About

Hi-Suzanne Carawan here. I inadvertently adopted that way of announcing myself from an African lady that was my father's client when I was growing up. Penelope Obing wore her native clothing from Nigeria and had huge gold earrings and would arrive in a flash of color announcing "Obing here!" which I always loved. I adopted this partly because it helps people to not call me Susan and gives them a chance to hear an uncommon last name.

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My story, like everyone's, has twists and turns, big ups and big downs, and a whole lotta characters thrown into the mix over the years. I am slowly unpacking the stories over the years, but what you need to know is that I have been the staunch supporter and spiritual/life advisor to all the men in my house--John, my husband, Jackson and Blake, my sons, and Toretto, my not very well-behaved dog (lookit-my boys are fabulous.) 

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What you need to know is that I took a vow to become a Carawan and reset the family legacy to be associated with a brand built on strong men created by strong women. What you need to know is that I've been married for close to 24 years and never thought I'd get to year one, what you need to know is that I never yearned for children or envisioned having children, and what you need to know is that being married and having now been a mother for 20+ years is absolutely the top accolades of my life that I never acknowledged as being the key driver of my career.

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Now, in terms of credibility aside from real-world experience in a working household, I have a lot of education. With an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (mostly studying the Stoics and philosophy of science) from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master's in Public Health in social marketing from Tulane University, I have a solid background in ethics, moral, critical thinking, wellness, and adoption strategies. From American University, I hold a MBA in marketing and IT and parlayed this into a 20+ year career in start-ups and turnarounds in a variety of different industries including high tech software, global events, financial services, and business consulting typically always holding sales and marketing roles. 

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Back to real-world experience and key events that have shaped me include my mother dying from esophageal cancer in my first year of college at The Ohio State University and me having to transfer home the evening of being initiated into my sorority, years and years of endless work while traveling and trying to balance raising strong boys who were heavily involved in sports, deciding to convert to Catholicism and having the whole family come over from the Episcopal church, picking up an moving 1-2-3-4-5 times (I've lost count, but no wonder we still haven't really moved in) to get the right combination of church-school-sports-work balance, supporting John after finding out on Facebook from a long-lost high school friend that his father had died and no one had told him, picking up the pieces from my father dying fairly quickly after going through comfort care with him, surviving the collegiate lacrosse recruitment and college admissions process for both boys, seeing my sons both graduate from high school, and then finding out that graduation doesn't really mean an end to the parenting, but just an opening to a new chapter that still requires the parent. There's so much in between even these milestones--so many highs and lows- but what you need to know is how it will benefit you.

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The bottom line is that my mission is to build strong men and that means building strong women because strong men come from strong women. All of the services we provide are to accomplish this and whether we're doing it through capturing stories on Boy Mom Podcast, or designing your family brand with you to use in your household, or documenting some of the classic and countless stories I have been mentally hoarding through my Mama Bear Tiger Teacher blog, the end goal is all the same: to be stronger and strengthen your resolve to have a strong family. If we can do this and even increase/elevate our families by just a tiny percentage, our society will be stronger. Every population study on Earth will tell you that when the mother's education increases, the entire household's health and welfare will increase. We also know that men who are strong within become friends, teammates, coaches, husbands, partners, teachers, and fathers who can lead through love. 

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I'm overjoyed to have bundled together all of my know-how to now offer these unique services to families that can be used to strengthen you, institutionalize you, and provide you with generational grit. I look forward to working with you to establish and celebrate your own legacy, or that of your family's.

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