Dignity Is the First Step in Healing

A letter from Scott Eggert, Founder of GoldenDoodle AI

I grew up admiring men who never complained.

My uncle, Phillip Hall, came home from Vietnam before I was born. I never knew the soldier; I only knew the quiet man who worked the night shift, kept to himself, and died only recently from the slow poison of Agent Orange. The war never really ended for him. Like so many of that generation, he was told to carry it in silence because that’s what men did: rub some dirt in it, keep moving, don’t burden anyone.

That silence shaped the air I breathed. When my daughters took a spill, I’d give them the same inherited line: “You’re okay—shake it off.” For playground scrapes, it worked. Kids need to know the world won’t end over a skinned knee, and a calm parent is powerful medicine. I still believe that.

But a skinned knee is not a foreign war.

A playground tumble is not addiction, homelessness, or the slow crush of childhood trauma.

For twenty-five years, I’ve worked alongside the organizations that meet people in those deeper places.

I started with ordinary kids: summer camps, campfire songs, the wholesome stuff. Later came international grant-making, trade associations, and co-founding a marketing agency that, in 2012, partnered with the Sacramento Region Community Foundation to help launch the very first Giving Tuesday campaign in our region. That partnership grew into supporting the pilot Arts Day of Giving and eventually the Big Day of Giving, which has now raised more than $100 million for local nonprofits. That is how I met Lisa Wrightsman, Managing Director of Street Soccer USA. At that time, it was the Lady Salamanders soccer team. Hearing her story and watching her hand out jerseys to people living on the streets and walk them toward housing, jobs, and sobriety, with success rates that invert the usual 10-15%.

Today, I serve on the board of The Alliance, a united movement of more than a hundred organizations in Greater Sacramento whose mission is to prevent and heal childhood trauma. Separately, as Program Director for the SVP Think Tank at Sacramento Venture Philanthropy, our team coordinates design-thinking workshops that bring executives and philanthropists together with frontline leaders from Saint John’s Program for Real Change, CASA Sacramento, YMCA, Single Mom Strong, ABELD, and dozens of others. All of these organizations stress dignity in their engagements with the communities they serve, and each is making a considerable difference in our region.

These leaders are not soft.

They are the toughest people I know, tough enough to insist on seeing every person whole.

The evidence stands with them.

SAMHSA’s trauma-informed framework makes empowerment, voice, and choice non-negotiable because programs that live those principles see 20-40% higher engagement and retention. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model proves the brain cannot move toward insight or change until it first feels relational safety: often delivered in the first sentence someone reads or hears. Agencies that embed dignity in their language cut no-show rates by a third, reduce staff turnover by nearly 20%, and lower acute-service utilization by up to 28%.

That is not sentiment.

That is return on investment.

Dignity costs almost nothing to give and multiplies every outcome that follows: treatment completion, donor loyalty, grant renewals, staff resilience, and lives reclaimed. And it’s not just the recipient who heals—exhibiting dignity is profoundly healthy for the giver, too. It cultivates empathy, strengthens personal resilience, and fosters a deeper sense of purpose, making us better stewards of our own well-being while we serve others. This brings to mind the modern colloquialism, “kindness, sprinkle that shit everywhere”.

I founded GoldenDoodle AI because I refuse to let the organizations doing the hardest, most human work on the planet accidentally wound the very people they exist to serve with hurried, careless words. At the same time, we were watching the rise of AI tools built on a careless “move fast and break things” philosophy, antithetical to everything these organizations stand for. We decided to build something different: a resource purpose-built for high-stakes care, infused with the same values of dignity, precision, and fierce compassion we witness in their work day in and day out.

Until dignity is the default in every message high-stakes care sends, our work isn’t finished.

With deep respect for every frontline leader who keeps choosing to see people whole—and for every person still writing their next chapter,

Scott Eggert

Founder, GoldenDoodle AI