About New Beginnings

Divorces and relationship ending can be some of life’s hardest trials. Our mission is to help people to deal with them in healthy ways, and to emerge with better skills for future relationships and life. We also help people not currently in crisis to better understand their relationship patterns, and to build healthy relationship skills.

Our founder Davis Fields, while going through his own separation and divorce experience in 2008 and 2009, found and attended a program called Divorce and Relationship Recovery at Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, and found it vital to his recovery and to starting a new life. He soon volunteered to help, and served every Monday evening from 2009 through the beginning of COVID-19 closures in 2020.

After lots of feedback like “why aren’t there more groups like this?” Davis decided to act. He left a successful career as a marketing consultant in the tech industry to launch a nonprofit organization called the Divorce and Relationship Recovery Network. Over the next few years, it launched and then operated in-person weekly support groups in San Francisco, Burlingame, and Castro Valley (all in the San Francisco Bay Area) and one in Lubbock, Texas and continued to partner with similar groups in Menlo Park and Los Gatos, California. Originally called Divorce and Relationship Recovery groups, the ones operated by the nonprofit are now called New Beginnings relationship support groups.

In 2016, the nonprofit also branched into “connection events” so the support group attendees could form new friendships and do fun things together. By popular demand, the group opened in 2018 to anyone, without regard to relationship status. The group, called Bay Area New Beginnings, had rexceeded 2,000 online members by the end of 2021.

With the advent of COVID-19 in 2020, the support groups were reinvented using Zoom videoconferencing, and began operating in their current form. There are two Zoom meetings each week, all year long, and people are invited to attend them, whether close to one of the original meeting locations or not.

All of this is funded by donations from people like you, and we’d be grateful for your one-time gift, or the setup of a recurring monthly gift. You can do either here. Thank you in advance for your support!