About The Catori Foundation

The Catori Foundation was not built from research. It was built from memory.

Dyani didn't learn about domestic violence from a textbook. She grew up watching it. And like most children who grow up inside it, she carried the blueprint into her own life — into relationships that looked familiar, felt familiar, that she assumed were just how love worked.

At 26, she knew she wanted out. She just didn't know how. She was years deep, kids in tow, still in love, and running on the belief that she was too damaged for anything different. It took another seven years before she actually left. Not because she didn't want to go — but because it takes that long to build a physical and emotional net when no one is building one with you.

In those seven years, she moved through every system this foundation is designed to fix. A DV shelter. A mental health hospital. A foster care case. She wasn't a passive victim — she fought back, she instigated, she made it complicated. And that complexity is exactly why no one helped her. You don't get clean cases in this work. You get real people.

Most didn't believe her. No one protected her. And she wasn't protecting her kids the way she wanted to. She knows that.

Things were actually stabilizing when DCF came. The worst was over, or so she thought. But the proof wasn't clean enough. Her children's own words weren't enough. She lost them for six months.

While fighting to get them back, she learned their foster placement was abusive. Some brave staff that shee connected with confirmed it had been happening for years across multiple families. Nothing was done. Their abuse didn't meet the threshold, their social work connections made excuses for them, covered things up. And the type that did meet the threshold, loopholes were found at her kids' expense. The families kept fostering. The kids were a paycheck. Every one.

She wasn't perfect. But she wasn't abusive. None of that nuance moved the system an inch. The worst part? Some of them knew. But statistics about minority families and abuse carried more weight than what they saw with their own eyes.

She got her kids back. And she never forgot what that system felt like from the inside — for her, and for them.

On the spectrum. Big feelings, a teenage boy's frustration, and a mind that needed more than most programs were designed to give. She lost count of how many times he was turned away. "He has autism, we aren't equipped.", "He was in the hospital too many times.", "For unexplained, unelaborated 'safety reasons'." The real reason was he wasn't the right kind of needy. Program after program, the door closed.

For years, Dyani hid her own mental health struggles because she couldn't afford to lose her job and couldn't afford the sessions. She wore the mask. She lied about being okay. It wasn't until three years ago that she even knew affordable, virtual care existed — on her own schedule, no time off required. The people around her were navigating the same darkness. Nobody knew where to look.

That's the gap. Not the absence of resources. The absence of a bridge.

Every program in this foundation was built from a gap Dyani lived inside.

The Porcelain House because she needed a shelter that believed her without requiring a clean story.
Lily House because she saw people turned away for not fitting the right category.
The Raft because Camryn kept hitting closed doors, and because she spent years not knowing help was within reach. The Cottages and The Lodge because she watched her own children placed somewhere that hurt them, while the system looked away.
Adult Living because she knows what it means to be handed nothing and told to figure it out.

This is not a fleeting thing. It is not a passion project or a pivot. It is the thing she was always going to build — because she isn't the only person who was always going to need it.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in Florida.

Four programs. One umbrella. A complete system of support for the people most likely to fall through the cracks — survivors of domestic violence, children and teens in foster care, and anyone who has needed mental health support they couldn't access or afford.

The foundation is pre-operational. The infrastructure is being built deliberately, carefully, and without cutting corners. Every program has been designed with the people it serves at the center — not the funnel, not the metrics, not the pitch. The people.

There will be obstacles. There will be funding gaps and bureaucratic walls and moments where the distance between what exists and what is needed feels impossible. None of that is new. The people apart of this have been navigating impossible distances their entire life.

The difference now is that we are building the bridge instead of just crossing it.