About Kristen
From One Family’s Journey to The Noah Project
For Kristen Maple, advocacy has never been an abstract idea. It has been personal.
A Board Certified Behavior Analyst, healthcare advocate, organizational leader, and mother, Kristen has spent much of her personal and professional life navigating the systems designed to support individuals with developmental, behavioral, and medical needs. Along the way, she has witnessed both the extraordinary difference the right services can make and the devastating consequences families can face when necessary care becomes difficult to access.
Those experiences ultimately helped inspire The Noah Project, an advocacy initiative created in honor of Kristen’s late son, Noah, with a mission rooted in a simple belief: no person should have to go without medically, behaviorally, or developmentally necessary care because a complicated system failed to make room for them.
Where Professional Experience Meets Personal Purpose
Professionally, Kristen serves as Director of Operations for Applied Behavioral Connections, a behavioral health company, and is co-owner of Trainalyst. As a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, her work has allowed her to serve individuals with Autism, developmental disabilities, communication challenges, and significant behavioral needs while working alongside the families who advocate for them every day.
Through Trainalyst, Kristen has expanded that work into another side of healthcare: helping organizations navigate insurance requirements, access-to-care barriers, and the administrative complexities that can stand between individuals and the services they need.
But Kristen’s understanding of those systems extends far beyond her professional experience. She has also experienced them as a mother.
The Story Behind The Noah Project
Kristen’s late son, Noah, profoundly shaped the person, professional, and advocate she is today.
Life with Noah included appointments, treatments, services, advocacy, difficult days, and countless moments of navigating systems that were not always designed around the realities families face. But Kristen does not want Noah’s story to be defined solely by medical needs or challenges.
Their life together was also filled with adventures, laughter, connection, and a determination to help Noah experience as much of life as possible.
Those experiences taught Kristen that caring for someone means more than keeping them safe or providing treatment. It means helping them live.
After Noah’s passing, that lesson became part of a larger purpose. The Noah Project was born from the belief that Noah’s story could continue helping people.
The Project seeks to bring attention to gaps in healthcare access and advocate for individuals and families who may not have the knowledge, resources, time, or ability to continually challenge complicated healthcare systems on their own.
It is about asking difficult questions when services are denied. It is about challenging systems and policies that unintentionally leave vulnerable people behind. And it is about helping families understand that needing care should not mean having to become an expert in healthcare bureaucracy just to obtain it.
For Kristen, The Noah Project is both advocacy and legacy. Noah taught her how fiercely one person can love and advocate for another. Now, she hopes to carry that same determination into the lives of other families.
Building the Tools to Create Change
Kristen’s commitment to advocacy has also shaped her education.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in Applied Linguistics and Communication Studies from Ashford University before earning a master’s degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Harvard University, where she also completed a graduate certificate in Organizational Behavior.
In 2021, Kristen received Harvard University’s Derek Bok Public Service Prize, recognizing her creative initiatives in community service and longstanding record of civic achievement.
Today, her interests increasingly sit at the intersection of behavioral healthcare, organizational leadership, public service, and law.
Kristen is currently pursuing a Health Care Law Certificate through Cornell University and aspires to attend The University of Akron School of Law. Her long-term goal is to use her clinical experience, organizational background, lived experience, and legal education to advocate for changes to healthcare policies and laws that disproportionately affect individuals who are medically, behaviorally, or developmentally disadvantaged.
“No one should spend their life without the care and services they need simply because the system failed to make room for them,” Kristen says. “If someone doesn't have the ability or resources to fight that system themselves, I want to help give them a voice.”
More Than a Name
The Noah Project carries Noah’s name, but Kristen hopes its impact will reach far beyond his story.
It represents every parent sitting at a kitchen table trying to understand an insurance denial. Every caregiver who is exhausted from making another phone call. Every individual whose needs do not fit neatly into a policy or predetermined box. And every person whose quality of life depends on someone being willing to say, “This isn't good enough. We can do better.”
Kristen believes meaningful change often begins when someone refuses to accept that the way something has always been done is the way it must continue to be done.
Through The Noah Project, she hopes to combine compassion with action—educating families, advocating for access to necessary services, bringing attention to gaps in healthcare systems, and ultimately contributing to changes that make those systems more responsive to the people they were created to serve.
Carrying Noah Forward
Outside of her professional and educational pursuits, Kristen continues to find joy in painting, spending time at the beach, serving through her church, and being involved in her local community. She shares her life with her husband, Stephen Maple, a retired United States Navy veteran, and her older son, Jayden.
And Noah remains part of that life, too.
Every day, Kristen wears Noah’s fingerprint around her neck, a small but powerful reminder that while his life may have been far too short, he left an unmistakable print on the world and on the people who loved him.
For Kristen, the fingerprint has also come to represent something more: a responsibility to carry forward what Noah began.
His influence can be found in her work, her advocacy, her education, and in every family she hopes The Noah Project will one day help. When Kristen looks at the fingerprint around her neck, she is reminded that Noah left his print on the world. Now, it is her turn to leave hers.
The Noah Project is not simply about remembering her son. It is about taking everything his life taught her, about love, perseverance, advocacy, joy, and what it truly means to help someone live, and putting those lessons to work for others.
One child inspired the mission. One fingerprint carries his legacy. And now, Kristen hopes to leave a print of her own by changing the lives of thousands more.
