Velamentis is comprised of passionate professionals who have come together with the goal of providing a support foundation for workers dealing with workplace mistreatment and trauma, also referred to as workplace abuse and workplace PTSD.
We have a deep development roadmap, and as we receive feedback from you, we’ll do our best to adapt to optimize how we can help. We are here for workers.
This means we provide access to workers directly; we don’t require your company to subscribe to any of our services in order for you to gain access. It’s not an exaggeration to state there are hundreds of agencies designed to help companies improve workplace culture, leadership, and so on.
We don’t doubt that companies (executives and majority shareholders) may desire to improve communication and empathy in their workplace; there are many agencies they can choose from to help them enact change. Companies should do as much as they can to improve the workplace experience.
In the meantime, though, we’re going to focus on you — the average worker. First and foremost because, like many of you, we went through our workplace mistreatments and traumas and had a tough time finding resources to help us through those dark days.
Velamentis comes from the Latin velamentum, which means “to shelter or protect.” It was part of ancient Greek and Roman practices to bring an offering called a velamentis (an olive branch wrapped in a wool covering) to a chosen deity as a demonstration of gratitude as well as a plea for protection and sustenance during the coming seasons.
With a feeling of gratitude formed by surviving and overcoming the challenges of dark days, and experience that enables us to build a foundation for support, we hope to provide a space where workers can gather to help each other through seasons of work.
Getting Velamentis to this stage has been a three-year journey and is the result of incredibly traumatizing workplace mistreatment I experienced in the games and entertainment industry. Fortunately, anyone who knows me knows turning lemons into lemonade is my “thing.” Faith, family, friends, advisors, and a whole lotta grit have helped me along on this journey.
I worked hard to solicit early-stage investment until I finally grew tired of confronting the same trends in investor responses. Here are the general flavors of comments I received:
- Does workplace mistreatment really happen every day? Isn’t that an exaggeration?
- I just don’t see a big enough demand for employees wanting help with workplace mistreatment. When employees have problems, they expect their company to take care of it; they won’t do much for themselves otherwise. [These types of comments really grated on my nerves.]
- Do you really think anyone is going to use your resources? Are that many people really affected by workplace mistreatment? Why would you build a platform like this?
Confronting attitudes like these made me even more determined to do what I could to help workers. This team is not trying to be martyrs; my advisors and I just know there are so many people like me and my cofounder, Avery, who dealt with mistreatment and trauma in the workplace. We’ll try until we can’t try anymore.
I worked several freelance jobs to pay bills as I built Velamentis; suffice it to say, bootstrapping a startup is much more challenging than I had ever imagined!
I will be forever grateful to the people who took this journey with me: advisors, developers, family, friends, colleagues … and I must shout to the skies a very heartfelt “thank you” to my cofounder, Avery, engineering lead, Nichie, early advisor, Nancy, and constant collaborators, Gary and Pam.
Workplace mistreatment/trauma is not an easy topic. We were triggered on this journey; we felt all the feelings, which just goes to show that continued therapy is good for the soul.
Now we are ready enough to share. We are eager to hear what you have to say and how we can work together to spread awareness, deliver support, and evolve the way we think collectively about humans at work.
We’ll be in a testing period for a while to try out and troubleshoot the basic tech, develop our content cadence, and solicit feedback from you, our early members. If you appreciate the resources and can spare some change (check your couches, everyone!), we appreciate donations.
Thank you for jumping in.
Jen
©Velamentis. All rights reserved. Please contact us if you would like to reprint any content in part or whole.
Contributors:
- Avery Schwartz: Copy Editor
- Pamela Sampel: Subject Matter Expert
- Gary Whitmer: Subject Matter Expert
Email content@velamentis.com with feedback
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