Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️ on Women Who Quietly Raise Futures

Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️, Co-founder & co-CEO @Chili Piper 🔥, recently posted something that made me stop scrolling. She wrote: "When I was five, I spent hours alone in a communist apartment, caring for my one-year-old sister while my parents worked 12 hours shifts. What helped me survive?"

From there, she introduced a woman the world would later label something small: a "childless cat lady" who lived across the street.

In her words:

She brought things I had never seen before
Cake. Bananas. Languages. Books.
Time.

She saw something in me that no one saw before
And because she saw it, I started growing courage.

Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️ ends by saying that this woman never raised a child of her own, but she raised something far more enduring in her. She even wrote the full story on Substack under a theme that’s both beautiful and a little uncomfortable: women who raise futures without raising children.

I want to stay with that idea for a moment and expand on why it matters so much—for careers, for communities, and for how we think about women, work, and worth.

The Story Behind the Viral Post

The setting Alina describes is stark: a communist apartment, two young children, parents working 12-hour shifts just to keep things going. It’s a picture of survival, not abundance.

In that world, help didn’t come as a formal program, a certified coach, or a polished mentor. It came as a neighbor who crossed the street with cake, bananas, languages, and books—everyday items that, in that context, felt almost magical.

What stands out is how ordinary this woman must have seemed to everyone else. The world, as Alina notes, would later call her a "childless cat lady"—a phrase that usually carries a mix of pity and dismissal. Yet in that cramped apartment, she was quietly doing something profound: she was expanding a child’s universe.

She didn’t just drop off food. She brought time. She brought attention. She brought belief. And that was enough to spark courage in a five-year-old girl who would one day go from intern to SVP, and from there to co-founding a company that’s grown from 0 to almost $1Bn.

The Power of Being Seen Early

There’s a line in Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️’s post that feels like the emotional center of the story:

She saw something in me that no one saw before.

To a child, being seen like that is oxygen.

When someone looks at you and sees potential instead of problems, curiosity instead of inconvenience, possibility instead of limitation—that changes how you see yourself.

Alina connects that early experience with a later capacity for courage. Courage rarely appears out of nowhere. It’s usually built quietly, through interactions with people who choose to see a future version of us and treat us as if we’re already on our way there.

This is what that neighbor did. She didn’t have a formal curriculum. She had a human instinct: this child could be more—let me give her a little extra.

Redefining What It Means to "Raise" Someone

Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️’s story challenges a deeply embedded assumption in many cultures: that the primary way women shape the future is by becoming mothers.

Her neighbor never had children of her own. By traditional measures, she might not be considered someone who "raised" anyone. And yet, she raised:

A young girl’s confidence
Her exposure to the wider world
Her belief that she deserved time, attention, and investment

To "raise" a person is not only to feed and house them. It is to:

Lift their sense of what’s possible
Help them climb out of survival mode, even momentarily
Plant ideas, skills, and stories that continue to grow long after you’re gone

Many people do this without ever having biological children: managers, teachers, neighbors, coaches, colleagues, aunties, community leaders, and yes—"childless cat ladies" who bring cake and books across the street.

The Invisible Labor of Emotional Support

What this story also highlights is a kind of work that rarely shows up in resumes or LinkedIn headlines: emotional labor and informal caregiving.

Alina’s neighbor wasn’t paid for this. She didn’t get a promotion, a title, or public recognition. She invested in a child because she wanted to, because she could, and because it felt right.

This invisible labor often falls on women—especially those who are perceived as having "more time" because they don’t have children. They become the ones people lean on, the ones who check in, the ones who remember birthdays, the ones who mentor, nurture, and hold the emotional fabric of workplaces and communities together.

It’s easy to dismiss that contribution because it doesn’t come with a job description. But as Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️’s life illustrates, those contributions can echo across decades.

Micro-Moments That Change Trajectories

Alina lists what this woman brought into her life in short, punchy fragments: "Cake. Bananas. Languages. Books. Time." That rhythm is part of what made the post spread—it’s poetic, but also deeply practical.

Each of those things represents a different kind of investment:

Cake and bananas: joy and nourishment in a setting defined by scarcity.
Languages: access to new cultures, opportunities, and ways of thinking.
Books: imagination, knowledge, and escape.
Time: the rarest resource of all, and the one children remember longest.

None of these are grand gestures. They are micro-moments. But stacked over months and years, micro-moments accumulate into identity. A child starts to think, Maybe I’m worth investing in. Maybe I can learn. Maybe there’s more for me than what I see every day.

How to Become Someone Who Raises Futures

Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️’s story is moving, but it’s also instructive. You don’t need a big platform or a big title to raise a future. You can start quietly, locally, today.

Here are a few ways to do it:

1. Notice the overlooked

Look for the intern who always stays late, the junior colleague who doesn’t speak up, the kid in your building who seems to be alone a lot. Often, the people who most need support are the ones least likely to ask.

2. Offer small, specific gifts

You might not be able to fund someone’s education, but you can give:

A book that shaped you
A conversation about careers
An introduction to someone in your network
A couple of hours helping them prepare for an interview or exam

Like Alina’s neighbor, you can bring "cake and books"—small things that symbolize something bigger.

3. Share your languages

For Alina, languages were literally part of what her neighbor gave her. For you, "languages" might mean:

The vocabulary of a new industry
The unspoken rules of a workplace
The mental models you use to make decisions

Teaching someone the language of a world they want to enter is one of the fastest ways to raise their future prospects.

4. Give your full attention

Time is powerful not just in quantity, but in quality. Ten minutes of undistracted, genuinely curious attention can leave a deeper mark than an hour of half-listening.

Ask questions. Listen without rushing to give advice. Reflect back what you see in them—especially strengths and potential they might not recognize.

For Women Who Choose Not to Have Children

One of the quiet gifts of Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️’s post is how it validates women who don’t become mothers.

In many cultures and corporate environments, women without children are subtly (or not so subtly) asked to justify themselves. They’re expected to work more, give more, be more available. And at the same time, they’re often told—implicitly—that they’re missing the "real" path to meaning.

Alina’s story offers a different framing: you can profoundly shape the future without giving birth. You can:

Raise courage in someone else
Raise opportunities for people coming after you
Raise the bar for what’s possible in your community or company

The woman in her story will probably never trend on LinkedIn. But a part of Chili Piper’s origin story—and Alina’s leadership story—belongs to her.

Gratitude as a Leadership Practice

Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️ did something important by not just remembering this woman privately, but writing about her publicly. That act of gratitude does at least three things:

It honors invisible work. It says: what you did mattered, even if no one else clapped for it at the time.
It models how leaders can talk about their past. Instead of presenting herself as self-made, she highlights the village that helped raise her.
It invites all of us to remember our own "cat ladies." The teachers, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues who saw something in us before we had proof.

If you’re in any kind of leadership role today—formal or informal—this is a powerful habit to adopt. Tell the stories of the people who raised your future. Name them. Share what they gave you. It not only keeps you grounded, it shows others that you are open to being shaped, helped, and taught.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️, Co-founder & co-CEO @Chili Piper 🔥 Here I talk about lessons I learned to jumpstart my career from intern to SVP. And to grow a company from 0 to almost $1Bn. View the original LinkedIn post →