When the younger Sisters began talking seriously about creating a nonprofit ministry, Sister Kate asked them a question she believed every nonprofit should be able to answer. What problem does society have that your nonprofit will fix? Their answer was immediate: housing.
It was not necessarily the answer she expected. But in retrospect, it made sense. The Sisters had spent more than a decade learning how difficult it is to create and sustain community in a culture that increasingly makes communal life difficult. Housing costs are preventing their own community from growing. At the same time, the sisters watch younger people struggle to afford housing, older people face isolation, families buckle under rising costs, and communities lose the informal systems of mutual support that once helped people through difficult times.
That initial conversation led to a year of research and planning, the formation of the Sisters of the Valley Ministry in May 2026, and federal recognition as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization in August. But the story of the Ministry really began much earlier.
The Original Dream
When Sister Kate founded the Sisters of the Valley in 2015, she did not envision building one company that would simply grow larger and larger. The dream was more decentralized: women operating independent businesses in different places, connected by a common spiritual practice and supporting one another economically and culturally.
The Sisters became best known for their plant-based healing products, but service was built into the enterprise from its early years. For approximately the first five or six years, the Sisters reserved five percent of the healing products they made for people who could not afford them. It was a small-business version of mutual aid. The business paid for the service. And for a while, it worked. Then came a succession of events that would test nearly every assumption underlying the enterprise.
A banking crisis in 2019 disrupted the Sisters’ access to financial services. The pandemic followed. Then came devastating West Coast weather, including floods and mudslides. Regulatory changes at the state and federal levels created still more instability for businesses operating in hemp and plant medicine. Any one of those events would have been difficult for a small company. Coming one after another, they changed what was possible.
The Sisters survived, but survival came at a cost. Growth stalled. Resources tightened. And among the things that became increasingly difficult to sustain was the philanthropic work that had once been funded directly through the business.
The original dream had encountered a hard truth: a commercial enterprise can practice generosity, but when the enterprise itself is fighting for survival, the service it supports becomes vulnerable too.
The Thing That Wouldn’t Die
Around the same period that the Sisters began discussing whether their spiritual and service work needed a structure of its own, three university researchers began studying the organization. The research is ongoing and is expected to continue into 2027. The researchers have been given unusual access to the Sisters’ quarterly board meetings and financial information as they study the enterprise and the culture surrounding it.
After attending one of those meetings and seeing the financial condition of the business firsthand, one of the researchers made an observation that stayed with Sister Kate. The company, she said in substance, should have failed years earlier. What appeared to be keeping it alive was its culture. The observation was not a completed academic finding, and the study is still underway. But its timing was remarkable.
The researchers were beginning to ask one question: Why is this organization still alive? At nearly the same time, the Sisters themselves were beginning to ask another: What is the thing here that is actually worth preserving and growing? Both questions pointed toward something larger than a product line.
The Sisters had developed rituals and prayers. They worked according to lunar cycles. They shared vows and a distinctive spiritual philosophy. They lived and worked communally. Women came, stayed, learned, left, returned, or established Sisters communities elsewhere. A recognizable culture had grown around the enterprise—one strong enough, apparently, to survive circumstances that the business itself could barely withstand. Perhaps the culture was not simply supporting the business. Perhaps it needed a home of its own.
A Different Kind of Institution
The idea of establishing a nonprofit ministry grew from those conversations, particularly among the younger Sisters. But Sister Kate was wary of creating a nonprofit simply because the Sisters had charitable intentions. A tax-exempt organization needed a reason to exist beyond preserving the Sisters themselves.
Hence the question: What problem does society have that your nonprofit will fix?
The answer was: Housing. And that answer opened a much larger discussion. Housing insecurity was obvious, but the Sisters increasingly saw it as intertwined with other problems: isolation, economic instability and the erosion of community-centered systems of support. Those ideas eventually became part of the formal mission of the new Ministry. Its governing plan describes sanctuary-centered communities built around cooperation, mutual aid, sustainable living, education and spiritual community. It identifies housing insecurity alongside isolation and economic instability, and proposes shared resources, education, meaningful work and cooperative living as parts of the response.
The Sisters then spent a full year studying the concept. They examined housing models. They considered what had worked—and what had not worked—in their own communal life. They began separating the activities of the existing commercial company from the religious, educational and charitable work of a future Ministry. They developed governance structures, budgets, programs and a long-term plan.
By May 2026, they were ready to form the Sisters of the Valley Ministry as a California nonprofit. Then came the longer wait for the federal government. In early August, the letter arrived. The Internal Revenue Service had approved the Sisters of the Valley Ministry for recognition as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.
For a Sisterhood that had spent eleven years being called many things—entrepreneurs, activists, feminists, farmers, herbalists, nuns who weren’t nuns—the letter represented something surprisingly concrete. The Ministry now existed as an institution in its own right.
What Survived Became the Seed
There is an irony in the timing. The Ministry did not emerge from the Sisters’ most prosperous years. It emerged after years that exposed just how fragile a small business can be. Yet those same years revealed something else. Businesses depend on banking systems, supply chains, regulations, markets and access to capital. All of those things can change. Culture behaves differently. It lives in people. It travels through stories and practices. It survives in shared meals, ceremonies, work, conflict, reconciliation, teaching, laughter, grief and the decision to show up again tomorrow. The Sisters had originally imagined that a successful business might someday create a network of women connected by a common spiritual culture. Eleven years later, the sequence has almost reversed.
The culture survived. Now the Sisters are building an institution designed to let that culture serve something larger than the business that gave birth to it.
And the Sisters are not being particularly shy about what they are building. The Sisters of the Valley Ministry is a matriarchal ministry—one rooted in the belief that this is a moment for women to reclaim forms of leadership, community, stewardship and spiritual authority that have been diminished or displaced for centuries.
It begins with the question the younger Sisters answered a year ago: What problem are we trying to solve? Housing.
Housing is where the work begins, but it is not where the vision ends. The Ministry is an experiment in what can happen when people organize around cooperation rather than competition, shared resources rather than isolation, and service rather than accumulation.
The Sisters invite those who have followed their journey—and those who are only now discovering it—to explore the new Ministry website. Read the beliefs and prayers. Explore the vision for sanctuary-centered housing and local chapters. Learn what membership means. And see where you might fit into what comes next.
You don’t have to be a Sister to believe that the world could use a little more matriarchy. The doors are open. Come see what we’re building.
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