of Every Mother’s Advocate (ĒMA), a national nonprofit working to prevent family separation by surrounding mothers in crisis with the support, relationships, and tools they need to keep their families together.
Her work was shaped by her own experience as a foster and adoptive mother, which gave her a front-row view into both the beauty and the brokenness of the child welfare system. Today, ĒMA equips communities across the country to intervene earlier and help mothers build safe, stable, flourishing families. Charlee lives in South Florida with her husband and their three children.
← All profilesPrograms can help people survive a crisis, but relationships are often what help people imagine a different future.
Charlee Tchividjian, Founder & CEO, ĒMA
Read it the way it ran in print.
At 17, Charlee Tchividjian was handed a three-day-old baby in rural South Africa whose 14-year-old mother had given birth alone and fled. Everyone’s heart went to the baby. Hers went to the girl. That’s where her feature opens in the October 2026 issue, pages 8–18. Below is the actual spread, page for page, exactly as it appears in print.
You have spent over a decade sitting with mothers who are on the verge of losing their children, often to poverty, not abuse. What has that done to you as a person? Has bearing witness to that reality for over ten years changed who you are?
It has shaped how I see people in their suffering with tremendous compassion, and it has made me much more aware of the privileges I carry.
Our culture is often quick to judge and slow to listen. When we slow down long enough to understand someone’s story, what we so often find is that the mothers interacting with the child welfare system are not bad parents. Many are simply experiencing poverty, trauma, or isolation without enough safe options around them.
It has also made me deeply believe that dignity changes the way we serve people. When you stop seeing someone as a problem to solve and instead see a woman with a story, gifts, dreams, and enormous capacity, everything changes. Sometimes what separates a family from crisis and stability is not a dramatic intervention. Sometimes it is simply having one person willing to stay close enough, long enough, to remind a mom that she does not have to do this alone.
You have built something significant, sustained it for over a decade, and are raising three children in the middle of all of it. What has this season of your life taught you about yourself that genuinely surprised you?
I think I’ve been surprised by how much motherhood has softened me without making me less ambitious.
But I also really care about my first and highest priority, which is my family. I care about knowing what my kids are thinking about. I care about being the person they come looking for when something hurts. I care about slow mornings, bedtime conversations, family traditions, and the thousand seemingly insignificant moments that actually make up a life.
What has surprised me is that becoming more rooted in those things has not made me less effective as a leader. In many ways, it has made me better.
Read the full feature in the October 2026 issue.
Open the issue
