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Meet Isatel
I know what it's like to question your worth, search for love in all the wrong places, and wonder if your past has disqualified you from your purpose.
Born legally blind and raised by a single mother of four, I grew up facing challenges that shaped how I saw myself and the world around me. Childhood trauma, rejection, and painful experiences left me carrying wounds I didn't know how to heal.
By the time I reached college, I was desperately searching for love, acceptance, and belonging. What followed were seven years of partying, drinking, and unhealthy sexual relationships with both men and women. I kept looking to others to give me the love and worth I couldn't find within myself.
But in 2009, everything began to change.
I surrendered my life to Jesus, and for the first time, I began to understand a love that wasn't based on my performance, appearance, or past. His love met me in my brokenness and began a journey of healing, freedom, and discovering who He created me to be.
Just months later, God gave me a vision to reach young women with that same transforming love. I didn't have all the answers or know what the journey would look like, but I knew I couldn't keep what He had done in my life to myself.
Over the years, God has continued to heal, stretch, and prepare me through unexpected seasons, closed doors, and lessons I never saw coming. I've learned that healing isn't always a straight line, and stepping into your calling doesn't mean you have everything figured out.
Through my devotional You Are Loved, speaking, inner healing, and the resources I'm developing, I want to create opportunities for women to experience the same freedom and transformation I've found in Jesus.
If there's one thing I want you to know, it's this:
Your past doesn't disqualify you. Your pain doesn't define you. And you don't have to become someone else to be worthy of God's love.
Your past doesn't disqualify you. Your pain doesn't define you. And you don't have to become someone else to be worthy of God's love.
I was born legally blind and raised in Southern California by a single mother of four. I grew up
familiar with the pressures of poverty, the absence of a father, and the wounds that come when a
young girl experiences sexual abuse. By high school, I had become very good at hiding my
loneliness.
I grew up in church. I knew how to believe the right things and say the right words, but I did not
know the intimate love of my Heavenly Father.
After my freshman year of college, the pain I had buried began to surface. I did not know how to
heal, so I tried to escape. Drinking, partying, and relationships with both men and women became
ways of coping with a deep emptiness I could not name.
For seven years, I ran.
Then, in 2009, I reached the end of myself.
I stopped running and surrendered my life to Jesus. I encountered the love of God in a way
religion had never shown me, and everything began to change.
A Vision for a Generation
Only months after being born again, God gave me a vision that has shaped the rest of my life.
I saw a global movement for college women.
Not another program built around religious performance. Not simply another Bible study.
I saw a Holy Spirit-filled sisterhood where young women could encounter Jesus, discover their
God-given identity, develop genuine intimacy with God, and understand the inheritance they carry
as daughters of the King.
I saw a community that could offer what so many young women are searching for in other places:
belonging, purpose, sisterhood, mentorship, and a place to become who they were created to be.
That vision became the assignment I could not put down.
The Years of Preparation
God gave me the vision quickly. He took years to prepare me to carry it.
I pursued my own inner healing while being discipled, mentored, and trained for ministry. I
served with women’s ministries in Los Angeles and attended and later staffed Epicentre
Discipleship Training School. I staffed an online Well School of Ministry discipleship school and
pioneered and co-led a college-age Bible study with Epicentre Church for 18 months.
I served on mission trips throughout Southeast Asia, including leadership ministry in the
Philippines with Lighthouse School of Leadership and anti-human-trafficking outreaches in Bangkok
and Pattaya with Justice Speaks.
In 2023, I helped oversee the Hope California Crusade with Ekballo Pasadena.
Each assignment expanded my understanding of what it means to reach people, disciple them, build
healthy community, and create spaces where transformation can happen.
From the Tenderloin to Berkeley
In 2023, I joined Youth With A Mission at its Tenderloin base and began serving people
experiencing homelessness through radical hospitality.
San Francisco became more than a place of ministry. It became a place where God continued to
clarify my assignment.
I began evangelizing at UC Berkeley and saw firsthand the spiritual hunger, loneliness,
confusion, and search for identity among young adults.
On January 2, 2025, I moved to Berkeley to begin pioneering the movement God had put on my heart
years before.
I did not arrive with everything figured out. I arrived with a yes.
The Mission
Today, I am building at the intersection of evangelism, discipleship, sisterhood, mentorship, and
compassionate outreach to vulnerable young women.
I speak.
My work has three primary expressions.
I share the Gospel and tell my story on stages, campuses, online, and wherever women are willing
to have honest conversations about faith, identity, healing, and purpose.
I speak to the woman who has learned how to look fine while quietly falling apart. I want her to
know that Jesus is not asking her to perform for Him. He is inviting her into relationship.
I serve.
I serve young women in vulnerable communities, including women living at the edge of exploitation
and those at increased risk of trafficking.
I believe prevention begins long before exploitation. It begins when a young woman knows she is
seen, knows she belongs, has healthy people around her, and believes her future is worth
protecting.
So I show up. I listen. I build trust. I honor her dignity. I make room for her dreams.
I mentor.
I walk alongside young women as they discover who God says they are and learn to live from that
identity.
We talk about hearing God’s voice, developing intimacy with Christ, building healthy
relationships, discovering purpose, and understanding the inheritance God has given them.
I do not want to simply introduce women to Jesus and leave them to figure out the rest. I want to
help build a generation that knows Him.
The Movement I Am Building
The vision God gave me in 2009 is still alive.
I believe young women need more than an invitation to attend church. They need communities where
they can belong before they know what they believe, ask honest questions, encounter the Holy
Spirit, experience healthy sisterhood, and be discipled into wholehearted lives with Jesus.
They need women who will go first. They need mentors who will stay. They need spiritual mothers
and sisters who can see what God placed inside them before they know how to see it themselves.
And they need a generation willing to carry the Gospel beyond church walls and into the places
where young people actually live, study, work, struggle, and dream.
That is the movement I am pioneering.
I know this mission personally because I was once the young woman searching for something to fill
the ache inside me.
I know what it feels like to be surrounded by people and still feel alone. I know what it feels
like to carry shame in silence.
And I know what happens when a woman finally discovers that the God she thought was distant is
actually a loving Father who sees her, knows her, and has never abandoned her.
I am building for the girl who is still searching.
