On a summer evening in 2015, Sheryl Kurland sat in a classroom at the Seminole County Sheriff’s Department and had her world ripped open. She had signed up for a civilian course called the Community Law Enforcement Academy, a way to learn how the sheriff’s department worked from the inside.
That night’s topic was domestic violence. What she heard and saw, photographs of women brutally beaten, recordings of 911 calls, the screams of mothers and children, stopped her breath cold.
She drove home a different person. An inner voice told her to do something. So she did. And ten years later, that voice has led to over 110,000 new lipsticks delivered to women escaping domestic violence across the United States, and a nonprofit that has quietly become one of the most original and tender acts of community healing Central Florida has ever produced.
A Moment That Changed Everything
Sheryl, who lives in Longwood, was a traveling college speaker at the time, giving presentations on healthy relationships to sorority women. When summer break slowed her schedule, she’d enrolled in the academy. After that unforgettable evening on domestic violence, she called the local shelter SafeHouse in Sanford and offered to lead free workshops for the women staying there. The shelter said yes.
For months, Sheryl showed up every two weeks, presenting workshops to the residents, women who had often fled their homes with next to nothing. She watched how broken they were.
Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. She kept asking herself how she could help these women feel like women again. Then a memory surfaced, her mother’s voice from years ago, gentle and certain, advising that a little lipstick could go a long way toward feeling better.
She went to a store, bought 25 lipsticks, and at the end of her next workshop placed them onto the conference table. She thanked the women for coming and invited each of them to pick out a new lipstick for themself.
What happened next, she still describes as profound.
The pain in the room lifted. There was laughter. Women helped each other choose colors. They sat and talked, not about their trauma, but about this.
For a moment, they were simply women together, finding something beautiful for themselves.
Sheryl has said she felt she owed that transformational lipstick experience to as many thousands of victims as she could possibly reach. That same reaction, the healing power of a new lipstick, happened over and over with new residents at each workshop.
To a domestic violence victim, that glide of lip color is not vanity. It is a declaration: I have a voice, an identity, and beauty inside and out. It helps her begin to love the person she sees in the mirror again.
Building a National Movement from a Dining Room Table
In August 2016, with no nonprofit experience, no funding, and no lipsticks to her name, just a passion and a purpose, she officially launched Find Your Fabulosity. She took a one-night course on starting a nonprofit at Rollins College’s Edyth Bush Institute and got to work.
She blanketed women’s organizations across Central Florida, offering to speak at their meetings for free, the only ask being that attendees bring new lipsticks to donate.
She cold-called shelter after shelter, and had to win over skeptical administrators who assumed anything offered for free must be a scam. She persevered. She always does.
About a year in, she made the decision to take Find Your Fabulosity national. One afternoon, driving around running errands, she heard Herman Cain’s nationally syndicated radio show on WDBO. The theme that day was living the American Dream, and she called in. What was meant to be a two-minute segment turned into six. Cain broke his own rules and let her share her website. The mailbox overflowed for weeks. Find Your Fabulosity became a national movement.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and women stopped buying, and even thinking about, lipstick, Sheryl pivoted. She reached out directly to makeup manufacturers, and they answered. Thrive Causemetics, Defiance Beauty, Clinique, E.L.F., Boom Beauty, Gwen Stefani’s GXVE line, and others came on board. Their generosity dramatically expanded what Find Your Fabulosity could give away.
The Impact, Close to Home
Today, the nonprofit ships 1,250 lipsticks at a time, 25 per box, sent to 50 shelters per mailing, distributing roughly 12,000 lipsticks and 1,000 Get Help Gift Bags to individual victims every year. There are over 300 domestic violence shelters and organizations on the distribution list nationwide.
In Central Florida alone, recipients include Harbor House of Central Florida in Orlando, SafeHouse of Seminole in Sanford, the Domestic Violence Advocacy Center in Celebration, Haven of Lake and Sumter Counties in Leesburg, Help Now of Osceola in Kissimmee, and more than a dozen others.
Everything happens around Sheryl’s giant dining room table, where about 40 volunteers gather to count, sort, box, tape, and label packages in assembly-line fashion. Some are domestic violence survivors themselves. Some have loved ones who’ve been through it. All of them are part of something that feels like family, women with big hearts helping women with broken hearts.
Watch Me
This year marks Find Your Fabulosity’s 10th anniversary. Sheryl recently received the 2025 Heart of Service award from the Women’s Executive Council of Orlando. In 2023, Thrive Causemetics named one of its new Impact-FULL™ lipstick shades Sheryl, a Berry Brown, in her honor, selecting her as one of only 12 inspirational women in the country to receive that distinction.
She has been featured in Costco Connection magazine with a circulation of 15.4 million, Woman’s World, CBS News, Fox 5 New York, NBC 10 Philadelphia, ABC Sacramento, and outlets from Tampa to Portland. Locally, she’s been recognized on WKMG as an Everyday Hero, on Spectrum News 13, Telemundo 31, and Fox 35.
Oh, and she’s a Black Belt in martial arts. Which, honestly, tracks perfectly for a woman who believes that fear simply points you in the direction you need to go, and that rejection leads you to a better opportunity.
When naysayers have told Sheryl she can’t do something, she has had one consistent response: watch me.
One hundred and ten thousand lipsticks later, Central Florida is watching, and grateful.
💄 Check out Find Your Fabulosity, or donate, right here.
👉 Know a community superstar? Tell me about them, right here.
