The Heart of Spaces Connected

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Spaces Connected is an emerging grassroots initiative committed to empowering women by offering growth opportunities, resources, and holistic support. Our aim is to serve as a centralized hub that provides comprehensive and integrative services, while also strengthening existing businesses and developing new resources to foster community growth and create lasting change.

A centralized hub empowering women through opportunities, resources, and support to achieve and sustain their best lives. 

To provide nurturing and integrative spaces that equip marginalized women with wellness, empowerment, and development opportunities, while strengthening aligned organizations to foster lasting transformation.

FAITH

We are led by and navigate with faith, believing beyond what can be seen and guided by a calling that gives purpose and direction to our work. Rooted in wisdom and love, we operate and serve in alignment with a greater divine mission, cultivating healing, peace, stability, harmony, happiness, and freedom so women, families, and communities may fully live out their purpose and experience the gift of life. 

COMMUNITY

We are community-focused, believing in the power of connection and collective impact through people, tools, and resources that foster support, growth, and shared good. We remain resourceful and collaborative, bringing together talents, gifts, and skills to create opportunities and experiences that promote healing, learning, and growth—driving meaningful change and sustainable impact for a more united and brighter world. 

EXCELLENCE

We strive for excellence, giving our best in all we do with passion, intention, organization, energy, and pride. We believe doing things right and showing up full-out with a persevering spirit produces long term, meaningful results and lasting impact. 

LEARN

We are committed to lifelong learning, remaining willing and accountable as learners and leaders who create positive and meaningful influence. We live with awareness and intention, growing individually and collectively to inspire and teach, creating a ripple effect that empowers others to achieve their dreams, prosperity, and fulfillment.  

SERVICE

We are unwavering in our commitment to service, offering our time, energy, and presence to contribute our unique talents, gifts, and skills to make a positive and meaningful difference. We focus our efforts in providing solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges—particularly poverty, addiction, and crime—serving consistently with purpose, resilience, and compassion.  

EMPOWERMENT

We foster empowerment by helping women and communities access and use what already exists, while also providing new, enriching resources, tools, and opportunities. Through shared knowledge, wisdom, and resources, we equip women to thrive with ownership of their lives, knowing that when they know better, they can be and do better in life. 

INNOVATION

We are driven by innovation, creating what we wish to exist by designing creative, sustainable solutions aligned with wellness, empowerment, and development to address some of the world's problems (poverty, addiction, crime). With intentionality and originality, we bring spaces and experiences to life that are beautiful, abundant, and impactful. 

INTEGRITY 

We stand on truth and authenticity, honoring our word and carrying out our actions with  excellence and consistency that can be trusted and depended on. 

Spaces Connected was created from lived experience, loss, redirection, transformation, and an unwavering commitment to give back from a once young girl’s belief of receiving a “second chance" in life. From that belief came purpose and a calling to create and offer something beautiful and wholesome deeply needed within her community and the world.

Destinie A. Otero, Founder of Spaces Connected, is a proud Hispanic woman born and raised in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her early childhood years were impacted and shaped by exposure to addiction, crime, and home environment instability when living with her mother. She was born to a teenage mother and had an estranged relationship with her father, who struggled with addiction and passed away from a drug overdose when she was eight years old. Her mother has maintained an unhealthy lifestyle to this day, entrapped by the cycles of addiction and the criminal justice system. Through these experiences growing up, Destinie deeply connects to and understands firsthand the realities of poverty, addiction, and crime, challenges that many women and families in her community continue to face and experience.

For years of her life, stability and nurture came in pieces and in chunks of time through the involvement and care of her Nana (Grandma) and Nina (Godmother). But at twelve years old, something happened that she believes to have been her saving grace and a second chance given in life. 

Through her official adoption by her Nana and Nina, Destinie experienced for the first time a permanent and nurturing home environment that provided belonging, connection, stability, safety, consistency, support, and love. It was within this space that she was able to focus, grow, and begin pursuing goals and dreams she felt had been placed in her heart.

After getting adopted, Destinie made a promise to herself to take full advantage of the second chance opportunity she had been given. With this, she became determined to avoid and never become entrapped by behaviors, patterns, and cycles she had witnessed and been victimized to, and would work hard in school and life to one day be in a position as an adult to help others and give them a second chance. At the same time, she recognized and took very seriously her role as an older sister to two younger sisters that were also adopted, stepping into a responsibility to help raise them and be a positive role model to show them a possible different life path from what they had all come from. Though her early life years were filled with adversity and trauma, they were what became a foundation for her purpose, which she began to realize and understand during her high school years, particularly through being accepted and involved in the New Mexico Leadership Institute Scholarship Program.

As a first-generation college graduate, Destinie earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a concentration in Addiction Counseling, driven by a deep passion and desire to help women, children, and families impacted by the same issues and challenges she experienced growing up, as well as to help women learn how to not only survive but to live positive, healthy, and fulfilling lives. It was during her undergraduate years and post graduation, she held closely and focused on the goal of becoming a therapist and opening her own clinical practice one day. However, through her early post college years she gained some graduate level education and hands-on professional experience in the behavioral health field that led her to have new realizations. While she felt the work she was part of to be meaningful, she felt systems and her roles were limiting. She also developed a deeper understanding of how interconnected social issues such as poverty, addiction, and crime truly are, recognizing the need for more holistic, integrative, and comprehensive approaches to address them effectively. These experiences led to a period of internal conflict, ultimately leading her to step away from her original goals and path of becoming a therapist and opening a clinical practice, and toward a deeper discovery of her purpose and the impact she was meant to create.

In a season of feeling incredibly lost, especially with a career path direction, Destinie experienced the unexpected major loss of her Nana from a tragic car accident. What followed were months of heavy grief, many major life transitions, and eventually, an awakening that resulted in both her breaking and turning point to surrender to life’s nudge for redirection and a transformation journey.

On this new journey, she discovered that her more true purpose and calling was not to remain within existing roles and systems, but to build something in addition to them. Something to bring them together and strengthen them to offer an intentional and holistic approach to helping others.

As she navigated forward, redirected and in an unknown season of life, she became grounded and centered in what she did know about herself, what she had experienced, what she was passionate about, and what she no longer wanted for her career and impact. She became committed to building solutions from her lived experiences to address the gaps she had noticed, creating programs, resources, and experiences that could more effectively support women, families, and communities in living well and fully. 

In 2023, Destinie started her entrepreneurial journey, seeking new opportunities and experiences, including her service with AmeriCorps, to equip and empower her to build the foundation necessary to bring to life Spaces Connected, something beautiful, wholesome, intentional, impactful, and lasting.

Spaces Connected is a grassroots, mission-driven initiative designed to empower women, especially those from marginalized and disadvantaged backgrounds—by providing opportunities, resources, and holistic support for them to be able to achieve and sustain their best lives. It is rooted in the belief that a best life is one where women are able to pursue their goals and dreams that are aligned with their purpose and calling to experience true fulfillment in their lifetime.

Spaces Connected is built on a powerful truth and is a reflection of:

When women are given access to nurturing, stable, safe, consistent, supportive, and loving intentional spaces/environments, they can live out their goals and dreams, transforming their lives, their families lives, and future generations.

Spaces Connected exists to create and hold those spaces providing belonging, connection, stability, safety, consistency, support, and love—equipping women to reach their fullest potential to live out their purpose, and their best lives.

At its heart, it is a second chance giving back.