About Us
Four women who wanted a different way to work, lead, and live. So we built one together.
Noria was founded by Allie Stark, Lela Tuhtan, Shawn Casey, and Kajal Vekaria.
Between us, we have thousands of hours of experience coaching and developing high-achieving women, along with deep expertise in leadership, organizational culture, integrative health, education, behavior change, and building companies.
We came to this work through different careers and lives: motherhood, illness, burnout, reinvention, and years spent inside high-performing systems.
What we share is an interest in a simple question: How can women be powerful without reproducing the habits that have made power so costly?
Section Styles top-border bottom-border
Why Noria?
A noria is an ancient water wheel that brings water to the surface so it can be used by a community.
We liked the image because it is practical. A resource exists, but it has to be accessed and circulated to become useful.
That is how we think about women, too. Power grows when knowledge, relationships, opportunities, money, support, and ideas move between us.
Our Team
Section Styles top-border
Section Styles clay-image
Co-Founder + Chief Executive Officer
Allie Stark
Allie has spent two decades helping powerful women stop succeeding at the expense of themselves.
Her path began in integrative health and expanded into leadership work that found her before she went looking for it. Across coaching, facilitation, and organizational development, she became increasingly interested in the relationship between inner well-being and the systems people create around them.
Allie is anti-establishment in the most practical sense. She challenges broken systems instinctively, builds intimate teams with people she loves, and has little interest in following a conventional path simply because it is familiar.
She co-founded Noria after recognizing that impact has a ceiling when the work remains centered around one person. She wanted to build something more relational, more enduring, and more capable of holding the complexity of women’s lives.
Allie holds the vision for Noria and tends the relationships, partnerships, and possibilities that allow it to grow.
Co-Founder + Chief Operating Officer
Shawn Casey
Section Styles clay-image top-border
Shawn’s path began with a health crisis at fourteen.
After bacterial meningitis, a week in the hospital, and a body that conventional medicine could not fully explain or repair, she spent years navigating systems that dismissed what she knew she was experiencing.
Her healing eventually led her beyond those systems and shaped a lifelong interest in how people reclaim authority over their bodies, choices, and lives.
She carried that inquiry into graduate school, where she met Allie, and later into a decade at One Medical, teaching graduate courses, leadership work, and new motherhood. Then the pandemic arrived, followed by burnout, a cross-country move, and twins. Much of what had been held together through competence and endurance could no longer remain intact.
What emerged was a clearer view of the conditioning, systems, and patterns she had been living inside.
During that period, Shawn had an image of a facade melting away. That image has remained central to how she understands transformation.
Shawn is the operational heart of Noria. She brings structure, discernment, quality, and consistency to everything the team creates. She is also, in her own words, the woman Noria is for.
Co-Founder + Chief Learning Officer
Lela Tuhtan
Section Styles clay-image top-border
Lela began as a teacher, earning her Master’s in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She believed she was there to teach literature and discovered instead that she was learning how stories shape identity, possibility, and the way people interpret their lives.
She later moved into coaching, working with founders, executives, artists, and creative leaders whose lives and careers rarely fit neatly into a single category.
The most consequential pivots in Lela’s own life were not professional. They came through motherhood, health challenges, perfectionism, over-functioning, and the long-held belief that if she worked hard enough, life would eventually feel safe.
What she discovered is that many accomplished people build their lives around performance rather than truth. The deeper work is not becoming more impressive. It is becoming more integrated.
Within Noria, Lela holds the deeper inquiry. She asks what the work means, what story it is telling, what it is contributing to, and whether it remains aligned with what is actually true.
She believes changing a life often begins with changing the story through which it is under
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
Kajal Vekaria
Section Styles clay-image top-border
Kajal has moved through some of the most demanding systems represented on the founding team.
Her career has included USAID, joining a startup as its first employee and helping grow it toward an acquisition by Airbnb, and five years inside one of the most high-performing companies in the world.
She wrote her Master’s thesis on women and leadership and has been living the question ever since.
At forty, Kajal made a conscious decision that her job would no longer serve as the primary source of her identity. She took a year, earned her coaching certification, planned her wedding, and asked herself what she actually wanted to build.
What Kajal brings to Noria is a rare dual awareness of performance and depletion.
She can see where someone’s success is real, earned, and meaningful while also recognizing where that success is being quietly paid for by the body, nervous system, relationships, or private life. She makes the invisible cost visible without making it dramatic.
As Chief Strategy Officer, Kajal turns vision into structures that can function, evolve, and sustain themselves over time.
What we are building
We want Noria to become bigger than its founders.
We are interested in what happens when ambitious women have a different relationship with power. When being powerful no longer requires being armored, depleted, hyper-independent, or endlessly productive.
Imagine a deeply resourced, confident, high-integrity woman in leadership.
Now imagine thousands of them.
That is the direction.
Section Styles top-border button-pair