“We, as women, grow up being told we can’t do these things, that we’re small, that we’re gonna get hurt,” says one Wildfires player, who goes by the name Xicana Heat. She wrote her master’s thesis on roller derby as a form of social and political resistance. “But everyone [I talked to for my thesis] felt … very strong, very empowered. And you’re surrounded by people who do nothing but support you.”

While a few players graduated to the Wildfires from Ringer’s youth league, most found derby as adults. For some, familial expectations barred them from sports as kids, so developing the strength and balance needed to play what’s essentially high-speed Red Rover was a slow (but rewarding) road. The Wildfires have members as young as 18. Others are in their 50s.

In derby, groups of five face off during two-minute “jams,” with each team’s “jammer” aiming to barrel past four opposing blockers and earn points. Invented in the 1930s, the sport drew serious crowds for a few decades, then declined, but a grassroots, women-led revival is bringing it back. The players take on punny derby names—and, for many, those monikers are a way to unleash the truest versions of themselves.

Though the players sometimes don’t know one another’s “real” names, their bond is palpable. At the team’s recent derby-themed art show at Convoy’s Hopnonymous Brewing Company, one player helped another study for a college Spanish test while SoCal Derby board member Reckem Ralph clarified details for their upcoming bout.

Each Wildfire I spoke to cited those bonds—even more than the love of the game, which they have in spades—as the reason they stay, strapping on their skates each week. “If I had to choose between playing derby and keeping you people,” Reckem Ralph says, gazing at her team, “I’d keep you people.”

The post San Diego’s Toughest Athletes Aren’t On the Team You Think appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

This memento wasn’t for vanity. It was a digital dead reckoning of my mental health.

I was three weeks into my eight-week intensive outpatient program (IOP) for Bipolar II Disorder, an illness that—when left untreated and unmedicated—would either send me into a hypomanic breeze of midday chardonnay, spending sprees, and selfish trysts or render me an unkempt shell who filmed her own self-harm and spun it as performance art on YouTube. A social scream for it all to stop.

I snapped the mirror selfie in the midst of a consuming impulse to destroy. But taking that photo—a moment of pause—let me look at myself like I was another woman. Seeing her reflection of sufferring, I finally chose myself.

I can’t help but wonder: Would I have gotten to this point sooner if I had been surrounded by other experiences that better reflected my own? Perhaps I wouldn’t have needed my camera app at all had I been in an IOP focused on women like me.

Monima Wellness Center aspires to be such a game-changing mental health recovery center. Monima is San Diego’s first mental health center to exclusively host women (including female-identifying) patients, offering them intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs with a focus on mental health disorders, substance abuse, and dual diagnoses, which treat both in tandem. Monima also offers nearby living quarters for those who are from out-of-state or whose home setting isn’t conducive to healing.

It doesn’t feel like other IOPs. Yes, it’s in a nondescript suite of medical offices, but, once you walk in, you’re met with soft lighting, peach-toned walls, and the energetic hum of a special kind of sorority. On one wall, there’s a fringy banner emblazoned with a silk-screened Buddha and the phrase “Let that shit go.” Above a reading nook is a neon heart and a framed poster declaring “Well-behaved women don’t make history.” It’s a vibe. And it’s on purpose.

“No OB-GYN lights here,” jokes Kat Grassetti, Monima’s clinical director. One could write it off as cheesy, but it’s designed to help women feel at ease, willing, and safe in the company of their assigned sisterhood. “There’s a huge difference between trauma-informed care and trauma-focused work,” Grassetti explains. “We really wanted to set up an environment where this is the landing space to do the trauma work. It’s not trauma-adjacent.”

With gender-specific care comes a comfort that co-ed wellness centers, by nature, simply cannot provide—and it’s not only patients who feel the impact. “It’s such a unique space,” says Olivia Ratcliff-Totty, a training clinician at Monima. “To be able to come in as a woman and feel safe and seen … and really connect with the patients on a deeper level is so beautiful.”

The sense of community at Monima has made a profound difference for patients like Karlee’s Mom. “I’m 35,” she tells me. “I lost my daughter, Karlee Jeanne, at 35 weeks in May of 2022.”

Frozen at the axis of grief, shame, and disbelief, Karlee’s Mom knew she needed the kind of care her family and friends couldn’t provide. “I was drinking a lot, smoking weed, just using what I had to cope and to deal and to numb,” she says. “By August, I was like, ‘I need help. I need somebody.’”

Monima was there.

With a program that offers nearly 20 different modules, including specific approaches like eye
movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), cognitive processing therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy alongside classes like Identity and Self-Esteem, Healthy Communication, and Sound Healing, the hope is that something will click with each individual.

Ultimately, the staff at Monima aim to tailor their approach with each patient, exploring the women’s pasts to understand their needs for the future.

“What we like to do is really speak to the person in front of us and say, ‘Let’s gather an actual deep history. Tell us your story. Tell us what you’ve been through,’” Grassetti explains. “At the end of the day, when somebody deeply knows themself, they can move through their world in a more profound and impactful way.” Karlee’s Mom is evidence of this.

“Leaving Monima … [I’m] really taking this unique, impactful opportunity and experience and feeling so ready to continue the work I’ve started there in the real world,” Karlee’s Mom says. After three months at Monima, she’s choosing herself and honoring her daughter’s memory with her future.

The post San Diego’s First Mental Health Center Designed for Women appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

It’s not uncommon to hear restaurant managers refer to their staff this way, but, unlike most of them, Sim has a necklace that I noticed when we sat down: a thin chain with “Callie” written in gold, like some people wear with the names of their actual kids. You get the sense Sim really means it. 

Sim is the general manager of Callie. She opened the East Village Mediterranean-style gem with chef Travis Swikard in the middle of 2021, and now they’re joining forces again for their second location, a to-be-named French restaurant in La Jolla Commons. Much has been made of Swikard’s experience, and rightfully so—more than a decade alongside Daniel Boulud in New York tends to draw eyes—but in terms of pure tonnage of resume fireworks, Sim might have him beat.

She’s worked at some of the most well-respected places in New York and Los Angeles, including a marquee stint as a captain at Eleven Madison Park, what was—at the time, by every metric available—the best restaurant in the world.

You wouldn’t know it to talk to her. The SoCal native is approachable with an easy laugh. But to watch her at the restaurant is to witness a pro at work. You see it in the way she adjusts a napkin or pushes in a chair, the way she glides between tables or opens a bottle of wine. But you also sense it in the warmth with which she greets guests, touches tables, and coaches her staff. 

The front of house at Callie is, like the cuisine, a union of world-class refinement and California vibes. The synthesis of these apparent contradictions is a big part of why Callie is such a local treasure—and why it has earned it national and international recognition (as well as this magazine’s award for Best Restaurant two years in a row). It’s an impressive CV for a woman whose main professional goal throughout college was to get out of restaurants for good.

The daughter of Korean immigrants-turned-restaurateurs, Sim was born and raised in Orange County. As a kid, Sim was “free child labor,” she quips—she worked the counter, grilled chicken, waited tables, whatever her parents’ business needed that day. She stayed in restaurants through college, serving and bartending, and graduated from UC Irvine sans debt. The tradeoff: They were bad places with toxic cultures. She had different ideas of success.

After college in 2011, she took her meager savings and moved to New York, something she had wanted to do since she was a kid. Though she had planned to change industries, she needed a job, so a friend got her an interview at Daniel Boulud’s celebrated Mediterranean restaurant, Boulud Sud, as a host.

For all her experience, she was completely unprepared. “I didn’t know who Daniel Boulud was,” she says. “I didn’t know what fine dining even meant. I never heard the phrase.” What she did know, however, was how to work hard and learn. She absorbed everything she could, bouncing from the host stand to the events team to management. 

It was there that she first met a young Swikard and other high-caliber restaurant pros, and it opened her eyes to what this life could be. “They were so good at what they did that I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually a career. This is a profession. This is actually something very respectable,’” she recalls.

Her next job was at Eleven Madison Park. The restaurant already had three Michelin stars, and, during her tenure, it earned an exuberant review from the New York Times, a James Beard Award for outstanding service, and the title of Best Restaurant in the World from the World’s 50 Best. 

When Eleven Madison Park closed for renovations, Sim took the opportunity to come back to California. She arrived in LA at the end of 2017 to open the area’s NoMad Hotel, and did a stint as the GM of Maude in Beverly Hills. After the start of the pandemic, she got a random text from Swikard, her old Boulud Sud colleague, who was trying to open a restaurant in San Diego and had just lost his GM. Did she know anyone who might want the job?

Callie is theirs. It is her and Swikard’s united vision of hospitality and what a restaurant should be. She’s not courting the 50 Best awards—she’s too “old and jaded,” she says, and those things come at too high a human cost (she still can’t watch The Bear, for example). To her, success comes from working hard, taking care of her people, and connecting with the community. Nearly two and a half years after she and Swikard opened the restaurant’s doors, the reservation list at Callie is still full pretty much every night.

“I genuinely care about the business as well as every single one of my employees,” she says. “So I don’t care if anyone’s like, ‘Oh, you wear a necklace with the name of your job?’ I don’t think it’s weird, because for me, it’s like, ‘I also pushed this baby out.’”

And with her and Swikard’s second culinary progeny incoming, she may have to add another charm.

The post Callie’s General Manager Has the Mother of All Resumes appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“There was a need. There was a void. There was an opportunity,” she reflects. Mah leads Stella and Ad Astra Ventures, two San Diego–based financial platforms finding and offering funding, respectively, for women entrepreneurs.

Now a pillar of the city’s financial and investment communities, Mah is a scientist at heart. She moved from her native Venezuela to California to study biology at Pepperdine University. Afterward, she settled in San Diego, drawn by the allure of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she earned a PhD in Marine Biology and topped it off with an MBA from University of California, San Diego’s Rady School of Management. Armed with business acumen and a researcher’s soul, she started a few companies that led her into San Diego’s investment world.

Mah says that, despite a robust community where people “want to invest in San Diego [and] make San Diego a start-up hub for those entrepreneurs that really want to get things done,” there was something missing. “I didn’t see a lot of me. I didn’t see women and I didn’t see a lot of Latinas,” Mah shares. “I said, ‘You know what? I can fundamentally change this somehow, some way, by writing checks to women entrepreneurs.’”

Twelve years ago, she filled the space with Stella, a 501c3 nonprofit, which had its beginnings as an all-women coworking space called Hera Hub. In its current iteration, Stella is “a constellation of resources and services for entrepreneurs, where they are able to go from launch to exit,” Mah explains. “We are also a constellation for those investors who want to fund them.”

Offering several different services, including courses from Stella Labs and an annual Women’s Venture Summit, Stella has helped provide $100 million in funding for women-led start-ups, thanks to its 75 female angel investors.

Ad Astra Ventures is Mah’s microfund. She runs the firm with two fellow founding partners. “We’re evaluating companies that fit our investment thesis,” she says. Mah herself has invested in more than 140 companies, including Vizer, an app that converts users’ daily exercise into donations to nonprofits through partnerships with other local businesses. Co-founders Samantha Pantazopoulos and Dylan Barbour “came through our accelerator really, really early,” Mah says. “They were in their 20s, still right out of USD.” According to Pitchbook, Vizer’s latest seed round in September of 2023 found them $2.3 million.

Mah hopes that her companies’ support helps more women-fronted businesses get off the ground—and reach toward the stars. “We would love for them to get to their next milestone” she says. “So, [that might mean] that they get a loan from a bank, or they go into revenue-based financing, or they really understand their projection and [are able] to get to Series A. We want to help them get there.”

The post The San Diego Investor Funding Women Entrepreneurs Locally appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Far from being a pandemic-specific issue, childcare has been a stressed industry for decades. San Diego Montessori-teacher-turned-technologist Lezama experienced this as a single parent trying to climb the corporate ladder while feeling increasingly anxious about securing care. Lezama, who helped grow four tech companies before turning her sights on childcare, was sure that her experience could help disrupt one of the most fraught industries in the country, which in turn would help keep women in the workforce.

From that hunch, Tootris took shape. Founded in San Diego in 2019 and now operational in all 50 states (and in many cases partnering with local governments), Lezama’s platform claims to be the only technology solution uniting all key childcare stakeholders—parents, employers, agencies, and more than 200,000 providers—in one interface.

This helps care become more accessible, affordable, and on-demand, and ensures that providers have the management tools to effectively run their businesses and retain employees. Previously, all of these entities had no streamlined way of interacting, which created significant gaps in the marketplace and further fueled the high turnover and low pay in the industry

The post Tootris’ On-Demand Services Help Combat the Childcare Crisis appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Nika Cleaver and Tanys Evangelisti, the mother-daughter team behind Del Mar–based brand JIV Athletics, are fighting the good fight—down there. They specialize in underwear that removes any visible outlines of the female nether region, better known and reviled as “camel-toe.”

The concept for JIV Athletics came in 2018, when Cleaver and Evangelisti resolved to find a cure for the uncomfortable tugging and sliding that underwear poses during workouts. A spin-off of athleisure, their line of undergarments is designed to be worn under yoga pants to keep everything near the sacral chakra looking smooth before, during, and after exercise.

Their two products—a mid-rise and a high-rise thong—wick sweat, lack tags, and never roll to provide comfort whether you’re downward dogging, downtown jogging, or powerlifting. A breathable insert at the gusset wards off any awkward overexposure. Though more costly than most undies on the market (they top out at $35), theirs is a small price to pay for peace of panty mind.

Their thongs are available for purchase through their website and at a few brick-and-mortar locations in San Diego. JIV Athletics aims for women to feel supported always—but especially in their spandex.

The post Local Brand JIV Athletics Says “No Mo’ to Cameltoe” appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Many people in the Barrio have fond memories of the bread factory that operated in what is now the Bread and Salt Gallery for more than 100 years, sending the scent of fresh baked goods wafting through the streets. Pan y Paz, alongside several community partners, is seeking to put the “bread” back in Bread and Salt.

The women who make up the collective met during the pandemic through their passion for baking and collaborated on pop-up markets. Eventually, they partnered with nonprofit group Via International, which supports independent artists and entrepreneurs in Barrio Logan, and began plans for a shared brick-and-mortar.

Other major contributors also stepped up to support the venture, including the San Diego Food Alliance, the County of San Diego’s Reinvestment Grant, and many local businesses. Pan y Paz is currently developing a menu of signature loaves and growing their membership through community outreach efforts. You can sample founders’ wares at pop-ups throughout San Diego. They hope to open their permanent spot in fall of 2024.

The post Pan Y Paz Set to Open New Brick-and-Mortar in 2024 appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

She’d plotted the details of her spirits company while still a student. “I really wanted to create a distilling concept that put an equal amount of thought and effort into not only the spirits themselves, but also the experience of drinking them and trying them and interacting with them,” she says.

After raising $500,000 in starting capital through friends and industry contacts, Johnson opened the doors to a 2,300-square-foot space in East Village in 2017. The building houses the company’s production facility and a massive tasting room offering a robust cocktail program and food menu.

The brand launched with two products, You & Yours Vodka and Sunday Gin. Since then, their portfolio has grown to include seven different spirits and a line of canned libations, inspired by her attempts to make a decent G&T while rocking on her grandfather’s boat. “F- this, we need a can!” she recalls saying. Driven by the need for sea-worthy sips, she sailed fearlessly into the world of ready-to-drink cocktails—which is kind of her style. “If no one’s going to give me a path to learn what I want to learn, then I’ll just figure it out on my own,” she says. “And that’s what we did.”

The post Yes, She Canned appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“I’ve always worked in male-dominated fields,” she says. “But I was honestly shocked by the disparate treatment of men and women in business. Women face hurdles that male counterparts often do not.”

Despite these challenges, Bivouac, established in 2018, quickly became a go-to in the neighborhood, and it is now expanding. The Bivouac Adventure Lodge arrives in late 2023. The space, located next to the company’s tasting room at 30th Street and Lincoln Avenue, will include a cider bar, a coffee bar featuring unique women-grown beans, a members-only speakeasy with in-depth brandy tastings, and a retail shop offering food and outdoor gear. Plus a Ms. Pac-Man tabletop game.

“My business is woman-powered,” Worm says. “It’s very rare that there’s a woman-owned brewery or craft beverage company. Ms. Pac-Man is appropriate.” It’s a place, as Worm puts it, for folks to grab a cider (alcoholic or zero-proof) and feel at home. “This is my ode to North Park,” she says. “You can bring your kids, you can bring your dog. It’s the community clubhouse we really needed.”

The post A Cider-Soaked Adventure Lodge Is Coming to North Park appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Shannon found her passion for vending treats at Hillcrest shop Candy Depot, where she was a sales associate for three years. She departed Candy Depot to launch a mobile candy business with her wife, Melissa Dove, slinging sweets at Pride events and music festivals—then the pandemic struck.

But as stores started to open back up, the Doves received a call from the owners of Candy
Depot, who told them that they’d decided to pivot their careers. “[They said,] ‘Would you be willing to take over a brick-and-mortar?’” Shannon recalls. “I turned to Melissa and I said, ‘Is it absolutely irrational and impulsive right now to just say yes?’”

“I said, ‘F- no,’” Melissa chimes in. “‘This is our dream knocking on the door.’”

The couple became the first LGBTQ owners of the 27-year-old Candy Depot in 2020, eventually renaming it The Candy Pushers and moving to a larger location on University Avenue.

Beyond treating sweet tooths, the couple aims to provide a sober, LGBTQ-friendly space in a bar-heavy gay scene. They host game nights, comedy shows, open mics. “Having something for [LGBTQ youth] to do in Hillcrest is so important,” Shannon says. “They can be around other gay people and see that it’s going to be okay, that there’s a community for them.”

The post The Sweetest Sober Sanctuary for LGBTQ Youth in Hillcrest appeared first on San Diego Magazine.