Edith Dorsey Gives Professionals a Safe Place Away From Work

For years, some of the most important conversations of Edith Dorsey’s corporate career happened off the clock. Employees would find her offline, after business hours, or away from work to talk through challenges they did not feel safe raising inside their organizations. Those quiet conversations became the blueprint for her business.

Edith Dorsey is the founder, president, and CEO of Away From Work, which offers professionals confidential conversations for navigating difficult work situations. A member of the Entreprenista League, she launched the business in September 2026 after decades as a senior leader in corporate America. She is building the resource she watched so many people go without.

“A safe place where professionals can share what they can’t at work. A place where they can gain psychological safety, clarity, confidence, and resolution,” Edith says.

A career spent building trust inside organizations

Throughout her career, Edith was brought in as a senior leader for two jobs: to energize and accelerate the performance of individuals, complex teams, and departments, and to deploy enterprise initiatives across matrixed and siloed organizations.

The work depended on relationships. “By building trusting relationships and navigating matrixed and siloed organizations, I led large scale change and operational turnarounds, solved complex problems, developed top performers, and garnered record employee engagement,” she says.

The employees who suffered in silence

Within the turnarounds, Edith saw how hard it was for employees to navigate organizational, political, and management challenges. Many of them had nowhere to take those problems.

“Too often there were no resources to help them, so they would suffer in silence, afraid to raise their issues with their managers, or even discuss them with HR,” she says.

So they came to her, away from the office, to talk through situations that were often politically sensitive. Edith listened, helped them think, and noticed how much those conversations changed what came next.

Confidential conversations away from the workplace

Away From Work turns those after-hours talks into a service. Working adults bring the difficult situations they cannot discuss at work and leave with psychological safety, clarity, confidence, and ideas for resolving the problem.

The early feedback has been consistent. “A consistent theme has been clarity, ideas for consideration, and having a path forward,” Edith says.

She sees Away From Work as a first mover in a new category, one built for the professional who needs a confidential place to think out loud before deciding what to do.

Learning agility as a solo founder

As a solo founder, Edith wears every operational hat: finance, operations, marketing, and technology. “It has taught me learning agility,” she says.

She runs on two mottos that fit a first-year founder well. “Don’t quit,” and “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.”

She has also collected a practical learning lesson already. Three weeks before joining the Entreprenista League, she paid an attorney to trademark her business, only to discover legal resources in the community that could have helped. Her advice for aspiring Entreprenistas: “Join immediately.”

What’s next for Away From Work

Edith has two goals for the years ahead. The first is to launch Away From Work outside the U.S. in 2029. The second is to explore whether companies could gain paid access to aggregated, anonymized intelligence that shows patterns, benchmarks, and risks across the workforce, without exposing any individual’s information.

You can learn more about Away From Work at awayfromwork.com, follow the business on LinkedIn, and connect with Edith on LinkedIn.

Edith built Away From Work alongside a community of women founders doing the same. No one should ever have to build a business alone. Consider this your official invitation to join us.