Meet Rizqa
I'm Rizqa Armien-Yang, and Still Willows began with observations I made while practising.
For over a decade I worked as an Occupational Therapist in South Africa, across community clinics, frontline services, and organisational health roles, including managing a COVID-19 isolation centre in Cape Town during the pandemic. I have also worked inside a psychiatric hospital. What all of that work has in common is that people arrived already unwell. By the time someone reached me, something had usually been building up for months while they carried on going to work and being described as fine.
I kept thinking about the stage before crisis. The person still functioning, still delivering, still holding it together, with nobody noticing that there may be an issue or two brewing.
That is where Still Willows comes in. Not with crisis care or therapy, but the layer that comes earlier, where a difficult period is still something you can work with rather than recover from. I have since coached across three continents, and the pattern holds everywhere. People need someone to look properly at their life with them, before it gets to the point where it costs them something.
I built it for small teams in particular because they are the ones most often left out. They care deeply about their people and are handed either enterprise wellness platforms built for someone else, or nothing at all.