Meet our founders
Founded with purpose. Led with experience.
Arden began with a shared belief between two women: surrogacy could be done differently.
Drawing on backgrounds in law, healthcare, leadership, and advocacy, co-founders Staci Musselman and Sara Shikhman saw an opportunity to create an experience that felt more personal, more thoughtful, and more connected than the traditional agency model.
They envisioned an agency where intended parents and gestational carriers would never feel like names in a pipeline or participants in a transaction. Where relationships matter as much as process. Where communication is personal, standards are uncompromising, confidentiality is honored, and support continues long after a match is made.
Arden was built around that vision, a highly personalized approach that combines experience and expertise with something equally important: genuine human connection.
Because when the journey is this personal, the care surrounding it should be too.
Staci Musselman
Co-Founder
Staci Musselman co-founded Arden Surrogacy with a clear vision: to create a more personal, elevated, and deeply human approach to surrogacy, one in which exceptional care is never separated from compassion.
A mother of three daughters, Staci has always understood motherhood as one of the defining privileges of her life. But in 2017, a breast cancer diagnosis changed her perspective on health, uncertainty, and the choices we sometimes assume will always be ours.
While Staci did not personally experience infertility, her cancer journey brought her into the lives of many women who did. Over the years, she has spoken with and worked alongside women whose diagnoses and treatments affected their fertility and, in some cases, changed entirely the way they imagined becoming mothers.
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Those experiences left a lasting impression. They gave Staci a profound appreciation for the deeply personal nature of family building, and for the extraordinary possibilities that emerge when modern medicine, advocacy, generosity, and human connection come together.
They also strengthened her belief in the remarkable possibilities created when medicine, generosity, advocacy, and human connection come together.
Before co-founding Arden, Staci spent more than three decades in the medical aesthetics and healthcare industry, leading large teams and building a career centered on relationships, trust, and service. Her leadership philosophy has always been deeply personal: listen first, communicate honestly, advocate fiercely, and treat people with dignity.
Arden is an extension of those values.
Staci believes intended parents deserve more than coordination. They deserve a trusted partner who understands the magnitude of what is at stake, anticipates what they need, communicates clearly, and makes an extraordinarily complex journey feel personal and manageable.
She believes just as strongly that gestational carriers deserve an exceptional experience of their own. The decision to help another person create a family is remarkable, and Staci believes it should be honored accordingly with respect, advocacy, transparency, attentive support, and genuine appreciation for the woman and family behind the journey.
That philosophy is at the heart of Arden: highly personalized care, uncompromising standards, and an experience designed around the individual rather than the process.
For Staci, Arden is ultimately about bringing together people who may arrive from very different places but share something profoundly important: the opportunity to change one another’s lives.
“Surrogacy is extraordinary because there are two stories unfolding at once: the story of someone longing to become a parent and the story of a woman choosing to help make that possible. Arden was created to honor both.”
Sara Shikhman, Esq.
Co-Founder
For Sara Shikhman, Arden Surrogacy began with something deeply personal: her own journey to motherhood.
After experiencing infertility, Sara ultimately turned to gestational surrogacy to build her family. Today, she is expecting her first child through surrogacy, an experience that has given her an intimate understanding of the hope, uncertainty, vulnerability, and extraordinary trust involved in this journey.
As Sara navigated the process of finding and matching with a gestational carrier, she began to see surrogacy through another lens, not only as an intended parent, but as an attorney, entrepreneur, and business leader who had spent much of her career building organizations around complex and highly personal areas of healthcare.
She saw an opportunity to do things differently.
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Sara envisioned an agency where intended parents didn't feel as though they were navigating one of the most important experiences of their lives through a system. She wanted the experience to feel personal from the very beginning, where someone truly knew your story, understood what mattered to you, anticipated your questions, and remained beside you throughout the journey.
Just as importantly, she believed gestational carriers deserved that same level of attention, advocacy, and respect. A successful surrogacy journey, in Sara's view, should never prioritize one person's experience at the expense of another's.
That vision became Arden.
Professionally, Sara brings more than 16 years of experience as a healthcare attorney and entrepreneur. As Managing Partner of Lengea Law, she has advised more than a thousand healthcare clients on complex legal and regulatory matters. She has also built and led multimillion-dollar businesses, giving her a rare combination of legal expertise, operational experience, and entrepreneurial perspective. Sara earned her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
At Arden, she brings all of that experience to something that has become profoundly personal.
Sara knows what it feels like to sit on the intended-parent side of the table to wait, to hope, to make difficult decisions, and ultimately to place tremendous trust in another woman and in the people guiding the journey.
Arden was created from the belief that something this important deserves more: more personal attention, more thoughtful guidance, more transparency, and a deeper level of human connection.
“Going through surrogacy myself changed the way I saw the entire experience. I realized there was an opportunity to create something more personal: an agency where intended parents and gestational carriers both feel known, supported, and genuinely cared for. That is what we set out to build with Arden.”
The meaning behind Arden
Inspired by the Forest of Arden
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is a place of transformation, renewal, and possibility, a sanctuary where individuals discover new paths, meaningful connections, and a renewed sense of belonging. It is this spirit that inspired our name.
At Arden Surrogacy, we believe that every journey to parenthood is uniquely personal, often requiring extraordinary courage, trust, and hope. Just as the Forest of Arden represents a place where new beginnings unfold, we aspire to create a welcoming space where intended parents and surrogates feel supported, valued, and empowered as they embark on a life-changing journey together.
Let's take the first step together.
You don’t need to have everything figured out before reaching out. A consultation is simply an opportunity to ask questions, learn more, and see if we’re the right fit for your journey. When you’re ready, we’re here to connect.