Meet the Founding Team

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The full story of how we found each other is coming soon. In the meantime, here's more about who we are and a behind the scenes peek of what we’ve been up to.

MARSTON FRIES

Marston Fries has spent her life learning what it means to perform inside demanding systems, and ultimately, what it means to question them.

A Division I collegiate swimmer before beginning her career in finance, Marston brought the same discipline, endurance, and drive that shaped her as an athlete to Wall Street. She rose quickly through institutional finance at one of the world’s largest asset firms, becoming a Vice President at a remarkably young age and achieving many of the markers of success she had been taught to pursue.

Then a profound personal loss and subsequent awakening changed the trajectory of her life.

In the period that followed, Marston experienced a profound awakening, accompanied by the emergence of heightened intuitive and psychic abilities that challenged her understanding of consciousness and what human beings may be capable of perceiving. Rather than treating those experiences as an endpoint, she began a process of exploration, discernment, and integration - studying consciousness, intuition, human potential, and the deeper structures shaping how we live, create, relate, and assign value.

That journey eventually brought two seemingly disparate parts of her life into conversation: the rigorous, results-driven world of institutional finance and an expanding inquiry into consciousness and human potential.

Today, Marston is a speaker, educator, author, and media figure whose work moves across finance, entrepreneurship, consciousness, emerging technology, human potential, and new models of collaboration. Her unusual path has also made her a natural point of convergence. People across disciplines, industries, geographies, and communities continually find their way into conversation with her and exploring what may be possible next.

The Bridging Catalyst emerged, in part, from noticing that pattern.

Marston's role is to recognize the signal between seemingly unrelated people and ideas - and create the conditions for something larger to emerge between them.

Founder + CEO

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TASHA HUGHES

Co-Founder, Chief Creative + Communications Officer

For more than 15 years, Tasha Hughes has worked inside the architecture and design industry - a world fundamentally concerned with a deceptively simple question: How do we build the environments in which human life takes place?

Her career has spanned commercial design, material innovation, manufacturing, research, media, and business transformation, leading strategic communications, creative direction, storytelling, and market positioning for organizations shaping the built environment. Her work has required her to move fluidly between designers, architects, researchers, manufacturers, executives, property owners, operators, and emerging ideas, finding the connective narrative and translating complexity into something people can understand, engage with, and act upon.

That experience takes on a different meaning within The Bridging Catalyst.

After years spent helping organizations communicate how we build the world literally, Tasha's work now extends that same question outward: How do we build the world we want to inhabit tomorrow?

At TBC, she brings the emerging into form - translating expansive ideas into narratives, media, experiences, frameworks, and practical infrastructure that allow other people to see and participate in them. She works at the intersection of creative direction and systems thinking, helping connect what something means with how it is communicated, organized, and ultimately made real.

Her role is, in many ways, an act of architecture itself: giving structure to possibility without losing what made it powerful in the first place.

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SARAH ROCKER

Sarah Rocker's work has been shaped by a deep understanding of systems - not only from studying them, but from working within the very institutions and public structures that movements for systems change often seek to transform.

Her background spans academia, government, organizational development, systems research, collective intelligence, ecosystem design, and international systems-change work. That experience has given her a rare perspective on both sides of transformation: an understanding of how established institutions actually function - their constraints, incentives, relationships, and decision-making structures - and a commitment to exploring what more adaptive, participatory, and human-centered systems might look like.

Across her work, Sarah has focused increasingly on the infrastructure beneath collaboration itself: How do people find one another? How does trust form? How does knowledge move? How do groups coordinate across difference? And what allows a collection of individuals and organizations to become a functioning ecosystem rather than simply a network of contacts?

At The Bridging Catalyst, Sarah brings that inquiry into practice.

As Network Weaver and Chief Stewardship Officer, she helps design the relational architecture through which people, communities, organizations, ideas, and resources can discover one another and work together with greater coherence and shared purpose. Her work is about cultivating the conditions in which an ecosystem can recognize itself, and become capable of coordinated action.

Sarah brings an understanding of the systems we inherited, the realities of changing them from within, and the relational infrastructure required to build beyond them.

Co-Founder, Chief Stewardship + Ecosystem Officer

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