A North Star in the Dark

Cate & Joanna

There is a moment when you realize the system is not coming to help you. Not because it failed- but because it was never designed with you in mind. You are now given two options: adapt alone, or build something new.

Image Description: Cate Benioff, a white woman pictured smiling from the shoulders up. Brown hair tied back and a Black V neck shirt

Cate Benioff

There was no one there to tell us how to do the job.

Cate builds from the ground up, giving people what she never received. She functions as artist, administrator, and facilitator. As a swing, she understood the paradox of the role: essential yet unseen, responsible for everything yet unsupported. Swings are expected to arrive ready, without a system that prepares them to do so.

The structure is not accidental, and exposes a wider truth. The swing, the “backbone of the

industry,” is indeed an “extracted piece” of the commercial theatre industry. They are not

humanized to the degree that they need to be.

In response, Cate co-created SwingNation, a mentorship program designed to interrupt isolation and alienation, bringing forth community. This creates a free mentorship opportunity for swings by paying its mentors. Veteran swings are paired with newcomers. Care is made tangible. What was once learned through trial, error, and anxiety is now offered as structure in a safe setting.

This organization based on community rather than extraction, now focuses on the youth, with their first ever Swing EDU Boot Camp. This focuses on educating the next generation or recently graduated artists with hands-on swinging experience in a safe setting, with guidance from swings and dance captains on Broadway.

Joanna Carpenter

Joanna Carpenter, mixed race asian and white woman smiling at the camera. Wearing a beige sweater with shoulder length brown hair.

Flipping a seat that is considered to be unflippable.

Joanna exists as a balancer of impossible scales, taking on the role of facilitator, artist, and

administrator.

As a political strategist and communications coach, she works with candidates navigating

systems that are not designed with them in mind: first-time runners, underfunded campaigns, and districts deemed unwinnable. Her work is to help them find clarity, voice, and strategy. It is labor that typically comes at a high cost. She chooses to give it freely.

Through national organizing efforts and independent work, Joanna donates her time—often expanding far beyond her formal role. What begins as coaching becomes strategy. What begins as guidance becomes infrastructure. She invests in campaigns others have already written off, challenging the logic that determines who is “worth” support. This is not charity. It is an intervention.

Alongside SwingNation, her work reveals a consistent pattern: identifying where systems fail

people, and stepping in to swing the pendulum back. Whether in politics or theatre, Joanna is not interested in maintaining broken structures. She is interested in outworking them.

You can learn more at : www.harriettubmaneffect.com/swingnation & swingnationTogether,

Cate and Joanna build alternatives to these broken systems in real time.

SwingNation stands as both critique and possibility: a response to an industry that extracts more than it sustains, and a model for what it could become if care were treated as foundational. They provide a north star for those navigating in the dark.