Laree was born on February 27th in Fort Collins, Colorado. She’s the granddaughter of a train robber and daughter to a couple of very nice, childlike parents who hated school. Seeing education as a vehicle, she put herself through undergrad at the University of Colorado as The Lady Barber. She slapped a magnetic sign on the side of her roommate’s VW and proceeded to cut hair and beards at male dorms and fraternities. This is where Laree’s hunger and love of entrepreneurship started.
While going to graduate school, Laree started the Kiely Group (and a rock and roll band called Timberline). Kiely Group’s focus was helping people handle difficult situations with each other and mediating disputes.
Loving school and forever craving knowledge, Laree ended up with a masters in psychology and cognitive science with a focus on cognitive and perceptual disorders. Then she received a social science PhD in Organizational Behavior and Development with a focus on how people interact with information and with each other.
Laree’s second most important day was November 9th, 2016, the day following the U.S. presidential election. Seeing this seismic shift in human affairs as a fascinated social scientist, Laree felt the world breaking into extreme factions. So, there it was: the clear path and reason for being here. It’s the culmination of many years of working to bring disagreeing and disputing people together to find mutually agreeable solutions, healthy decisions that included everyone’s voice, and actionable plans. To reasonably and effectively interact with information and with each other. To view disagreement as something of value, not something harmful.
Clinging to her belief in the power of people coming together with the right tools, armed with the knowledge of what causes human-made problems and how to avoid or solve them, this peaceful warrior adopted the quote: “The devil whispered in my ear ‘You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.’ And I whispered in the Devil’s ear, ‘We are the storm!’”
And so, she went to work.
Every person and organization will encounter a storm. The question is will they be at its mercy or will they be the storm? We Will be the storm.