Groundwork: Rebuilding Work For Mothers

When I got off my first call with Suzanne Slaughter, I knew immediately she was a trailblazer.

Not just because of what she was building, but because of how she was thinking about it.

Suzanne had spent years researching the intersection of caregiving and work, convinced that companies could do far more to support caregivers without forcing them to choose between contribution and family.

What she found was a system offering mothers an impossible choice:

Total professional commitment at significant personal cost.

Or stepping away entirely during some of the most experienced and capable years of a woman's career.

She called what was happening economic waste.

Companies were losing extraordinary leaders. The talent existed. The pathways did not.

Suzanne was not framing this as a benefit to caregivers. She was framing it as a systems failure. And she was building the solution.

That kind of thinking resonates deeply with me because House of Maya was also not built to support individual mothers in isolation. It was built to help redesign the structures around them.

Groundwork is exactly that kind of redesign.

Rather than helping women adapt to a broken system, Suzanne built a better one.

Groundwork, which officially launched in April 2026, connects experienced operators, primarily mothers and other caregivers, with part-time, interim, and project-based roles at early-stage and mission-aligned companies. Suzanne serves as CEO alongside co-founder and COO Greg Siegel. Together, they spent two years building and testing the model before launch.

Suzanne Slaughter - Founder of Groundwork

What Matrescence Explains About the Gap Groundwork Is Filling

What Suzanne observed in her research is something matrescence helps explain. The women leaving traditional workforce structures were not stepping back from ambition. They were stepping away from systems that no longer reflected who they had become.

Matrescence, the complete psychological, emotional, social, physical, economic, cultural, and spiritual transformation a woman moves through in motherhood, reshapes everything. Identity. Priorities. How a woman allocates her time and what she is willing to spend it on.

The old version of success no longer fully fits. But the ambition is still there. It has not disappeared. It has been redirected.

What many mothers are seeking is not a full exit from meaningful work. They are searching for a different configuration, one that honors both the depth of their professional expertise and the depth of what motherhood has expanded within them.

Three in four U.S. workers are also caregivers. The work of caring for children and aging parents increasingly overlaps with the years of highest professional contribution, inside a labor market that still assumes full-time, uninterrupted availability.

What Suzanne Found

After interviewing hundreds of mothers, Suzanne arrived at a deceptively simple insight: what most caregivers are seeking is greater control of their time.

Control that allows them to be present for the field trip, the emergency, the fleeting Tuesday afternoon that matters, while still contributing at a high level professionally.

Critically, 80% of roles filled through Groundwork were never publicly posted, and 82% of candidates were equally invisible to traditional recruiting systems. Groundwork’s model was intentionally designed for this hidden market.

The talent existed. The demand existed. The infrastructure connecting them did not.

Suzanne built it.

Why This Moment Matters

For the first time, what caregivers need and what employers need may finally be converging.

AI can automate portions of a role, but rarely all of it. Companies increasingly need experienced operators who can step into highly specific, high-impact functions without necessarily occupying a traditional full-time seat.

For years, flexibility was framed primarily as a benefit for caregivers. Groundwork reframes it as a structural advantage for companies operating in a rapidly evolving economy, where lean, expert, project-based talent is becoming increasingly valuable.

Groundwork reflects a broader shift already underway: the future of work will require more adaptive, human-centered models than the ones many mothers inherited.

What Becomes Possible

Suzanne’s story is a maternal leadership story.

She became a mother, recognized a systems gap, and built something designed to change the future of work itself.

Groundwork reflects a larger shift already underway. Mothers are not asking for less meaningful work. They are asking for structures that reflect the reality of their lives, the depth of their expertise, and the transformation motherhood creates.

And increasingly, the future of work may depend on exactly that kind of redesign.

If you are a mother with deep professional experience looking for work that fits who you are now, or a company searching for exceptional part-time talent, Groundwork was built for this moment.

You can learn more and explore opportunities at https://www.groundwork.careers/