Shauna Hill is a single mom to sixth grade twins in Burlington, VT who urgently needs our help to secure her housing & access the specialty healthcare and supports she needs to stabilize.

Last year, Shauna’s life was upended unexpectedly by her third major health crisis since first being diagnosed with a rare cancer known as LCH & having neurosurgery/skull reconstruction in 2016. Brain & nervous system damage from her medical care combined with over-working continuously through health crises to support her family has caused the functional collapse of her vision processing & stamina & resulted in chronically unstable, unpredictable nervous system function and mobility. Time, stress & out-of-state health access (not covered by state Medicaid) are the factors her medical teams & family are urgently working to help her solve for, and we need your help!

While her health is more stable than a year ago, Shauna’s doctors & rehab teams have advised her that she will not ever return to traditional work environments or schedules again. Simply put, the brain/nervous system injuries from her neurosurgery in 2016 & a nearly-fatal medication toxicity event that caused Serotonin Syndrome and system-wide damage have compromised the central processing “software” that ALL functional systems in the body depend on. She will be on severe “screens”/reading, driving, and functional stress restrictions for the rest of her life, and even small efforts to “push” on that have caused symptom progression.

Just before her unexpected collapse last year, Shauna’s mental health media & tech social impact start-up was about to bring its first big workforce mental health training product to market while still maintaining a small therapy practice for LGBTQ+ youth and adults. Shauna’s vision & mobility issues forced her to close her clinical practice & ultimately suspend all work projects, abruptly disrupting her income and career of 23 years, overnight. For 9 months, family, neighbors & friends have supported Shauna & her epic kids–known widely and loved here in Burlington–with help and financial support, but those resources are now exhausted, leaving Shauna & the kids immanently vulnerable to losing their rental housing at a moment of intractable housing crisis in Vermont.

From Shauna: “Since 2020, rental and real estate prices have spiked 75% in Burlington, due to unprecedented migration to VT from other places. Last week I learned from a care manager that all housing voucher and subsidy programs have been indefinitely frozen, and interruptions or issues are anticipated with all federal and state benefit and support programs, including SSA/Disability:( We have seen a large surge in unhoused folks including kids and families, which I have never seen in Vermont in my lifetime, but recognize from my work in housing, street outreach in Seattle. We currently have a wonderful townhome in a safe neighborhood where our neighbors are a huge part of our lives & support, as a substantially below-market rent rate. I am preparing to sub-lease our place, send the kids to stay with local family, and couch surf with friends, which would be disastrous for my health & the kids well-being. If we lose the lease for failing to pay or I give it up, it is unlikely we will EVER be able to access housing in Burlington again. It is my most pressing concern, as the kids are thriving and well-supported in their schools and community after many stressful health-related moves and disruptions when they were younger. I would never ask for help with this if I saw any viable path to staying securely housed.”

As of Feb 2025, Shauna is mid-process for federal Social Security/SSDI and making legal, financial and social/community plans for long-term disability as a single mom. You can learn more about Shauna’s “one in a million” health story (and how she used the clinical neuroscience from her own work to heal herself, twice so far!) can be heard in the first episode of her groundbreaking mental health storytelling podcast With all federal & publicly funded programs in chaos & in the line of fire of the current administration, it is unclear if programs like SSDI/Social Security, Medicaid, and disability supports will continue or be reliable enough for Shauna to count on.

Those of us who know Shauna & her family know her as a truly relentless advocate & changemaker whose entire life & career has been dedicated to the health and well-being of children, families, the LGBTQ+ community and folks who live on the margins. Shauna’s work in Seattle, WA 2000-2013 in foster care, crisis stabilization programs, schools & housing informed the clinical, executive & policy work she has been doing in her home state of Vermont for the past decade. Her clinical & executive leadership around mental health equity, health access, community resilience and youth/young adult MH have had an enormous impact locally and nationally, and she has personally provided thousands of hours of care to others while educating new clinicians and building improvements & equity innovation into the systems for the benefit of others. She is an active member of Burlington’s thriving DIY music scene, where she continues to perform and develop events & projects that build community resilience capacity through music & the arts. Shauna is the kind of friend, parent, neighbor & community member we all cherish in our communities, and we desperately want to transform these circumstances so she can continue to be.

Shauna & her children have experienced multiple compounding traumas over the past 9 years and have consistently needed to pivot, restabilize and rebuild. As Shauna said when we asked if we could do a public GFM, “I can’t hurl myself, my body, my eyes into this as a solution another time without risking my remaining vision & our ability to stay independent at all. I have been trying to out hustle this for almost a decade…If building an entire company, working 2 jobs for years, I don’t think it can be done by anyone without personal wealth.”

While her health is more stable than a year ago, her medical teams have made referrals & recommendations for oncology, neurology and functional brain health care not available locally and that Medicaid will not cover. They have advised her that reducing functional life & vision stress, transitioning to disabled lifestyle with accessibility tools and supports, and moving expediently to the care she needs but can’t access will be the determining factors in the length & course of her life.

OUR $150k GOAL

Medical debt: Shauna has paid over $100k on what was original less than $25K in medical debt, but now creditors are harassing her for the small amount of remaining debt

Urgent treatment: $20k in urgently needed specialty out-of-state care that VT Medicaid will not pay for

Housing: Covering rent & living expenses for up to one more year, as the government systems remain in chaos & their future unclear

Accessibility: Accessible technology, household items and paid physical & administrative help that will enable her to maintain the Hill family in their home safely

Kid’s needs: Specialty medical care for the children that is long-delayed and not currently covered by Medicaid, as well as funds for basic needs such as clothing, school activities that Shauna has been unable to afford.

We know there is so, so much need and a relentless flood of horrible news about bad things happening to good people. Helping Shauna & her kids right now in any small amount you can could truly change the course of their lives. Thank you for reading, for your care, and for amplifying this if you can–let’s do this one correct thing together. Thank you!