For six years, the We Are For Good journey has been one of the most profoundly life-changing experiences of my life. The sprint to build community, share stories, and understand what’s possible when we chase this work together has been life-changing. It’s brought the most beautiful humans into my life and reshaped me from the inside out. But the sprint has been a sprinted marathon.

And now it’s time for me to rest.

We’ve spent years telling this community that burnout isn’t proof of commitment, and that rest isn’t something you earn after you’ve run yourself into the ground. Wellness is a birthright, not a bonus. And I’m not just saying that from a stage. I want to live it.

So for the next two months, I’m going fully untethered. No email, no Slack, no social media. Just quiet, mountain air, long hikes, naps, and whatever it takes to bring myself back to center. We all deserve this kind of break in our work.

Here’s the beautiful part: when I realized I needed to stop, the people around me met that moment with incredible kindness and support. They showed up with warmth + care reminding me that my worth isn’t measured by my output. They helped me remember that taking care of myself isn’t letting people down. It’s what allows me to come back as my fullest self.

To me, that’s what psychological safety actually looks like in practice. Not a mission statement on a page, but a whole community proving that rest doesn’t have to be earned in secret or apologized for. I’m incredibly grateful for that, and I know not everyone has that experience. I hope sharing mine encourages someone else to ask for the support they need.

We built We Are For Good on a simple belief: you cannot pour into a mission if you’re pouring from an empty cup. No strategic plan has ever survived the humans running it burning out underneath it. We believe wellness is the thing holding culture up.

The podcast and our work will absolutely go on powered by the mighty We Are For Good team. In fact, you’ll see some incredible guest co-hosts with Jon, which we hope brings more depth to our community + conversations. I’m pausing BE the Good for eight weeks. It’ll be back sharing more stories of humans doing good soon - stay tuned!

For six years, it’s been an honor to walk alongside each person in this community. Every DM mid-panic-attack. Every “I’ve never told anyone this.” Every person I’ve told, genuinely, “I’ll be your person if you don’t have one.” I meant it every time. My empathy is a sensor that never turns off, and a nervous system that absorbs without boundary runs a deficit every day, even the days nothing happens directly. It’s our body giving us a signal, and I’m listening. I hope you feel seen and known in these words.

Loving and holding this community has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Now I’m taking a turn to hold myself up. Eight weeks to find my center. I feel this community holding that with me completely. Thank you.

See you back here in October, ready to dive back in, accelerate good and build toward the Impact Uprising. It’s truly the joy of a lifetime to be able to do so.

See you soon, friends✌️

Meet Katie Hannah.

Katie’s the Director of Development at Momentum Leaders in Birmingham, and she wanted a grant. Badly. Her words. She’d emailed the funder more than once trying to get a meeting and got the group chat equivalent of crickets. So when she found out they were hosting a panel a few hours north of where she was in Alabama - she just drove there. Pitched her mission in person. Got an actual nod from the executive director to go ahead and apply.

Great outcome, right?

Then the decline landed - yet again. But something about it felt off before she’d even finished reading it. The “no” came from a name she’d never seen, a reviewer in New York, clearly part of some third-party screening process for what was supposed to be an Alabama opportunity. She had a hunch. This wasn’t a real no. It was a sign her story hadn’t landed on the right eyeballs yet.

Here’s the kicker.

Their application asked her to explain the whole scope of her work in 100 words. A hundred. Try summing up your entire mission in a text message and see how that goes. Her project didn’t fit in that box, and honestly, I doubt anyone’s mission does. That’s exactly why it got filtered out before a human who actually understood the work ever saw it.

So Katie didn’t just accept the no and move on with her life. She politely, persistently pushed back and asked if she could send supplemental documentation straight to the committee. She got a yes. Built a seven-page packet, photos, quotes, stories, the stuff a hundred words could never carry, and made her case the way it deserved to be made.

That “no” turned into a $223,000 “yes.”

“Don’t let one no be the end of the story,” Katie told us. “Perseverance isn’t just a nice word for a hard season. It’s a strategy that wins.”

This is the power of what unlocks when we see what’s Possible, not just what’s in front of us.

Enter Scott Curran, Possibility’s Hype Man

Years ago, Jon and I sat across from Scott Curran for the first time, and I remember thinking, this man has spent his whole career quietly rewiring how the biggest names in philanthropy think about impact, and somehow he’s also just... a genuinely delightful hang. Since then I’ve lovingly referred to him as the Ted Lasso of the nonprofit sector.

Scott was General Counsel of the Clinton Foundation for a decade, helping run a global nonprofit across 40+ countries. Casual name drop, I know. But it’s never a flex for him. It was simply the beginning of the journey. He’s advised presidents, Fortune 500 companies, and some of the sharpest changemakers on the planet. And every single time we’ve been in his orbit, things have felt more possible. That’s not a compliment I hand out lightly.

Jon told him back then, half-joking, you need to write a book. He went and actually did it. Better Good comes out this month, and it’s basically a decoder ring for a pattern he’s watched play out over and over, behind every changemaker the world calls a genius and every hometown hero who deserves to be one. A way for anyone - presidents and everyday changemakers alike - to unlock possibility and chase impact.

He told us a story that grounded us and shifted possibility into perspective. A billionaire friend of his walked in one day and asked, essentially, how do I give away a billion dollars in a way that doesn’t suck? Scott, mid-newborn-fog at the time, watched this guy hand over a report from one of the top consulting firms in the world. Scott read it and thought, it’s good, but it’s not great.

The billionaire didn’t have it figured out either. Nobody does.

Scott’s whole point (and the whole premise of the book) is that the patterns behind the world’s most effective people aren’t reserved for the famous ones. They’re the same patterns available to the founder running a nonprofit out of a spare bedroom right now. We just chronically underestimate what we’re already sitting on.

“We overlook what we already have,” he said. “We undervalue the resources we currently have, and we underestimate the impact of starting where we are.”

Scott shared, “Nobody climbs a ladder one ladder at a time. We climb it one rung at a time.” That’s the whole secret, and it’s annoyingly simple. Or perhaps - blissfully simple.

Why This Sector Moves Like Molasses

This isn’t just an observation. It’s stagnation holding missions and people back.

This is every nonprofiteer’s favorite inside joke: embracing the notion that this sector is notoriously, chronically slow to change, and it’s worth actually asking why, because “why” is where the fix lives.

Here’s the case for taking it seriously. Research by NonProfit PRO, drawing on a Unit4 study of nonprofit leaders, found that roughly three in four of them point to the same short list of internal roadblocks slowing everything down:

1️⃣ Siloed data

2️⃣ Cultural resistance to change

3️⃣ Limited technical expertise

4️⃣ Not enough capacity for training

Aka: the perfect storm for stagnation. Not “our mission is wrong.” Not “the need isn’t real.” Just, we’re stuck, and it’s mostly us stopping us.

I also love something the Harrelson Center’s report on nonprofit change pointed out recently. Most nonprofit leaders aren’t actually resistant to change. They’re overextended. (Check back to last week’s column if you’re looking for more data and stories on this.)

When you’re already running on fumes just to keep the lights on and the mission moving, a new idea doesn’t feel like an opportunity. It feels like one more risk you don’t have the bandwidth to absorb. Researchers call that missing bandwidth “slack,” the time and flexibility to step back, test something, and adjust before you bet the whole operation on it.

Most of us in the work don’t have any slack.

Layer onto that the way this sector is funded. Research on flexible funding found that roughly 80% of nonprofits surveyed had less than a quarter of their funding unrestricted, and for more than half of them, flexible dollars made up just 10% of the budget. Restricted grants pay for the thing you already said you’d do, not the thing you haven’t tried yet. There’s rarely a line item for figuring out a better way. So the incentive structure itself rewards doing exactly what you did last year, on time and on budget, and quietly punishes anyone who tries something new and risks looking like they wasted a donor’s dollar.

[insert palm to forehead]

Proof that the phrase “that’s the way it’s always been done” is fostered by the systems set up to support the work. Navigating around them is notoriously difficult and often frowned upon.

This recovering major gift officer is speaking from experience.

And unlike a startup that can fail fast and pivot in private, we do this work in public. Stanford Social Innovation Review has written about how grant-seekers stay quiet about the gap between a sound bet and a sure thing for fear of scaring off a cautious funder, while funders, focused on results, often leave little room for a grantee’s discretion. Watched by donors, boards, and a sector primed to equate any misstep with mismanagement, we play it safe. Even after safe stops working.

My therapist has a phrase I believe applies here: “You’re holding onto a belief system that’s no longer serving you.” That’s what “we’ve always done it this way” actually is. Not a strategy. A belief system, formed under different conditions, in a different decade, that nobody’s gone back and re-tested since.

So here’s the tell I want you to start listening for. The next time you ask why something’s done a certain way, and someone says the dreaded, “because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” stop right there. You haven’t hit a wall. You’ve found a door. That sentence is basically a treasure map pointing straight at the exact spot most ripe for disruption in your org.

The world outside our sector is not waiting for us to catch up. It’s moving at the pace of a swipe, a scroll, an overnight update.

Possibility doesn’t wait for permission, and neither should we.

What Happens When We Pivot

When I look at those in the sector who aren’t waiting for permission, I’m amazed at the ingenuity and success that’s uncovered. Which is basically the plot of one of my favorite stories from this year, from Akeeya Umstead, founder of Misstakenid Gives Back Foundation in Durham, NC.

When Akeeya’s dad passed away after being cared for by his hospice team, she wanted to honor him with something bigger than her own grief. So she created the Wallace L. Umstead Legacy Cookout, a community gathering built around food, fellowship, and service for the elders and veterans at the facility where he’d lived.

She could’ve approached his hospice provider the way most of us approach a sponsor, email a flyer or graphic, cross your fingers, hope for a check. Instead she asked a totally different question: what could we co-create together?

That one question turned a transactional ask into a real partnership rooted in a story both sides already shared. “Sometimes the most impactful partner is not the organization you immediately think of when you hear sponsorship,” she told us. “It may be an organization that already has connection to your mission, your story, your community, or the people you serve.”

Here’s how that story actually ends. AuthoraCare Collective, the hospice provider who cared for Akeeya’s dad, said yes to a shared partnership, and didn’t just write a check, they showed up, donating door prizes for residents and staff alike. Once AuthoraCare was in, Roxboro Savings Bank and UTZ Snacks joined too. By September 2025, the Wallace L. Umstead Legacy Cookout had grown big enough that the Mayor of Roxboro showed up in person, Governor Josh Stein sent a letter recognizing the event, and a State House Representative came too. A cookout born out of grief, honoring one man and the hospice team that cared for him, ended up with the governor’s office sending a letter. That’s what happens when you ask the right question of the right partner and keep showing up.

That’s what linking arms actually looks like. Not networking. Not a logo swap for a check. Looking sideways at the people already standing next to you and asking what you could build if you stopped treating each other like line items.

Besides, the people standing beside you already believe. And there’s no stronger starting point than starting with your believers.

More Proof Possible Is Already Happening

Our community dropped so much gold when we asked them what they’d found was possible when they thought differently and approached the work collectively. Here’s a fast round of what our community’s already made possible, in their own words, and a handful join us on the podcast for an expanded series starting next week. Tune in 🎧

Anna Dravland founded Spread Goodness Day in 2017. Three weeks after launching it, she suffered a massive stroke that left her paralyzed and unable to speak or spell her own name. She kept the holiday alive anyway, relearning to walk while relaunching a global event. It’s now recognized across six states heading into its tenth year. “There’s no straight line to success,” she says, “and there’s not a finish line either. Just do it.”

Amy Milne spent 20 years fundraising for other people’s causes before her own years-long, undiagnosed health crisis showed her a gap nobody was funding: women’s below-the-belt health. So she built The Down There Affair, Canada’s first fundraising walk dedicated entirely to it, where participants are invited to walk in their underwear on purpose. “The event isn’t the fundraiser wrapped in a party,” she says. “The event is the intervention.”

Jai Parkash launched a digital literacy program for women in rural Haryana, India, through Delta Forum Society, with zero training budget. So he trained local college students, retired teachers, and program graduates to teach instead, and reached up to 200 women in smartphone use, digital payments, and online safety on trust alone. “Stop looking outward for expertise,” he says, “and start looking at who’s already inside your community who could lead.”

Alexander Kelley’s student union, WUSA, had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in Ontario. They stripped every barrier off the ballot, added an incentive with zero strings attached, and recruited more candidates instead of just marketing the vote itself. The result: a 60-year turnout record, broken. “If your goal is to grow involvement in something that already takes effort,” he says, “make that thing easier to do, not harder.”

April Thompson took a foster care nonprofit’s donor retention rate from 33% to 66% with a deceptively small tool: a ringless voicemail sent within 24 to 48 hours of every gift. “Giving gratitude is never time wasted,” she says. One touch nudges retention up. A second one within 90 days nudges it up again.

Jesse Bohlin rewrote RVC Seattle’s entire communications strategy after a major reduction in force, trading polish for honesty. They published a blog on how the org landed in a deficit. They put real reflection at the top of every newsletter. They even cursed in one. “People are craving authenticity from nonprofits,” they say. “They want to be in the struggle with us.”

Every single one of these started with a person deciding the limit in front of them was more movable than it looked. And every single one of them did it alone, in their own city, with their own community backing them up. Now imagine that same energy, all of it, happening on purpose, on the same day, everywhere at once.

Which Brings Me To ImpactUp

Which is exactly why we don’t leave that disruption to any one org or any one person staring down their own “we’ve always done it this way.”

This is the exact energy behind ImpactUp: Possible that’s happening literally today. ImpactUp is our quarterly global activation where the We Are For Good community picks one theme, shows up virtually together, then ripples out into local meetups in cities everywhere. This round, we’re exploring the theme “Possible,” and what becomes possible the second we stop trying to do it solo. One theme, held by thousands of us at once, turns out to unlock a lot more than any of us could unlock alone. That’s really the whole model. Community is the unlock. And if you want proof, just keep scrolling👇

How We Activate

Okay, so what do you actually do with all of this? Here’s the whole playbook, and none of it requires a plane ticket:

🎥 Show up virtually. Join us for free for ImpactUp - TODAY, 12 - 1:30 p.m. CST. Hala Hanna of MIT Solve is keynoting, and she’s spent her career proving what happens when the people closest to a problem get the resources to solve it. Worth clearing your calendar for, and just by signing up you’ll have access to all the replays for free.

📍 Find your city. Check the local meetup map and show up in person. This is genuinely where the good stuff happens, strangers turning into collaborators over bad coffee and good conversation.

🎤 Host one if yours isn’t listed. Apply to be a local host. Requirements are minimal. Impact is not.

🤝 Ask your own “what could we create together” question. Look sideways at a partner, a funder, a neighbor org already connected to your story, and pitch them something other than a sponsorship ask.

📣 Don’t let one “no” be the final answer. If a door closed recently, revisit it. Ask questions. Ask for a second look. Send the seven-page packet.

🎧 Listen to Scott’s episode. Catch our Possible conversation with Scott Curran on the podcast, then grab his book, Better Good, for the full framework behind everything he told us.

🔁 **Register even if you can’t watch live.** It’s not too late, and registering unlocks full access to the replay afterward, so nothing gets missed just because your calendar said no first.

The Roll Call

Here’s the part that gets me every time I look at this list. As of right now, we’ve got confirmed hosts across roughly 50 cities and six continents for ImpactUp: Possible, with a few more still landing.

North America: Boulder. Brooklyn. Chicago. Dallas. Fargo. Florence, CO. Incline Village, NV. Indianapolis. Kansas City, KS. Latham, NY. Manchester, NH. Nashville. New York City. Newport. Orlando. Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. San Antonio (with a second San Antonio crew joining too, apparently once wasn’t enough). San Diego. San Francisco. Seattle. Tacoma. Williamsburg. Pittsburgh. Philly. OKC (hi, hometown). Culver City. Westminster, MD. Bay City, MI. DC.

Vancouver + Burlington, Ontario are on board in Canada.

Latin America: Panama City. Barcelona, Venezuela, with two more Venezuela meetups verbally confirmed and headed our way.

Africa: Johannesburg, Gauteng. Lira, Uganda. Jinja, Uganda. Kampala, Uganda. Plus meetups building across Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia.

Oceania and beyond: Auckland, New Zealand. Dubai, UAE.

And a virtual meetup for everyone who can’t make it to a city above but still wants in on the day.

Read that list one more time.

Uganda and Nashville, on the same day, both building toward the same question: what’s possible when we finally stop waiting for someday? That’s not a coincidence. That’s the whole point of ImpactUp. The next breakthrough was never going to come from one city or one org. It was always going to come from what happens when we find each other.

This Week’s Prompt 💬

Katie didn’t accept her no. Akeeya asked a different question than the one everyone told her to ask. Anna kept a nonprofit alive while relearning how to spell her own name.

So here’s what I want to know: *what’s one “no” you haven’t fully accepted as final, or one partner sitting closer to your mission than you realized?*** What would it look like to treat that limit as movable this week instead of permanent?

Drop it in the comments below or click on the link to share.

One more thing before we close. You’re going to get another special message from me tomorrow. It’ll be short, human, and honest. And it tells you what the next eight weeks look like for me. I hope you’re supportive. Knowing that “doing good and being the good” brought you here gives me all the hope in the world that you will be.

We need each other. And I’m honored you chose to show up here.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵🥊

Never miss an episode + freebies + what’s trending now by subscribing to our newsletter each Monday, The Weekly. (and I thank you kindly for doing so 🫶)

My First Nervous Breakdown, Courtesy of This Sector

I had my first nervous breakdown in 2018, and nonprofit work was the biggest factor that brought me to my knees.

It was late 2018. I was part of a team raising a nearly $50 million capital campaign to build a mental health and addiction recovery center, which is ironic, given what was about to happen to me. I was studying for my CFRE. I was a mom. I was the person everyone called when their world fell apart because I was good at holding other people’s chaos.

I started feeling unwell. Nothing I could point to. Just static under my skin. My doctor asked if I had anxiety. I laughed. Of course I have anxiety. I’m a mom. I’m busy. Everyone does. She offered a low-dose something to take the edge off. I said no. I didn’t want to be medicated. Then I moved on.

Four weeks later, I was sitting on my couch on a Sunday afternoon studying for the CFRE exam (the CPA or Bar exam for fundraisers). My family was at church. I’d made myself a little lunch, nachos (my favorite), a Diet Coke, my favorite book, small joys, things that always perk me up a bit. And then, mid-bite, I realized I hated all of it. I dumped the plate. I stood four feet from a wall in my living room and started hysterically crying, the kind of crying I never do. And then I did the most bizarre thing of all. I sat down, crisscross applesauce, pulled my notes back into my lap, and kept reading about charitable remainder unitrusts while sobbing.

I want you to sit with how absurd and how real that scene was at the same time.

Three days later I took the CFRE exam on an anxious adrenaline high. Passed. Then two days later, the bottom dropped out. My first panic attack lasted 18 hours. That began 10 months of not knowing what was happening to my own brain.

The moment I remember most: standing at the bathroom sink one morning, mid-toothbrush, when a wave of dread hit me so hard I told my husband, Kyle, to get in bed and wrap his body around me right now. He looked at me, half-joking, half-terrified, and said the most important sentence anyone’s ever said to me: “Do I have your permission to take over?“ I said yes. For the first time in my life, I let someone else hold the reins.

I took three months of leave. My instinct was to take the least amount possible because that’s what high-achievers do. We minimize our own need. My therapist told me that instinct was the problem, not the solution. The first month off, I couldn’t tell you what I did. I just sat. I pet the dog. I stared out the window. It took that long to remember how to be still.

Here’s the Part I Want You to Hear

I had every possible privilege in that moment. Paid leave. A therapist. A partner who could step in. An employer who gave me short-term disability. And it still nearly broke me. If you’re carrying even one of those things without that same safety net underneath you, the mountain is that much steeper.

And back in 2018, I didn’t have the language for what was happening, and I only received some of those answers a couple years ago: I’m autistic and I have ADHD. Diagnosed as an adult, decades into a life I’d already built entirely around compensating for it without knowing that’s what I was doing.

That diagnosis didn’t just explain a quirky trait or two. It rewired how I understood the entire collapse. Late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD adults spend years, sometimes a lifetime, masking. Watching everyone else, calculating the “right” response, performing a version of normal that costs enormous energy nobody around you can see.

You look high-functioning. You look like you have it all together. Underneath, you’re running a second full-time job just to pass as fine. That’s not a small tax. That’s a reserve that quietly empties for years before anyone, including you, notices it’s gone.

Layer onto that the empathy.

Oh, the empathy: my greatest superpower plus my kryptonite, rolled into one.

It’s not a metaphor when I say I feel other people’s emotional weight. I learned a couple years ago that my autism sits in my feelings, and it lands in my body before I’ve consciously registered it. It’s a sensor that lets me “feel” when something is off, disingenuous, or just heavy. And it’s a lever that never turns off.

And this spidey sense is part of the wiring too. It’s a gift, genuinely. It’s why I could sit across from donors in crisis, hospital families at their worst, hear when a We Are For Good community member is collapsing mentally, emotionally, and physically, and actually still be present with them.

But a nervous system that absorbs everyone else’s fear, grief, and urgency, with no natural off switch, is a nervous system that runs a deficit every single day, even on the days nothing bad happens to me personally.

All of these are new insights for this 46-year-old brain. New learnings that tell me where I need to shift, how to communicate it, what’s mine to hold, and so on.

My therapist recently told me I have a crazy high level of tolerance for discomfort, conflict, and hard topics. I was proud. She said, “Oh, that’s not a gold star. That’s a signal that you’re running hot all the time. Let’s work on right-sizing that.”

Oops, fell into that old achieving phase again. Some habits are hard to shake.

Now add the state of the world on top of that. A body already running hot from masking, a mind already carrying everyone else’s weight, dropped into a few years of genuine, sustained collective anxiety, division, fear, uncertainty stacked on uncertainty, and people who don’t understand what’s happening inside me. That’s not one drop too many in the bucket. That’s the ocean deciding to pour in all at once.

Autistic and ADHD brains are frequently wired for heightened threat sensitivity to begin with. Add a world that keeps giving real reasons to feel unsafe, and the system doesn’t just get tired. It goes into a kind of quiet, invisible free fall, all the while, to someone on the outside, it looks like someone who simply “has a lot going on.”

That’s what actually collapsed me. Not one bad Sunday. Years of unmetabolized masking, empathy with no boundary, and a world that never let the alarm bell fully quiet down. And even worse, the world - my people - the ones closest to me, had become used to me running at this pace consistently, and weren’t ready to embrace the world where I couldn’t carry it all.

Conundrum for everyone.

Understanding all that didn’t undo the damage. But it gave me something I didn’t have in 2018: a reason it happened that wasn’t “something is wrong with me.” Something was finally, accurately explained about me. That’s a very different thing to carry.

Yet, I’m not the only one carrying something heavy in this work. Not even close.

I’m Not Alone in the Reality of My Story

All of that felt deeply isolating.

All of that felt shameful.

All of that made me feel broken.

And even worse, I didn’t know anyone in the nonprofit sector who’d had even close to a similar experience.

That is, until I shared my story on the podcast, then asked the question: “What’s your mental health story?”

And the stories flooded in.

In 2023, We Are For Good launched our first-ever mental health survey. We didn’t want to just measure the quantitative (though it’s highly important), because we knew the stories behind the stats would reveal an even greater truth of what’s happening.

I wasn’t fully prepared for what we received. Here are a couple in their own words.

A father of six, who leads a business serving this sector, had what he called a very public breakdown in front of his family and neighbors in 2020, and spent three days hospitalized. “I was very good at showing my teams compassion and making sure they were taking the time they needed for themselves,” he wrote. “But I was very bad at showing myself the same compassion and self-love.” He’s since become, in his own words, a mental health advocate wherever he goes.

A 52-year-old Ugandan man started a community-based organization with the aim to help vulnerable children acquire quality education, counseling, and to encourage and support vulnerable people in the community by providing free medications, food, and clean water. The work is unbelievably challenging, as many of these individuals were victims of the Kony rebel war from 1995 to 2006. “People in northern Uganda suffered a lot from the Kony war. Many innocent fathers, mothers, and youths were killed and left orphans, with remaining relatives in bad conditions. The work we are doing together is helping many people, including children, have hope for their future.” It’s a balancing act to maintain your mental health amidst a traumatized population.

A prospect research professional who’s spoken at Apra International chapters about burnout, imposter syndrome, and what he calls “the tyranny of the urgent,” told us he’s built small practices into his life to fight it, like limiting himself to one or two email check-in windows a day instead of leaving his inbox open like an open wound. “Yet as consistently as I apply them, workforce culture and constant access to devices intervene,” he wrote, “starting the cycle of burnout and urgency anew.”

A woman leading an entire refugee resettlement team, newly appointed into that role while, in her words, “the entirety of the resettlement infrastructure is under attack,” told us the last boss she trusted listened to her 24 months ago when she said she was going through the equivalent of a divorce. “The grace she showed me is what I hope to now bring to the role,” she wrote.

An anonymous fundraiser spent seven years in what she called a toxic workplace, ultimately leaving after facing bullying and harassment from a CEO who told her that her sexuality was “against her religion.” She’s since found a fully remote role where she can show up as her authentic self, name a hard day out loud, and take a mental health day without asking permission first. “My mental health is the strongest it has ever been,” she wrote, “though it’s something I continue to work on daily.”

A veteran, more than a decade into social impact work, currently working as a contractor with no benefits, wrote candidly about living with severe PTSD, and about losing the life and the person she thought she was, and finding a whole new one in its place. “I find strength in social impact,” she told us. “I am still learning to balance self sacrifice and being a part of change for good.” She asked us to keep her story anonymous.

Multiple women - multiple (insert chilling shudder) - cited being in active labor whilst still making edits to work presentations, fielding calls from anxious executive directors, and “just a quick finish” post-labor to things that simply couldn’t get done in the time before baby’s arrival.

A woman who lost her mother to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) last year while running her own small consulting practice serving nonprofits described the 12 months since as tortuous, watching her mother decline while trying to keep her business afloat, and said, simply, “It has been 12 months and I would say we are just starting to see some light.”

A man in his late 70s, who’s spent decades leading food pantry work across Michigan and Illinois after an earlier career in automotive parts sales, wrote to us about being a recovering alcoholic, with no relapse since 2016. “With support and encouragement of a life partner of 55 years, I have contributed to the well-being of the people I encounter,” he told us, “and have used my experiences, both positive and negative, to read into the lives of the people around me as they, in turn, read into mine.”

A C-suite leader in Europe, a mom of three navigating a chronic illness and her own neurodivergence, told us her workplace supports her need for flexibility while still holding real structure and accountability, “which allows me to (usually!) be my most productive self.”

None of these are dramatic. That’s the point. Burnout rarely announces itself with a confetti cannon. It shows up as a bucket, quietly filling, one ordinary Thursday at a time, whether you’re running a food pantry in the Midwest, a resettlement team on the front lines of policy chaos, a village in northern Uganda, or a one-woman consulting shop while grieving your mother.

That’s real every day for people deep in the work.

What the Data Says (And It’s Not Subtle)

I layered three sources against each other: Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) national CEO data (sample size 380), the Social Impact Staff Retention Project (SISR) survey (sample size 300), and three years of our own We Are For Good community’s mental health survey (sample size 400). Three insights kept surfacing, no matter which lens I used.

📈 Insight 1: Demand Is Rising. Capacity Is Falling.

• 73% of nonprofit CEOs report increased demand for services (CEP).

• Nearly 30% have had to cut staff anyway (CEP).

• 7 in 10 frontline staff plan to look for a new job this year (SISR).

• Across three years of our own survey, “too much to do” is the single most repeated phrase in every open-text response.

Translation: orgs are being asked to do more with structurally less, every single year, and the people expected to close that gap are the same people burning out.

💔 Insight 2: It’s Not the Money. It’s the Support.

• The top reason staff are leaving isn’t pay, it’s “too much responsibility, not enough support” (59%, SISR), followed by no clear growth path (54%) and unsupportive leadership (52%). Pay ranks lower, at 50% (but is still a very real issue).

• CEO burnout rated “very much a concern” jumped from 30% to 46% in one year (CEP), driven largely by carrying organizational weight with no backup.

• Our own community’s respondents repeated “lack of management support” across all three survey years, almost word for word.

Translation: people aren’t leaving because of what they’re paid. They’re leaving because of who has their back, or doesn’t.

🌱 Insight 3: Culture Retains People. Perks Don’t.

• 78% of staff cite flexibility, hybrid or remote work, as the top reason they stay (SISR). Mission alignment (74%) and a genuinely good work environment (71%) aren’t far behind.

• Almost 30% of nonprofit CEOs report a renewed sense of purpose despite the hardship (CEP); purpose paired with support builds resilience, purpose alone just delays the crash.

• In our own survey, people who did access therapy or had flexible time consistently cited having explicit permission and a supportive culture as the deciding factor, not just whether the benefit technically existed on paper.

Translation: retention is a culture problem with a culture solution. You can’t perk your way out of a broken belief system.

A quick word here: the SISR survey I keep citing was co-created by Michelle Flores Vryn and Evan Wildstein, two nonprofit execs who’ve spent their careers working tirelessly on behalf of this sector and the humans inside it. This data exists because they cared enough to go build it themselves. Bravo, friends 👏

Why This Is One of the Biggest Threats Facing Human Issues Today

I want to be direct about something.

This isn’t a “nice to fix eventually” problem.

It’s not even an “oh, that sucks for those people doing hard work” platitude.

This is a structural threat to the entire safety net all our communities rely on.

Here’s the math nobody talks about.

The people running domestic violence shelters, refugee resettlement programs, food banks, disability services, and mental health nonprofits are, themselves, the last line of defense for the most vulnerable people in this country and around the world.

When the data tells us demand is rising while capacity is shrinking, that’s not an internal HR problem. That’s the safety net developing holes in exactly the places we need it most. If the people catching everyone else are themselves in freefall, who’s left standing underneath?

I keep coming back to Lindsey Fuller’s work on this. Lindsey’s the Executive Director of The Teaching Well, and also one of the sector’s most forward-thinking change leaders on building what she calls “work cultures we don’t have to heal from.”

She says the quiet part out loud in a way most of us are too afraid to: “Burnout is the default, and I reject that. We think we can be healthy, wealthy, and impactful right here in the social sector space.” Not one or the other. Both.

Lindsey talks about a Continuous Replenishment Cycle, the idea that wellness isn’t a single retreat or a one-time perk. It’s a practice you return to again and again, the way you’d return to breathing.

“Wellness is your birthright,” she says. Not a bonus you earn after you’ve proven your worth through exhaustion. A birthright.

She also names something that I think is the real threat underneath the threat: masking.

In one of her episodes she said, “Young people in our communities are watching us. They want to feel like they can bring more and more of themselves and dedicate less and less mental and emotional energy to masking, fitting inside of a box.”

That’s not just a generational observation. That’s a warning.

If the next generation of changemakers watches us burn ourselves down to prove our commitment, they won’t walk through that door behind us. We will lose them before we ever get the chance to hand them anything.

And here’s the piece we all need to hear: “I always tell my team, we can do hard things as long as we choose each other.”

That’s it. That’s the whole antidote in one sentence. Not less hard work. Not fewer crises. Choosing each other inside the hard work, instead of white-knuckling it alone.

“Collective liberation starts with me. My rest is resistance.” Lindsey said that after receiving a violent, harassing phone call at her own organization, and choosing to regulate her nervous system and protect her team rather than let fear dictate the next move. If she can hold that line in an actual crisis, the rest of us can hold it in a normal Monday. I believe that.

Brooke Richie-Babbage, who coaches nonprofit leaders on exactly this problem, offers the reframe I think the whole sector needs: “Capacity building is about changing the conditions under which your work happens, making the ‘how’ easier.” Not more heroics. Not ‘everyone just trying harder.’ Different conditions. She puts it even more plainly: “Stability is a leadership choice.”

That’s not a guilt trip. It’s actually the most hopeful sentence in this whole section because a choice can be made differently starting today.

What This Means, and What We Can Do About It

Here’s the belief we have to kill first: the idea that struggle is proof of commitment or that the more depleted you are, the more it proves you care about the mission.

Hard stop.

That belief is the actual disease. Everything else is a symptom.

The belief we need to build in its place is simple, and it’s the same one Lindsey Fuller keeps saying out loud: you can be healthy, well-resourced, and deeply impactful, all at once, and none of those things cancel each other out. Culture change starts the moment enough of us actually believe that and hold our orgs + leaders to it - not just say it in an all-staff meeting once a year.

Here’s what that looks like:

If You Lead

• Model the leave, don’t just approve it. If you email on your vacation, your team will believe that’s what “committed” looks like, no matter what your handbook says.

• Build codified systems, not just good intentions. Lindsey’s language is exact: people are far more resilient “when there are clear, codified systems, when you can rest into the structures and expectations inside of your organization.” Clarity is a form of care.

• Ask “how are you, actually” and mean it, then hold space for an answer that might be inconvenient to hear mid-campaign.

• Choose flexibility before you chase a raise you can’t afford yet. The data is clear: flexibility retains people almost as powerfully as compensation does.

• Say the quiet part out loud, then build the policy behind it: “Burnout is the default, and I reject that.”

If You’re on the Frontline

• Say the sentence out loud to one person: “I am not okay.” You don’t need the perfect words. Kyle’s words back to me weren’t fancy, they were just true.

• Take the leave. All of it. Not the minimum.

• Find your person, the one you can text mid-crisis and say “I need you to take over.” If you don’t have one yet, that’s what our community is for.

• Let go of the myth that struggling means you’re failing the mission. “We can do hard things as long as we choose each other.” You were never meant to do this solo or over capacity.

If You Support Nonprofits, as a Donor, Volunteer, or Mission Fan

(aka: the MacKenzie Scott human-prioritized vetting policy enacted👇)

• Ask about staff turnover, not just program outcomes. If an org can’t tell you their retention rate, that’s information too.

• Ask whether leadership actually uses their own PTO policy. A generous benefits page means nothing if nobody’s allowed to use it without guilt.

• Demand multi-year, unrestricted funding whenever you can. Scarcity breeds burnout. Stability breeds the capacity to actually rest. This is one of the single highest-leverage things a funder can do for staff wellbeing.

• Ask what the org is doing about psychological safety, not as a checkbox, but as infrastructure. Lindsey’s framework sorts policies into three buckets: care, conditions, and corrections. A nonprofit that can answer which bucket its policies fall into is a nonprofit that’s actually done the work.

• Refuse the overhead myth out loud. If you find yourself judging a nonprofit for spending “too much” on staff salaries or wellness benefits, interrogate that reflex. You’re not funding a machine. You’re funding people. Jon and I actually dug into this at length with Mallory Erickson on the podcast, in The Overhead Myth, if you want the fuller argument for why this belief needs to die.

• Stop treating nonprofit staff like they should be grateful just to have the job. Passion is not payment. Ask the people doing this work how they’re actually doing, and believe the answer.

What It Means When the Helpers Leave

Sit with this number for a second: SISR’s survey showed seven in 10 nonprofit staff are planning to look for a new job this year.

That’s not a staffing hiccup. That’s a wave.

And when a wave that size pulls back from the shore, it doesn’t just leave an empty beach, it takes the sandbags with it. The domestic violence shelter loses the advocate who knew every survivor’s name. The food bank loses the coordinator who’d built trust with every single family in line. The refugee resettlement team loses the one person who understood both the paperwork and the person standing in front of it. Institutional knowledge doesn’t transfer in an exit interview. It just walks out the door.

We talk endlessly about mission impact, dollars raised, meals served, lives touched. We almost never talk about what happens to the mission when the humans delivering it are too depleted to keep showing up.

But the mission and the people carrying it aren’t two separate things. They’re the same thing. You can’t protect one while discarding the other and expect the work to survive.

So here’s my ask, plain and simple: care about your mission friends with the same ferocity you care about the mission itself. Not as a nice add-on. As the actual infrastructure the mission is built on. Because if we keep losing the helpers at this rate, there won’t be anyone left standing between the crisis and the people who need us most.

One More Thing

I’m not just writing about this - I’m trying my best to live it.

I’m going to be taking an extended leave soon.

There’s a bigger story behind that, and it’s not one I’m ready to tell yet. But I wanted you to hear it from me, here, before you hear it anywhere else. When I’m ready, I’ll tell you the whole thing. For now, just know: I’m practicing exactly what I just spent this entire column asking you to do.

Take the damn leave.

This work, and our world, needs us healthy to unleash the fight needed to equalize + empower good. We need your whole self in the ring.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵🥊

Never miss an episode + freebies + what’s trending now by subscribing to our newsletter each Monday, The Weekly. (and I thank you kindly for doing so 🫶)

Take Action + Free Resources

🌐 Visit our own hub built for exactly this: weareforgood.com/mentalhealth. It’s a curated, growing list of every mental health conversation, books, organizations and curated help.

🤝Check out your own Employee Assistance Program, if your org has one. Most people never use it. Use it.

🧘‍♀️Explore Tandem, Sanctuary In Tandem offers a rest fellowship built specifically for social changemakers who’ve poured themselves empty.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Lindsey Fuller: 513. Cultivating Wellness in Leadership: How The Teaching Well’s Approach Revolutionizes Nonprofit Work Environments

🎧 Listen to Brooke Richie-Babbage reframe capacity as a design problem, not a personal failure: 674. Shift 4, Capacity Isn’t Extra: Build Your Foundation for Sustainable Growth

🎧 Listen to Jon and Mallory Erickson take on the belief system underneath all of this: The Overhead Myth

🎧 Listen to Diaris Alexander, Carolina García Jayaram, Virginia Almendarez, and Jonah Nigh on what it actually takes to lead whole: 553. Our Sector Needs Whole Leaders. Here’s How.

🎧 Listen to Channon Lucas, Lindsey Fuller, Michelle Flores Vryn, and Jennifer Mulholland on retention: 561. Building a Durable + Retention Focused Team Culture

🎧 More burnout-specific conversations worth your time, all findable at weareforgood.com/mentalhealth: 579. From Burnout to Balance, with Kishshana Palmer, 573. Unlocking the Power of Alignment Fundraising + Combatting Burnout, with Mallory Erickson, 474. Navigating Through Burnout, with Diaris Alexander, and 332. It’s Time to Prioritize Mental Health in the Nonprofit Sector, with Nneka Allen, Eleanor Wells, Aila Malik, and Jean Pierre-Louis.

🌱 Learn more about Lindsey’s organization: The Teaching Well

📊 Read the full report: CEP’s State of Nonprofits 2026

📊 Read the full findings: SISR 2025, Social Impact Staff Retention, co-created by Michelle Flores Vryn and Evan Wildstein

🌐 Another good place to find help if you don’t know where to start: Mental Health America offers free, confidential screening tools and a searchable directory to help you find support near you

🆘 If you or someone you love is in crisis: call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free, confidential support available 24/7/365, with counselors trained specifically for moments like this.

In July of last year, my family and I uprooted from our home in Edmond, Oklahoma, and set our eyes due west on the mountains as we relocated to Fort Collins, Colorado.

All our family was in Oklahoma. So were our friends, our church, our favorite spots, our beloved community. All our beliefs and behaviors were formulated, nurtured and set on fire there.

But something had happened to me in the last six years. And that change was profound.

I knew the We Are For Good journey would change my life in big and small ways. I could never have foreseen the totality of its effect on the world — and on me.

Something rewires within you when you’ve sat across from 700+ strangers and asked to hear their stories and what they know. Something changes within you when you don’t just interview, you absorb. Something happens within you when you hear stories about impact.

About human deficiency and human solve. About mental health, wellness, belonging. About power. About how to deal with toxicity + division. About how we build something meaningful and long-lasting that generates rather than depletes. About how to be the brightest version of yourself.

And it unlocked the power of connected community within me. And once I knew and understood, I knew I could never live without it in my life.

I think the old Becky might say I changed entirely. But that wouldn’t be the truth.

The reality was that I was becoming me again. The real me.

I’ve been calling this process: The Great Unraveling.

And when it became clear our family wasn’t in that space of value-aligned community, we did the insane thing of saying, “we love you and we loved our time here, but we’re moving in the direction we believe we were meant to be.”

• Shock.

• Disbelief.

• Fears.

• Worries.

• Questions.

👆These feelings bubbled up hot and fast…as it did for every Okie who loved us.

• How are our children going to adjust?

• How are we going to pay for this?

• How will Kyle find a job?

• What’s coming from this move that we can’t see from here?

• Will Dixie’s joints do well in the cold? (Yes, our dog held his own category of worry. #priorities)

• Are we crazy? (← questioned many times)

The list went on and on.

It’s easy to get caught up in the realities facing you, to let fear take hold and do the safe thing. But this moment felt so heavy and important, a chance to teach our daughters what it means to align with who you are and where you want to be. And to trust your gut, and just fucking go for it.

So we leapt.

The decision was made. Now it needed a North Star - something to make sure we followed our heart, and not just the way we’d always done things. So we went back to our values. We sat down as a family and asked ourselves two questions: What do we want to leave in Oklahoma? And what do we want to bring to Colorado?

It started out light — kids wanting adventure, Kyle wanting to lose weight, lots of laughing before we got anywhere near the heart of it. Then Sophie, quietly: “I don’t want to be around fake people anymore. I just want to be loved for who I am.”

Boom.

Leave it to the neurospicies to name what’s really there and question it. Bravo.

With that vulnerability, the tone shifted, and the floodgates opened for what we wanted less of and what we wanted more of. Two sheets of poster paper went up on the wall and filled fast. Leave: masking, insincerity, division and otherizing, high screen time, isolation from each other, bottling up emotions, fake friends. Bring: more adventure, more hiking, mountain climbing, kayaking, trout fishing, Sunday family time, learning about neurodivergence together - even Dixie’s needs made the cut.

We co-built the new life we wanted to lead. We built a bucket list of things we want to do, and I can proudly say we’re more than 60% of the way through it. With those two lists taped to the wall, we had our North Star. So we packed up the house, hugged our people until it hurt, and pointed the car west.

As we drove away from Oklahoma, I realized an hour down the road that I hadn’t looked in the rearview mirror once. I didn’t shed tears. I simply said “thank you” in my heart for what I’d been given in that space, and moved toward where I felt the light and love calling me.

Fourteen hours later, loaded down with two cars, one U-haul, two kids, one dog, three mattresses and a literal *freezer filled with beef we saw the mountains creep up in the distance - and it weirdly already felt like home.

*Y’all, I realize this is about the most trite Oklahoma stereotype unfolding, but hear me out. Kyle’s dad is a brilliant rancher + farmer, so we have incredible beef. We had just received our portion of a calf, and my husband literally transported that appliance the entire way to Colorado, plugged it into an outlet outside the La Quinta Inn, and transferred the next day when we got keys to a house we’d bought without ever stepping inside. Commitment ✊

Spoiler alert: taking that road less traveled has made all the difference.

From the moment we arrived in Fort Collins, community encircled us.

We knew two friends here. They introduced us to their friends. Who introduced us to their friends. Who brought their kids so our kids would know other kids at school. Who invited us over for barbecues and birthday parties and fishing trips. Our neighbors opened their arms to us. Our daughter’s new tennis coach arranged for her to play with two teammates. Palisade peaches were given (holy geez, Palisade peaches) as a housewarming gift. The We Are For Good community, led by Chris Barlow and Lauren Atherton, arranged a northern Colorado welcome dinner. Bart Lillie coordinated happy hours for nonprofit professionals in the region. We found collective joy serving with the Colorado State University Food Pantry ‘Rams Against Hunger’ as a family.

I thought you might like to see it in action 👇

This is what value-aligned community looks like in action.

And I sank into it like you do that couch at your grandma’s house that feels so warm and comforting.

In two months, we didn’t feel like strangers. We felt like neighbors. One year in, we’ve found our village.

And it turns out, my story isn’t that uncommon.

An Art Date With Destiny

Our one-year move-to-Colorado anniversary coincided with a dream vacation for our family to Kauai. Last week was spent relaxing, sleeping, napping (yes, sleeping and napping, entirely different things), boogie boarding, eating whatever fresh fish we could find, and soaking in the immense beauty of this jungle island.

And let me tell you about a beautiful stranger I met.

Her name is Kate.

You know when you meet someone who just seems to radiate from the inside out? Like a glow that emits warmth and safety? That’s how it felt meeting Kate.

Here’s the scene.

Kyle and I have hit that wonderful sweet spot in parenthood where, after “vacation dinner,” we can wave goodbye to our teenagers at the pool and go have a date. Every evening we’d go for a long walk, look at the stars (you can see the Milky Way with the naked eye in Kauai), listen to the waves crash, and just amble along and visit.

We didn’t know our feet were leading us on an art date.

One night, our steps led us into a beautiful art gallery owned by Aaron Feinberg. You should know, we love art, like, love it in a “finding money in an old jacket pocket” way. There was a piece in the gallery that stopped me in my tracks. I was transfixed. I thought it was watercolor - not photography.

Someone saw and felt that shift in me. And that’s when Kate walked over.

We spent more than an hour visiting with her. We talked about art, what we loved about it, what she loved, how it makes us feel, what we notice, how it awakens, and finally received a transcendent light demo. It was magical, and I think it all happened in the space of less than 150 square feet.

While Kyle went back to the room for a credit card to buy Aaron’s coffee table book, I hung back to visit with Kate.

That’s when our worlds collided.

She asked about our background, and I told her everything: about our move, our determination to find value-aligned community that uplifts and pours into each other, about We Are For Good and this Impact Uprising we were naive and ridiculous enough to chase. I told her about The Great Unraveling.

Then she turned to me and said some of my favorite words: that’s my story too.

You see, Kate had taken a similar leap of faith recently. In early November she’d purchased a one-way ticket, leaving her home in upstate New York as well as a CEO role for a multi-year stretch of solitude in Kauai, searching for “reinvention” in her value-aligned community too. She loved swimming, art, business development and meeting new people. She felt she was being called to the light and water.

So she leapt.

Would you believe she was a podcaster?

Would you believe her podcast was also about empowering impact and unleashing brilliant leaders?

And she loved art, turtles and hugs too?

Soul sister found.

And she said a line that’s hung in the front of my brain ever since.

“I just felt stuck, you know? Like, the place that I was standing then was not entirely letting my shine out.”

Whoa.

My shine.

That’s what “it” is. The intangible heart at the core of our being. The knowing. The you.

So I ask you, friends - have you thought about your shine? That gut feeling inside you that lights up when you’re wholly yourself, when you’re seen and accepted for who you are, surrounded by people who love you being you?

It’s the greatest feeling in the world. Like, it’s Pretzel Day level of joy.

Play Your Part

What Kate said cracked something open in me, because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it.

Months before we ever boarded a flight to Kauai, I sat across from my friend Jeff Shuck on the We Are For Good podcast. Jeff is the co-author of Leading with Light. Over three decades of leading fundraising and consulting firms, his campaigns have raised more than a billion dollars for charity - and somewhere in there he turned his life’s work toward something quieter and, I’d argue, far more radical: helping people find their light and the courage to let it out.

Here’s how Jeff put it in a conversation we had last year exploring one of our most important social impact trends of 2025: We Need Your Light.

“The fundamental idea that we’re proposing for people to try on is: what if the world is waiting for you to realize that you matter? What if that’s the invitation - for you to realize you don’t have to play every part? You just need to play yours. Because if you don’t play yours, no one else can do it.”

You don’t have to play every part. You just have to play yours.

I think about the year I’ve had, the leap, the unraveling, the rebuilding, and I realize now that so much of it was me finally agreeing to play my part instead of everyone else’s.

Jeff calls the thing underneath all of this “a crisis of consciousness,” not the loud crises we can all point to, but the quieter one happening inside each of us: our instinct to run, to numb, to doomscroll, to disconnect from what’s real because we don’t trust we’re strong enough to hold it. His antidote isn’t blind positivity. It’s practice.

“Optimism is a practice,” he told me. “You practice things you want to get better at. When you’re feeling defeated, instead of the indulgence of going into that place for a year or a decade, the practice says, what could I do to make distance between myself and my thoughts? What could I do that’s constructive?”

He’s not asking anyone to pretend the woods aren’t dark. He’s asking what you do once you’re lost in them: “Someone says, ‘this sucks, but maybe I can gather some wood for a fire.’ Someone else finds leaves for a place to sit. And someone else just says, ‘I can’t believe it’s going to rain. We’re stuck out here. It’s never going to work.’”

Low social utility, he calls it. Understandable. Not entirely helpful.

When my co-host, Jon McCoy, asked Jeff what “light” even means, he didn’t overcomplicate it: “At the core, we mean your soul, your spark, the essence of God, the thing that is incarnate in you that makes you special and who you are.” You find clues to it, he said, in what lights you up, what breaks your heart, what makes you feel mirth. They’re all pointing back to the same place.

I’ll share something personal, too. Two summers ago, at a wellness retreat alongside Jeff and his incomparable business partner in wellness, Jennifer Mulholland, I was in the thick of my own unraveling, raw, tired, wondering if I’d lost the plot entirely. We Are For Good was soaring, but I wasn’t. Jeff took my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said four words I’ve carried with me every single day since:

“You’re not broken, friend.”

Then I burst into tears and fell into his chest. And he gave me one of those comforting dad hugs and said it again softly. (Thank you Jeff. I really needed that.)

I want to hand that phrase to you too, because I have a hunch some of you need it as much as I did.

Which brings me back to Kate, standing in that gallery on a Kauai night, telling a stranger, “I just felt stuck, you know? Like the place I was standing was not entirely letting my shine out.”

She’d never met Jeff. She didn’t need to. She’d already found her way to the same truth on her own: sometimes you have to move across an ocean, or across a country, or maybe across the block, or maybe it’s just a mental move before your shine - your light - can finally do what it was made to do.

What Makes You Come Alive?

It’s time. We need to put intention around going toward what makes us feel alive.

The obvious division and despair we’re feeling right now has an antidote - connection. And we’ve forgotten, in the middle of all that noise, is the light that already lives in each of us. All hope isn’t lost. It’s waiting to be called in. Step out into it. We need you.

So what’s restorative?

Coming together. Doing good. Helping. Listening. Comforting. Expanding. Just being present. Resting. Volunteering.

But you may be more of a list person like me, so here’s the practice, broken down:

🎧 Listen first. Tune inside to what’s stirring within your own soul. And Howard Thurman knew this. Coming alive isn’t just about renewal - it’s allowing yourself to become a part of something bigger. It’s a calling to be the change, the hope, the joy, the solution. One baby step at a time.

🌳 Find your oak tree. Where’s the quiet space where you can get still and center down? Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are part of your dreams and your ambitions. Thurman says we must learn how to still ourselves and bend in the wind.

🔥 Steel yourself, then bend. The wind gets violent sometimes. Learn to hold your ground and know when to flex. Both take strength.

💡 Ask a bigger question. Thurman put it best: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

🧭 Trust your internal authority. Psychologists call this an internal locus of control: the moment someone realizes they have agency and can act on it. If we listen to that inner voice, we can live out who we’re truly called to be. We’ve all been given specific gifts and abilities, but too often we let what other people say about us cloud our own knowing.

🎁 Name your gifts out loud. What can you share with the world? Your story matters. You are enough, and you’re strong enough to meet this moment.

🌱 Plant your mustard seed. Look for the people who give you hope. It starts small and grows to six-feet-tall, always focused on the future. Do your small thing to make the world a little better. It might be mundane. But it’s something.

🌵 Root down like the acacia. These trees grow in the desert with almost no water because their roots run deep enough to stay grounded, deep enough to keep their leaves from withering. That’s centering down: being rooted so you can become part of something bigger than yourself.

🫶 Remember who you are. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Truly.

Take Action

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Jeff Shuck on the We Are For Good podcast: 603. 2025 Social Impact Trends That Matter: We Need Your Light

📖 Read the book: Leading with Light: Choosing Conscious Leadership When You’re Ready for More by Jeff Shuck and Jennifer Mulholland

🌐 Learn more about Kate’s podcast + work

🎨 See the art that started it all at aFeinberg Photography

💬 This Week’s Prompt

Here’s what I keep coming back to: Kate didn’t need fancy language to describe what was missing. She just knew the place she was standing wasn’t letting her shine out. And I didn’t need a diagnosis to know I needed to hear “you’re not broken, friend.” Sometimes the moment someone truly sees us doesn’t look like anything dramatic at all.

So we want to know: What makes you feel truly seen? Like you’re finally letting your shine out?

It doesn’t have to be a big moment. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that hold the most weight. Drop it in the comments below or tell me directly here.

Go let your shine out. The world’s been waiting for it.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

Never miss an episode + freebies + what’s trending now by subscribing to our newsletter each Monday, The Weekly. (and we thank you kindly for doing so 🫶)

Quick Hits

🎙️ On the Pod: One conversation, one meal, one person at a time - that’s how Courtney Johnson turned her father’s cancer battle into Culinary Care, a mission that’s now delivered 40,000+ free meals to families fighting cancer. She joined the We Are For Good podcast to talk food, grief, community-building, and why “the least you could do” can change a life. Give it a listen 🍽️

🩵 Good Humans: Adam Garone co-founded Movember back in 2003, turning a silly mustache-growing dare into a global movement that’s raised over $1.5 billion for men’s health. Rather than coast on that legacy, he took the CEO seat at Starlight Children’s Foundation, building a culture around the healing power of play to make hospital stays a little lighter for seriously ill kids. Twice now he’s found a way to make something joyful actually move the needle, which is no accident. Plus, he’s warm, funny, and exactly the kind of leader who proves impact and delight coexist beautifully.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight: Charlie Grosso traded a 20-year advertising career to found Hello Future, teaching Syrian refugee teens in an Iraqi Kurdistan camp digital literacy and entrepreneurship, so a generation often overlooked by aid groups can become community leaders instead of falling through the cracks. Her students have used the skills to launch real micro-businesses in a week — one team turned $5 into $34 offering grandmothers a virtual reality tour of Mecca. Give them a follow!

🌱Environmental Goodness: Big shift for fast fashion: as of July 19, big EU companies are banned from destroying unsold clothes and shoes - no more shredding or landfilling perfectly good stock. Instead they have to sell it (discounts, alternate markets), donate it, or repair and resell it. Textiles are the first product category hit with this rule, and for good reason: Europe destroys an estimated 4–9% of all textiles put on the market before they’re ever used - up to 594,000 tons a year. Celebrating this win for the circular economy!

🎉 Worthy of Celebrating: I’ve been living my whole life at Ludicrous Speed waiting for this. Spaceballs: The New One is finally happening in 2027! Marvel fans, Star Wars fans, doesn’t matter - the Spaceballs Cinematic Universe is the most clever brand + design + fandom + cheeky thing in the galaxy. Rabid fan approved 🪮⚫️🪖

🌎 Global Good News: Imagine your phone buzzing to tell you someone nearby needs help, and you actually know what to do. That’s real life in Sweden: over 150,000 CPR-trained volunteers are signed up for an app called SMS-livräddare, and they get alerted the moment a 112 call comes in for a suspected cardiac arrest. They often beat the ambulance there. It’s a genuinely brilliant use of crowdsourcing, and it’s saving lives. Swedes, you continue to impress.

🐀Hilarious Ingenuity: When federal funding dried up, marmot scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab didn’t panic. They pivoted to OnlyFans. Seriously. ‘OnlyMarms‘ is 100% G-rated, 100% adorable, and 100% dead serious about funding 65 years of research. Science has never been this thirsty for subscribers. Bravo scientists.

Picture a 90-year-old woman setting out her good tea mugs.

She’s not running for office. She’s not on any ballot. She’s just made a pot of tea, put out a plate of cookies, and invited her neighbors over, the way she’s probably done a hundred times before. People file in, sit down, talk about their week, maybe grumble about the potholes on the way over. Nothing about the afternoon looks remotely political.

And yet, by the time all those mugs get rinsed and put away, a local election has flipped. By 57 votes.

That’s what happened to my friend Hali Lee’s mother-in-law. And that tea party is the whole thesis of this post.

Okay friends, buckle up, because I’m about to make you fall in love with tea parties and county commission meetings in the same breath.

Trust me.

Democracy warrior Hannah Fried told us a similar story, and it starts a lot further from a teacup, but ends up in exactly the same place.

In Apache County, AZ, hundreds of voters from the Navajo Nation were disenfranchised in 2024. Not because of some sweeping federal fight you’d catch on the news, but because there just weren’t enough polling locations on tribal land. Many Native voters don’t have a traditional mailing address. Some live a long way from a mailbox or a post office. Voting in-person isn’t a preference for a lot of these folks, it’s the only real option they’ve got.

Hannah’s organization, All Voting Is Local (AVL), worked alongside Native Vote partners for years to fix this. And they finally got it done. A commitment from the county to add voting locations. Hundreds and hundreds of people who’d been locked out of the process, let back in.

Here’s my favorite part: one of the AVL staff members who worked on that fight is herself a member of the Navajo Nation. This wasn’t some outside group parachuting in with a clipboard. It was someone fighting for her own community’s right to vote, alongside neighbors and relatives she actually knows by name.

“It’s really meaningful for our staff,” Hannah shared. The people closest to the harm are so often the ones doing the work to fix it, and they deserve to be seen doing it.

“It’s a statement from the county that we see you,” she added. “We know your vote is important.”

Here’s the part that gives me hope every single time I sit with a story like this:

Nobody voted on this in Congress.

Nobody debated it on cable news.

A handful of local officials quietly decided how many polling places a community gets, and that decision changed hundreds of lives.

“Our elections, by design, are run at the local level,” Hannah said. That’s not an accident. It’s baked right into the architecture of this country. Which means democracy’s most powerful lever isn’t a presidential debate stage.

It’s a county commission meeting most of us have never attended.

The Numbers That Demand to Be Seen

Let’s sit with a few of these for a second, because the picture underneath this story is way bigger than one county in Arizona.

🗳️ About half of local election officials say finding enough poll workers is either very difficult or somewhat difficult in any given election year, according to Brookings. That’s not a fringe problem, y’all. That’s the baseline.

📉 In Tennessee alone, 35 of the state’s 95 counties said they needed more poll workers just this year. Over in my home state of Oklahoma, Tulsa County officials say they’re short about 200 workers out of the roughly 1,300 they need to keep things running smoothly.

👵🏻👴🏻 The people staffing your polling place have historically skewed older and retired. As that generation ages out, counties everywhere are scrambling to find the next wave of people willing to do this unglamorous, essential work. (Hint: that could be you 🫵…pardon the aggressive emoji)

🏜️ In rural + tribal communities especially, the question isn’t just “’do we have enough workers?’ it’s ‘do we have enough polling locations at all?’” How far should someone reasonably have to drive to cast a ballot? That’s a policy question getting decided right now, by people whose names you’ll never see in a headline.

This is the invisible infrastructure Hannah keeps pointing at. Nobody thinks about the plumbing until the water stops running. Nobody thinks about who decided their polling hours until they can’t get there in time.

Why This Actually Matters

Here’s why this conversation feels so important right now.

When we talk about “protecting democracy,” it’s easy to picture something huge and far away, a Supreme Court case, a constitutional crisis, a headline with a lot of exclamation points. And sure, those things matter. But democracy doesn’t actually break in one dramatic moment. It erodes quietly, one closed polling place at a time, one under-staffed county office at a time, one community that stopped believing its voice counted.

That’s exactly why this story matters so much right now.

If the fix for disenfranchisement lives at the local level, that means the fix is actually within reach for regular people like you and me, wherever you happen to live.

We don’t have to wait around for someone in Washington to save the day. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport. It’s a muscle we’ve got to use constantly, in our own communities, or it atrophies.

The Kitchen Table Was Always the Original Polling Place

Remember that tea party from the top of this post? Let’s go back to it because there’s more to love here, and mostly because I want to be

friends with Hali’s MIL.

Hali was born in Seoul and grew up in Kansas City, and she talks about a tradition her family brought with them called a “gae,” a shared savings circle where a group of people - usually women - pool their money and take turns using it. No bank required. No formal paperwork. Just trust, tradition, and a rotating pot of cash that got a family through a rough month or paid for a wedding.

Her own grandfather was a freedom fighter, and that thread of “we take care of each other because no one else will” runs straight through everything Hali’s built since, all the way down to her mother-in-law’s mugs.

She hosted 12 tea parties, one a week for the summer before the November election. So roughly six people came to each one (her table seats eight, so leaving a spot for her and one for the candidate, leaving six for neighbors), which means 72 people came to one of her tea parties.

The winning candidate? Won by fifty-seven votes. I’m not kidding. That’s fewer people than your average Costco sample line on a Saturday, and it’s what a pot of tea and an open guest list managed to move.

Hali’s whole philosophy is built around that number. She pushes back hard on what she calls “Big Phil,” the billionaire-driven model of philanthropy that dominates the national conversation about change. Her argument is that Big Phil, for all its scale, can quietly convince regular folks that their own actions don’t matter much. That change is something rich people do to the world, not something the rest of us do with each other over a pot of tea

Her fix isn’t complicated, and that’s what I like about it. Change is simple, human, and it’s built one-on-one through trust that already existed with everyday neighbors and friends who want to live in vibrant, inclusive communities.

She calls it “adding a leaf to the table.” Literally invite the neighbor you don’t usually invite. Widen the circle by exactly one seat.

Her giving circle, the Asian Women Giving Circle, started in 2005 with a handful of women pooling small amounts of money, and it’s since moved more than a million dollars to support Asian American artists and activists in New York. One of my favorite grants they made was just $4,000, put behind young LGBTQ+ activists working to integrate the Lunar New Year parade in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a parade that, for generations, hadn’t made room for them.

Four thousand dollars. One parade route. A whole community that finally got to march as themselves, in front of their own neighbors, in a celebration that’s supposed to belong to everyone.

Small dollars. Small rooms. Enormous downstream effect.

Two Through Lines, One Truth

Put Hannah’s work next to Hali’s, and two things come into focus.

First: the people closest to the decision are the ones who actually hold the power, whether they realize it or not.

A county clerk deciding on polling locations. A staff member fighting for her own tribe’s right to vote. A mother-in-law pouring tea for the neighbors. None of them are household names. All three of them changed the actual math of who gets heard.

Second: exclusion + inclusion both happen at the smallest possible scale, one seat, one polling location, one invitation at a time.

Hundreds of Navajo Nation voters were shut out because of a gap the size of a few polling stations. A parade in Chinatown didn’t have room for a whole group of young activists until someone handed them $4,000 and said go march. An election flipped because of a gap the size of a tea party guest list. The scale of the fix is almost always more modest than the scale of the harm it undoes, and that should give every single one of us permission to start.

Because here’s what both women are really saying, in their own language, from their own corners of this work: this was never about them. It’s about you and me. You don’t need a national platform to move democracy. You don’t need to be a co-founder or a CEO. You need a chair, a table, and the willingness to pull up one more.

Everyone who steps forward is taking the first step toward community democracy on behalf of themselves and their circle of people.

And I think you and I could be that person.

Why This Matters So Much Right Now: The 2026 Midterms

Heading into this year’s midterms, claims of widespread election fraud are being made loudly, at high levels of government. It’s worth knowing what the evidence actually shows.

A 2024 audit by Georgia’s own Republican Secretary of State found that only 20 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters were noncitizens, and just nine had ever cast a ballot. An ongoing review tracking state government efforts found the same pattern across the country: noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.

Here’s the steadying fact worth holding onto. States run elections, and courts have repeatedly upheld that. The actual machinery, who runs your election, how your ballot gets counted, hasn’t changed.

Where to get the truth:

• Protect Democracy - plain-language tracking of real threats to election administration

• Brennan Center for Justice - nonpartisan research on voting rights and election security

• Votebeat - nonprofit newsroom covering election mechanics, no spin

• Your own state or county election office site - always the primary source for your local rules

Where Hope Lives

Hannah finds hope in the fact that it’s never too late to get involved, whether that’s becoming a poll worker, a poll monitor, or just showing up to a board of elections meeting to ask the pesky question nobody else thought to ask.

Hali finds hope in the fact that change doesn’t need permission from anyone. It just needs a table and the guts to widen it.

I find hope in the plain fact that these two women, working in totally different corners of this fight, landed on the exact same instinct: start where you actually are, with the people actually around you.

No cape required. Just a chair, a table, and maybe a tea kettle.

Here’s How to Show Up 👇

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Hannah on the We Are For Good podcast. And listen to the full episode with Hali Lee on the podcast from a couple seasons back.

🗳️ Sign up to work or observe your local election. In the U.S., powerthepolls.org is a great place to start.

✅ Double check your own voter registration, and ask a neighbor to check theirs too.

🔍 Fact check a fraud claim against the Brennan Center or Votebeat before you share it.

📌 Show up to a local board of elections meeting before November. That’s where the real decisions get made.

🫖 Host your own tiny tea party. Invite the neighbor you don’t usually invite. Add a literal or figurative leaf to your table this month. Cookies optional but strongly encouraged.

🤝 Look into giving circles as a model for collective, democratized giving. I’m a big fan of Philanthropy Together, or you can check out Asian Women Giving Circle for inspiration, then go start or join one where you live.

This Week’s Prompt 💬

Hali’s mother-in-law changed an election with tea, cookies, and an open invitation. No PAC. No press release. Just a table.

So here’s what I want to know: What’s one small, local thing you could do this month that widens the table for someone who’s usually left off the guest list?

Drop it here or below.

Doesn’t have to be political. Doesn’t have to be big.

Thanks for being here. If this one landed, forward it to someone who still thinks their little corner of the world doesn’t matter. It does. It really, really does.

With you in the good,

Becky 🫶

This episode is part of Stories That Fill the Hope Gap, a 10-part limited series created in partnership with Good is the New Cool and We Are For Good.

Never miss an episode + freebies + what’s trending now by subscribing to our newsletter each Monday, The Weekly. (and we thank you kindly for doing so 🫶)

Quick Hits

🎙️ On the Pod: Sam Teicher built Coral Vita (a for-profit coral restoration company) after a restrictive grant left a project stranded, starting with $1,000 and a conviction that hope’s a discipline, not a feeling. Half the world’s coral reefs have died since the 1970s, and he’s decided that’s a problem worth dedicating his life to solving, one farm, one community, and one resilient coral at a time. Listen here 🌊

🩵 Good Humans: Stacy Huston is a TEDx alum + Executive Director of SixDegrees.org, Kevin Bacon’s nonprofit that connects grassroots orgs to resources, celebrity platforms, and the kind of creative campaigns that make people forget they’re being activated until they already are. Her campaigns are massively successful because they lead with joy, and she’s building movements where dignity’s in the details. Give her a follow.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight: New Story. They’ve raised $80+ million, impacted 20,000+ people across Haiti, El Salvador, and Mexico, and built the world’s first 3D-printed community, printing entire homes in under 24 hours for families living in extreme poverty, because they decided that if the housing crisis is too big for philanthropy alone, you don’t shrink your ambition, you reinvent the construction industry. They’re not just building homes. They’re building a housing market that finally works for the people who’ve been locked out of it.

🎉 Worthy of Celebrating: A nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt has been buying up Americans’ unpaid medical bills for pennies on the dollar and just - erasing them, no application required, just a letter in the mail saying “you’re free” - and in North Carolina alone, they’ve wiped out $6.5 billion of it, with churches now getting in on the action and turning $22,000 in donations into $1.8 million in debt relief. The audacity of just deciding that’s how it works now. I love it. Check it out: unduemedicaldebt.org

🌎 Global Good News: Africa’s solar imports surged 176% in a single month in early 2026, with Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia each importing more than 1 GW of solar technology for the first time ever - and the continent isn’t just buying panels anymore, it’s building them. The sun has always been Africa’s. Turns out the future is too. I love seeing Africa rising!

💜 This Is What Trust Looks Like: The Magnolia Mother’s Trust has been quietly handing $1,000 a month, no strings attached, to Black single mothers in Jackson, Mississippi for years now - and the data keeps saying the same thing: when you trust women with money, they do extraordinary things with it. Radical? Maybe. Obvious? Absolutely. 🙌🏽

👫 Kids Changing the World: Eleven-year-old Nehemiah Turner of Jacksonville, FL walked into his local Humane Society with his grandma two years ago and just…kept showing up, eventually logging 100 volunteer hours reading to shelter animals through the Pawsitive Reading program - the first kid in the program’s history to do it. The dogs were calm, the cats were cozy, Nehemiah’s a straight-A student, and his next goal is 200 hours. Bottom line: Be like Nehemiah 🐾📚

On the morning of June 16, 2016, Imran Ahmed was doing what he did most days: working inside the walls of the UK Parliament, helping his party’s politicians turn complicated policy into words regular people could actually understand. He’d built a whole career on that skill. Clarity as a value. Simplify, humanize, tell the truth.

That afternoon, a week before Britain would vote on whether to leave the European Union, his colleague Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, a mother of two, a woman known around Westminster for being warm, fierce, and relentlessly kind, stepped outside her constituency office in Birstall to meet with the people she served.

A man named Thomas Mair was waiting for her. He shot her three times. He stabbed her fifteen times. Witnesses heard him shout “Britain first” among other far-right hashtag phrases with each stab. He’d spent years steeping himself in white supremacist material online, the kind of content that tells a lonely, angry person that violence isn’t just permissible but heroic. Jo Cox died in the street, feet from the office where she’d spent her career trying to help people.

Ten years isn’t very long ago. It’s exactly as long ago as Instagram Stories have existed. It’s more recent than the iPhone 6. And it happened to someone Imran Ahmed worked alongside, in the building where he went to work every day.

That’s the sentence I keep sitting with. Hate didn’t happen to a stranger in a headline. It happened to his colleague.

I don’t know what that grief did to Imran privately.

But I did see his face when he shared this story. I saw his posture sink. I could look in his eyes and see a decade-long pain that began a heroic journey to fight tooth and nail to ensure truth and justice prevailed.

But what I do know is what he built because of it.

Two years later, in 2018, he founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization built on a wildly unfashionable premise: that the platforms profiting from our attention have a responsibility for what that attention turns into. He built a simple, repeatable framework for it called STAR (Safety, Transparency, Accountability, Responsibility), the kind of value-based clarity that lets a policymaker, a parent, or a 14-year-old understand exactly what’s being asked of the companies running the internet.

And it doesn’t just demand our attention and action. Hate may win if we choose to look away.

I keep thinking about something else Imran told us on the podcast, almost as an aside, about growing up in a house with a lot of violence. “I learned really early on that bullying is something to truly abhor, to truly reject,” he said. “The only way you can overcome it is to stand up, is to refuse to back down.” He was talking about being a kid.

He could’ve been describing his entire career.

Meet CCDH: What Imran Actually Built, and Why He’s the Target Now

When I said Imran turned his grief into an organization, I want to be specific about what that org actually does because it isn’t abstract. CCDH is a research shop. They pull the data platforms would rather you not see, and they publish it.

In 2021, their “Disinformation Dozen“ report found that just 12 accounts were responsible for 65% of all anti-vaccine misinformation across Facebook and Twitter.

That same year, their “Toxic Ten“ report found ten fringe publishers responsible for nearly 70% of climate denial content on Facebook.

In October 2025, “The Illusion of AI Safety“ tested OpenAI’s newest chatbot, GPT-5, against its supposedly less-safe predecessor. GPT-5 produced harmful content on self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and substance abuse in 53% of test prompts, compared to 43% for the older model. It also encouraged the user to keep going in 99% of those harmful conversations, versus 9% for the old one. The company said the new version was safer. The data said the opposite.

In 2026, “Safety Off“ tracked what happened after Meta quietly rolled back safety enforcement: abuse tripled within six months.

That’s the signal CCDH keeps finding, over and over, across platforms and years: when a company says trust and safety, and you actually check the numbers, safety is usually the first thing that gets cut.

Here’s why this is urgent right now, and not just as an abstract data trend.

On December 23, 2025, when the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against Imran and threatened him with deportation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted about it on social media, accusing Imran and others of having “led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

That’s the core accusation: essentially framing CCDH’s research and advocacy work as an effort to suppress speech rather than protect people from online harm. It’s the basis the government used to justify the sanctions and deportation threat, which a federal court then blocked with a temporary restraining order through March 2026.

Sit with that for a second. The man who built his life’s work around tracking, naming, and holding hate accountable is now, 10 years after his colleague’s murder, being threatened with removal from the country by a government, for doing exactly that.

That’s not a metaphor for autocracy creeping in. That’s what it looks like in practice: the machinery of the state turned against the people documenting the harm.

“No one should be deported for being an advocate,” Imran said. He’s right. Might I say, damn right. And if that’s happening to a founder with a legal team and a public platform, it’s worth asking what’s happening to the researchers and everyday critics who have neither.

The watchdog is now the target. That’s usually the last signal before things get worse, not the first.

The Numbers That Demand to Be Seen (Again)

Let’s just sit with these for a second, because friends, they are not subtle.

🗳️ The United States has lost its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than 50 years, and autocracies now officially outnumber democracies worldwide, 92 to 87. The average person on this planet now lives with roughly as much democracy as someone did in 1978. That’s not background noise. That’s the water everything else in this post swims in. [insert a deep exhale and a “holy shit” from me]

👧 Here’s what it’s doing to kids. The rate of U.S. students directly exposed to a school shooting has nearly tripled since 1999, from 19 per 100,000 to 51 per 100,000. And the drills meant to protect them aren’t neutral: researchers have linked active shooter drills to increased fear and hopelessness in students, with only one in five teachers saying the drills even make them feel safer. We are asking children to rehearse their own deaths on a school day.

🚺 Here’s what it’s doing to women. More than a quarter of women now report online abuse or harassment, and it climbs to 55% for LGBTQ+ women and 32% for women of color. Nearly 1 in 8 women say they now fear for their physical safety because of something that started online. And it doesn’t stay online: researchers estimate roughly 13% of that misogynistic abuse escalates into real-world violence against women.

😔 Here’s what it’s doing to everyday people just trying to live their lives. Anti-Latino hate crimes hit a record high in 2025. Nearly half of Pacific Islander adults report experiencing harassment or violence tied to their race or ethnicity in the past year. And in one 2025 survey, 76% of advocates for immigrant survivors of domestic abuse said their clients were too afraid to call the police at all, for anything, ever.

🫠 The American Psychological Association’s 2025 “Stress in America” report gave the whole moment a name: a crisis of connection. 62% of adults say societal division is a significant source of their stress. Half of us report feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship often or some of the time. Nearly 7 in 10 say they needed more emotional support this year than they got.

📵 And here’s the pipeline underneath all of it. CCDH just published research timed to the 10-year mark of Jo Cox’s murder, tracking nearly 8 million comments before and after a major platform weakened its safety enforcement in January 2025. Abusive comments tripled within six months. This isn’t a hypothetical about what happens when hate goes unmoderated online. It’s a measurement of what DID happen, and it’s the same pipeline that turns an angry comment into an incel attack, a bullied kid, a family too scared to dial 911.

CCDH put it plainer than I ever could: “The conditions that helped radicalize [Jo Cox’s] killer have not gone away. In important respects, they have worsened.”

That’s not a think piece. That’s a receipt. And we simply cannot let it stand.

Division Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum. It Happens in an Empty Room.

My neurospicy brain loves to discover patterns. But here’s a sobering one that took me some time to connect, and once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. The same decade that produced this surge in hate and division is the same decade we quietly, collectively, stopped showing up for each other.

😞 About half of American adults report feeling lonely, so pervasive that the U.S. Surgeon General called it an epidemic, with health risks on par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness raises your risk of premature death by nearly 30%.

📉 Americans aged 15 to 24 saw a 70% drop in time spent with friends. We went from roughly an hour a day with friends two decades ago to about 20 minutes now.

🫥 A brand new 2025 Social Connection in America survey of over 10,000 adults found 41% feel lonely at least sometimes, and almost three-quarters get together face-to-face with people they love twice a month or less. More than half attended zero clubs, zero religious services, volunteered zero hours, and helped a neighbor zero times, in an entire year.

Sit with that last one. Zero. For a whole year.

And a lot of that disconnection traces back to one spring. We all went inside in March 2020, and in-person socializing still hasn’t recovered since, it’s actually fallen further. We didn’t just lose time together. We lost the habit of it, and hate moved straight into the room we left empty.

We asked connection genius, Susan McPherson, what she thought was underneath all of it. She flipped the question back on us in the most useful way possible.

“We don’t really think about the fact that our democracy is imploding,” she told us. “Teens have higher rates of suicide, higher rates of gun violence. Is that emanating from this lack of connection? Think of the lack of connection as the actual problem.”

She’s naming what former Ford Foundation president Darren Walker talks about in his book From Generosity to Justice: we cannot just look at symptoms; we must tackle the root of these issues.

And frankly, I believe Susan’s observation is more than perception; it’s a diagnosis.

Hate needs isolation the way fire needs oxygen. A person who is deeply, locally, physically connected to a neighbor, a coworker, a kid’s soccer team, a synagogue, a Tuesday night trivia group, knitting circle, is a person who’s much harder to radicalize into hating a stranger.

Disconnection isn’t a side effect of division. It might be the whole delivery system.

Susan’s Prescription: Return to Local

Susan calls this the Reconnection Era, and her prescription isn’t complicated, which is exactly why it works. Go small. Go local. Go slow.

“Connection isn’t a nice to have,” she told us. “It needs to be your operating system.” Not a monthly happy hour. Not an annual gala. Something woven into every single day.

She’s watching it happen already: small, unpolished local salons instead of big produced events. Companies standing up giving circles so employees connect around causes they actually care about. A renewed appetite for skills-based volunteering, where people show up with their actual expertise instead of just a check. New efforts like the U.S. Chamber of Connection, built to help companies, nonprofits, and everyday citizens pump the volume back up on real, human, in-person contact.

My young daughters have a phrase for this - get off your butt, go touch grass, and talk to a human. Aww the wisdom of kids.

And the antidote to disconnection isn’t more communication either, which feels almost rude to type in a column, but she’s right. “Throwing more spaghetti at the wall is not going to lead you to the answer,” she said. More emails, more posts, more notifications, none of it is dialogue.

Dialogue means you listen twice as much as you talk. It means you let a conversation hold a little friction, a respectful disagreement, instead of the algorithmic “yes-man” comfort of a chatbot that will never once tell you you’re wrong. It means doing the thing we all despise - sitting in the discomfort and processing what that means against our values.

“We’re all human,” she told us, describing a genuinely brutal year of surgeries and stress. “It may sound trite, but empathy, empathy, empathy.”

It doesn’t sound trite to me. It sounds like the whole assignment.

What Hate and Division Actually Cost Us

I want to be really clear about something because it’s easy to let this live in the abstract. Division isn’t a vibe. It isn’t a bad news cycle. It has a body count, a resignation letter, a kid who grows up thinking this is just how the world works now.

It costs us our public servants.

Nearly three in four officials say they’re pulling back from the job because of the threats. That’s not hypothetical. That’s your local school board member, your county clerk, your city council person, quietly deciding it isn’t worth it anymore, and taking their integrity and institutional memory with them on the way out.

It costs us our information ecosystem.

When a platform rolls back safety enforcement, like Meta did in January 2025, abuse doesn’t stay flat. It triples. Violent threats quadruple. The people most willing to serve the public become the people most exposed to hate.

It costs us actual lives.

Jo Cox. Sir David Amess, another UK MP, murdered in 2021 by an attacker also significantly radicalized online. These aren’t isolated tragedies five years apart. They’re two points on the same trend line.

And that line runs straight through the U.S., too.

• Ten Black shoppers killed at a Buffalo supermarket by a shooter who’d steeped himself in “great replacement” conspiracy videos.

• Five people killed at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ bar in Colorado Springs.

• Two Israeli embassy staffers, about to get engaged, shot outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

• Minnesota’s House Speaker Emerita and her husband, gunned down in their own home by a man posing as a police officer, carrying a list of nearly 70 more names.

• A mother named Renée Good and a nurse named Alex Pretti, killed by federal agents in Minneapolis 17 days apart, while the country argued over whether either death even counted.

Different targets. Different ideologies. Different fingers on different triggers. Same trend line.

And lastly - it costs us each other.

Every loneliness stat up there isn’t separate from the division stats. They’re the same graph. A country full of people who see fewer neighbors, attend fewer gatherings, and trust fewer institutions is a country primed to see the person across the aisle, or across the fence, as an enemy instead of a fellow human having a hard time.

What Happens If We Don’t Turn This Around

I don’t love writing a section like this, but I think we owe each other the honesty of it.

Because this is the price of inaction + looking away👇

If we don’t, the trend lines don’t self-correct. Autocracies already outnumber democracies for the first time in this generation.

If we don’t, more good people opt out of public life, and the ones willing to stay skew toward the ones who thrive on conflict instead of the ones who came to serve.

If we don’t, the loneliness numbers keep climbing, and loneliness isn’t a neutral, private sadness. It’s fuel. It’s the empty room hate moves into because no one else is home.

If we don’t, we hand our kids a world where the muscle for disagreeing well, for sitting across from someone who thinks differently and still seeing their humanity, never gets built. We already know from our last conversation about kids’ mental health that they’re absorbing every bit of this ambient dread. This is the same crisis wearing a different hat.

And if we don’t, we get more Jo Coxes. More Sir David Amesses. More names that trend for a week and then fade, while researchers keep finding the same grim pattern: hate crime spikes triggered by a single event rarely fall back to where they started once the news cycle moves on. The baseline just keeps ratcheting up.

Here’s an important nuance, and it’s worth naming precisely because it makes the story more honest, not less. Overall violent crime in America isn’t rising. It’s near a 60-year low, and 2025’s preliminary numbers show the largest year-over-year drop in violent crime and murder since 1937. That’s real, and it’s worth sitting with as genuinely good news.

But hate-fueled and politically motivated violence is moving in the opposite direction, in that same window. Targeted violence grew more than 30% from 2024 to 2025. This isn’t the country getting more dangerous across the board. It’s a specific, ideologically driven current running against the overall tide.

And if we don’t name that current specifically, we get more Jo Coxes. More Sir David Amesses. More names that trend for a week and then fade, while researchers keep finding the same grim pattern: hate crime spikes triggered by a single event rarely fall back to where they started once the news cycle moves on. The baseline just keeps ratcheting up.

That’s the whole ballgame. The floor keeps dropping. Unless something interrupts it.

That’s where we come in.

Where People Are Already Interrupting

Here’s the part of this column I actually love writing, because I promised myself a long time ago I’d never let despair have the last word. Here’s who’s already refusing to sit still.

🇺🇸 In the U.S., three waves of “No Kings” protests grew every single time. Roughly 5 million people across 2,100 locations in June 2025. Nearly 7 million across 2,700 locations that October. By March 2026, an estimated 8 million people across more than 3,300 sites, the second largest protest in American history. People showing up, in their actual bodies, in their actual towns.

🌉 Braver Angels has built 124 local alliances across the country, each one co-led by a “red” chair and a “blue” chair, doing the unglamorous, unshowy work of getting people who disagree into the same room to actually talk. Not to win. To understand.

🇰🇷 In South Korea, when the president declared martial law in December 2024, ordinary citizens and lawmakers physically surrounded the National Assembly. Within six hours, the declaration was reversed. Within six months, that president was impeached and the country had elected someone new. [Insert slow clap for an entire nation.] Democracy, defended by people showing up in the street at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.

🇷🇸 In Serbia, after a train station canopy collapsed and killed 16 people, largely because of corruption everyone had quietly tolerated for years, students led the largest protest in the country’s modern history. Somewhere between 275,000 and 325,000 people packed Belgrade in March 2025. Months of this pressure had already forced their prime minister to resign. They’re still out there in 2026, still demanding real accountability, despite arrests and police pushback.

And something I can see everyday - happens here within the We Are For Good community. Four thousand changemakers reaching out, connecting, meeting one-on-one, sharing ideas, sitting with each other’s hurt and encouraging one another, generously sharing time + space + knowledge in a collective effort to power more good into the world.

Hope is everywhere.

None of these are perfect movements. None of them “solve” division in one clean headline.

But every single one is proof of something Imran said almost in passing, describing what he was fighting against when he thought about joining the army after 9/11: “the idea of oppressing women, LGBTQ+, autocracy, and taking away people’s ability to determine their own future for themselves.” He listed those things as what he hates most in the world.

Every protest above is people refusing exactly that list.

What You Can Actually Do About It

Okay. Deep breath. Here’s the good news buried in all of this: the actions that fight hate and the actions that cure loneliness are, delightfully, the same actions.

🕯️ Go small + go local. Host the unpolished dinner. Start the giving circle. Join the book club you keep meaning to join. Susan’s right that connection has to be woven into your regular Tuesday, not saved for a gala.

👂 Practice actual dialogue. Find one person in your life who sees things differently and have one real, in-person conversation with them, where your goal is understanding, not winning. Let there be a little friction. That’s the whole point.

📣 Show up in your body, somewhere. A protest, a town hall, a school board meeting, a polling place as a volunteer. Presence is a form of speech no algorithm can throttle.

💌 Reach out to someone who’s gone quiet. Caregivers get uninvited. Isolated neighbors get forgotten. A single text that says “I see you” costs you nothing and might cost them everything if you don’t send it.

✍️ Hold platforms accountable. CCDH is asking people to sign onto pressuring Meta to reinstate the safety protections it rolled back, the exact ones tied to the tripling of abuse toward politicians. That’s five minutes of your day for a policy fight that protects actual lives.

🫶 Support the people already doing the bridging work. Braver Angels. Local mutual aid groups. Election officials and poll workers who deserve a thank-you note, not just our outrage when things go wrong.

Small, local, human, repeatable. That’s the whole playbook. Turns out the cure for autocracy and the cure for loneliness were sitting in the same toolbox the whole time.

Why This Is Critical Right Now

Because every week we wait to rebuild the village is a week hate gets to keep recruiting in the empty room next door.

This isn’t a distant historical lesson. This is a live wire. And I think, and I say this as someone who has thought about this more than almost anything else I’ve written here, that this might be the actual assignment of our lifetime: not to fix the whole internet, not to single-handedly repair a fractured democracy, just to make sure one more person isn’t lonely enough, isolated enough, unseen enough, to become the next person radicalized into hate.

We do that with dinner tables, around lunch tables and within religious institutions. With showing up at the school board meeting. With a text message to someone who’s gone quiet. With refusing, like Imran learned as a kid getting bullied in Manchester, to back down.

“The only way you can overcome it is to stand up,” he said.

So let’s stand up. Together, preferably. In a room. With snacks. [Cheeze-Its + peanut butter M&Ms]

Here’s How to Show Up 👇

🎧 Listen to the full episode, “When Online Became Real Life: The Fight to Hold Big Tech Accountable,” with Imran Ahmed on the We Are For Good podcast.

🎧 Revisit our “12 Shifts” conversation with Susan McPherson, “Communication to Connection: The Reconnection Era.“

🌐 Visit counterhate.com to learn about CCDH’s STAR Framework and sign onto the push for platform accountability.

📖 Pick up Susan McPherson’s The Lost Art of Connecting and subscribe to her newsletter, The Memo, for more of this thinking.

This Week’s Prompt 💬

Imran told us the lesson he learned young was that the only way to overcome bullying is to refuse to back down.

So here’s what I want to know: What’s one small, local, unglamorous thing you’re doing, or could start doing this week, to reconnect with your actual neighbors, in your actual body, in your actual town?

Share your answer here or drop in comments below.

Thanks for being here. If this one landed, forward it to one person who needs to stand up alongside you.

With you in the good,

Becky 🫶

This episode is part of Stories That Fill the Hope Gap, a 10-part limited series created in partnership with Good is the New Cool + We Are For Good.

Quick hits removed this week so we can sit with this topic. They’ll be back next week ✌️

Appendix

1. Murder of Jo Cox, Wikipedia

2. Ten Years After Jo Cox: Platforms Turn Safety Off, CCDH

3. Imran Ahmed (strategist), Wikipedia

4. CCDH STAR Framework

5. V-Dem Democracy Report 2026

6. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy

7. NPR: How active shooter drills in U.S. schools affect kids

8. Gallup: Parents’ unease over school safety elevated for fourth year

9. NOW/Incogni 2026 Online Abuse Survey

10. Newsweek: Women are facing growing online abuse

11. DOJ/FBI hate crime statistics

12. Axios: Hate crimes against Latinos and Sikhs hit record high in 2025

13. Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAJC analysis of preliminary 2025 FBI hate crime data

14. American Community Media: Hate crimes, immigration enforcement fuel a public health crisis for Pacific Islanders

15. Surgeon General’s Advisory on loneliness, PBS News

16. 2025 Social Connection in America report

17. APA Stress in America 2025, A Crisis of Connection

18. Attention to the Unseen: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever

19. Our World in Data: Young Americans spend much more time alone than fifteen years ago

20. CIDRAP: Remote work tied to isolation, mental distress

21. NewsNation: Americans are socializing less than they used to

22. Axios: A loneliness epidemic meets uneven social infrastructure

23. University of Colorado Boulder IBS: New research on disappearing third places

24. No Kings protests, Wikipedia

25. Braver Angels, Wikipedia

26. 2024 South Korean martial law crisis, Wikipedia

27. Serbia’s Historic Student-led Protest Movement (2024-2025)

28. 2022 Buffalo shooting, Wikipedia

29. 2022 Colorado Springs nightclub shooting, Wikipedia

30. NPR: 2 Israeli Embassy aides killed in DC shooting

31. 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators, Wikipedia

32. Killing of Renée Good, Wikipedia

33. Killing of Alex Pretti, Wikipedia

34. Disinformation Dozen, CCDH

35. The Toxic Ten, CCDH

36. Safety Off, CCDH

37. The Illusion of AI Safety, CCDH

38. CCDH CEO Faces U.S. Deportation Threat for Research on Social Media Harms

39. Deadly by Design, CCDH

A mother. Standing at the glass door, looking in at her son. The look on her face? Massive despair.

Within seconds, a staff member had clocked it too, gave Kirk the head nod (“I’ve got this”) and walked over to her. She melted. Sat down. Began to talk. Turns out she and her son were homeless. The boy was in Handy’s after-school program. She was just grateful he had something to eat.

Three days later, Kirk got a phone call. His housing team member was crying on the phone. She’d found them an apartment. And when that little boy walked in, he got down and kissed the floor.

“There’s no categorization to that life,” Kirk told us. “That’s a 10-year-old kissing the floor of an apartment. And for everyone who’s been homeless, who’s felt what the ground feels like to sleep on, you understand a 10-year-old kissing the floor.”

Housing instability, food insecurity, trauma, and mental health don’t live in separate zip codes. They live in the same body. And that story isn’t an outlier. It’s playing out, in some form, in every community in America. In every community in the world.

Numbers That Demand to Be Seen

The World Health Organization now classifies children’s mental health as a global emergency. And honestly? The data makes that feel like an understatement.

Let’s just sit with these for a second:

🌍 1 in 7 adolescents globally experiences a mental health condition. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a classroom. That’s your kid’s friend group.

😔 Depression and anxiety are now among the top five causes of disability in adolescents worldwide. We used to think of these as adult problems. Spoiler: they never were.

💔 Suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 19 globally. Read that again. Second. Leading. Cause. Shit, that’s depressing (ironic), and a stat desperate for intervention.

🚨 1 in 4 children under 18 is now affected by a mental health condition, according to a strategy unanimously adopted by all 53 WHO European Member States in 2025. All 53. Unanimous. If that doesn’t signal a five-alarm fire, I don’t know what does.

Here in the U.S., we’ve got our own sobering scoreboard.

😢 1 in 5 American children has been diagnosed with a mental, emotional, or behavioral health condition. That’s more than 12 million kids.

📈 35% increase in diagnosed mental health conditions among children between 2016 and 2023. We’re not stabilizing. We’re accelerating.

😞 40% of high school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023, so heavy they stopped doing the things they used to love. Forty percent.

🚪 70 to 80% of children and teens with mental health disorders never get the help they need. Not because the treatments don’t exist. Because the people trained to deliver them are desperately scarce.

👩‍⚕️ There are approximately 11,400 child and adolescent psychiatrists in the entire United States. That’s roughly 15 for every 100,000 children. Nearly 72% of U.S. counties don’t have a single one.

⏳ On average, 11 years pass between when symptoms first appear and when a child receives treatment.

Eleven. Years.

Dr. Lisa Hunter Romanelli has spent the last two decades refusing to let those 11 years stand. And friends, she’s not playing around. That’s good news for us and the kids we love.

Little Lisa, and the Question That Changed Everything

To understand why Dr. Romanelli built what she built, you’ve got to go back.

She was a junior in high school (studious, quiet, the kid who got the good grades) when her mom suffered a major episode of depression. Before that, her mom was the steady, present force holding everything together. Then, seemingly overnight, she wasn’t. It was a shock to Lisa and her siblings that nothing in their lives had prepared them for.

So Lisa did what Lisa does: she went to learn. This was before Google, before you could find anything in thirty seconds. She went to the library.

She read books about depression. She tried to understand what had happened to her mother and why. Her mom eventually got treatment and came back to herself. But something had cracked open in Lisa that never fully closed, a deep personal need to understand the mind and to help others get the help her own family had once desperately needed.

She majored in psychology. Got her PhD. Became a child psychologist, because she loved kids and wanted to serve them. But almost immediately she ran headfirst into a wall she couldn’t ignore: as one psychologist, she could only help so many children. There were only so many hours in a day. Only so many kids she could sit across from.

“I was trying to figure out a way of having a bigger impact,” she told us.

That search led her to Columbia’s child psychiatry department and to Dr. Peter Jensen, a psychiatrist and researcher wrestling with a maddening problem. The research on children’s mental health existed. Evidence-based treatments worked. But it took, on average, 15 years for that research to make its way into the hands of practitioners. Fifteen years of kids falling through the gap between what we know and what actually gets done.

Dr. Jensen eventually left Columbia to start The REACH Institute. Lisa was his first hire. She’s been there 19 years. So yeah, I think it’s pretty fair to call her the Founding First Lady of REACH in our hearts

From One Psychologist to 9,000+ Trained Providers

REACH trains primary care providers, pediatricians, nurses, and family practitioners to identify and treat mental health conditions in the children they’re already seeing. The insight is elegant in its simplicity: most kids have a pediatrician even when they don’t have access to a psychiatrist. So REACH goes to where the kids already are.

[insert standing ovation]

To date, REACH has trained more than 9,000+ providers. Their goal is to reach 16,000 by 2027.

But the story that captures what this really means isn’t a number. It’s a 13-year-old named Mia.

During a routine well-child visit in Oklahoma City, a city with very few practicing child psychiatrists, a pediatrician trained by REACH did something her training had prepared her for: she asked mom to step out of the room. Because she knew teenagers share more without a parent present.

What Mia shared was devastating. About a year before, she’d climbed onto a bridge and contemplated ending her life. What the doctor did next is the whole story. She didn’t panic. She didn’t freeze. Because of her REACH training, she knew how to talk with Mia, assess her safety, bring her mother in with steadiness and care, and ultimately diagnose the severe anxiety that had driven Mia to that bridge. She prescribed both therapy and medication.

Mia got better. She went off medication. She got to live the life kids are supposed to live.

“She literally saved a life,” Dr. Romanelli said simply.

I’m not crying.

Lead With What’s Working, Not What’s Broken

Here’s the storytelling insight baked into REACH’s entire approach, and the reason we wanted Dr. Romanelli in this limited series: they lead with the solution.

“We can’t just admire the problem,” she told us. “When we’re talking to donors, to potential partners, we share stories like Mia’s. Stories that show the REACH approach can make a difference. It’s not the only solution, but it’s an important part of the solution. And that gives everybody hope that there’s something we can do about it.”

This isn’t a small philosophical choice. It’s a strategic one. In a world drowning in crisis content where every headline competes to be the most alarming, the orgs that inspire action are the ones that hold the door open to possibility. They name the problem clearly, then show you the door out.

Kirk Brown lives this truth every day at Handy - a Fort Lauderdale-based nonprofit supporting foster care, at-risk, and disadvantaged youth through life skills training, mentoring, mental health services, education/workforce programs, and affordable housing assistance. He described children arriving with histories of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. Children whose mental health needs didn’t fit anyone’s eligibility criteria because they weren’t failing school yet, even if they were quietly contemplating self-harm.

He talked about what he calls “macro harm becoming micro hate,” how national rhetoric makes whole communities afraid to ask for help. How immigrant families in domestic violence situations watch the news and wonder: if I call, who will actually come?

And yet. A boy kisses the floor of an apartment. A mother standing outside a glass door in despair gets to exhale.

“If I told you a hamster funeral could save a life, would you do it?” Kirk asked us, describing the day his entire staff stopped everything to hold a proper service for a child’s emotional support animal, because she needed to grieve and to know her grief mattered. “So why not?”

I don’t know about you, but I am a rabid fan of Handy’s mission. Everything big and small matters to kids, and we must see that. Even the death of a beloved hamster.

That’s what it looks like to lead with what’s working. To treat the human in front of you as the whole point.

The Perfection Trap Underneath It All

There’s another layer to this crisis that Dr. Thomas Curran, world-leading expert on perfectionism and Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, helped us name. (He’s also delightful, for the record, and I’d recommend his book The Perfection Trap. It will blow you away.)

Rising rates of perfectionism are directly connected to rising rates of anxiety, depression, and in some cases, disordered eating and self-harm in young people. Perfectionism, he explained, doesn’t come from ambition. It comes from a deep sense of not being enough.

“Perfectionism comes from a place of lacking,” he told us. “A deep sense that we’re not good enough, and that we have to move through the world concealing those imperfections, proving to everyone that we’re okay, that we’re worth something, that we matter.”

For the children that REACH and Handy serve, many of whom have experienced trauma, instability, and systems that told them they didn’t qualify for help, that sense of not being enough isn’t abstract. It’s the water they swim in every day.

Which is exactly why a trained pediatrician asking the right question at the right moment matters so much. And why a staff member stopping to sit with a grieving child, unhurried and fully present, isn’t a charming sidebar.

It’s the whole entire work.

The Reason This Topic Hits Me So Hard

I had a lovely childhood. I want to say that clearly, because what I’m about to tell you lives alongside that truth and doesn’t cancel it.

I was a deep-feeling, high-energy, wildly extroverted kid. That’s what the outside world saw. What was happening on the inside was something I didn’t have language for: anxiety that never quite switched off, hyperfocus that could consume me whole, emotional reactivity that felt like too much even to me, a restlessness I couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake. I learned early to mask it. To be the version of myself that fit. And I got very, very good at it.

I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD + autism until my 40s.

Let that land for a second. Decades of chronically feeling like I was “too much” and never quite understanding why. Decades of executive functioning that looked ridiculous from the inside even when things looked fine from the outside. Decades of working around something I didn’t have a name for. And the attempts to hold it all compounding as I got a job, got married, became a mother. Until it was too much - and I broke.

I think about that little girl a lot when I read the research on early intervention. I think about how different it might have felt to have one adult, one trained provider, ask the right question at the right moment. Not to fix me. Just to see me. To say: there’s nothing wrong with you. Your brain just works differently, and here’s how we help it work for you.

That’s what REACH is building.

Supporting REACH isn’t only about getting kids help. It’s about getting them seen. Really seen. The kind of seen that tells a child: you’re not broken, you’re not too much, you’re not a problem to be managed. You’re a person worth understanding. A world where kids don’t have to wait 40 years to understand themselves. I think Little Becky would’ve cried happy tears over that.

The Geometry of This Problem

Here’s what makes the REACH model so powerful: you’re not training one person to help one child. You’re creating a multiplier.

One trained pediatrician sees hundreds of children a year. Across a career spanning decades, that’s thousands of kids in front of someone who’s now equipped to catch what used to get missed. Then another. And another. The WHO recognizes that closing the global treatment gap requires exactly this kind of integrated, community-level approach, reaching children through the systems they already trust rather than waiting for them to find their way to specialized care that may not exist in their county at all.

Dr. Romanelli spent years watching the gap between research and practice. A gap that historically took 15 years to close. REACH exists to collapse that gap. To get evidence-based tools into the hands of the people who are already in the room with the children who need them.

“As one psychologist, I can only help so many kids,” she said. “There are only so many kids you can see in a day.”

So she stopped seeing patients one at a time and started training the people who could. Honestly? I’m exploding the metaphorical confetti cannon on that one. We have a name and a value for that at We Are For Good: Core value #7: Disrupt, adapt, grow, repeat.

Where Hope Lives

We asked Dr. Romanelli where she still finds hope after 20 years of this work.

“I find hope knowing that there are still a lot more pediatricians, nurses, and other primary care folks who haven’t gotten this training,” she said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, and that’s a source of hope. Because we feel our training can make a difference.”

She also finds it in the testimonials from providers who write to say their work changed. That they feel equipped now, where once they felt helpless.

Kirk Brown finds hope in the practitioner who calls him crying, describing a boy kissing a floor.

Dr. Curran finds it in radical acceptance, in progress over perfection, in letting life be ordinary and enough.

And I find it in all three of them. In the clear-eyed understanding that this crisis is real, the need is urgent, and the solutions exist. We just have to fund them. Train more people. Tell the stories. Spread the word.

One in five children is struggling right now. Most of them won’t get help unless something changes.

The REACH Institute is changing it, one trained provider, one brave conversation, one Mia at a time.

And honestly? That’s everything.

Here’s How to Show Up 👇

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Dr. Lisa Hunter Romanelli on the We Are For Good podcast. Her story and Mia’s will stay with you longer than you expect.

🌐 Visit the REACH Institute at thereachinstitute.org. Learn about their training programs and how your organization can get involved.

💸 Give if this story moved you. REACH is actively fundraising to expand training in the most underserved communities, where the psychiatrist shortage is most severe and the need is greatest.

🤝 Make an introduction. If you’re connected to health systems, pediatric practices, or foundations working in mental health or child welfare, connect them to REACH. The multiplier effect starts with one conversation.

📢 Spread the word about Handy Inc. at handyinc.org. Kirk Brown and his team are on the front lines every single day and they need partners, corporate sponsors for their workforce development program, and donors who believe every child deserves to be seen.

💬 This Week’s Prompt

Here’s what I keep coming back to: behind every child who got the help they needed, there was usually one adult paying attention. A pediatrician who asked one more question. A teacher who noticed something was off. A case manager who stayed on the phone a little longer. A coach who remembered a name.

So we want to know: What’s one thing you wish an adult had said to you as a kid? Not fixed. Not solved. Just said.

It doesn’t have to be a dramatic story. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that hold the most weight. Drop it in the comments.

Thanks for being here. If this one landed with you, forward it to one person who needs to read it today.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

This episode is part of Stories That Fill the Hope Gap, a 10-part limited series created in partnership with Good is the New Cool and We Are For Good.

Never miss an episode + freebies + what’s trending now by subscribing to our newsletter each Monday, The Weekly. (and we thank you kindly for doing so 🫶)

Quick Hits

🎙️ On the Pod: Listen to the full episode with Kirk Brown + Handy, Inc. here. Handy’s supported over 50,000 foster care and at-risk youth since 1985 through mental health services, education, workforce development, and housing support. Hear the story of the Handy hamster funeral, proof that this team shows up for their kids in the smallest, most human ways.

🩵 Good Humans: Amina Mohammed founded Cameras for Girls to teach young women in Uganda photography and journalism skills, turning a camera into a tool for storytelling, income, and agency in communities where girls are too often told their voice doesn’t matter. Her deep commitment to ethical, dignity-centered storytelling and mentorship has helped dozens of girls build real careers, making her a powerful example of grassroots impact done right. Plus, she’s kind, funny, trustworthy and an incredible change leader worth following.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight: Pretty obsessed with this nonprofit + its name + its impact. Warm Cookies of the Revolution is proof that civic engagement doesn’t have to feel heavy to be transformational. Since 2012, they’ve engaged a million participants through programs that meet people where they actually are, not where we wish they were, and they’ve done it with joy, art, and honestly, cookies. In a moment when so many people feel disconnected and distrustful of institutions, that’s exactly the kind of medicine our world needs right now.

🎉 Worthy of Celebrating: In 1970, four Dayton, OH teenagers got fed up with pay toilets on a road trip and started the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. Membership cost a quarter and came with a newsletter called the Free Toilet Paper, and within six years they’d helped ban pay toilets in six states. Never underestimate what a cheap membership fee, a funny name, and a clear sense of injustice can build. Logical, human and hilarious - all my faves.

🌎 Global Good News: For 34 years, the Japan Cleft Palate Foundation has sent volunteer doctors, dentists, and nurses to Vietnam’s Mekong Delta to give free cleft-lip and palate surgeries to people who’d otherwise have no access to that care. This year’s team of 58 medical professionals made the journey again, proof that some commitments to service don’t fade with time, they just deepen.

👫 Kids Changing the World: Mia Heller is proof that you don’t need a lab full of PhDs to solve a real problem, just curiosity, grit, and a willingness to build something in your garage that tackles what your own community is facing. This high school student built a ferrofluid-based filter removing 95.5% of microplastics from drinking water, and is a reminder that the next generation isn’t waiting for permission to change the world.

💬 Your Stories. Right here.

Last week’s question: Name one person, one community, or one piece of art that has expanded what you thought was possible for the world.

I came to Bell Hooks’ words late(r) in life. Her ‘Where We Stand’ is incredible and, while my life experiences were/are VERY different, I’m better having read Hooks’ work. - Evan, Houston

Here’s a question I want you to sit with before we go any further.

When you think about Pride month, when your organization thinks about Pride month, what story do you tell?

I’m guessing it may start with a statistic. Maybe it’s the one about lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth being four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Maybe it’s the nearly half of all trans and non-binary people who have attempted suicide in their lifetimes.

These statistics are real. They are devastating. They deserve to be named.

And then there’s my home state of Oklahoma, and the data from the Trevor Project’s 2024 state-level survey does not let me look away. In Oklahoma, 46% of LGBTQ young people seriously considered suicide in the past year. That number climbs to 52% among transgender and nonbinary youth. Fourteen percent attempted suicide. Fifty-three percent wanted mental health care and couldn’t get it.

And only 31% of LGBTQ young people in Oklahoma feel that the community where they live is accepting of them. For transgender and nonbinary youth, it’s 27%.

We Are For Good’s made an entire business around community, and to know that Oklahoma trans teens feel accepted by 27% of their neighbors is horrifying. Chilling. And wholly unnecessary.

I grew up on those streets. I know those towns. And there are kids in all of those places right now who don’t have a studio, a runway, a chosen family, or a single adult who’s told them their life matters.

That is the crisis. And it’s real.

But here’s what I want to ask: is that the only story we know how to tell? And if it is, what does that say about us?

Because there’s another story. There’s always been another story. And it’s been living, breathing, sequined, and spectacular in the underground ballroom scene since before most of our orgs existed. We just haven’t been paying attention.

The Room That Already Knew

When I sat down with Colby King, founder of Kiki Arts Collaborative and 2025 David Prize winner, I was struck immediately by what he leads with. Not the crisis. Not the statistics. Not the need.

He leads with his mom - you know, where values were first rooted.

Lashika King was a minister who let people sleep in their home, who sat with neighbors doing their resumes and cover letters without ever calling it workforce development, who told her son from the beginning: the opportunities you have are blessings, and a lot of people don’t have access to what you have. That ethic of radical, expansive, unpretentious generosity is the DNA of everything Colby has built thus far.

He grew up in Dallas, made it to Columbia (seven of eight Ivies said yes, for the record), started out in chemical engineering, pivoted to African American studies and psychology with a focus on religion and morality, did stints at the ACLU and American Express, and then four years ago a friend said: come to a practice.

He went. And the Kiki scene cracked something open.

Because in ballroom, in the Kiki scene specifically, which has been running underground since the early 90s as a space created by and for LGBTQ youth of color, Colby found something philanthropy has been struggling to name. A community that was already doing the work. Already mentoring. Already creating. Already building economic ecosystems, artistic pipelines, chosen families, and cultural infrastructure. Doing it without grants. Without recognition. Without anyone calling it what it was.

“People have been doing this for 20, 30 years underground, just as a community together,” Colby told us. “They have all these skills. So how do you make it visible to everyone else, so that it makes sense for them to be able to have careers that are actually sustainable?”

That question is a provocation disguised as a program description. And it should give every nonprofit communicator pause.

The Deficit Story Is a Choice

Here’s the thing about the way philanthropy has historically told stories about LGBTQ communities, and particularly about Black and brown LGBTQ youth: It starts with what’s broken.

Homelessness rates. HIV transmission rates. Suicide statistics. Mental health crises. The language of vulnerability, of need, of a population to be saved.

None of that is false. Muneer Panjwani, formerly with the Trevor Project, will tell you plainly: LGBTQ youth are suffering on a daily basis, and the resources to reach them are nowhere near adequate. Nearly half of LGBT youth who want mental health care can’t access it. The Trevor Project exists precisely because that gap is a matter of life and death.

But here’s what Muneer also understands, and what drove one of the most quietly radical decisions I’ve heard a nonprofit make. In June 2020, when the Black Lives Matter protests broke out the night before 60 Trevor Project corporate campaigns were set to launch, Muneer sent one email: we need to pause. Not because the Trevor Project’s mission mattered less. But because the story of that moment belonged to someone else, and centering themselves in it would’ve been a values failure. Every corporate partner paused with them. No one fought it. Because when you’ve built relationships rooted in shared values rather than transactional exchange, people follow your lead into the hard calls.

That kind of organizational courage comes from knowing who you are. From having a story that goes deeper than the ask.

Colby’s building that kind of organization. And the story he’s choosing to tell isn’t the deficit story.

“In the ballroom scene,” he told me, “there is nowhere else in the world where Black and brown people, femininity, art, color, and beauty are celebrated in mass. White patriarchy says it’s supposed to be one thing. In ballroom, it’s the exact opposite of that. And so it allows you to rethink what the world can look like.”

That’s not the language of a population in crisis. That’s the language of a counterculture that has been quietly, defiantly, joyfully building the world that mainstream institutions keep saying is possible someday.

It’s already here. It’s been here. We just haven’t been funding it.

What a Friend Saw in a Gallery

Colby recently held Kiki Arts Collaborative‘s first annual visual art exhibit at Inspiration Point in the Bronx, a multimedia arts space that used to be a youth correctional facility. Five artists from the Kiki scene. Seven weeks. Real walls. Real light. Real audience.

One of those artists was one of Colby’s closest friends. A man who makes all of Colby’s ballroom costumes. Who never had a sewing lesson, just got a sewing machine from his grandmother and started teaching himself, stitch by stitch, costume by costume, for years.

Colby helped him mount his pieces on mannequins. And when his friend saw his own work hanging in the gallery for the first time, he started to cry.

“Thank you so much for allowing me to see my art as art.”

Read that again.

Not thank you for helping me. Not thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for allowing me to see my art as art.

That’s what the deficit story costs us. When we only tell the story of what’s broken, we make it harder for people to see themselves as anything other than the problem being solved. We strip the dignity from the very people we say we’re serving. We take their art and turn it into evidence of need.

At We Are For Good, our first core value is: everyone matters. Not everyone matters when they’re in crisis. Not everyone matters once they’ve achieved the outcome we’re measuring. Everyone. Matters. Now. As they are. In their art, in their culture, in their chosen families, in their sequins and their runway walks and their decades of underground community-building that nobody called philanthropy but that saved lives every single day.

Colby isn’t building a charity. He’s building an infrastructure. He’s making visible what was always there. He’s doing, professionally and publicly, what his mother did quietly her entire life: opening up the space, and genuinely doing so expansively.

I know this because I saw it with my own eyes.

In April, at GoodCon in New York City, Kiki Arts Collaborative performed.

The feathers were popping. The entire room was on its feet. The grins on the faces of the performers, and the people watching them, were the kind of joy you don’t perform, you can’t manufacture, you only get when something true is happening in real time. It was infectious and full and loud and it was community made completely, unapologetically visible.

I hugged them afterward. I thanked them. I want to be honest about who I am in that moment: a cisgender white woman from Oklahoma City with zero rhythm and a deep, abiding appreciation for art that I could never make. And I stood in that room and felt something shift. Not pity. Not charity. Not the bittersweet feeling of witnessing someone else’s struggle from a safe distance.

Pride. Straight up pride. The kind Colby’s mom was talking about when she told him his opportunities were blessings. The kind that makes you want to go do something worthy of what you just witnessed.

That’s what philanthropy is supposed to feel like. That’s the story we should be desperate to tell.

Pride Is Not a Statistic. It’s a Statement.

Pride month wasn’t born as a fundraising campaign. It was born as a riot. Trans women of color, Black trans women in particular, fighting back against police raids on gay bars, against the daily violence of simply existing in a body the world said was wrong. Muneer said it plainly: the history of Pride and the history of Black liberation aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story told in different voices.

Which means Pride was, from the very beginning, celebration as resistance. Joy as a political act. Community as survival infrastructure.

The Kiki scene carries that same DNA. It was created in the early 90s specifically to counter the things that were killing Black and brown LGBTQ youth: homelessness, HIV, isolation, invisibility. And it did it not through a crisis hotline or a case management system, but through a ballroom, a runway, a chosen family cheering your name.

That is philanthropy. That is generosity. That is everyone matters made real and put to music.

And so this Pride, I want to ask the sector something uncomfortable.

🎤 Are we telling the story that’s true, or the story that’s easiest to fundraise?

🏳️‍🌈 Are we centering the community’s crisis or the community’s power?

🪞 Are we showing up as partners in liberation or as institutions that need people to stay just broken enough to justify our budgets?

Colby is 26 years old. Kiki Arts Collaborative is one year old. And he already understands something it takes most organizations decades to learn: the story you choose to tell is a values statement. The frame is the thesis. And if you keep leading with what’s broken, you’ll never be able to show people what’s possible.

How You Can Help Kiki Arts Collaborative

Colby was clear about what Kiki needs, and it goes deeper than a donation.

🎨 Connect them to the industry. If you work in arts, culture, media, film, fashion, or entertainment and want to create pathways for talented young people, Colby wants to hear from you. Internships, mentorships, portfolio reviews, introductions: this is exactly the pipeline he’s trying to build. Reach out directly.

💸 Fund the infrastructure. Year one orgs doing revolutionary work rarely have the backing they deserve. A gift to Kiki Arts Collaborative is a direct investment in making visible what has always been there. Visit kikiartscollaborative.org to give.

📱 Follow and amplify. Find them on Instagram at @KikiArtsCollab and follow Colby at @colbyxzavier. Share their work. Tag your networks. Show the algorithm that this community deserves to be seen because visibility is not a small thing when you’ve spent decades underground.

🗣️ Tell a different story. If you lead a nonprofit, run a communications team, or write anything for public consumption this Pride month, ask yourself which story you’re choosing to tell. Colby’s work is the answer to that question. Share this post. Share his name. Let people know this exists.

Take Care of Your Blessings

Colby closed our conversation with a saying of Essex Hemphill, the Black queer poet whose work should be required reading for anyone in this sector.

Take care of your blessings.

He said it’s been his guiding mantra. That the people in his life, the opportunities he has, even just being here, those are blessings. And blessings require tending.

I keep thinking about what it means to tend something. It doesn’t mean putting it behind glass. It doesn’t mean explaining it to an audience that didn’t ask for it. It means showing up for it consistently, in the quiet and in the public, in the funded moments and the unfunded ones. It means building the gallery so your friend can finally see his own art as art.

Colby’s mom opened her home. Let people sleep in her son’s bed. Did people’s resumes at the kitchen table. Called none of it service. Just called it what you do.

Her son grew up and built a ballroom.

That’s the story. That’s all of the story. And it’s still being written.

We’re building a more honest picture of the world together. And starting with abundance first - because a celebration shows others how to join our party.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

Special thanks to Good is the New Cool + Elevate Prize for connecting Kiki to WAFG

If you or an LGBTQ+ young person in your life needs support:

The Trevor Project offers free, confidential crisis counseling 24/7 for LGBTQ+ people under 25, by phone, text, or chat.

• Call 1-866-488-7386

• Text START to 678-678

• Chat at TheTrevorProject.org/get-help

You don’t have to be in crisis to reach out — being overwhelmed, questioning, or just needing someone to talk to is reason enough.

💬 This week’s prompt:

Let’s “take care of your blessings.” Name one person, one community, or one piece of art that has expanded what you thought was possible for the world.

Drop it here. Let’s tend these things together.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

Quick Hits

🎙️ On the Pod: Haylin Denison is a licensed clinical social worker, mental health systems disruptor, and the kind of angry mother the world needs. When she couldn't find a therapist for her own child during COVID and looked around to find almost no resources for LGBTQ+ youth in Hawaii. She built Spill the Tea Café from scratch with her son Mattie, who came up with the name. It's Hawaii's first gender-affirming youth mental health clinic - and it looks less like a clinic and more like somewhere you'd actually want to be. Free boba, a PS5, a library, and some of the most trauma-informed community care in the state. Over 700 youth served. 🧋

🩵 Good Humans - She calls herself a quirky nerd. I call her one of the most important voices in the room right now. Dr. Payal Beri is a global empathy speaker, psychologist, and founder of RK Empathy - and her framework is quietly revolutionary: compassion for self, empathy for others, accountability for both. Find her at RKempathy.com and follow her on LinkedIn. Your nervous system will thank you.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight - The Trevor Project exists because a film about a gay teenager exploring suicide ideation aired on HBO in 1988, and the producers refused to let it air without a lifeline at the end - so they built one from scratch. Today it's the world's largest suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, operating a 24/7 crisis line by phone, text, and chat, and the research that keeps us up at night: having just one supportive adult in an LGBTQ+ young person's life reduces their risk of suicide by 40%. Be that person 🌈

💪Women Being Badasses - Olivia Rodrigo just did something I love to see. She announced Daisy Chain Fields - an all-women music festival on Aug. 29 at Great Park in Irvine, CA with 100% of net proceeds going directly to nonprofits advancing and advocating for women and girls. The lineup is genuinely unhinged in the best way: Chappell Roan, Mitski, Doechii, Bikini Kill, Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan, Karen O and more. Joy as a political act, community as the strategy, and women taking care of women. That's the whole thing. Head to daisychainfields.com.

🌎 Global Goodness - Chief Theresa Kachindamoto was a Malawian chief who saw girls as young as 12 with children of their own in her community, and decided that was the last day she'd look away - eventually annulling over 3,500 child marriages and sending every single one of those girls back to school, often funding their education herself. The world lost her in August 2025, but her words still ring: "Educate a girl and you educate the whole world." 🙏🏽

📚 What I’m Reading - Chop Wood, Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf. A story of a young man who travels to Japan to become a samurai archer and slowly discovers that the training was never really about the arrow. It’s just a simple parable about doing the quiet, unglamorous, nobody’s-watching work every single day - and trusting that it’s enough. Chop the wood. Carry the water. Show up anyway. 🪵 Thank you, Justin McCord, for putting this in my hands - and for knowing I needed it before I did.

🎶 What I’m Listening - Currently obsessed with The Werks out of Dayton, OH, and this song Stars Collide. Incredible vibes guaranteed🤘

💬 Your Stories. Right here.

Last issue we asked: Name an artist or song that has ever made you feel genuinely, completely understood - the kind that hits lower in your chest than everything else and makes you feel something you can’t fully explain.

Jimmy Eat World has spoken to me and my place in life for nearly 30 years. Their song “23” has gotten me through some muckity muck, for sure. - Evan, Houston

It may seem silly, but when I work late, I’ll sometimes find a song I love to loop over and over. Three years into We Are For Good, I found a Janet Jackson song I loved, “Take Me Away.” I had listened to it probably 30+ times by the time I tuned into the lyrics and realized it was what I needed to move out of Oklahoma. “Take me away from here. Somewhere the air is clear. Take me away from here. Somewhere where love has no fear.” We made the call to move two weeks later. - Becky, Ft. Collins

I’m a GenX girl from Oklahoma City. Raised on red dirt, OSU football, and the kind of summers that melt into the pavement. And I grew up in a house that was never quiet.

My mother was a pianist, vocalist, and choir director. We all played piano. My dad played the organ, came home to watch MTV on his lunch breaks and his CD collection spanned every genre you can imagine (except country. Ironic, no?). But above everything else, he loved the blues. The grit of it. The feeling. The pain and the trauma transmuted into something you could hear. The blues let my dad feel deeply, and he passed that love of deep feeling music on to me like a birthright.

So when I got my 16 year-old hands on a 1987 Chrysler LeBaron convertible, handed down three times, maroon, peeling paint on the hood (earning the name Leprotetic LeBaron), and started driving around the streets with the top down blasting hip hop and R&B, it wasn’t as strange as it sounds.

Shoop. This Is How We Do It. Waterfalls. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Mary J. Blige all making me feel everything at once. Dre. OutKast. Salt-N-Pepa. Janet Jackson. My people 🎧

But here’s the thing, and it took me decades to put language to this: hip hop hit differently. It didn’t sit in the top of my chest the way a lot of music did. It sat lower. It landed in the body before it landed in the brain. It was raw. It was personal. The stories stayed with me. The beats carried something real, something that had been lived, something that came from people who needed a container big enough to hold it.

Just like the blues.

Turns out, that was my first education in empathy.

The Recording Studio That Changed Everything

When we sat down with JC Hall, licensed clinical social worker, hip hop artist, and the founder of a hip hop therapy studio inside Mott Haven Community High School in the South Bronx, I knew within the first five minutes we were kindred spirits.

And then he mentioned Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and it was over. “Tha Crossroads” bonded us. We were friends for life.

JC grew up the way a lot of kids grow up, struggling, isolated, reaching for something to hold onto. He described himself plainly as a problem child. Alcoholism. Addiction. Mental health issues that sent him in and out of rehab, psych wards, halfway houses, sober living homes. The full circuit of institutions that were supposed to help him and largely made things worse.

Every time he landed somewhere, they took his music. They looked at his love of hip hop and saw a root cause rather than a lifeline. They saw the commercialized 1% of the culture, the stuff on the radio, and decided that was what he was made of. Nobody looked deeper. Nobody asked what the music meant to him or why he needed it. They just removed it.

[insert heartbreak]

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about that: Obi Okolo, creative director at Bittersweet Creative, is a storytelling genius and puts it plainly, “the exercise of storytelling is deeply relational and cannot be transactional without causing a lot of damage.” Every institution that took JC’s music away was being transactional with his story. Extracting a diagnosis. Mapping him to a protocol. Deciding what his hip hop meant before ever sitting down with him. They saw the surface and made a verdict. Nobody self-emptied. Nobody listened.

And it almost killed him.

So his first real experience of therapy was a cultural disconnection so complete that he’d go in, lie down on the couch, and say: write me the prescription, give me the meds, I’m not talking to you. He was medicated and unseen and sliding.

I sit here and wonder how many other JCs are out there going through the same experience. How is that our call to see them.

But then something shifted in JC’s story.

Because he met Dr. Stuart Lerner. Who wasn’t a hip hop head. Who wore earth tones and wrote poetry and was, by JC’s own description, “kind of a hippie.” But when JC told him he loved hip hop, Dr. Lerner didn’t flinch. He said: that’s poetry, man. And then he shared some of his own lyrics. And JC shared some of his. And something cracked open that no prescription ever had.

That’s what Obi means when he talks about relationship as the foundation of everything. Not relationship as a tactic - relationship as the prerequisite. Dr. Lerner didn’t arrive with a framework for what JC’s music was. He arrived with curiosity. He met JC where he was instead of where it was convenient to find him. And in doing so, he became the first person to say: I see what that is.

That’s everything he needed - right there. The 15-year-old who didn’t plan on making it to 16. The institutions that kept taking the one thing keeping him alive. And the one man who finally said: I see what that is. That’s poetry.

He found it in hip hop. Specifically in the way emcees could take utter desperation, feeling lost and alone, and transform it into poetry. Into bars. Into something that resonated in the chest before the brain had a chance to catch up.

Sound familiar?

Hip hop was essentially his therapy. It kept him alive just long enough to finally get to actual therapy.

And then, through one of those universe-winking moments that I deeply believe in, he stumbled across the term hip hop therapy while preparing for grad school, and found that the man who coined it, Dr. Edgar Tyson, was a professor at the one school JC had applied to. He sent Dr. Tyson a novel-length email. Dr. Tyson wrote back. A mentorship was born. And from that relationship, and from the grief of losing Dr. Tyson suddenly at 54, came the work JC is doing today.

Thirteen years. One school. A recording studio built in an old storage closet that now houses professional-grade equipment. An 85% graduation rate at a school serving trauma-exposed students, against a city average of 60%. That’s how Hip Hop Therapy was born.

And it led him to some incredibly talented students. And I’d love for you to meet Ephraim.

Ephraim came to JC’s studio after a suicide attempt, a kid who had always written poetry but had been told - explicitly, repeatedly - that rap was bad, that his culture was the problem. JC recognized it immediately because he’d lived the same story. He encouraged Ephraim to put his poetry to beats, and slowly this shelled-up, bottled-up kid started finding his voice, connecting with others in the studio, saying things that surprised even himself.

One Friday they stayed until 6 p.m. and Ephraim didn’t get his turn to record - three other kids were ahead of him - so JC made him a promise: “Monday is your day, E. The whole session, just you.” That weekend, Ephraim was walking down the street with a friend when they crossed paths with another group. His friend said something. The other kids pulled out knives. His friend ran. Ephraim didn’t. He was stabbed ten times - punctured lung, spleen, kidney, leg - and only survived because a stranger in a minivan wrapped him in clothes and rushed him to the hospital. He woke up the next day, barely alive, and his first thought was: Damn, I’m not gonna get my Monday.

His Monday - his day to record - was the first thing he thought about. Not the pain. Not the fear. The studio. The story he was waiting to tell.

What Story Actually Is

This is where I want to slow down, because I think we’ve gotten confused about what storytelling is for.

We’ve turned it into a tactic. A marketing tool. A fundraising mechanism. We map out the quotes we want to get before we ever sit down with the person. We force stories into org narratives instead of letting org narratives emerge from stories. We extract rather than receive.

And in doing so, we’ve lost the plot entirely.

Obi talks about the necessity of what he calls “self-emptying” before ever approaching someone else’s story. It’s the most challenging part of his process, he says - setting down his own voice, his own agenda, his own idea of what the story should be, so that he can actually hear what it is. “Storytelling is not necessarily time for my voice,” he told me. “There is an art to it, but it’s not my art.”

That’s brilliant, ethical storytelling-in-action right there.

That discipline is almost countercultural in a sector obsessed with control over narrative. The social impact sector loves to focus on the case for support. (Or as I call it, the “Ye Olde Case for Support”). The traditional case for support is built on the assumption that if you give someone enough information - the problem, the solution, the proof, the ask - they will logically conclude that they should give. It’s a document designed to convince. And conviction is the wrong goal entirely.

Obi says money is a byproduct, not a product. The case for support inverts that. It makes the financial transaction the entire architecture of the communication. Everything in it - the statistics, the stories, the outcomes - is arranged in service of the ask. Which means the humans inside it aren’t really there to be witnessed. They’re there to be useful. That’s the extractive model Obi is describing when he says storytelling cannot be transactional without causing damage.

The case for support also tends to universalize. It smooths out the specific human details in favor of language that will land with the broadest possible donor audience. But Obi’s entire argument - and JC’s work proves it - is that specificity is what actually moves people. Ephraim thinking about his Monday from a hospital bed does more work than any impact statistic. The case for support would probably turn Ephraim into a data point.

We want the story to serve the mission statement. We want it to hit the right notes for the major donor in the room. We want it packaged and pointed at an outcome before the person telling it has even finished speaking.

JC learned the same lesson making his documentary Mott Haven. He wanted to sit in front of the camera and explain hip hop therapy. Walk people through the framework. His director said: the kids are the story. Let people see it.

The director was his buddy Kyle - not a film school grad, just someone who caught wind of what JC was doing and showed up with a camera. Pure DIY, shoestring, no budget. But Kyle was adamant: the kids are the story. You don’t need to explain it, let people see it.

That landed for JC because of the creative writing principle he already knew: show, don’t tell.

The story we try to manufacture is almost never as powerful as the one that actually happened. And we can’t hear the one that actually happened if we walk in already knowing what we’re going to find.

The Gift of Specificity

Consider what Obi’s saying: specificity is what makes a story stick. Not in spite of its particularity — because of it.

“When you create something for everybody, you’ve actually just created nothing for no one.”

We do the opposite in nonprofit storytelling all the time. We sand down the edges. We universalize. We make the story palatable to the widest possible audience because we’re afraid that if it’s too specific — too particular to one community, one experience, one moment — we’ll lose people.

But Obi argues the inverse is true. The stories that have stayed with him most are hyper-specific: a queer couple coming home for the holidays, a kid terrified of a carpenter bee, a family dinner that holds decades of unspoken love and grief. Those stories don’t need explaining. They land somewhere below the brain before the brain even has a chance to catch up.

Ephraim waking up in the hospital and thinking I’m not gonna get my Monday is almost absurdly specific. One kid. One recording day. One storage-closet studio in the South Bronx. And yet it is the most complete encapsulation of what it means to have something worth coming back for. It doesn’t need a fundraising ask attached to it. It doesn’t need framing or context or a call to action. It just lands because it is true in the most particular way possible.

That’s what hip hop has always known. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t justify. It witnesses. It is radically, unapologetically specific, and that specificity is exactly what makes it universal.

Dr. Tyson didn’t coin hip hop therapy because it sounded like a great grant application. He noticed a kid banging Bone Thugs-N-Harmony on a lunch table and thought: I know that song. Let me start there. That’s proximity. That’s presence. That’s what it means to meet someone where they are.

The People Are the Story. Get Out of the Way.

Obi puts it plainly: “I would rather have 10 people who are vocal 10s in a room for my brand than 30 people who are just lukewarm threes.” The 10s are advocates. The 10s are attractors. The 10s are disrupters. The lukewarm threes will drain every ounce of your energy trying to be something you’re not for people who were never fully with you anyway.

We Are For Good calls those 10s your Believers.

This is the bet JC made - maybe without knowing it - when he built the studio. He wasn’t building it for everyone. He was building it for the Ephraims. The kids who had been medicated and unseen and told that the thing keeping them alive was actually the problem. He went specific. He went deep. And the results - 85% graduation rate, a documentary, a kid who came back to finish his song - are the fruit of that specificity.

JC didn’t build toward an 85% graduation rate. He built toward something true, something relational, something that could hold what these kids were carrying. The graduation rate is the fruit. The studio - the Monday, the story, the space to witness yourself - that’s the process.

And Obi’s final word in all of this keeps surfacing for me: slow down. In a culture that is loud and fast, the counter-cultural act is to be slow and quiet. To resist the urgency. To give the thing the time it needs to become what it actually is.

JC built his studio in an old storage closet. It took thirteen years.

That’s not a liability. That’s the whole point.

What JC Taught Me I Already Knew

I didn’t have a therapist who told me hip hop was poetry when I was 16. But I had a convertible and a removable CD faceplate and a dad who taught me that the most honest music is the kind that hurts a little on the way in. And enough road to figure out that something in that music was telling me the truth about being human in a way nothing else was.

The rawness. The specificity. The way it didn’t clean anything up or make it prettier than it was. The way it made you feel like someone had reached into the exact pocket of your experience and named what was in there. And all of our experiences matter. Deeply.

That’s what story does at its best. Not explain. Not persuade. Not convert. Witness.

And when Ephraim came back to that recording studio on a cane, learning to walk again, and wrote a song called Heaven’s Gates about being on the cusp of death, that wasn’t a marketing asset. That was a human being using the only container big enough to hold what had happened to him.

Our job, as storytellers for good, is to create the conditions for that. To build the studio. To hold the space. To self-empty enough to actually hear what’s in front of us. To say: Monday is your day. We’ll be here.

And then to get out of the way.

Here’s How to Show Up 👇

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with JC Hall on the We Are For Good podcast. He’ll give you language for something you’ve always felt but maybe never had words for — and you’ll never hear a hip hop song the same way again.

🎬 Watch the documentary. Mott Haven is short, it’s real, and it will wreck you in the best way. No explaining. No framing. Just kids telling their own stories. Show, don’t tell — exactly the way it should be.

📲 Follow JC at @JCHipHopTherapy and visit hiphoptherapy.com - a free resource he built to honor Dr. Tyson’s legacy and make the model accessible to anyone who needs it. Share it with every therapist, counselor, educator, and youth worker you know. Awareness is the first door.

💸 Spread the word to funders. JC needs research support to build the evidence base that gets hip hop therapy into more schools, more cities, more kids’ lives. If you’re connected to foundations or grant-makers working in mental health or education equity, make the introduction. This is exactly the kind of work that deserves big bets.

💬 This Week’s Prompt

Name an artist or song that has ever made you feel genuinely, completely understood - the kind that hits lower in your chest than everything else and makes you feel something you can’t fully explain.

Share your song here. I want to know what’s living in your chest. Let’s build the most honest playlist the Internet has ever seen.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

This blog dedicated to the memories of Ephraim + Joshua 🎤🫳

Quick Hits

(honoring the World Cup by taking this section international this week!)

🎙️ On the Pod: When Alphonsine Anderson was a teenager, she survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide - losing her parents and two siblings, and becoming the sole caretaker of three younger children overnight. “My childhood was rushed,” she says. “I grew up in a hurry.” What she did next is the kind of story that stops you mid-scroll. She chased education across continents, landed her dream job at Cisco, and then turned around and built a nonprofit - Rising Above the Storms - to make sure vulnerable children in Rwanda know they are loved and that their lives can be different. To date, RAS has served 2,000+ kids, provided 40+ scholarships, and logged 13,000+ counseling sessions. Grab the tissues. This conversation is everything 🇷🇼

🩵 Good Humans - Marta Cagliani is an international creative do-gooder with a heart of gold. Her talent lies in designing nonprofit print + digital fundraising campaigns. Based in Milan, she brings together a background in communications and graphic design with experience inside a nonprofit fundraising unit, which means she doesn’t just make things look good - she understands the mission behind the ask. She’s also an ImpactUp host in Milan, where she’s building exactly the kind of warm, purposeful community that makes you want to pull up a chair. A la famiglia, Marta 🇮🇹

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight - MAIA Impact is asking one question - how far can she go? Then doing everything in their power to find out. Based in rural Guatemala, MAIA invests in “Girl Pioneers,” ambitious young Indigenous women who have the talent to change their trajectories but lack access to opportunity. Their MAIA Impact School pairs rigorous academics with deep mentorship, family engagement, and role models from the same communities as their students. Culturally rooted, ecosystemic, and led by Indigenous women - this is one of my favorite girl-empowered nonprofits 🇬🇹

👫 Neighborly Awesomeness - Scotland won their first game at the World Cup and apparently decided to celebrate by... being the most wholesome fans on the planet! Scotland supporters donated nearly $30K to Providence, Rhode Island charities while in town. They came, they won (!!), and they gave back. Meanwhile the rest of us are just out here tipping 18%. Respect, Scotland. Absolute respect 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

🥖 Good Food, Good Law - France said throwing away perfectly good food while people go hungry is actually illegal now - and I love to see it. A law banned supermarkets from trashing or deliberately spoiling unsold food, requiring them to donate it to food banks and charities instead. No more bleaching the dumpsters to deter hungry people (yes, that was a thing). Just...giving food to people who need food. Revolutionary concept, truly. The rest of the world is taking notes 🇫🇷

🌎 Global Good News - Mexico just said “healthcare is a right, not a privilege” - and then actually did something about it. President Claudia Sheinbaum (I heart her 🫶) announced a plan to achieve universal health coverage by 2027, merging the country’s three fragmented public health systems into one unified network where every resident gets a single health ID card and free access to care. We’re talking mammograms, cancer treatment, kidney disease, the works - no insurance required. Brilliant, human, accessible. No notes, Mexico. 🇲🇽

🧬 Science Win for Women - A single shot given to 12-year-olds has brought cervical cancer deaths in young women in England to close to zero. Let that sink in. New landmark research found zero cervical cancer deaths in women aged 20-24 between 2020 and 2024 - where 23 would have been expected without the vaccine. 200 lives saved so far, and researchers say we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg as vaccinated generations get older. Science doing what science does best - and this time, it’s personal. Cervical cancer touches so many of us. In fact, 4,200 women will die from it this year in the U.S. This is the kind of news worth celebrating 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

My grandma lost both her parents by the time she was 15.

She was the daughter of Italian immigrants, and when they were gone, there was no safety net, no system, no policy waiting to catch her. I cannot even imagine what it felt like to endure and overcome that. But the reality was - something did catch her. Invisible nets that often go unnoticed. What caught her was the people.

The older brother who went to the mines so the family could earn a living. The older sister who braided her hair and made sure she got to school. The neighbors who passed food through the fence. The older kids on the block who watched out for the younger ones because that was simply what you did.

She carried all of that into every house she ever lived in. Every pot of sauce on the stove on a Sunday. Every ravioli she made for Thanksgiving, the kind that took two days and fed every person in the family old enough to hold a fork. The neighborhood women she joined for Canasta nights and stood in solidarity when tragedy hit. Every kid from the neighborhood who ended up at her kitchen table or card table whether they lived there or not.

In our family, caring for each other wasn’t a value we talked about. It was as embedded in us as the dialect, the recipes, and the very connective tissue that fostered safety + love + generosity concurrently among us. My grandma Ann and her siblings grew up believing it takes a village to raise a family. Not philosophically. Practically. Survivally. Because they’d seen what happened when the village wasn’t there.

I didn’t have language for what that was.

Not until I sat down with Ai-jen Poo.

The Fear in His Eyes

Ai-jen Poo is the co-founder of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She’s a MacArthur Fellow, a Time 100 honoree, and one of the clearest thinkers in America about what we owe each other.

She grew up in an intergenerational family too. Her grandfather, Liang Shao Pu, retired early from his career as an Air Force engineer in Taiwan to come help raise his grandchildren. He picked them up from school every day. They watched Wheel of Fortune together every night. He did tai chi in the driveway.

[cue every Italian grandmother nodding aggressively in recognition]

And then he grew older. He lost his vision. He grew frail. And the family couldn’t figure out how to find the right supports for him at home. They had to put him in a nursing home. The room was shared with strangers. The food was wrong. The lights didn’t work. The workers had thirty people in their charge. There was no way to take care of that number of people well, and everyone in that building knew it.

Ai-jen said something I knew directly from my experience with my grandma - and it was chilling.

“I remember seeing fear in his eyes for the first time. This person who was my hero growing up.”

That heartbreak became a question she couldn’t stop asking. How could it be that we have people in our lives who gave us everything, who made us who we are, and when they need care, we can’t show up the way we want to?

That question became Caring Across Generations, which has now spent 15 years working to change both policy and culture around what America believes care is worth.

She put it plainly: care should be - in modern American life - almost like infrastructure. Almost like the roads, the bridges, the tunnels, the wireless access. The enabling force that makes everything else possible.

Some of us need a bridge to get to work. Others need child care. Others need home care.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s a policy argument. And it’s long overdue.

The Numbers Behind the Invisible

Here’s what we’re actually talking about when we talk about caregiving in America right now. And y’all. These numbers 🤯🫣

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 1 in 4 American adults is a family caregiver right now. That’s 63 million people, up 20 million since 2015. The village didn’t disappear. It just got exhausted.

💸 Nearly half of caregivers have experienced major financial strain, including taking on debt, stopping savings, or being unable to afford food.

🏥 1 in 5 caregivers report poor health. They’re pouring out constantly, often with no one pouring back in.

💼 7 in 10 caregivers are also employed. They’re not choosing between work and care. They’re doing both. All the time. Usually without telling anyone.

💰 The value of America’s unpaid caregiver labor: $873 billion annually. Nearly twice what we spend on home care and nursing homes. Combined. Let that land.

And here’s the part that keeps me up at night: social isolation and loneliness are common among caregivers, which increases their risk for psychological distress. They’re doing enormous, invisible work. Largely alone.

This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a structural one.

We built a society that treats care as private, invisible, and individual. And then we wonder why so many caregivers are quietly drowning in plain sight.

Ai-jen said it plainly: you can’t value what you can’t see. And you can’t support what you can’t name.

My grandmother never called herself a caregiver.

She called it being a family

The Research Confirms What She Already Knew

Turns out - intergenerational programs reduce loneliness and increase social support in older adults. Research shows positive impacts on children’s perceptions of older adults, and benefits for older participants, including improved wellbeing, self-perceived health, self-esteem, and a meaningful reduction in depression.

Bringing two or more generations together in purposeful connection builds more cohesive communities and improves social + emotional + behavioral outcomes across age groups.

And emerging research supports a shift away from single-caregiver models toward network-level planning, where care is distributed across families and communities rather than concentrated on one person.

Network-level planning. [That’s just a clinical way of saying: the village]

That’s giving me some serious “Community is Everything” vibes ✌️😎✌️

My grandmother wasn’t doing anything radical. She was doing something ancient. And we’ve spent the better part of a century dismantling the conditions that made it possible.

People First. Always People First.

The “it takes a village” concept Ai-jen is uplifting is something my friend Caylee supports too. Caylee Dodson, executive director of Restore OKC, came on the We Are For Good podcast and said something that reordered how I think about community change.

“People in a place create a practice, and that practice shapes policy.”

Not the other way around. Not policy, then practice. Not data, then people.

People first. Always.

Restore OKC’s spent nearly a decade building a holistic community ecosystem in northeast Oklahoma City rooted in health, education, housing and employment. They didn’t walk in with a strategic plan. They walked in with questions. They sat in a library and listened to a librarian tell them what was actually happening. They spent a summer with families who had nowhere to take their children when the state cut child care subsidies overnight.

They made water balloons. They showed up.

And from that showing up, everything else grew.

When they asked families what the biggest need was, the answer wasn’t what the data said it should be. The data said: the schools are failing, fix literacy. The families said: the teachers are leaving. Keep the teachers.

So Restore built care teams. Six to eight adults showing up to a school for two hours a week to do whatever the teacher needed. No curriculum, no program, no outcome metrics. Just presence. Just people.

Teacher retention shifted from 4% to 80%. The school went from last in the district to top ten in reading.

That’s what happens when you start with people.

[check out Restore OKC’s podcast convo. It’s wickedly inspiring.]

Ai-jen’s running the same play at scale. The 1 Million Care Conversations campaign isn’t a marketing initiative. It’s a listening initiative. She wants to hear from family caregivers directly, in their own words, about what they’re carrying and what they need. Because you can’t design solutions from a distance. You have to be in proximity to the problem to understand it. These are stories that fill The Hope Gap🙌

Both of them are saying the same thing: the community has the answers. We just have to stop talking long enough to hear them.

What Vibrant Communities Actually Look Like

I’ve seen what it looks like when a community decides that caring for each other is everybody’s business.

It looks like Restore OKC’s Monday morning ritual, where every staff member stops for an hour to share what’s good. Not to solve problems. Not to check boxes. Just to witness each other and remember why they’re there.

It looks like Ai-jen’s Give Not Take Media, a new production label dedicated to walking alongside filmmakers telling authentic stories about care. Their film Take Me Home, which premiered at Tribeca, centers a woman with a cognitive disability who ends up caring for her aging parents. It’s the care reversal nobody talks about. It’s one of 63 million stories waiting to be told.

It looks like my parents - and other volunteers who spend 90 minutes a week reading math books and Elephant & Piggie books alike with their Whiz Kids.

It looks like the Japanese fans who stayed after the World Cup game, Japan vs. Netherlands, to Clean.The.Entire.Stadium😳🥹😭🥰👏🙏🤝 (← that was the order of my emotions. Full story below in Quick Hits.)

It looks like my grandmother making ravioli, every person in the house with a job, three-year-old cranking manically on the pasta maker handle, the kitchen loud and warm, - nobody keeping score.

And the science? It backs all of it up. When generations actually do life together, older adults feel less invisible, kids grow up kinder, and the whole community gets a little more whole. Turns out showing up for each other is one of the most powerful things we can do.

Who knew ravioli was basically a public health strategy? 🍝 *

The Invitation

Ai-jen’s one good thing on the podcast was simple. And gut-punching.

She said: “If you know someone in your life who’s a caregiver, just reach out. Just do the invitation. Just check in. It means so much, and you never know how much it might mean.”

Here’s what doesn’t get said enough: caregivers get uninvited.

Once people know you’re deep in it, they assume you’re too busy. They stop calling. They stop including you. The very moment when someone needs the most connection is the moment they’re most likely to be quietly dropped from the social web.

My grandma wouldn’t have understood this. In her world, if someone was struggling, you showed up with food. You didn’t wait to be asked. That wasn’t heroic.

That was Tuesday.

We’ve been so busy trying to professionalize care, commodify it, turn it into a line item in a budget, that we forgot it was always supposed to be woven into the fabric of daily life. Not a service.

A way of being with each other.

Caring Across Generations is trying to stitch that fabric back together at scale. They need your story. They need your voice. They need you to know that what your family did, what my family did, what Ai-jen’s grandfather showed up to do when he retired early and moved across the world to raise his grandchildren...none of that was small.

That was the whole point.

Here’s How to Show Up 👇

🗣️ Share your care story at caringacross.org. They’re working toward 1 million care conversations this year, and your story is part of the infrastructure.

📲 Follow Ai-jen at @igenp on Instagram and on Bluesky, and follow Caring Across Generations for updates on the campaign. They’ll be sharing what they’re hearing along the way. You’ll want to see it.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Ai-jen Poo on the We Are For Good podcast. She’ll give you language for things you’ve always known but never had the words for.

💌 Reach out to a caregiver this week. Not to help. Just to say: I see you. I haven’t forgotten you. The invitation still stands.

This Week’s Prompt 💬

Think about the person in your life who modeled care as a way of being, not a service to be rendered. A grandmother. A neighbor. A coach. A church lady who showed up with a casserole before anyone even asked.

Who was it? What did they do that you’re still carrying with you?

🗣️Share your answer here.

We can all build villages of care around us. Whether the village starts in a St. Louis kitchen or at the end of the driveway during Tai-chi class, it all matters. Community of care. It would make Ann and Liang smile, I have no doubt.

The village is still here.

It just needs to remember itself. To show up…and someone bring the sauce.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

The Quick + The Good

🎙️ On the Pod: Hala Hanna, Executive Director of MIT Solve, is doing some crazy, amazing things with the smartest engineers + entrepreneurs. She joined Jon and I to talk about how philanthropy is shifting from rewarding proximity to power toward rewarding proximity to the problem - and why the best risk capital we have is philanthropic funding deployed with trust, measurable outcomes, and real relationships. She brought receipts: 460 innovators worldwide, 430 million lives reached, and a 92–96% five-year survival rate for the ventures they support.

🩵 Good Humans - Nicole R. Smith, CVA is the first-ever Executive Director of ALIVE - the Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement - and the person making the irrefutable case that your volunteer coordinator is actually the most strategic person in your building. Nicole’s devoted her career to championing the hidden gems of the nonprofit sector, and if you want to know what it looks like to fight for the people who show up for everyone else, she's your person.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight - The FarmLink Project started as a group chat between college students during the pandemic who noticed something that didn't make sense: farmers were plowing crops back into the ground while food banks were running out of food. So they did something about it. What began as a scrappy volunteer operation turned into a movement that’s saved over 497 million pounds of food moved to date in high-need communities - and proved that proximity to a problem plus a bias for action is all you really need to change the world. Follow them, share them, and remember that the next big solution might be born in a group chat.

📰 Good News - Y’all, Melinda French Gates is starting the “menopause revolution” and I gotta tell you that I am HERE FOR IT 🎉 She committed an additional $215 million to women’s healthcare last week, and is making the case to address what she sees as systemic problems plaguing women in middle age. Melinda shows up for girls + women not just with her philanthropy, but with her time + allyship. I heart her 🫶

🔭 Ahead of Their Time - Zambia made a bold, historic decision: free education for every child back in 2021. Two million kids flooded into schools who had never been there before - and the country is now wrestling with the most beautiful, complicated problem a nation can have. Classrooms built for 30 now hold 100. Teachers went from 40 students to 100 overnight. Kids are sitting on cold floors just to get a seat. And yet, kids who stopped going to school because their parents couldn't afford it are back. That's the whole point. Zambia's Education Minister said it plainly: "I'd rather let the children be in a congested classroom than in the street." This story is messy and hopeful and real, and it's a reminder that access is always the first door.

😊 Stuff to make you smile - Last week at the World Cup, Japanese fans stayed after the final whistle to clean up the bleachers. Trash bags in hand, cheers still in their hearts. For real. [insert swoon] This tradition dates back to 1998 and is rooted in a cultural mantra translated to "a bird leaves nothing behind" - meaning you return every space exactly as you found it. It's built in from childhood. Most Japanese schools don't even hire janitors because students clean up after themselves. And their players follow the same code, leaving locker rooms spotless on the way out. In a world that feels increasingly disposable, Japan is quietly modeling something ancient + radical: that how you leave a place is just as important as how you showed up to it.

💬 Your Stories. Right here.

Last issue we asked: What’s a piece of childhood media — a book, show, song, or character — that shaped how you see the world?

Just so you know, I grinned at every one.

The post reminded me of growing up myself with Sesame Street and introducing my boys to it. They are now 22 and 18 but can still recall episodes of the show. My oldest used to sit in his little rocking chair by the Christmas tree covered in kid ornaments. He would go to the tree and kiss Big Bird and the gang and tell them each “good night.” When he got to Elmo - his favorite - he would say “night night Melmo.” We had front row seats to Sesame Street Live on more than one occasion, and to watch him interact with the characters and other children there was indescribable. Sesame Street has always been a staple in our house. Still is. Because if anything Sesame Street related comes on...they stop and watch. 😭 — Lisa, Newcastle

So many from this Gen Xer. The Frog & Toad books by Arnold Lobel, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Schoolhouse Rock (specifically the Great American Melting Pot song) - and on the “what not to do” side, Zack Morris is Trash episode reviews of Saved by the Bell. — Lexy, Civitella Messer Raimondo, Italy

Mr. Rogers. I don’t think it was ever a specific episode, but I remember how kind he was and how he treated others. He was soft-spoken and took his time - with everything - and it still reminds me now to slow down, listen, pay attention to the people around you. That helps me enjoy my life more and truly fills my cup. — Nelvin, Long Island

When I was young, I read a book called A Spoon for Every Bite by Joe Hayes. In it, Joe depicts a rich man encountering a poor family who tell him they use a new spoon with every bite. The rich man becomes obsessed with being “rich enough” to do the same - and eventually runs out of funds trying. He finally goes to visit the family to see how they do it, only to learn that they eat their meals with tortillas, and every new bite is a new “spoon.” Reading this book normalized eating my meals with tortillas as the spoon - and taught me the power of sitting with someone to learn from them instead of trying to be better than them. — Anonymous

Maya and Miguel, also a PBS Kids show, gave me empathy for Hispanic-American kids and immigrant families. Honestly, I think it was my earliest introduction to Spanish, which I’m now fluent in. — Emily, Malaga, Spain

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. He promises to sit on an egg for Maudie the bird, not realizing she’ll be gone for the entire time the egg needs to hatch. So while she flits across the world enjoying herself, he stays on that egg through weather, challenge after dangerous event - because he promised. — Nancy, Oklahoma City

I have to be honest with you. When we got the news that Scott Cameron from Sesame Workshop was coming on the podcast, I may have screamed in my car.

Not a little. A lot.

Because Sesame Street isn’t just a show I watched. It was my world. I’m a GenX kid who grew up in the 80s, and Sesame Street was as real to me as my own neighborhood. Maria. Gordon. Luis. Mr. Hooper. Cookie Monster. Bert and Ernie. Big Bird. I had the lamp. The one with the streetlight and Big Bird on the shade, sitting on my bedside table, casting a warm glow over everything. And I can still sing every word of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, ELEVEN TWELVE without missing a beat. Monsterpiece Theater. The Letter B sung to the Beatles’ “Let Her Be.” The little girl holding up the orange crayon, watching how it was made.

That show didn’t just teach me to count. It taught me how to see people.

And sitting across from Scott Cameron, I realized that was never an accident.

It Was Always About Empathy First

Here’s what most people don’t know about Sesame Street: it started at a dinner party in 1966, when a television producer named Joan Ganz Cooney told a guest she’d learned to make beef bourguignon by watching Julia Child on PBS. That guest, an experimental psychologist named Lloyd Morissette, looked at her and said: if you learned to cook by watching television, do you think television could teach young children?

She said: I don’t know. Let’s find out.

What followed was the most research-driven, empathy-forward, intentionally designed children’s media experiment in history. The model was both simple and radical: a Venn diagram of creative production + education + research. All three had a seat at the table. All three had a voice. And children, the actual children the show was for, were at the center of every decision.

Scott said that when Sesame was developing content for children affected by conflict and displacement in Syria and the surrounding region, the team flew to Jordan expecting to build a curriculum around resilience. They’d done their research. They were ready. And then every single advisor and educator in the room said the same thing: slow down. You’re trying to do too much.

Children need to learn the ABCs of emotion first.

Not resilience. Not coping. Not grit. The ABCs of emotion. Happy. Sad. Mad. Because if a child doesn’t know the word frustrated, they can’t manage frustration. If they don’t know the word scared, they can’t ask for help when they’re scared. Language is the first tool. Empathy is the foundation. Because Sesame went to the community first and listened before building anything, they got it right.

That’s the model. That’s always been the model.

Listen to the full Sesame episode here

Oscar Taught Us More Than We Realized

Scott shared something else that unlocked a memory I didn’t even know I had. When he started at Sesame as a young intern, he learned that Oscar the Grouch was designed intentionally. Not as a joke character. Not as comic relief. As a representation of mutual respect and differing perspectives.

Every single time Oscar is in a scene, you get conflict. You get tension. You get this wildly exaggerated version of what it means to hold a completely different worldview from everyone around you. And you’re watching it as a five-year-old, learning something that most adults still struggle with: that someone can see the world entirely differently from you, and still deserve to be in the circle.

That’s not a soft skill. That’s civilization.

Henry Winkler (yes, The Fonz) said it beautifully at a recent Emerson College graduation, telling the crowd that empathy is what gives you a rich life. Not achievement. Not accolades. Not the resume. Empathy. The ability to feel what someone else is feeling, to take their perspective seriously, to stay in the room with someone whose experience of the world is nothing like yours. That’s what makes a life full. That’s what makes communities thrive. And Sesame Street has been teaching it since 1969.

Kindness Isn’t Soft. It’s the Whole Thing.

We’ve spent years in our culture labeling kindness, generosity, and civility as soft skills. The nice-to-haves. The extras. The things you teach after the hard skills are handled.

Sesame Street has been quietly, persistently, brilliantly proving that backwards for six decades.

The research is unambiguous. Psychological safety is the single most predictive factor in team performance. Belonging is a biological need, not a luxury. Connection is not a perk of community. It is community. We know this firsthand.

We built the We Are For Good Belonging Index because we needed a way to measure something we kept watching orgs treat as a vibe. Belonging isn’t a vibe. It’s the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. And we define it simply: belonging is when someone feels safe to be human, seen for who they are, and invited into meaningful contribution. When belonging is strong, trust grows, leaders stay, ideas move faster, and community becomes capacity. When it erodes, it doesn’t break loudly. It just gets quiet. People stop showing up. They opt out slowly, without announcement, and nobody notices until the room feels different.

Sesame Street has been measuring the thing underneath that for 60 years. They just called it research. They sat with kids. They listened before they built. They asked educators what children actually needed before they wrote a single script. That’s belonging infrastructure in action — the deep belief that the people you’re serving deserve to be seen, heard, and centered before you decide what to give them.

And the kids who grow up knowing how to name their emotions, how to make room in the circle for someone who just walked in late, how to sit with someone in their trash can and disagree with them without dismissing them - those kids build better relationships, make better decisions, and yes, raise more money for better causes and lead more effective orgs.

Kindness isn’t soft. Kindness is the infrastructure.

Scott told us about something they’ve seen in every focus group, in every country, in every culture: when a child comes in late to a group of kids watching Sesame Street on the floor, the other kids scooch over. Every time. Without being asked. In Bangladesh. In Jordan. In Los Angeles. In South Africa. They just make room.

That’s not a learned behavior. That’s what children often do before the world teaches them otherwise.

What Kids Already Know

This is where our friend Kevin Adler comes in.

When Kevin was building Miracle Messages, his org that helps people experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems, he spent a year putting GoPro cameras on unhoused individuals and watching the footage. And one thing he saw over and over stopped him completely.

Every single time a child walked by someone experiencing homelessness, they never just walked by. They looked. They pointed. They tugged on their parent’s sleeve and asked why. They wanted to know what was happening and what they could do about it. Half the time, Kevin watched a child literally guide their parent back toward the person on the street (and watched adults quickly steer them away).

Kids didn’t need the neuroscience lesson about how the brain stops recognizing unhoused neighbors as fully human. They hadn’t learned it yet. They were still seeing everyone.

And then we teach it out of them.

Sesame Street has always known this. That’s why the show exists. Joan Ganz Cooney didn’t set out to build an entertainment empire. She set out to close a learning gap for children who were arriving at school without the same foundation as their peers. She set out to reach the kids who were being left behind. And she understood intuitively what Kevin Adler would spend years proving with data: that the children are not the problem to solve. They’re the ones closest to the answer.

Why This Matters Right Now

We’re living in a moment where the word empathy has become political. Where kindness has been weaponized as naivety. Where civility is dismissed as tone policing. And into that moment, Sesame Street quietly renewed itself on Netflix following elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting by the current administration. And with a new Netflix home streaming in 190 countries + 31 languages, the show kept doing exactly what it’s always done.

Putting children first. Listening before building. Finding the adults in the zeitgeist and pulling them back in through humor, celebrity, and songs too catchy to ignore. And creating characters, like Julia, who is on the autism spectrum, so that a little girl who shares her name can turn on the TV and see herself for the very first time.

That last one isn’t research. That’s my daughter. My Julia, child. And I’m her mom. And I’m telling you, what Sesame Street does goes so much deeper than focus groups and curriculum frameworks. It lands in the hearts of children who didn’t know they were waiting to feel seen. (yes, the full circle nature of Julia Child setting the tone for Sesame Street’s creation and my neurospicy Julia getting born around the same time as Sesame’s neurospicy muppet Julia makes me swoon 🥹).

What Sesame Street Teaches Us

It’s taught me that story is the most powerful educational tool we have. That research and creativity and education aren’t competing forces. They’re a Venn diagram, and the magic lives in the middle. That children aren’t vessels to fill; they’re teachers to learn from. That empathy isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation of every thriving community ever built. That the ABCs of emotion come before everything else. That making room in the circle is instinct, not curriculum. That kindness, generosity, and civility aren’t soft skills. They’re civilization. And that the light in the window, the one on a lamp beside a child’s bed, the one that’s been glowing since 1969, is still on.

It’s still on.

How to Show Up for Sesame Workshop

🎵 Watch and stream. Every view matters. Sesame Street is on Netflix in 190 countries.

📲 Follow and share on social. Their content resonates for adults just as much as kids — the Andrew Garfield and Elmo grief conversation will wreck you in the best way.

🌐 Explore resources - there’s incredible tools for parents, educators, grandparents, and anyone navigating hard conversations with young people.

📧 Reach Scott directly at scott.cameron@sesame.org (y’all, he literally gave our listeners his direct email. Community is everything!).

Can you feel it? That’s hope. It looks like a Muppet. It sounds like a counting song. And it’s been waiting for you to come back to it.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

💬 This Week’s Prompt

What’s a show, book, or character from your childhood that taught you something about kindness, empathy, or humanity that you still carry with you today?

[Share your answer here →]

The Quick + The Good

🎙️ On the Pod: Mentioned above, Kevin Adler with Miracle Messages - one of the most human, innovative approaches to the homelessness crisis I’ve encountered. Kevin’s work is rooted in something he calls relational poverty, the idea that losing housing is devastating, but losing your people is what actually breaks someone. My daughter Julia, who has a big heart for the unhoused community, joined me as co-host. If you want to understand homelessness differently, and you want your kids to too, this one’s for both of you.

🩵 Good Humans - Kishshana Palmer is the leadership voice the impact sector didn’t know it needed until she showed up and told the truth. A first-gen Caribbean American, solo mom, international keynote speaker, and founder of Managemint, Kish has spent 25+ years helping leaders build thriving, equitable orgs from the inside out - starting with the radical premise that you can’t lead well until you’re living well. Her new book Busy Is a Four Letter Word is the love letter the sector needs right now, and if you want to know what it looks like to lead with both grit and grace, Kish is your person (Golden Girls references are icing on top!).

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight - Manuela Testolini founded In a Perfect World on the most radical of premises: that kids already have the empathy, they just need someone to ask the right question. That question is simple - in a perfect world, what would you change? - and the answers led to 30+ schools built across eight countries, youth ambassador programs turning teens into changemakers, and a philosophy that puts children’s voices at the center of every solution. Get your kids into this community and watch what happens.

📰 Good News - In a country facing a nursing shortage projected to exceed 263,000 RNs by 2026, Morgan State University just did something extraordinary. Their nursing program achieved a 100% first-time NCLEX-RN pass rate. This is what investment in HBCUs looks like when it works. Celebrate this one loud!

🔓 Talking About Hard Things - Andrew Garfield sat down with Elmo to talk about grief, and what happened next broke the internet. Garfield opened up about losing his mom and what it feels like to carry that kind of loss and Elmo, in true Sesame Street fashion, just listened, asked gentle questions, and made space for every feeling. It’s a masterclass in what it looks like to let someone be sad without trying to fix it. 🤧

🎥 What I’m Watching - Hamnet. I was not prepared for this film. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s stunning novel, this film follows the life of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, and the grief that consumes a family after losing their son. I ugly cried for the last 20 mins. What I took away: grief is not a problem to solve. It’s a testament to love. And art - the kind Shakespeare made, the kind this film makes - is sometimes the only container big enough to hold it.

He bought a ticket to a country music festival in Clinton, Iowa with one intention. He wanted to give his wife one last good memory before he ended his life.

He wasn’t looking for help. He was looking for an exit. And on his way out, he walked past a sign that said: Veteran Song Experience.

Two songwriters from Nashville were sitting in an RV, writing songs with veterans on the spot. No appointment. No intake form. Just a guitar, a story, and someone who’d been there too.

James sat down. And for the first time in longer than he could remember, he told his wife what he had been carrying. Not in therapy. Not in a hospital. In a song.

Two weeks later he showed up at the next festival wearing the shirt they’d given him, his lyrics printed on the back. Six months after that he was sober, speaking at a gala. Today he runs the program in Clinton, Iowa.

That’s what we mean when we say story fills The Hope Gap.

Listen to the full story here 🎧

The Red Background That Started a Movement

I sat across from Richard Casper at GoodCon in New York City last month and watched him bring a room full of seasoned social impact storytellers to complete silence. Not with statistics. With truth.

Richard is a Marine Corps veteran, Purple Heart recipient, CNN Hero, and co-founder of CreatiVets - a nonprofit that helps wounded veterans heal from PTSD and traumatic brain injury through songwriting, visual art, and performance.

He didn’t set out to build a nonprofit. He set out to survive.

After serving at Camp David under President Bush and deploying to Fallujah in 2006, Richard came home with a traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and a grief so heavy he couldn’t function. Failing classes. Throwing up from anxiety before he could walk into a room. On a scale of zero to a hundred he was at a nine. His words.

And then a community college art teacher told him to paint the background of a drawing the wrong color.

He painted it red. And a room full of 18-year-olds he never thought would understand him told him exactly what it meant. One said: I think you put red there because you were with your friend when he died and you saw his blood.

Richard’s words: for a moment, I said everything without saying anything.

That was the moment. One color. One teacher. One room of strangers who saw him completely. From there came songwriting, Nashville, a hit songwriter who said yes to a guy from Illinois, and a vision: What if I brought every veteran I know here to tell their story?

CreatiVets was born.

Today, they’ve written more than 700 songs with veterans. They have 25 million streams of music reaching veterans in their homes and pulling them into programs. They have a $250,000 mobile songwriting studio - a gift from Amazon that came after Richard told James’s story on an investment call that was supposed to be about something else entirely. They’re in the middle of a capital campaign to build a 24-hour art and music center in Nashville - a place where a veteran can show up at 3 a.m., pick up a guitar, and find their way back without a bar or a hospital being their only options.

And it all started with a red background.

The 80% Nobody’s Reaching

In We Are For Good’s 2026 Trend on Story as Infrastructure, we explored how narrative doesn’t just communicate mission. It becomes the mission. It shapes culture. It builds belonging. It closes the distance between people who thought they had nothing in common.

Richard lives this. Every song CreatiVets writes is a story. Every story is a bridge. A wife once pulled over on the side of the road, crying after hearing one of their songs on the radio. Her husband had PTSD and wouldn’t open up. That night she played him two songs. He told her things about his time at war for the very first time. She wrote: Thank you. You’re helping our marriage. Keep writing songs.

Richard says it plainly: over 80% of veterans who take their own lives never seek help. You can have the best program in the world, but if you can’t reach them, you’re not serving the people who need you most. So what do you do? You outweigh the anxiety with excitement. You fly them to Nashville. You put them backstage at the Grand Ole Opry with a hit songwriter. (George Strait, Vince Gill, among others — casual 🤯) You make the story so irresistible that they can’t help but walk through the door.

That is what story is for.

The Door Is Open. Walk Through It.

Here’s how to show up for CreatiVets:

🎵 **Listen to their music.** Every stream generates royalties back to veterans. Over 60 songs on Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, and Apple Music.

📣 Share this story. The veteran who needed to hear James’s story might be someone you know. Story travels when people share it.

🤝 Invest in the building. Technology, furniture, construction, programming — if you have resources or in-kind support, reach out. This is a sound investment.

🤔 This Week’s Prompt

What’s helped you - or someone you love - process something that felt impossible to put into words? It could be music, art, running, cooking, faith, or nature. What was the unexpected outlet that cracked something open?

[Share your answer here →]

The Quick + The Good

🎙️ On the Pod: Vincent Jones, Beyond Impact - how fiscal sponsorship is rewriting who gets to lead change. If you’re looking for a way to fund community power, this is your episode.

🩵 Good Humans — Anne Marie Dougherty leads the Bob Woodruff Foundation building one of the most innovative, veteran-serving ecosystems in the country and making sure no one who served gets left behind when they come home. From partnering with the NFL to launching the Viva Fund that has brought 32 IVF babies into families who otherwise may not have been able to have children, Anne Marie has spent over a decade proving that the most powerful thing a nonprofit can do is stay close to the lived experience. If you want to know what it looks like to lead with both rigor + radical generosity, Anne Marie is your person.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight — Veterans are 57% more likely to die by suicide than their non-military peers. Stop Soldier Suicide is on a relentless mission to change that, using data-driven innovation, digital outreach, and clinical care to find the veterans who would never raise their hand and ask for help. Follow them, fund them, and share them.

🔭 Ahead of Their Time - The kid who crowdfunded his college education through pennies. The power of belief + crowdfunding + joy having a mighty effect…even in 1987!

📚 What I’m Reading — Beyond the Mega Gift in the Stanford Social Innovation Review talks about 20 million American households have stopped giving to charity since 2000. I have a hypothesis. What do you think? Drop comments below in chat.

😊 Stuff to make you smile - Prinnie, a tiny toy poodle has a best friend, John, a WWII veteran who moved into a nearby nursing home. They met during a walk and Prinnie instantly bonded with him. Since then she looks for him every day. The video will melt you 🤧

💬 Your Stories. Right here.

Last issue we asked: Tell me a time when a stranger was kind to you?

You came through. Every single one moved my heart.

Becca — Nairobi, Kenya

Kindness from a stranger? Here’s one...

Picture 22 year old Becca, traveling by myself in northern India. Out of my depth. I took the economy class train from Dehli to Varanasi -- and stood for hours propping my giant backpack (like 70-liter-fit-Becca-inside-it backpacking backpack) on my toes so it wouldn’t soak in the sewage running out of the train bathroom and between my feet. No one offered for me to squeeze in with them. And I was too scared to ask.

On the train ride back, I splurged for a sleeping berth/first class ticket. I was tired and, frankly sick. Not sick and tired, but actually sick. I had just been to the most worshippinest (not a word, but you get it!) place -- the head of the Ganges river, where pujas and prayer were happening around the clock. So gained some perspective. But I was also really sick and still so uncomfortable and, frankly, scared.

After a quiet few hours (no sewage!), an engineering student (don’t remember his name) and I chatted for the last few minutes of the ride. He wondered where I was going. Did I have a plan when I arrived in Dehli -- AT NIGHT? I didn’t. Somewhere inexpensive. I gestured toward my dog-earred Lonely Planet guide.

When we got off the train, he walked over to the rickshaw drivers with me. He spoke in Hindi to the driver, but I understood exactly what he was saying. Deliver her safely to this hostel.

Anyhow, I am writing this now, so we know that rickshaw ride worked out. Thank you-dhanyvad-to that kind engineering student on the train.

Evan — Austin, TX

Just last week! I was attempting to leave the grocery store with my 2 overstimulated kids who were, let’s say just...not on their best behavior. At ages 4 and 7 I did not anticipate still being in a season where I might need to physically carry them out of the store, but alas there I was. A kind supervisor walked by (very clearly on her way to do something else) as I was attempting this herculean effort to somehow carry my squirmy 4 year old with one hand, push the cart full of bagged groceries with the other, while also mind grab my 7-year-old from flailing himself into the street in protest over not being able to stop at the pokemon kiosk on the way out. Instead, she paused in front of me and asked “could I offer you a walk-out?” I was embarrassed by the scene we were causing and wanted desperately to say “omg no we’re totally fine!” but we both knew that was a lie. I caved, sighed, and humbly accepted her offer. She grabbed the cart swiftly, asked me about my weekend plans as we walked to the car, and stayed with me until I had everyone safely in the car. It was small and it was everything that day.

Mark — Ft. Worth, TX

A few weeks ago, I was at Walmart picking up food and essentials for my mom’s new independent living apartment—two weeks after losing my stepdad, and in the middle of moving her out of the home they’d shared for 15 years in Florida to start over in Texas. At the self-checkout, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. No problem, I’d just use tap-to-pay. Except Walmart doesn’t accept tap-to-pay 🤦

A stranger nearby overheard and, without knowing any of what had been consuming my life for the past two weeks or that I needed to get home to put my kids to bed, said, “Hey, I can cover that. Just Venmo me.”

My order wasn’t small. He moved money around on his phone, paid, and waited while I sent it back. Then he said something like: “I figure there’ll come a time I need help too, so I just try to help when I can.”

That made my otherwise chaotic day so much easier and has certainly stayed with me.

Anonymous — Waco, TX

I have been breastfeeding my daughter for almost 2 years now, and it has been the hardest thing I have consistently done non-stop, and also the most rewarding and amazing thing I have consistently done non-stop. Recently, I developed mastitis, and it was very painful, and I was so embarrassed because I felt that I should have a handle on breastfeeding and not be going through something as “amateur” as mastitis. So I called a breastfeeding consultant and explained to her what was going on, and the first thing she told me was, “This is okay, this happens to many of us at many stages of breastfeeding.” She normalized what was happening, gave me such great advice, and at the end, invited me to visit them in person if I needed, but encouraged me in my breastfeeding journey and said that I was doing a great job. Her normalizing and encouragement gave me the hope and courage to continue on my breastfeeding journey. We are 21 months in and going strong!

Anonymous — Williamsburg, VA

As simple as it sounds, my last run to the pharmacy! My wife was having trouble getting her prescription filled and when I was there to pick up mine, the same wonderful human who helps me each time took an extra second and said “oh! I think someone just finished your wife’s fill, would you like me to check on that for you?” It was pouring rain outside, it was a really heavy day, and the last thing either of us wanted to do was go BACK out into the world to pick up another script. The fact she remembered not only me, but also who my wife was, and connected the dots to save us another trip (and LOTS of sanity) was so kind.

Nelvin — Long Island, NY

I was in grad school in Philly, living in on-campus housing. I had a job at the time and during winter break, I found out I wasn’t allowed to be on campus. Everyone went back home. But with my job, I couldn’t go back home to New York. An administrator that I had never met, though we had mutual friends in common, opened up his home for me - without even knowing anything about me! I stayed with him, his wife, and 8 month old baby for almost 4 weeks. It was above and beyond and I’ll never forget it.

Evan — Houston, TX

A salesperson took time to be kind to our very toddler-y toddler. Learned his name, gave him child toys, and didn’t mind when he made the store a bit messy. Made a world of difference, especially when salespeople usually roll their eyes at people with toddler-y toddlers.

Christy — Washington D.C.

The last time a stranger was kind to me. I was in Miami to scatter my dad’s ashes and the man at my hotel front desk asked what brought me to town, and I told him. And he stepped out from behind the desk to hug me and asked about my dad and how I was doing. The day I checked out, he gave me a tiny Jesus. He was just so kind.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

Welcome, new friend.

I’m Becky 👋

I’m thrilled you’re here. Like, it’s-Scholastic-Book-Fair-day level of excitement.

And before we get into anything meaningful, I’d like to set the room.

Welcome to a space of generosity, collectivism, joy, truth-telling, and activated impact. It matters to me that you have the comfiest chair in the room. It matters that you feel belonging here. It matters no one has to posture or perform or pretend they have it all figured out. Because I sure don’t.

So come in.

[insert dusting off plush recliner]

I’ve had a long-time dream to have a different kind of conversation with good humans. Not the polished kind. Not the buttoned-up, thought-leadery, “here are my 5 perfect insights” via LinkedIn, AI-generated slop kind. I mean the real kind. The kind with heart and mess and honesty. The kind where we can talk about what is breaking us, what is building us, what is delighting us, and what still makes us believe a better world is possible.

That dream is why Be the Good exists.

And today is Day One.

Which feels both thrilling and mildly nauseating. Ahhh duality…

But here’s what I know.

Blogs can feel one-sided. A person writes. The internet receives. End scene.

That is absolutely not what I want this to be.

This is not a pedestal. It’s a gathering place.

This is not content for content’s sake. It’s a living conversation.

So yes, I’ll bring ideas here. Stories. Patterns. Hard-earned lessons. Things that make me laugh, rage, think and pay attention. Things that need our action.

Because showing up - instead of scrolling by - freaking matters right now more than ever.

And I hope you bring yourself.

Your questions. Your wisdom. Your ache. Your hope. Your stories. Your own lens on what it means to do good and stay human while doing it.

Because here’s the tl;dr of what I believe:
You being you is one of the greatest gifts to generative community.

Not a shinier version of you.

Not a more productive version of you.

Not a less complicated, less tender, less justice-hungry version of you.

Just you.

That’s the good stuff.

That’s how movements become real.

So what is this, exactly?

This is Be the Good. A weekly place to gather around what matters.

A space for honest reflections, practical wisdom, beautiful ideas, good trouble, and stories that restore some faith in humanity. A place where we can connect the dots between what we’re seeing in the world and how we might show up inside it with a little more courage, a little more imagination, and a shit ton of action to Be The Good.

Around here, we’ll talk about community. Belonging. Leadership. Culture. Justice. Storytelling. Fundraising. Parenting. The nonprofit sector. Pop culture. Nervous systems. Hope. The weird and wonderful things my neurospicy brain cannot stop linking together. And we’ll spotlight good humans + good work. We’ll share what’s stirring in the We Are For Good community. And we’ll keep asking the question beneath all the questions:

How do we build a more generous world together?

That question is the pulse of damn near everything.

A quick word on We Are For Good

If you’re new to my corner of the internet, I co-founded We Are For Good with my dear friend and adopted little brother, Jon McCoy, back in 2020. It started as a podcast. What grew beneath it was so much bigger. Today, we’re a media and community ecosystem acting as a movement that equips changemakers with the stories, tools, and relationships they need to build a better world.

But if I were saying it less formally and more truthfully: We Are For Good is a home for the helpers.

It’s where nonprofit leaders, fundraisers, movement builders, impact nerds (me, btw✌️🤓✌️), and wildly caring humans come to remember they are not alone. It’s where we learn out loud, tell the truth, share what’s working, and keep choosing trust, belonging, and community as the path forward.

Because I believe with my whole chest that:

🦋 Generosity is a force for transformation.

🧭 Community is not a side dish. It is the strategy.

🌱 And hope is not something we passively feel. It is something we practice together.

That’s the deeper heartbeat underneath this blog, too.

Why now?

Because the world feels heavy.

Because so many good people are tired.

Because too much of the digital landscape is built to numb us, divide us, perform for us, or sell us certainty.

And because I still think there is enormous power in creating spaces that feel like oxygen.

Spaces where we can be reminded that goodness is still here. That brave people are still building. That new futures are being imagined by people closest to the challenge. That community is still a miracle. That trust is still worth fighting for. That there are still reasons to keep going.

About me, since we’re apparently
doing introductions.

Hi again. I’m Becky Endicott.

I’m a mom, writer, reader, community-builder-for-good, runner, cinephile, podcast host, foodie, disrupter, equity amplifier, and co-founder of We Are For Good. I talk a lot. I feel deeply. I’m always trying to balance my sense of justice with my sense of humanity, which is beautiful and exhausting and probably why I need snacks often.

I love my daughters + husband fiercely. I love books and pop culture and puzzles and nature and nachos and hugging good people (with consent, ofc).

I also believe every person can be a philanthropist. Every person can be a builder of good. Every person can shape the culture around them through generosity, courage, attention, and action.

This blog is for the people who still believe a better world is possible and are brave enough to help co-build it.

Before you go

Each week, I’ll drop a prompt here to get us talking to one another. Please answer only if it speaks to you, and let me know whether you consent to share as we ask bigger questions. Leave a comment. What is the small story you still carry?

Community is built on the stories we tell.

And recently we hosted Afdhel Aziz in our space talking about the Hope Gap — this divide between hope and despair that’s grown to 27% over the last couple of years. But the antidote? Sharing stories that bind us + remind us of our humanity.

So let’s start today.

🤔 When was a time a stranger was kind to you?

Can be short. Could feel small. Doesn’t matter. It stayed with you for a reason. What happened? What did it mean? I want to know what goodness looked like when it arrived.

Expect to see some of these stories curated below by you. Again, this is your conversation space as much as mine, so let’s learn together.

Because those stories matter. They remind us who we can be for each other.

And maybe that’s the whole point of this little corner of the internet.

Not just to talk about good.

Not just to admire it from afar.

But to practice it.

To multiply it.

To become it.

Thanks for pulling up a chair. Covering you with a soft afghan, placing a steamy mug of cocoa on your end table, and offering a virtual hug as you move onto the next thing.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. So let’s get started.

With you in the good,

Becky 🩵

P.S. Know someone who needs a little more hope, honesty, and community in their inbox? Share the subscribe link and invite them into this bigger story we’re all co-writing.

The Quick + The Good

😊 Happy News - Mariska Hargitay’s End the Backlog campaign officially achieved rape kit reform legislation in all 50 U.S. states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, after 16 years of advocacy.

🎙️ On the Pod: Richard Casper, CreatiVets - grab tissues + discover this beautiful mission leveraging art as a storytelling vessel for vets to heal trauma through music, art, and creative expression. Casual music collaborations with George Strait + Vince Gill happening live.

🩵 Good Humans - Brooke Richie Babbage - one of the wisest voices in the impact sector on what it really takes to build orgs that can hold the weight of the mission. She’s taught me that capacity isn’t extra, stability is a leadership choice, and sustainable growth starts by reducing fragility + designing systems that help people breathe easier.

🏆 Nonprofit Spotlight - Meet NewComm. It doesn’t just teach leadership; it hands young people real authority. High school students manage real budgets, solve real community problems for real clients, and start seeing themselves as builders instead of bystanders. They’re solidifying trust as the kind of identity shift that tells a young person, “I am not just here to inherit the future. I’m here to help design it.” Give them a follow — good action that’s good for the soul.

💌 We Are For Good Community - Join us for Good Chats. This is our take on speed networking, except we’re calling it what it actually is — a chance to meet good humans doing good work, fast. Join us + meet legendary humans for 45 minutes.

🧠 What’s on my mind: Immigration - and the misinformation spilling out around the topic. We took our question right to the frontline to speak with Carmen Patlan, whose family crossed the border in a harrowing story at age 7, and now leads one of the most holistic immigrant support orgs in the country: Center for Immigrant Progress. And what she reminded us is simple, but powerful: Immigrants don’t need their stories told about them. They need space to tell them themselves. Check out our convo here.

📚 What I’m Reading - My Friends, by Fredrik Backman (fiction). It’s the story of four teenagers in a seaside town who form an intense, protective bond, using friendship as a refuge from their difficult lives and a source of artistic inspiration. One of my favorite authors, whose incredible character development makes you feel everything.

🥸 Feeling this…