Who we are
IncuBrighter is a civic R&D incubator for people, programs, and ideas that strengthen community ecosystems. We build tools and frameworks that help organizations operate with clarity, compassion, and structural integrity—because communities thrive when the systems around them are designed to care.
We’re known for TRACEs, the EPIC Lived Experience Integration Method, and a suite of practical, low-barrier programs aimed at making community support more accessible.
Each initiative is rooted in our ethical foundation: the Reciprocal Perception and Care Model.
When we see each other, we become responsible for each other.
That’s the principle that shapes everything we build.
IncuBrighter partners with nonprofits, coalitions, educators, and grassroots leaders to design programs that are trauma-informed, community-driven, and built to last. Our goal isn’t to create perfect systems—it’s to create human ones.
Leah Buzek builds the kinds of systems she wished existed when she needed them most. As the Founder and Executive Director of IncuBrighter, she works at the crossroads of ethics, design, and lived experience; building programs and frameworks that help communities function with integrity, compassion, and structural clarity.
She is the mind behind the Reciprocal Perception and Care Model, a new approach to applied care ethics grounded in mutual vulnerability and shared responsibility.
Leah brings a rare combination of lived experience, research depth, and practical systems thinking. Her perspective is informed by her own path: rural roots, caregiving, poverty, disability, academic reinvention, and the belief that communities don’t fail for lack of effort; they fail for lack of structure.
Her work carries one throughline:
everyone deserves a community built to hold them, not harm them.
leah buzek
FOUNDER; EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR