Meet Sheena
Sheena Hemens is a speaker, writer, business consultant, and founder of the Beyond Three Days campaign based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Drawing on decades of experience across business, hospitality, communications, and entrepreneurship, she now works at the intersection of grief, resilience, and workplace wellbeing, helping individuals and organisations navigate some of life’s most difficult moments.
When Life Changes Everything
Some people spend years carefully planning where they want to go. Others follow opportunity, curiosity, and instinct, allowing life to unfold in unexpected ways. Sheena Hemens belongs to the latter group.
Her professional life has never followed a straight line. She has been a stay at home mother, worked in an investment bank, spent time in radio and television, built a successful PR and Event agency, and later created a restaurant brand from the ground up. Yet beneath every role has been the same
thread: a deep interest in people, connection, and finding meaning through experience.
Today, she is known for speaking openly about grief and resilience. She helps workplaces better understand bereavement, supports people navigating loss, and advocates for meaningful change through a national campaign aimed at improving bereavement leave entitlement in New Zealand. None of this was part of a carefully designed career strategy. Instead, it emerged from profound personal experience and a determination to create purpose from heartbreak.
The work she does now is not simply a profession. It is the result of a life that has been shaped by both extraordinary success and unimaginable loss.
Growing Up Between Cultures and Possibilities
Born in London to Sri Lankan immigrant parents, Sheena learned early what it meant to navigate different worlds. Growing up between cultures gave her an understanding of identity, belonging, and adaptability that would later become valuable throughout her career.
Her professional journey developed organically rather than according to a fixed plan. She embraced opportunities as they appeared, often stepping into entirely different industries and learning along the way. This willingness to remain open to possibility became one of her defining strengths.
In 2010, she launched her own public relations, marketing, and events agency. The business quickly grew, working with organisations across a broad range of sectors. During the rebuilding of Christchurch following the devastating 2011 earthquake, her agency became involved in projects that contributed to the city’s recovery and future direction.
The work was demanding and meaningful. It placed her at the centre of conversations about community, rebuilding, and collective resilience. Looking back, those years offered valuable lessons about leadership and the power of people working together toward a common purpose.
After six years, however, she felt called toward a completely different challenge.
Following her passion for hospitality, food, and creativity, she opened Maison de Crepes, a French inspired restaurant and café concept built from her own recipes, vision, and design ideas. What began as a dream eventually expanded into multiple locations.
For seven years she poured herself into the business. She created not only a brand but also a culture. Customers returned because they felt welcomed. Staff members felt valued. The business reflected her belief that success is measured as much by relationships as by revenue.
Then came the pandemic.
Like countless hospitality businesses around the world, Maison de Crepes faced enormous challenges. She managed to navigate the immediate crisis, but the long term economic effects eventually proved too difficult to overcome. In 2023, the company was voluntarily liquidated.
It was a painful ending to something she had built with her own hands. Yet she could not have known that an even greater challenge was about to arrive.
The Year That Broke Everything Open
In June 2023, Sheena’s daughter Lauren was killed after being struck by a car while walking to work.
Lauren was twenty seven years old.
She had recently secured the job she loved, was preparing to move in with her partner, and had her future stretching out before her. She was deeply loved by family and friends. Lauren was also an identical twin, adding another layer of heartbreak and complexity to an already devastating loss.
No parent expects to outlive their child. The loss shattered assumptions about how life is supposed to unfold.
As Sheena reflects,
“Nobody should ever lose a child. It is unnatural.”
The months that followed brought further upheaval. Her relationship ended when it became clear that her partner could not support her through the grief she was experiencing. Within weeks of Lauren’s death, she found herself leaving the home they had shared and facing an uncertain future.
In a matter of months, she lost her daughter, her relationship, her home, her business, and many of the foundations upon which her life had been built.
For many people, such a sequence of events might have felt impossible to survive.
Yet survival became the first step toward something else.
Rather than suppressing her grief, Sheena chose to move through it honestly. She allowed herself to experience the pain and the grief while refusing to become defined by it.
She spoke openly about what she was feeling. She sought connection rather than isolation. Most importantly, she remained committed to moving forward, even when the path ahead was unclear.
What emerged during this period was a deeper understanding of resilience.
Not the polished version often presented in motivational speeches, but the quieter reality of resilience. The kind that involves showing yourself compassion. The kind that asks you to rebuild one small piece at a time. The kind that allows grief and hope to exist together.
During this period, she created a personal guiding principle that continues to shape her decisions today.
“Only do work that is joyful, has meaning or purpose and involves good, like minded people.”
The sentence became more than a mantra. It became a framework for rebuilding a life.
Creating Meaning From the Unthinkable
The work Sheena does today is deeply connected to what she has lived through.
Rather than leaving her experiences behind, she has transformed them into a source of service for others.
She speaks at conferences, businesses, and events about grief, resilience, adversity, and recovery. Her talks resonate because they are grounded in reality rather than theory. Audiences do not hear abstract concepts. They hear the reflections of someone who has faced profound loss and found a way forward.
Alongside her speaking work, she facilitates Grief Fluency workshops that help organisations learn how to understand grief and loss so they can better support employees experiencing bereavement.
Many workplaces struggle to navigate grief. Managers often feel uncertain about what to say or how to respond. Policies frequently fail to reflect the realities of loss. Through her consulting work, Sheena helps businesses create more compassionate and effective approaches that do more than just check the wellbeing tickboxes.
She understands that grief does not stay at home when people return to work. It affects concentration, wellbeing, relationships, and performance. By helping organisations become more grief literate, she hopes to create environments where people feel supported during some of the hardest moments of their lives.
She is also writing a memoir, hoping her story will provide comfort and perspective for others facing adversity.
What makes her work distinctive is not simply her expertise. It is her willingness to bring honesty into conversations that many people find uncomfortable.
Too often, grief remains hidden behind polite silence. Sheena believes that acknowledging loss openly creates opportunities for healing and connection.
Beyond Three Days
Among all her current projects, one stands out as particularly important.
Following her own experience of bereavement, Sheena became acutely aware of how little time employees are often given to process the death of an immediate family member.
In New Zealand, statutory bereavement leave currently provides three days.
For someone grieving the loss of a child, parent, spouse, or sibling, three days can feel impossibly inadequate.
This recognition led to the creation of Beyond Three Days, a campaign and parliamentary petition seeking to increase statutory bereavement leave from three days to ten days.
The campaign reflects her broader mission of bringing greater understanding and compassion to the realities of grief.
While the policy itself is important, the deeper goal is cultural change. It is about recognising that grief cannot be neatly contained within a few days. It is about acknowledging human experience rather than expecting people to return immediately to normal functioning.
For Sheena, the campaign is also a way of honouring Lauren’s memory.
It represents an effort to ensure that something meaningful emerges from an experience that otherwise makes little sense.
A Different Definition of Success
Success has changed dramatically throughout Sheena’s life.
Like many entrepreneurs, she once measured achievement through growth, business performance, and professional milestones. Those accomplishments still matter, but they no longer sit at the centre of her definition.
Today, success looks different.
It is reflected in the quality of her relationships. It is measured by personal growth, purpose, and impact. It is found in whether she leaves people feeling better than they did before meeting her.
The challenges she has faced have reshaped her priorities and sharpened her understanding of what matters most.
She values authenticity, kindness, honesty, and meaningful contribution. She protects her energy carefully, recognising that resilience requires restoration as much as effort.
Walking, reading, writing, exercise, rest, and time with loved ones have become essential practices rather than optional luxuries.
These habits help create balance while allowing her to continue doing work that demands emotional presence and generosity.
Looking Toward the Future
The future Sheena envisions is not focused on personal accolades or recognition.
Instead, it centres on contribution.
She hopes to see the Beyond Three Days campaign create lasting legislative change. She wants more workplaces to become grief fluent and better equipped to support employees through loss. She hopes her memoir will reach readers who need reassurance that survival is possible, even after devastating circumstances.
Alongside this work, she continues to support businesses through consulting and strategic development projects, bringing decades of entrepreneurial and communications experience to organisations seeking growth and clarity.
What unites all these efforts is a desire to help people navigate uncertainty with greater confidence and compassion.
The experiences of the past few years have given her a unique perspective on adversity. Rather than viewing challenges solely as obstacles, she sees them as opportunities for growth, understanding, and transformation.
That perspective now informs everything she does.
The Strength We Build Along the Way
When Sheena reflects on resilience, she often speaks about it as something built gradually over time.
“We all have these bricks of resilience within us, and if you combine this with a positive attitude and a huge dose of self compassion, you will get through life’s toughest challenges.”
It is a philosophy shaped not by theory but by experience.
Her story is not one of avoiding hardship. It is the story of meeting hardship head on and discovering strengths that only reveal themselves when they are needed most.
Through loss, rebuilding, advocacy, and service, Sheena Hemens has found a new sense of purpose. She continues to carry grief with her, but she also carries hope, compassion, and a determination to help others navigate their own difficult seasons.
In doing so, she reminds us that resilience is not about being untouched by pain. It is about finding a way to keep moving forward while honouring everything we have loved and lost.
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