About The Hosts

Kind Retreats — the first offering from For A Kind World — is a mother-daughter project, born from a shared love of travel, a belief in meaningful connections, and a desire to experience the world a little differently.

For Suzanne, travel started young. She was raised in Guatemala and grew up spending weekends at Lake Atitlán, one of the places we host our retreats. The lake, its communities, and the landscapes surrounding it have been part of her life for as long as she can remember. Today, she still loves bringing people to the places she knows best, sharing not only the country's natural beauty and rich culture, but also the warmth that makes it feel like home. 

Travel also started young for Karla. Raised in the US, she grew up visiting family in Guatemala, and the country quickly became a second home. She later spent four years living in Antigua—a fairytale of a city, entirely cradled by volcanoes. Her career then took her across Latin America, Africa, and the United States, shaping her vision for what travel could be.  

In different ways, we've both spent our lives moving between places, learning from the people we meet, and discovering how each journey changes the way we see the world—and ourselves.

Yoga has been another thread we share. Karla has practiced for more than a decade and became a 200-hour certified yoga teacher in 2018. Suzanne is also a longtime yoga enthusiast. For both of us, yoga offers a way to slow down and create space to be present—something that can be surprisingly difficult to find when we're moving through our everyday lives. While our retreats aren't centered around yoga, we believe that making a little space to move, breathe, and reconnect with ourselves can change the way we experience a place.

Our professional lives have also shaped the way we think about travel. Together, we bring more than fifteen years of experience in nonprofit leadership and community impact, working with organizations and communities across different parts of the world. We've seen firsthand the importance of relationships, and of approaching new communities with curiosity and respect.

Those lessons are part of what inspired Kind Retreats.

We wanted to create a way of traveling that feels restorative without being removed from the places we visit. A way to experience the beauty of a destination while also making room for connection—to the people who live there, to the culture and landscape, to one another, and to ourselves.

And while Guatemala is where we begin, it isn't where we intend to end.

We hope this is only the beginning of For A Kind World—more retreats, more destinations, and new ways of traveling thoughtfully wherever we go. Each will be different, but the intention will remain the same: to travel thoughtfully and connect meaningfully.

For now, though, we're beginning somewhere very close to our hearts.

We begin in Guatemala.