A pioneer in belongingness, Shasta Nelson is an in-demand keynote speaker, popular media resource, and author of three books in which she teaches how to build healthy relationships, including The Business of Friendship: Making the Most of the Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time. 

 

For over 15 years, Shasta has been translating the science of human connection into actionable practices that lead to greater belonging in our communities and work culture. Her expertise has activated organizations such as Google and LinkedIn to intentionally create and accelerate the high-trust and resilient relationships that lead to higher employee retention, engagement, and collaboration.

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Shasta is a contributor to the Harvard Business Review; has been featured in hundreds of publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and TIME magazine; and has appeared as a guest on the Harvard Business Review podcast, the Today Show, and the Steve Harvey Show. Shasta is a two-time featured TEDx speaker, with her first TED talk receiving over 800,000 views, and she has delivered 500+ keynotes for over 20 different industries, including tech, healthcare, nonprofits, education, and more.

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WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

 

Shasta has always been an advocate for belongingness. With dreams of becoming a war correspondent, Shasta earned her B.A. in Communications before recognizing that her true passions lay in fostering community and human connection. Growing up in church, she was inspired by the sense of belongingness she’d witnessed—how people could rely on and support one another—leading her to pursue an M.Div and be one of the few women in her program to become a pastor. 

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In many ways, Shasta loved leading this community—teaching personal growth weekly, training small group leaders to facilitate meaningful connection, grappling with how to encourage deep and supportive bonds, and providing relationship counseling. But it also became increasingly clear that many were not finding true belonging in this environment. Believing that neither conformity nor perfection should be a prerequisite to human connection, Shasta sought to extend belonging beyond the walls of religion. 

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In 2008, Shasta founded one of the first online friendship-matching platforms, GirlFriendCircles, which was credited with creating thousands of new friendships across the U.S. and earned her the title, “The OG of Friendship.” With nearly 100,000 followers, Shasta’s blogs evolved into three books on belongingness in our work cultures and at home. After writing Friendships Don’t Just Happen (2013) as the guide to making new friends as an adult, and Frientimacy (2016) as the blueprint for deepening our connections, she wrote The Business of Friendship (2020) in response to the growing loneliness in the workplace that is not only debilitating our leaders and employees through stress and burnout, but is also the cause of high turnover rates, low engagement, and poor collaboration. 

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Today, backed by the scientific data and real-world research she applies in her books, Shasta’s highly acclaimed keynotes teach organizations and communities of people from diverse backgrounds how to create a culture of belonging and support in their own spaces. At her core, Shasta believes that there is nothing more vital to our physical or mental health than our belongingness.