You Don't Have to Do This Alone: Letting Others Help You

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone: Letting Others Help You is an in-person event for the general public, featuring a keynote presentation and a workshop.

In this inspiring, heartfelt keynote, Jess Ronne shares her journey through caregiver burnout and the resilience it takes to face life’s fiercest storms. She raised a profoundly disabled son, lost her husband to brain cancer, and rebuilt a purposeful life as a mother of eight, author, nonprofit founder, podcaster, filmmaker, and advocate. After 19 years in constant fight mode, she experienced total burnout.

With honesty, humor, and hope, Jess encourages caregivers to face their storms head-on, like the bison. Attendees will gain practical strategies for navigating overwhelming stress, embracing grace when plans change, living fully present, and building a trusted support community. She also shares meaningful ways friends, family, and professionals can better support caregivers.

Caregiving can feel like a job you’re never allowed to step away from. Appointments, therapies, medications, advocacy, endless decisions, and daily care can make it feel like everything depends on you—and asking for help can feel impossible. But you were never meant to carry it alone.

This honest, practical workshop explores why accepting help can be difficult, how to move beyond guilt and fear of burdening others, and how to identify people who can truly walk alongside you. It considers how to let others into caregiving’s messy, exhausting, and beautiful reality, and why receiving help is not weakness but necessary to sustain you and your family. Letting others help isn’t giving up; it’s letting yourself be cared for, too.