We are Renee Martyna, Emerald Forcier, and Trisha Benson.
We've learned (the hard way!) what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to making big changes
in our personal, professional, and global lives.
Creating INTRA is how we turned our pain into purpose.
We were chronic workaholics; always doing everything for some higher ideal but struggling to take care of ourselves.
We worked all across the world---- in the U.N. and in various international NGOs, in corporate social responsibility and conflict zones, with political campaigns and volunteer groups, in our own communities and foreign ones----
always trying to save the world from its systemic failures.
Until we had systems' failure, too. The true costs of that were not being properly accounted for.
That’s when we learned the hardest lesson of our lives:
If you really want to save the world, you have to save yourself too. That makes all the difference.
We spent years recovering from 'wounded idealism' after burning out badly. We did this by learning how to talk about taboos. And crowdsourcing solutions to complex problems from all over the world, so we could do our part to change the systems that we all live, work and learn in.
That's INTRA's offering in a nutshell: our whole life in one efficient and effective conversation.
So that YOU don't have to change your world the hard way, too.
Join us to learn how INTRApreneurship and transformative conversations can change everything.
Renee Martyna
Co-Founder
Content Curation & Curriculum Development
Renée has been a serial-social-innovator and facilitator offering psychosocial support to changemakers and social service workers for over twenty years.
She began her life overseas as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar studying Islamic Feminism in the Middle East. She later earned a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Canada. Renée holds fellowships in Social Innovation and Social Enterprise. She has trained in integrative arts like yoga and meditation, and well as transformative communication. She recently completed a 240-hour graduate-level training for mental health professionals in Compassionate Inquiry with Gabor Maté, a leading authority on addiction recovery, trauma, and the scientific connection between mental, emotional and physical health.
Renée's call to create Intra is a deeply personal one. She spent 10 years working for the United Nations as a Gender and Human Rights Advisor in countries like Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka and Cambodia before burning out. Her journey of recovery led her to be self-taught in psychology, trauma, neuroscience, and the healing arts. Her desire to share this with others initially led her to help co-create Hubud in Bali, Indonesia, the world's first non-urban community coworking space. This is where she designed and delivered programs to foster a new way of living, working and learning in the new, 'knowmadic', economy, where measuring success puts people, passion and the planet on par with profit and productivity.
She is the lead content creator for Intra as well as the chief curator of Asia's largest conference on community building, CU Asia. Renée brings her longstanding interest in trauma as a source for personal, professional and systemic transformation as well as her special interest in community building to all of Intra's curriculum.
Emerald Forcier
Co-Founder
Operations & Business Development
Emerald has fifteen years of experience managing and executing projects across the globe. Today she, her husband, and their two children call Bangor, Maine home.
Emerald has been determined to change her world for as long as she can remember. Even before completing her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology, she renovated a school for blind & visually impaired children in Tanzania and brought sick children to the US to help them navigate and secure life-saving treatments.
Later she managed a home for children with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, was the Director of an overnight summer camp in Maine, was the General Manager of an experiential education company in Bali, and served as the Director of Development & Community Engagement for the YMCA.
Emerald has always been productive and passionate, with an infectious enthusiasm for getting things done. With time, though, she began to appreciate the need for balance; the profound connection between personal and professional growth, along with the certain knowledge that we cannot reach our professional potential or build powerful projects in the world if we cannot tend to our souls and address our deeper drivers.
That is what Emerald brings to Intra; project management coupled with very honest and raw experiences about mental illness, early childhood trauma, parenthood, marriage, and more recently, caring for a parent as they passed. But she aims to do it all with an infectious sense of wit and survival humour.
Trisha Benson
Partner & COO
Trisha has settled in Reno, NV with her husband and 2 young children after years of living and working internationally. After studying International Development at UCLA she ended up in East Africa for nearly a decade, working in both the private and non-profit sectors as a Program Management specialist. In Uganda, she initially worked as the Director of the African Headquarters for Camara, an Irish Non-Profit that has delivered computer access and technology education to over 3.7 million children throughout Africa. Trisha later moved into the corporate sector as the Social Enterprise Advisor for an upstream Oil & Gas organization, leading all Corporate Social Responsibility, Communications, and Environmental Projects.
Never one to take the well beaten path, in 2013 Trisha shifted her focus from organizations to individuals, moving to Bali and completing a yoga teacher training. She later began coaching and managing a fitness and wellness facility in Reno, where her passion for helping people become the best versions of themselves has flourished.
Currently Trisha is a partner, facilitator, and the Chief Operations Officer at Intra, where her desire to help organizations and individuals reach their ultimate potential while finding meaning in a chaotic world can coexist.
