About Us

Hello, my name is Alicia…

Tell me your hopes and dreams! Because I will most likely have a few tools I can offer you that will help you find your way to achieving them. I am a well-read wanderlust who has traveled the country and some of the world. I came by my creative gifts honestly with an Irish tenor as a father and a visual artist of a mother. I am proud to be on the Autistic spectrum and a massive advocate for neurodiversity acceptance. I spent 5 years running a creative service firm with my brother in Texas before making my way back to NC. In January 2021 I found my person and we proceeded to get married in July of the same year.

 Art and creative outlets are a passion of mine. I have dreamed of creating a place for artists and creatives to come together and share their work and collaborate. I have been looking for my “scenius” as Austin Kleon shares in his fantastic book “Show Your Work!” ever since I read it. I originally wanted to start Making Room over 10 years ago when I was finishing college. At the time I was not as well equipped for the task. But I kept the idea in the back of my mind for a long time. After meeting Hannah and really getting established and starting to get better connected to the scene here in CLT plus where we are in the social media scene I think now is the time not to let something like geography stop me from starting to create a community of creatives that we can work with around the world.

 The Woman Behind the Curtain

       Seventh grade. A school assembly showed videos from Samaritan’s Purse, encouraging us to compile our little shoe boxes of donations in time for Christmas and support desperate children across the globe. I cried, disturbed but inspired to do something. I felt powerless: little kid, no money, parents had just divorced so everything was uncertain. This felt like an out, but all I could think of was blessing kids who had no idea where their next meal or clean water might come from.

       That strange desire stayed with me. Through pain, depression, major social anxiety that no one had the verbiage yet to explain, through my peers and elders assuming I was “perfectly functional” yet chose to be a lazy jerk. Teens, right? I realized at age 28 that I’d accidentally trained myself to people-please even while using my psychological studies from both early college and life observation to encourage friends and strangers alike NOT to become emotional doormats for loved ones. Following some intensely necessary internal changes the end of 2021, all these events have culminated into something wonderful.

       I’m taking my drive to heal others, turning it on myself, and willing the resulting overflow to bless others in far more meaningful and lasting ways than I’ve ever dreamed. Through Making Room with Alicia Malcomb and our growing team of incredible humans I see a power in the little things, individuals, entrepreneurism, and all creative fields that can not only help support us all in these tumultuous economic seasons but further sustain truly healthy living well beyond the chaos.

Sound a bit idealistic? Grandiose? We live in a culture full of t-shirts proclaiming, “Be the change you want to see!” Thank you, Gandhi and King. Well, how many of us actually live that way? See that’s where the work comes in.

So what’s stopping us?

I believe, in the vast majority of cases, it’s us. Making Room is for me as much an important venture as it is therapy. My work as Hannah RJ and HRJI had come along slowly over the years, but I started choosing those in my life very carefully, and intention really is everything. Alicia helped rekindle my motivation, and we simply aim to pay it forward indefinitely. 

As Tony Dungy highlights in his book Uncommon:

“Life is challenging. I wish I could tell you that you’ll always be on top of the mountain, but the reality is that there are days when nothing will go right, when not only will you not be on top, you may not even be able to figure out which way is up. Do yourself a favor, and don’t make it any harder than it has to be. In those moments, be careful how you speak to yourself; be careful how you think of yourself; be careful how you conduct yourself; be careful how you develop yourself.” - TD