💔 From Pain to Purpose: Why I Built TheMothershp

On June 20th, 2020, my life changed forever. I received a call that my brother, Isaiah Renouf, had been murdered. In a single moment, every sense of safety, understanding, and stability I had built was gone, just 4 houses down from my child home. The home where I built an unbreakable bond with 4 of my foster siblings.

Isaiah wasn’t just my foster brother, he was my God given family. Like me, he came from instability, from a system that was supposed to protect us but too often failed to see us. We built a bond rooted in survival, loyalty, and love. But even love couldn’t protect him from the gaps in the very systems meant to keep us safe.

It took nearly five years for justice to come, and even then, it came at the cost of re-traumatization. There were missed signals, disconnected records, and blind spots between agencies the same cracks that have taken too many lives and broken too many families.

In that absence of protection, I experienced further harm. I entered a relationship with someone who manipulated my grief and withheld devastating truths tied to my brother’s death. The justice system had no tools to detect or intervene, no awareness of what was unfolding.

That’s when I decided something had to change.

From that pain, I built TheMothershp  a technology company designed to bridge the devastating gaps in our social systems. Our flagship AI platform, Selena, was created to do what outdated systems cannot: detect risk earlier, surface critical information, and help professionals make informed, preventative decisions.

Selena is more than a tool it’s a system of truth and transparency. It’s built to give voice to what was once unseen and to transform how agencies, courts, and child welfare systems respond to human lives.

We’re now preparing a Proof of Concept (POC) requested by a nonprofit partner working toward state-level interoperability. Our goal is to prove that technology, when grounded in humanity and physics, can create systems that no longer fail families, but protect them.

With Selena, what was once unprovable can now be understood. What was once missed can now be seen.

This is how we honor Isaiah —and every child and family whose story could have been different if the right tools existed.

Because justice should never be reactive. It should be preventative, human, and grounded in truth.

— Crystal Renouf

Founder & CEO, TheMothershp