ABOUT US
HOW BE BRAVE NOW CAME TOGETHER
Sometimes the most meaningful ideas aren’t born in a boardroom. They’re born from friendship, experience, and the moments in life when we realize how much people need help.
Be Brave Now began with Joe Barthen, Barbara Folb, and Shary Connella, three friends whose relationship began years ago while working together in the medical device industry. Although their professional paths eventually changed, their friendship remained strong.
Over the years, they became more than colleagues. They became people who could turn to one another when life became complicated.
Each experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating healthcare for someone they loved. Barbara remains deeply involved in the care of her mother, who is 102 and approaching 103. Her experience has given her an extraordinary perspective on aging, caregiving, and the decisions families face as loved ones grow older. Joe experienced those challenges while helping navigate healthcare for his grandmother.
And Shary faced them with her father as his health declined, confronting difficult decisions about care, transitions, quality of life, and making sure his wishes were understood and honored.
They helped each other through it all.
They shared information, resources, questions, experiences, and most importantly, perspective.
Through those experiences, they recognized something larger:
Families shouldn’t have to wait for a crisis to figure out what to do.
Their professional experience taught them how to navigate complex systems and advocate for solutions. Their personal experiences taught them how deeply families need guidance when healthcare, legal, financial, caregiving and end-of-life
decisions suddenly become real.
And from that shared understanding, Be Brave Now was born.
A resource created by three friends who had been there for one another—and wanted to be there for others.
Three friends. Three personal journeys. One shared purpose.
Help people prepare before the crisis.
Have the conversations that are difficult to have.
Know your choices.
Document your wishes.
Know who will speak for you.
And make a plan for the people and pets who depend on you.
Because sometimes the bravest thing you can do is prepare before you have to.
Be Brave Now.
Meet The Founders
SHARY CONNELLA
CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
As Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Be Brave Now, Shary Connella is helping build an organization dedicated to empowering individuals and families to prepare for serious illness, medical emergencies, aging, caregiving, incapacity, and end-of-life decisions, before those moments arrive.
With nearly three decades of experience spanning medical devices, pharmaceuticals, wound care, healthcare technology, patient care, communications, journalism, and healthcare policy, Connella brings a unique combination of professional expertise and lived experience. Her career has placed her alongside physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, case managers, discharge planners, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, skilled nursing facilities, post-acute providers, insurers, and other healthcare organizations throughout the United States, giving her firsthand insight into the complexities of navigating the American healthcare system.
Connella earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and later graduated from American
University’s Washington College of Law Healthcare Policy and Law Program, with a concentration in healthcare compliance.
She is also the author of Code Red, White and Blue: A Revolutionary Solution to Saving America’s Healthcare System,
published in 2020.
Her commitment to Be Brave Now is deeply personal. Connella and her siblings became caregivers and advocates when their
mother faced advanced mycosis fungoides. Years later, they navigated another profound healthcare journey when their father
developed serious heart and kidney disease and experienced declining health. Together, they faced the medical, caregiving,
legal, financial, insurance, and end-of-life decisions that so many families encounter, often with little preparation.
Weeks before her father passed, Connella told him:
“Dad, I need you to be brave now, the way you taught me to be brave. Tell me what you want. What is important to you before you pass?”
That conversation became the inspiration for Be Brave Now.
Connella came to understand that bravery is not only about facing something difficult. It is also having the courage to speak
openly about what matters most, make your wishes known, and prepare the people you love for what comes next.
Together with Co-Founders Barbara Folb and Joesph Barthen, Connella is building a trusted community connecting individuals
and families with resources across healthcare, law, financial planning, caregiving, transitions of care, communications, and pet
care.
Be Brave Now is grounded in a simple belief: Preparation is empowerment.
No family should have to learn how to navigate a healthcare crisis while they are already living through one.
People deserve to understand their choices before they are forced to make them. They deserve to know who will speak for
them, to have their wishes documented, and to know where to turn when they need help most.
Be Brave Now is, in many ways, a living tribute to Connella’s parents and the values they instilled in her: family, community, compassion, personal responsibility, and the belief that “United we stand, divided we fall.”
Joe Barthen is a Co-Founder of Be Brave Now and a healthcare professional with more than a decade of experience in medical devices and advanced wound care. His career has included ManukaMed, KCI/Acelity, 3M Healthcare, Solventum, and Zoll, giving him experience working within complex healthcare environments and alongside the people responsible for patient care.
Throughout his career, Joe has worked with physicians, nurses, wound-care specialists, case managers, discharge planners, hospitals, post-acute providers, home-health organizations, and other healthcare professionals. His work has given him a practical understanding of hospital workflows, clinical education, care transitions, and the challenges that patients and families encounter as they move through the healthcare system.
JOE BARTHEN
CO-FOUNDER
His professional experience has also taught him an important lesson: knowing how healthcare works is very different from knowing how to navigate it when someone you love is the patient. Even people who work around healthcare every day can find themselves overwhelmed when the decisions become personal.
Joe's commitment to Be Brave Now is deeply personal. He considers himself fortunate, not because his family has avoided difficult moments, but because he has had the opportunity to learn from them and to be in a position to help.
Becoming a father changed the way he viewed the relationships between generations. Watching his children build relationships with their grandparents made the importance of family connections much more tangible. Then, watching his own parents navigate the aging and healthcare transitions of their parents reinforced how quickly families can find themselves making complicated decisions without knowing what questions to ask or where to turn.
Joe also saw firsthand how difficult healthcare can be for someone who does not understand the system. When his mother needed help navigating healthcare, he recognized how different things might have been if someone had not been there to help her understand what was happening, what questions to ask, and what choices were available.
That experience became part of the reason Be Brave Now matters to him. Families should not have to become experts in healthcare, law, caregiving, or life transitions while they are already in the middle of a crisis.
Joe believes the answer is preparation, and community. People need the right conversations before the crisis, reliable information when decisions arise, and trusted people around them who can help them navigate what comes next.
For Joe, the idea is simple: nobody should have to do this alone. It takes a village, not because families are incapable, but because the village is what matters. The people we love, the people who care for us, and the people who step forward when life becomes difficult are what make us stronger.
“Nobody should be alone in this. It takes a village, because the village is what’s important.”
BARBARA FOLB
CO-FOUNDER
Barbara Folb is a healthcare leader, patient advocate, caregiver, cancer survivor, and Co-Founder of Be Brave Now. Her commitment to helping individuals and families navigate healthcare comes from nearly two decades working within the healthcare system, and from experiencing some of life’s most difficult moments on the other side of it.
Barbara spent much of her career in medical device leadership, particularly in advanced wound care, working alongside physicians, nurses, hospitals, post-acute providers, and healthcare organizations. That experience gave her an intimate understanding of a healthcare system that can be extraordinarily difficult to navigate, even for people who know it well.
But her most important lessons came outside the boardroom.
Barbara lost her husband to cancer after walking beside him through serious illness, treatment, caregiving, and ultimately grief
and loss. She later faced cancer herself, experiencing firsthand the fear and uncertainty that come when the person who
understands healthcare suddenly becomes the patient.
Those experiences changed her perspective on what truly matters: knowing what you want, having people who will advocate
for you, asking the questions that need to be asked, and understanding that preparation can be an extraordinary gift to the
people you love.
Her experience as a daughter and caregiver added yet another dimension. Navigating the realities of aging with her mother, including dementia, hospitalization, rehabilitation, assisted living, transitions of care, and difficult decisions about
safety, independence, and quality of life, showed Barbara how quickly families can become overwhelmed by a system they
were never taught how to navigate.
She also learned that caregiving is about far more than arranging care. It is love, responsibility, advocacy, exhaustion, difficult
choices, and sometimes grief for someone who is still physically present.
These experiences are at the heart of Barbara’s work with Be Brave Now.
She believes people should not have to become healthcare experts during the worst moments of their lives. They deserve
information, preparation, trusted resources, and someone who can help them understand what questions to ask before a crisis makes those decisions urgent.
For Barbara, Be Brave Now is about helping people face life’s hardest transitions with knowledge, courage, and compassion, and reminding families that they do not have to figure everything out alone.
“People should not have to become healthcare experts during the worst moments of their lives.”