Tori Tomlinson and the art of staying involved

The crock pots are the detail worth keeping. During an early chapter at US Wellness, a blizzard shut down much of the East Coast while the company was responsible for a week-long national assignment. Tori Tomlinson remembers her colleagues arriving with blankets, sleeping bags and food. They had decided to stay and finish the work. Snow piled several feet outside the office door. Inside, the conference room remained in business.

For a founder, it is an unusually domestic picture of corporate resolve. Strategy has its place, but somebody must remember dinner. Tomlinson has returned to that memory when describing the company she built: people anticipating what a difficult week would require, then making themselves useful without waiting for instructions.

The episode gives her career a human scale. A national business can sound abstract; a sleeping bag beside a conference table is admirably specific. So is the choice to remember the colleagues who brought it. Tomlinson’s story gains texture when the founder shares the frame with other people.

A business education, then a business of her own

Based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Tomlinson is the founder and CEO of US Wellness. She founded the company in August 1997, following an earlier career at Futrex, where she served as a vice president. Her route into entrepreneurship included both practical executive experience and formal business study.

She studied business at the University of Maryland from 1986 to 1988, then pursued an MBA in marketing and international business at Loyola from 1995 to 1997. The overlap in dates puts her graduate education immediately before the company’s founding. An idea was about to acquire an organization, with all the responsibilities that accompany the stationery.

The dates offer a useful way into her career. There is preparation, a period inside another business, and then the decision to establish her own. Today, she still occupies the founder’s chair. That continuity makes room for a different kind of entrepreneurial story: one concerned with what happens after the opening announcement, when people must keep working together year after year.

Making room at the top

One of those people is Alyssa Williamson. Her US Wellness career began in 2004 as senior director of operations. She became vice president of operations in 2007, chief operating officer in 2010, and president in 2022. By March 2024, the company was marking her twentieth anniversary.

That progression gives a concrete shape to shared leadership. Operations became a route to the presidency, with successive responsibilities across almost two decades. Tomlinson remained CEO as Williamson became president. The company’s leadership had room for both the person who started it and the colleague who had spent years helping it run.

When Tomlinson celebrated Williamson’s anniversary, she singled out the ability to adapt processes to clients and changing requirements. It is a revealing choice of praise. Processes seldom receive flowers, though everyone notices when they fail. Here, the work of making an organization function received public credit. The tribute put a colleague’s judgment and contribution at the center of a company milestone.

The meeting a younger colleague remembered

Nicole Donnelly carries another memory of Tomlinson’s management. Donnelly recalled being called into an unexpected meeting at 27. Tomlinson told her she saw leadership potential and that the business wanted to pay for an executive coach. The offer came early enough to surprise her.

The coach was Lori Evans Ermi. Donnelly later described the relationship as an introduction to greater self-awareness, including how to read a room and manage working relationships. In her telling, the significance of the meeting endured well beyond the appointment itself. Someone with authority had seen a future leader and committed resources to her development.

This is a more intimate measure of a manager than an organizational chart can provide. The decision reached one person at a particular moment in her career. Its meaning remained with that person long afterward. Tomlinson’s role in the anecdote is brief, practical and consequential: recognize promise, arrange support, let another professional help it develop.

Before the boardroom, the refreshments

Tomlinson’s connection with CaringMatters began with a friend. As a young woman, she volunteered alongside Beth, the daughter of the organization’s founder, Penny Gladhill. Her first contributions included serving refreshments at fundraisers. It is a pleasantly unceremonious entrance into a story that would eventually include board service.

Over time she joined the board and chaired its development committee. In 2021, she helped launch the Pam Hard Legacy Circle. In 2022, she helped bring back in-person fundraising events, including Golfing For Good and Raise Your Glass. That same year, CaringMatters honored her with the Jerry Gimmel Loyalty Award.

The sequence matters: friendship, useful work, greater responsibility, recognition. There is no need to improve the opening by making it grander. Refreshments are a perfectly respectable beginning. They put a volunteer in the room, beside other people doing the work, and leave open the possibility that a small commitment may become a lasting one.

A calendar filled with other people

The volunteering also has a social history. In 2016, Tomlinson co-chaired the annual gala with Linda Ellington. Years later, when she reflected on receiving the loyalty award, she thanked longtime friends Kathy McCallum and Beth Brouillard for presenting it. Relationships that began outside the language of titles continued into moments of public recognition.

There is something appealing about a career whose cast of characters keeps returning. A gala co-chair, a childhood connection to an organization, a colleague whose promotion is celebrated: each relationship adds texture to the formal biography. The duties are real, but so are the people alongside whom they are carried out.

Her own invitation to others has been modest in scale. She has encouraged people to contribute time, talents or resources. It allows for several ways of joining in, including the sort of small first task she once accepted herself. A person can begin by helping with the evening and discover, years later, that the organization has become part of their life.

Thinking past the next event

The Pam Hard Legacy Circle extends that commitment into the future. Tomlinson is a founding member, and she and her husband, Matt, have included CaringMatters in their estate plans. Her explanation connects a family’s choices with the continued existence of an organization it values.

It is a particularly deliberate form of involvement. A fundraising evening has a date, an invitation and a closing time. A legacy commitment asks what will be available to people much later. Tomlinson has taken part in both kinds of work: gathering supporters in the present and encouraging provision for the years ahead.

The distinction gives her volunteer career an additional dimension. She has served at events, helped lead fundraising and made a personal commitment beyond the event calendar. These are related tasks, but each operates on a different clock. Together, they show how participation can deepen without losing its original connection to a familiar community.

“My husband, Matt, and I have already included CaringMatters in our estate planning”Tori Tomlinson · Pam Hard Legacy Circle

Still on the agenda

Her place in that work continues. CaringMatters currently lists Tomlinson on its board as chair of the Pam Hard Legacy Circle. Its 2025 Silver Linings Gala program also gave her a role presenting the circle. The founder who once served refreshments remained involved in the organization’s formal program years later.

That continuing responsibility gives the 2022 loyalty award a useful afterlife. Awards can turn a contribution into a finished story, neatly wrapped for an evening. Her board role keeps the story open. There are still people to gather, decisions to make and commitments to explain.

The scale of this work is local and personal even while her business operates nationally. Gaithersburg and Montgomery County recur throughout her public life. A founder’s professional reach can stretch across the country while some of her longest relationships remain rooted close to home. In Tomlinson’s case, both belong in the same portrait.

Going first, and staying for what follows

In November 2024, Tomlinson joined Donnelly for a 36-minute Hello Moxie conversation titled “Tori Tomlinson and Going First.” Its themes included mentorship, overcoming challenges, women from history and advice for aspiring women entrepreneurs. Passion, teamwork and resilience were part of the discussion. The title suits the act of founding a company; the other episodes of her career give it a companion idea: continuing to participate.

Founding requires a first move. Supporting a colleague’s development requires another kind of decision, as does sharing senior responsibility or returning to volunteer work year after year. Those choices unfold at different speeds. A meeting can occupy an hour and remain in someone’s memory for years. A first shift at a fundraiser can lead to a place on its board.

Tomlinson’s public story contains these different measures of time. There is the urgent week with snow outside the office. There are the years of Williamson’s progression through the company. There is the much longer horizon of a legacy commitment. Each makes the founder visible through something she helped other people do.

The crock pots remain a fitting opening image. They bring the story back to a roomful of colleagues, a job that needed doing, and the practical consideration that people would need to eat. Business biographies have room for such details. They are often where the people can be found. In this case, the remembered food and blankets give a business milestone the texture of an ordinary working week, interrupted by very extraordinary weather.