88: Katya Fels Smyth on Normalizing Endings
Katya Fels Smyth is an advocate / activist for shifting power and perspective so we all have a fair shot at wellbeing. She is the founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative, now in its final stages of winddown after more than 15 years of national social change work; and is the founder and former Executive Director of On The Rise, a 30 year-old community of and by women who are unhoused and who have not found community or support in traditional social services. She's a mom, spouse, and a person to almost 20 animals who share a 25 acre farm, where the people grow and sell artisanal garlic and the animals live the good life.
Find Katya:
Steward the Forest, Not Save Every Tree
If We Care About Justice, We Must Care About Endings
Quotes:
“We never have control over things. But what we can do is pay a lot of attention to relationships and energy more than control what others are going to do moving forward.”
“Whether you are an individual leaving a relationship, or a board deciding to close an organization, or a funder deciding to end a funding relationship, the decision to leave is an expression of power.”
“We remember endings. We remember the high and the low of our experience, whether it's a surgery, hospitalization experience, or a work experience. And we remember how it felt when it ended.”
“Your legacy is as much about how you left people feeling and doing and equipped, and did you respect them enough to not walk out on them if you had the opportunity to stay with them and hand things over to them.”
To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/
To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
“Whether you are an individual leaving a relationship, or a board deciding to close an organization, or a funder deciding to end a funding relationship, the decision to leave is an expression of power.”
Transcript:
Katia Fells Smith is an advocate and activist for shifting power and perspective so that we all have a fair shot at Wellbeing. She's the founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative now in its final stages of wind down after more than 15 years of national social change work and is the founder and former executive director of On the Rise, a 30-year-old community of and by women who are unhoused, who have not found community or support in traditional social services.
She's a mom, spouse, and a person to almost 20 animals who share a 25 acre farm where the people grow and sell artisanal garlic and the animals live the good life. Katya, I'm so excited for this conversation. I'm excited that you have done your leaving well and you're winding down in public so that others can learn from it.
I would love to start us off with a question that's kind of big. Uh, you wrote a piece in Medium that we will link, um, in the show notes, and in it you described the nonprofit sector as entering an inferno and you further describe it as being a time when our refusal to prune is creating systemic strain.
Curious if you could talk about maybe one decision that you made during your organization's sunset process that felt like courageous pruning, and how did that choice reshape your sense of legacy and stewardship? It's a big question. Is, and thank you for asking it, and thanks so much for having me. I'm really, uh, really, really delighted to, to be here and to talk with you.
Fundamentally, I think the decision to wind down was, you know, to poon our tree completely was, was the biggest decision. And particularly because we didn't have to, there were stresses and trains that I can can talk about. Um, but we weren't forced into a corner. Where we had to and which, and so we didn't sort of chop down the tree so it came crashing down.
We were able to, you can extend the metaphor as as much as you want. So I think that that's the biggest, you know, sort of from a macro perspective, that's, that's the biggest thing. And, but I think on an organizational level, like clicking down, our board took this vote in the middle of October of 2024. And I started talking to our staff the next day, one-on-ones with, with everyone, and.
We didn't have a plan. We had values. We knew something about endings. We had some things, but the common wisdom that I had heard, you know, about other big, you know, transitions or other things, and certainly that I've heard subsequently in talking to folks about how they've done endings is. There is this sense that the board and the leadership need to figure out, like Hermetically seal themselves off from staff and partners and funders, and come up with a perfect plan that answers all questions.
And you also probably don't wanna give staff too much notice because. Who knows, and we did exactly the opposite. We basically said, I can't do this without these people. And our whole way of being is about movement building. And everything we know about wellbeing is that people need to feel they matter.
And there are few things that make you feel like you matter less than being handed a plan that you are in charge of executing that you've had not only no say in, but you didn't even know was being developed. It felt like a risk, but it also felt really important to know upfront, like whether people were gonna completely bail.
Because if, if half our team was gonna completely bail, then it didn't matter how great our plan was. I wasn't gonna go out and hire a whole new staff to end. So, so that was two weeks and I had, I asked the staff. If they could sit on this, not tell anybody. It was sort of like, you can tell your partner obviously, and you know, but please don't tell your friends.
Don't tell your, you know, um, and can you do that? And, and here's why we're thinking this would be important, so that we can all get our heads around it and also engage our partners so they can hear it directly from us and not have it third hand. And you know what? Everybody did it. Which was sort of for me, the first sign that we were doing something right?
'cause everybody felt included and everybody felt responsible for doing this well. So, so I think that, that, that felt, I don't know. I will say I don't know that it felt particularly courageous in that moment because it didn't feel like an alternative to do it in the, we're going to decide for the team.
Way. I couldn't see how that would end. Well, you know how that would work out well, but I now understand it to be more heretical. I think the thing about courage is I think we often don't see it in ourselves. What are, you know, what's a courageous decision? But largely by and large organizations do exactly what you've said.
They hermetically seal, there's, it's like the Pope, right? It's like the conclave. A whole group of people are going to make this decision that impact so many, and we're gonna do it in secrecy and in silence. And so I. I applaud you and think that that was a pretty courageous decision to say, you know, I'm gonna do it with the staff and with transparency.
You talk also in your piece about, you called it stewarding the forest and not saving every tree. Are there trees? That you did want to save? Or was it all kind of using the metaphor, was it that the whole tree needed to come down? And I'm curious how your decisions around all of this, maybe this is the big part of this conversation, is how did all of that shape your relationship to your own wellbeing, um, and to the wellbeing of the community in the piece, the sort of stewarding the forest, not saving every tree.
What I'm really recognizing. What, what I've been able to recognize over the last nine months is all the assumptions I've been walking around with for 30 something years of nonprofit leadership that I think are just so in the water we, we don't know them, which have to do with this idea that ultimately the only way you can fail as a nonprofit is to close.
Like for all this discussion of impact and outcomes and whatever, whatever, actually success is still staying alive. Right? Which is something that really merits a lot of, uh, examination because I think it's where a lot of harm in communities comes from is right. The ego of the organization starts to just overwhelm our sense, our, our sense of, of mission.
And so I think, you know, from, from this standpoint, like we. Chose not to fight to save the tree. That was the full frame initiative. And you know, if you wanna push the metaphor out to instead, um, to actually have the time to basically compost ourselves, to sort of deconstruct ourselves and whether it was compost ourselves or hand off different pieces, pieces to, to different folks that, and, and we were able to do that in a really.
And in a way that I think exceeded all of my and our board and our staff's expectations. In part because we spent November and December meeting with over 50 of our partners current and past the, in October, the, the board head said that I'm part of the board said, look, we have three priorities. We need to take care of our people.
'cause none of this is gonna work if we don't take care of our people. We need to take care of our partners, meaning our current partners, those that we were deeply engaged with around the country. Um, and we need to do our best to make sure that the mission lives on. And that one obviously felt like the least accessible.
What, what would that look like, et cetera, right? Like, and so we spent November and December talking to our current and past partners. About what it would look like to end well with them and for the mission to live on. And the most extraordinary thing that started to happen is, first of all, we were hearing from our partners, well, I can't unsee this.
I'm not gonna stop doing this. And then a a, a number of folks said, well, this can't die and I want to like, step forward and, and weren't this sort of slightly rapid, like, just let me know if you need anything from me, but like, I want to be part of ensuring that it lives on. So that led to us, um, creating this Stewards Council of 19 really extraordinary leaders and a hundred champions and, and an amazing resource library that our team put up online with hundreds of resources.
All of that was amazing and, but there still were things that we weren't able to do. What, so there was some, I've never been able to find the time, have a funding, et cetera, to do to really document everything. You know what we have learned about how you actually do systems change work. And that's a loss to me.
And one of the things I sort of, I'm like, well, should I be doing that? I, I don't know. We've done a lot of doing and there are a lot of people that have done a lot of writing without the doing. And we've done a lot of the doing, even though we've written a lot without some, some of the codification. And so that feels like something that.
I don't know that it's fully lost because there are other people that know it, but part of what we were really good at was when we were able to make sort of tacit knowledge explicit to do that. And so I ha I'm curious, it's more a curiosity about how much of that actually is still living in all of these different places around the country.
That sort of, that, that, that view. And I think we'll, we'll, we'll see. I mean, that's part of the process is, is a certain amount of letting go. I mean, we never have control over things, but basically saying like, what we can do right now is to try, is to pay a lot of attention to relationships and energy more than, uh, try to control what is be sort of like the hand from a grave right.
To control what others are gonna do. Moving forward to your question about my wellbeing, I think this last nine months has been really rejuvenating for me in a way that's really unexpected. Um, part of that. I think is that the team I, so I invited not all, but, but a lot of our staff to stay and, and I think it's really important to know that we did have to raise additional funds.
We were not out of money when we took this vote, but we did not have nine months of un unrestricted operating funding in the bank. So we did have to go to some of our donors and, and raise some more money. And some of that was to ensure that we could offer. Um, some retention and severance packages that if you were in corporate America would seem piddly and in the nonprofit sector are generous.
And there's other things we can talk about about other, other ways that we supported staff. What happened with these 11 staff, all of whom didn't just stay, but what were, everybody was activated. And what we realized is that everybody understood completely how they were part. Of making, of landing this plane.
Well, and everybody was really proud to be part of this. Dammit. We are gonna do this with values and integrity and that's what we are going to lead with. And to be really out front about, um, this is about not pushing harm down on communities. This is about insulating communities from harm and and risk that normally they're asked to bear.
And so there was a lot of pride and there was a lot of sort ofri to core, um, among our group in a way that everybody's commented on. Just felt incredibly special. I personally discovered that. Good endings. Tap my best leadership qualities because they're not too different from a startup, right? Like you have to be pretty clear on where you're going and you're in this radically, especially now.
Like the context is just right. And so on the one hand you have to know where you're going. But you can't, and certainly with the land, you can't afford to get nine tenths of the way there. That doesn't count right. Sometimes. So you may have to jettison some things. So you're sort of pruning in order to fully land the things that you're gonna land, you can't get nine tenths of the way to landing everything.
So, so that felt really good to me 'cause I felt useful and then it felt, I think for, for me and, and for our team and for our partners in this moment, right? We took this vote in October. And then November, and then January 20th. And in this hellscape for so many people and so many communities to be able to, um, what what was so odd is that actually this endings place felt like a refuge for many of us from this case.
I mean, it's not like we were sealed off. We're totally responsive to the context, but we actually knew so much more than many of our colleagues. What, what we were gonna do. And we would joke that we all had more job security than many folks because everybody who was with us knew they had another five months or six months or seven months or whatever it was, which we were seeing people all around us not have that.
So that was actually got complicated at times because we. Weren't in that same chaos that so many of our colleagues were, and how could we be really supportive and relevant to them. And then the final thing I will note is just in our staff final reflections, what we all realize is, and this speaks so much to the work that you do, that's so, so important.
People have so few experiences to anchor in of good endings. Yep. Very, very few good endings in the workplace. Very, very few good endings. Certainly of the sort of organizational entity. The endings are usually a time where you feel, uh, flailing and powerless and everybody actually, if, if I felt more powerful.
And I've heard from some staff subsequently, just in the last month, that their experience with this ending has helped them think and and respond really differently in job interviews, in other things. Right. And to be less fearful if something might end. And to, and my sense is that we're all gonna be asking different questions and not see an ending as the radioactive thing that has to be avoided.
But actually the thing that has to be. Thought about and cared for and done well. Yeah. I love that so much. It especially that piece around the ripple effect of your leadership that was almost turned on and like underscored and undergirded because of endings, because you function so well in that. The ripple effects you obviously heard from your staff the reflections, but that will go on forever and you might not hear.
All of the subsequent ripple of that, it will change how they care. Take their own families and their loved ones and their community. It will ripple how they show up in new employment spaces. Like That's amazing, Katya. So I'm so excited to hear about that. I wanna make it really clear that this is as much about their willingness to take a leap.
Um, and, and each one of them as very different individuals who have. Families who have obligations, who have other things, and to jump into a complete unknown last November that I personally really appreciate their willingness to do that. But they, to a person, did a kick ass job and they were all incredibly leaderful in how they were doing it.
So this wasn't, I was not micromanaging, I mean, this really was a. True devolution of leadership. Okay. You guys are gonna be having to be in charge of the crazy ass ops that are required to end well and end everything well. This is the partnership team and this is the, this team. And at a time when people were really struggling with everything happening in the context, each of those people took a deep breath and chose, made a choice to lean in and to do this really well.
And they all did an incredible job. So it was a, it is a team effort. I have two paths that I would love to go down and I'll let you choose your own adventure. So either we go down the path talking about the connection of justice and power and endings, or we go down the path of staff and caretaking and how that felt and, and maybe that maybe more of that is, like you just said, it's a crazy asset of things that you have to do to unwind.
Which, which way would you like to go first? I'd love to talk. I, first of all, I mean, I think like everything, there's some overlap there. I would love to talk about the justice piece in part because I, I have a personal sense that that doesn't get enough attention. I think it is incredibly important to pay, take care of our people, and I think that is part of justice, right?
Like how do we do justice with the people that have been with us on this whole journey? Whether you are an individual leaving a relationship or whether you are a. Board deciding to close an organization or a funder deciding to end a funding relationship. The decision to leave is an expression of power.
Who gets to decide that they're leaving and what the implications of that is and who is sort of left holding the bag? I think really is about power and we don't talk about that enough and I, I think it is really important to pay attention to how staff feel and partners in terms of other organizations or government entities they feel.
But ultimately, if you're running a nonprofit, you are responding to deep social inequities. Maybe, well, maybe you're doing a really crappy job. Maybe you are actually providing services that actually enable the perpe perpetuation of social inequities. Like we can have that whole conversation about the nonprofit sector, et cetera.
But fundamentally, as a sector, we should be healing, doing work that is healing. And I come at this from a, what the healing needs to be systemic. You know, I started full frame initiative because. Was doing and seeing that, realized that our systems were are set up with this assumption that people need not just human services, but everything going on is 'cause people of people, people are screwed up and people are screwed up.
Need nonprofits versus actually we're set. We exist because certain people are particularly screwed over. Hmm. And if you're dealing with the, if you start out with the assumption that people are screwed over, then you are doing systemic work, you're doing justice work, you're doing some of that other work.
So that has been the pervading arc of, of my work. And that was sort of the, um, inelegant analysis that we used at, at the full frame initiative. And I just don't think that, that, when, when you decide to end, that doesn't go away. And behavioral science bears this out. We remember ending. We remember the high and the low of our experience, whether it's a surgery, hospitalization experience, or a work experience or whatever it is.
And we remember how it felt when it ended. Our experience in, in so many communities is, so many of the harms that have been done in communities is is the way that communities have been left and not just left behind, but promises made and so many promises broken, and everybody coming back as if. That didn't happen, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I think that that if we're not thinking about how power is playing out and showing up, and if we're not using endings to shift power essentially to put our values in overdrive and as sort of this opportunity to really stick the landing, then we. We actually dramatically undercut probably the impact that we've had.
First of all, because we're reinforcing all these experiences of bad living, leaving, et cetera there. There's so much talk right now about centering community and community power and sharing power. I mean, I wish we were talking about shifting power more, but, but at least sharing it, right? And not just foundations, but nonprofits and other things, and then when things start to get in trouble, there's no.
Consideration of whether or not the community should have any say in how this, how this bears out. And so that was a really important piece of this for us. In the same, that was, I realize it's sort of analogous to the talking to staff before we knew our ass from our elbow about what our plan was to actually say that.
Look, if, if our partners in North Flint and New London and Cleveland and Austin and all the other places have been. With us on this wellbeing journey. Then they're with us on this wellbeing journey, and we're going to figure out together what this looks like and that ripple effect you were just talking about, about how, what people take carry forward about endings.
We've also heard from partners about it just being a fundamentally different experience and not in a, like everybody just run around hugging each other and loving each other, and there's loss, there's upset, there's disappointment. There are all those other things. Our culture's ending illiteracy. Like everything does not fall equitably.
The fallout of that endings of literacy falls, particularly because of how power sits again and again and again on the communities that are not given a say in how endings happen. And so our deciding to combat our own endings of literacy. In partnership with communities and basically to say that like most of us don't really have, we may have some experiences, but fundamentally, most of our normative experiences is about like, what we don't want.
We're gonna, we all have to figure this out, figure this out together. So I think that that's the, that's the justice piece is at a time when all the wisdom is to hoard power, hoard information. To dole it out only in packets when it has been completely vetted, right. Et cetera, to de-risk, whatever that means, things fully.
It's sort of a, the test of whether we really mean that. Right. I loved when you said that decisions to leave are an expression of power, because I think that's one of the things I see so often in organizations is they don't even have any kind of named decision making. Processes. Who, who decides when, when you've asked, uh, a group of community members or stakeholders, interested, parties, whatever, for input and feedback.
Does that inform the decision or are we just asking to ask and to check the box? You know, and so when organizations can get truly, um, radical about decision making and how it happens by whom, when, et cetera, then I think it starts to shift their relationship to sharing power and shifting power. But you're right, I, I had not thought about the decision to leave being an expression of power, and I'm glad you brought that up.
I think it's shows up a lot in HR stuff and I think one of the things I think about. A lot is how good endings and in, uh, the workplace, HR legal stuff makes it harder, much, much harder. It is harder to have the honest conversations. It's harder to have the stuff, right? Like, yes, we have exit interviews, whatever, whatever.
Right? But, but there is, it's just harder to be that. Authentic. And so I think there is a, a real need to think about as we normalize endings in other places. How to, uh, I'm married to a lawyer, my family, right? Like, it is not about the people. This is about like the fee, this is about fields. Yeah. How, how do we not have law and money and risk of aversion?
Yet again. Right, right. Especially colonize this thing that we all have to deal with. Yeah. Because that is not gonna help us. Yeah. Pat, I'm curious. So the person listening is probably saying, okay, this sounds great because you had a great board, you have a great staff, you have great leadership, your staff has great leadership.
What would you say to the person listening who's like, this would never go well with my organization? What's, what's a structural innovation? Whether it's part of the board conversation, how you approached funding? The equitable, yeah. Way you addressed your staff. What's emerged that you think another organization could adopt, even if they don't have all the pieces that you had?
I'm also not saying that it was easy because I, I, I know that it wasn't, but for no, to tell the, the final story makes it sound like it was, it went great. Curious what you would share as a thank you for that. No, it hasn't been easy and there is a lot of sadness and loss and like all the feelings on the feeling wheel.
Sort of the answer to how, how are we doing is, and like this and this, and this and this, right? So, yes. So this is not a, like, it's the greatest thing ever. No. Um, I mean, I have a lot of identity wrapped up in this work. And what does it mean for me? Like, I loved our work and we were impactful, and so what does it mean that I'm not gonna be doing that anymore?
And, and there's a lot about the Scarlet Letter of, even though I've closed, well, I'm still considered. Our organization failed. We failed to make it through. We failed. I failed to lead my organization through, and I probably, we probably could have made it through. So yes, we can talk about that. But, but the, you're right, we had a lot of enabling factors.
Which I think are really important to name because not everybody may have all of these, but you might have some and some folks may have other ones. I don't know that you Right, that we didn't have. One is a good board and a board chair who had agreed with me and we talked about really explicitly long before this came up, about mission and organization are not the same.
And those old fashioned duty of care and loyalty, and those are to the mission as well as to the organization, which is not what most board introductions tell you. Okay? So we had that, we were funded by donors that I could get to quickly. I was not trying to get to a massive, highly staffed foundation where it was gonna take them six months.
To decide our request for additional funding, one major, our, our biggest gift was a 48 hour turnaround, and the other one was a couple of weeks. And then we had, we had a couple of others. It turns out we knew a lot about endings, which I didn't, wasn't able to put my name on my, my finger on. But I now realize that, oh, well, systems change is all about endings.
We have done nothing but help government entities and communities end things so they can begin something else. And Right. Change their identity, change, whatever. So it's all, we, we are actually more ending fluent than we knew, or it's more comfortable with it. And we had these wellbeing design principles that we used with our partners that we'd never tested out as the architecture for our framing, but we tested, like we had a framework to experiment with.
I'm not just not bothered by ambiguity and, and there not being a path, like that's my happy place. And so. That's not a, a comment on good leadership or bad leadership. That's just my particular happy place, which made it easier for me to lead through this With all that said, there still was a lot of convincing to do and I still had to remind myself and remind my team and remind our board and remind our partners.
'cause people could get excited. But then the old thing comes in, right? That this is so, so one of the ways we do this is bus is a business lens. Protect. This is for our funders. This is protecting your investment. If you didn't make this last grant, it wasn't just about what you'd fund, sort of, I hate this way of thinking about it, but the outcomes that they paid for would be solid, but there wouldn't be more.
No, no, no, no. All so much of that is under threat. There's, tied to that is this idea of legacy. What do you want your legacy to be? Do you want your legacy to be that you, you left harm? Or do you want your legacy to be one of turning things over to the community and the mission living on, and that's about a different investment of time, of energy, of money, et cetera.
But I, I feel like right now in this particularly weird, larger context, we're in this question of legacy is very, very salient for so many people because people are wondering, do I matter? And so I think this question of actually how. Your legacy isn't necessarily, you stayed around forever. Your legacy is as much about how you left people feeling and doing and equipped, and did you respect them enough to not walk out on them if you had the opportunity to stay with them and hand things over to them and, and um, whatever.
And so I think that for boards and for those in positions of power who don't really understand this, that's a piece. And then. I don't know, maybe this is really, really manipulative, but to remind people about their experience of endings. Hmm. Yeah. And one that I used is, and I, I would often say to staff who gave notice, you know, they were not gonna leave that day, right.
But we sort of were moving them out. What people are gonna remember about you is how you left. This is going to be more work. You are gonna have to work harder in these last weeks. Than you were working before. And some people believe me and some people didn't and it's, and some people probably knew that.
I mean, it's not like I was the only one saying that. Um, but most of us have experience with yeah, the great colleague who up and left and yeah, they might have given two weeks or even a month notice. But they were a jerk or they didn't actually, like, they were just kind of clock, you know, sort of punching the clock and like we all felt like, what?
That's a pretty universal experience that I know you're trying to fight, but that's, lots of people have that experience that you can then ladder, um, up. And then the other is. Particularly for folks of a certain age, if they have experience losing a loved one. And I, I have had so many conversations with people about the death of a parent and how they experienced the death of a parent.
And I've lost both my parents, my dad in the eighties of cancer, and it was horrible. It was at a time when. They, the goal was to keep you alive as long as possible. And it was horrible. And my mom, like 12 years ago, who also had had cancer, but very different. Mm-hmm. Very, very different. Still huge loss and sad, but not that sense of, but different.
And it is amazing to me how many people, particularly people over 50 generally, but sometimes people who are younger have lost someone they loved deeply. And can really think about was yes, but was that a death? That was the process bad. And then we can talk about like it's, we're not changing the fact that there's gonna be a loss.
We're not changing that. It's what I call the harms of how there's this whole question of the process, who decides how it's done? Those harms of how never show up on our accounting sheet. Right, right. And so that that loss is a loss. But there actually could be all these gains in those, in that, how that would offset the loss.
Or you could dig yourself into a big hole, which is what usually happens because we're so afraid of that loss that we just. Squirrely and tear each other apart in those, those last moments. Well, and a lot of it is American culture, western culture too. If we look at any of the things that you've just talked about, whether it's divorce, um, end of a relationship without a marriage, death moving, moving is a huge loss.
Mm-hmm. Um, other cultures handle it much better. Much more open, much more transparently. They even have processes, and I've been encouraged by watching like the death doula concept come to the United States and be more of a thing because unfortunately, and I, I like that you said it's kind of manipulation, but it's also getting at the point much quicker to ask a team, when was the last time you experienced loss and how did that change shape?
How did you process through it? What were your reflections from it? That gets people a lot closer, a lot quicker. Two processing workplace transitions than if we just acted like everyone's supposed to be okay with it. So I love that. I love that you brought that up. Our board chair and our head of HR both had experience in the military.
Mm. Board chair grew up on a military base and and moving around a lot. And our head of HR had done HR in the army. And then, and also on a native reservation. Right. So, so very different experiences. But, but there's something about folks that have experience in the military, which I, I was just thinking about your, your, this idea of moving, brought a slightly different flavor to it, which was not discounting, but was, there was a recognition that we actually have a lot of choices in this.
That normally we don't talk about because we're so sad about the loss, and so we don't make those choices about process. Well, and so one of my last questions for you is gonna be about change and transition, because change is what happens to us. Transition in my book is how we process it and the choices that we get to make.
Before we get to that though. What have we not talked about that you want to share? Because you and I, I mean, I feel like you and I could really talk about this for a long, long time, um, and go down all sorts of different paths. But is there anything that you want really to make sure to share whether it's the upside of endings or anything that we haven't talked about yet?
This is a little bit of a, a random assortment, but a couple of things that are. Wonderful head of HR did was she started these, I think they were biweekly drop-ins and, but she created a whole arc for folks doing a resume, et cetera. What are you doing? And there was so much attention to that. And there's something kind of fun and magical that happens when people don't have to be squirrely about going for interviews when like the whole organization could celebrate if you get an interview for something.
Right? And so. There are these weird upside moments even in the process that are sort of count, counter-cultural, but the role of HR outside of the legal stuff is important, but actually not very complicated. If you do a good job. Of the human side. I think the human, if you don't do a good job of the human side, I think you really need to lean in on, on the legal stuff.
So I think that, that, I just, I wanna just name how important, um, Samantha was in that. This is to me about what is an enabling environment. And I know this really is, is what you focus on as well, that this is not just about individual practice. Look, I think it's important that individual nonprofits start to normalize endings just as something that should be part of discussing in a strategic plan.
Like are we the right ones to be still doing this right or not? And it shouldn't just be about when we're under huge stress or money or, or something else. Particularly in the, again, the nonprofit, the social change what or outside nonprofits. So if, if we're in a social change and justice space. All change has come with endings.
And so because of Western culture, our ability to end well with each other and and with the communities that we're in may actually be where we can have some of the greatest impact in culture change, which is not something I would've said to you nine months ago. I would've said, I thought this was a harm reduction journey.
I didn't understand this as part harm reduction and part emergence, part mission, transition part, the mo some of the most intentional stewardship that we have have done. And because of that connection to power, um, I think particularly for us founders, whether it's ending with a nonprofit or just leaving a a, a with a good founder transition.
I think it's a really important test of, of why we're in this work, and if funders won't pay for it, it cannot happen. It costs money to end well. It costs something regardless whether you're ending well or not, and the money that it takes to end well. The impact of that, not only on individual people that then go out to continue different parts of the mission or different parts of the, um, the impact that you are all trying to reach for, but it literally does physically and mentally and all of the things.
Impact for good the community, especially in cases like, um, you all, where you handed pieces of it to other stewards to, to take some of the work forward. I, I can't underscore what you just said about it takes money. Um, that is one of the biggest missions right now in my world is trying to get funders to understand that and to be proactive about it instead of having an organization need to.
Turn something around in 48 hours. Let's be proactive about it and just say, start talking about the reality is that endings will happen at some point. Are we ready for it? How can we help you be ready for it? That's, that's so powerful. I believe that funders need to be held accountable for how grants end as well.
Mm-hmm. That part of giving a grant should be a clear agreement for how long an organization's runway is gonna be. Before you find out if you don't have a grant, because there also is an expectation of a lot of funders that you're gonna run full tilt at something. You know, let's say it's on a calendar year and you only find out in November of that year whether or not your grant's gonna get renewed, which you, it is not.
Appropriate. And so when we go back to this power thing, right, like this is also, this is about how we leave each other, which is well, and, and say, that is one of the first times I've ever heard someone say it so clearly that funders have a responsibility to end their grants. Well, I mean, we all know how it feels to be part of the same.
Pool of candidates, even though you've just been working full tilt at something that the funder often times also, uh, has donor intent and donor design around for two years and then only to find out you're not getting it, uh, renewed or continued. I think about two. Some of the funders that I'm so impressed with that have grantee.
Resources that introduce grantees to each other. That also fosters some of what you've been talking about, where partnerships can happen. And I think that's something that, you know, a nonprofit doesn't have to end to leave. Well, it can also be a merger, an acquisition, a partnership. Those are things that we're also not talking very much about in the nonprofit space, but I'm excited to see it happen more.
Katya, what is, what's your personal relationship to. Change in transition. And how has that shifted with the effort of shuttering full frame initiative? So when I wrote my first piece about endings, which was about, it was directed specifically at funders, about funders, let me tell you about my donkeys. It was about sort of the need for funders, just as you just said, to actually be the ones to start the conversation.
Someone had said something to me, it was like, I don't wanna be the endings lady. And now I'm finding like, no, maybe actually there is a role for the systems change, like knowledge about endings. I like change. I like, well, I don't know that I like change. I like things that, that change. I like, I don't like things that stand still too much.
I like things that are responsive and, and, and contextual. I'm sitting with. Just how much this process has revealed to me. All these assumptions I had about endings, about nonprofits, about all these other things, like they weren't even assumptions I could have named right. But just the assumption that you're supposed to stay, you know, especially a founder, like you're supposed to, you know, make sure something lives, lives forever.
And so I'm also curious about like, well, I wonder what else is in the water that I'm not even looking at. I'm sitting with a lot of, also humility. I mean, I, I have. It's always been really important to me to keep promises. And I also know that as a leader, as an organization that I've run, I have looked back and thought about like a lot of endings that I wish we'd done really differently.
And so that's, you know, it's like anytime you learn something new that kind of shifts all of your thinking, it's, it's really important to look back, but really. Important to expend the energy, to not get sucked back and feeling like guilty about, like not knowing something five years ago or 10 years ago.
Um, and so I also want, I think it's really important for folks that are starting to think about this to not. See this as a, I should feel really bad about myself, the work that you're doing. Naomi, there, there, there are other folks that, over the last couple of years have been really trying to bring attention to this issue.
But fundamentally, this is a whole new, whole new area. And, and credit to a, a new colleague, uh, Lisa, who wound down an organization really well. The student experience, uh, learning network. We had a conversation recently where we were talking about how endings probably shouldn't be a field of its own. It's kind of needs to be a more explicit horizontal across all these other fields, and there seems to be this cottage industry making a field of endings, which makes it optional to then look at.
Right. Versus saying like, part of everything. Yeah. Like we may not like it, but like it's, it's there. And so how do we live better and do better with, with endings in whatever it is we're doing? And that to me is much more interesting in terms of my, how I orient towards sort of change and transitions is to think about first for all of us to think about.
First, where are all the endings that we've been part of? We know the ones that haven't gone well, but actually are there micro endings that have gone well? But we didn't call 'em endings. We called them something else. Why did we call them something else? Because they didn't feel better? Whatever, like, so can we also learn individually and also collectively from some of that and layering on top of that?
Then your question about, and who had the power to decide in that moment, because that's a huge pivot point for how we reflect on our endings. I'm sitting with so much appreciation for not only the work that you did with Full Frame Initiative across the years, the work that you did with your team, and you've made this point.
So I just wanna draw, uh, draw it out next to your team. You didn't do it, you know, on a hierarchical level, but you did it next to your team. Um, because it truly, and, and Katya, your willingness to publish pieces about it, be on a conversation like this because that's part of where it also dies. Is the, the normalization of endings dies when we don't talk about it.
And it's not a super sexy topic to be on LinkedIn and be like, I closed an organization. So I'm really thankful that you're talking about it. 'cause it's gonna help. Uh, who knows, who knows who. It will help funders, organizations, individuals. So I appreciate you, thank you, uh, for this and thank you for your interest and thank you for the work that you've been.
Uh, that you've been doing? Yeah, absolutely. A great podcast that I discovered recently. I haven't listened to all, what is it, 80 something episodes, but I've listened to all of them. Yes. Well, and they're good people. They're good people. And the whole idea of this, you know, it's like we've been talking about, I really just want.
Obviously there's work to be done with clients and helping organizations, but really in the, the long scheme of things, I just want people to be able to communicate with each other about endings and how to do them better. Like you said, the reality is, is that people leave. We leave all sorts of things all the time, and how can we bring that into the nonprofit space?
So thank you for being with.
If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the leaving while assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype. It's quick and easy, and you can find it@naomihadaway.com. Slash assessment, it's Naomi, N-A-O-M-I, hattaway, H-A-T-T-A-W-A y.com/assessment.
To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace. You can also see that information on my website. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation.
Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a Navigation Guide for Workplace Transitions.