Our Origin Story

We met under a wide open sky in West Texas, sitting outside of a pink vintage trailer. The stars were shining bright and our hearts were open; we were ready for each other.

It was Sera’s first night away from her kids in almost two years since the COVID pandemic had started; she could hardly remember how to make a new friend in person and was giddy to be in conversation with a stranger. She was in Marfa to provide COVID testing and safety guidance to the Trans Pecos Music Festival and to remember who the hell she was as the pandemic was taking a turn in its own road, opening the world up again a bit.

Bobby was working that night, he was one of the original minds behind the Trans Pecos Music Festival in Marfa. His heart was slowly moving his mind towards choosing to make some big professional changes in his life. He was deeply tired and was seeking a sign, some support, to help him navigate the change that was coming.

We immediately felt drawn to one another. Sera felt drawn to Bobby as an alluring creative force; her own creativity had felt unaccessible to her after being mostly home for so long during the pandemic and not being able to see beyond the needs of her family. Bobby felt drawn to Sera as she felt, immediately, like the safe place that he was craving. Bobby was looking for a place, a person, who could bare witness to him as he released the grief and trauma he was carrying having spent the last few months living + navigating a hurricane response in New Orleans and some scary illness in his family. Bobby was ready to prioritize his own creativity in his work and Sera felt like a perfect companion for this next journey.

We were ready for each other; met at a perfect time for us to truly see and hear one another. This timing enabled us to see, to feel in our bodies, the creative and social alchemy that we could make together.

Sera had spent the last two decades running towards the fire, literally. Since the late 90’s she’d worked in abortion rights in the rural South, coexistence work in Israel and Palestine, HIV/AIDS in Vietnam, and doing work like keeping hospitals open during bombings in Syria; trauma was a lived reality she new too well. She’d stepped away from humanitarian work in 2018 to lean into activism on purpose. She was looking for radical ways to blend her skills in organizing, fundraising, coaching, writing, and teaching to make the world a better place.

This photo is of Sera providing prenatal support in a maternity home while attending a rural conference of Women Indigenous Organizers in Nicaragua.

Bobby had been an accidental grocer at the age of 18 being among the first 100 employees at Whole Foods. And by age 22 was a culture maker and had operationalized the opening of 50 stores across the country; this stretch of his career carried him for almost twenty years. Then after two decades of opening stores, he came home to ATX to start his own business and then accidentally became a hotelier. For seventeen years he was the right hand to an iconic creative force who revolutionized hospitality, creating the watermark for the way that folks want to travel. Bobby then got to flex his entrepreneurial muscles through the opening of two retail offerings while building a massive hospitality force for good.

Bobby jumping for joy with a graduating class of new hospitality staff at the opening of a new hotel in Todos Santos, Baja, California Sur, Mexico.

After that auspicious meeting in Marfa, we started our quiet collaboration by throwing pool parties and a PRIDE event in the summer of 2022. We loved it. We loved working together and found a lot of value in the strengths that we each brought to our collaborations. Bobby brings his bottomless well of creativity, larger than life ideas, and his belief that more is better. Sera brings her commitment to blending justice, joy, and social creativity enabling her to see collaborations that can light us up and make us better everywhere. We are both deeply committed to doing work where everyone feels safe, seen, and valued. That is the values system that birthed Better Union.

We decided to make it official and started Better Union in November 2022, just in time for Bobby’s 50th birthday party. We learned a lot about each other through that collaboration. Spoiler: it wasn’t the wildly successful fundraiser or wildly well attended event that we wanted it to be. It poured rain, tickets were slow to sell, we raised much less money that we’d aimed to, and we were both really stressed out about the whole thing. But we stayed kind with each other, we told each other what disappointed and scared us about how that collaboration went, and we reminded each other that not every event, every action, every collaboration is going to be a “winner”.

We say to each other often that just because you don’t win doesn’t mean that you don’t keep playing. Especially when you love the person that you are playing with. Especially when you know that your playmate makes you better at what you do. Especially when you are committed to making and bringing the light.

So we are continuing on and we are doing joyful, impactful, and connective work together in the last few months since we founded Better Union. Since starting Better Union just a few months ago we’ve landed a few clients, thrown some more parties, launched a coaching program, and raised a bit of money for the actions that move us. THAT is winning, indeed.

We continue our shared commitment to being safe place for each other and our collaborators in and at work. We continue to share a vision for a way to build a company that is rooted in mutual aid, creativity, hospitality, health, wealth, efficiency, beauty, and joy. We continue to believe that we can all do better; and so we are.

We’ d love to care for + support YOU. You can learn more about Better Union and our full range of offerings at the Better Union website. And we obviously invite you to subscribe here to our Substack offering here where a few times a month we will share our own reflections on work, play, joy, beauty, grief, love, impact, and collaboration.

Onwards, y’all!

Bobby + Sera