You freeze.

Because the honest answer is something you’re actually really proud of!

But you can’t say the specifics because the client is confidential, the population is vulnerable, maybe the campaign hasn’t launched yet, maybe the results won’t be visible for another 18 months, or the org just isn’t ready to talk about it publicly.

So when the convo is over, you walk away frustrated with yourself for the fifth time this month.

If you’ve ever been that person, I need you to believe me when I say you’re not alone in this.

The problem is that we’ve all quietly agreed that “impact” only counts if it comes in the form of a screenshot-worthy metric, a testimonial with a logo, or a case study you can post publicly.

And that framing is costing a huge number of impact professionals the confidence to actually own the work they do.

Because if you’ve ever:

• Held a struggling team together through a leadership transition

• Sat with a client for six months while they slowly rewrote how they think about their own mission

• Kept a coalition talking to each other when it could have easily fallen apart

• Rewritten a program strategy in a way that made a small population feel actually seen for the first time

• Built a system, a framework, or a template that quietly saves your team ten hours a week for years to come

• The list goes on…

You’ve made impact!!!!

But none of that is going to show up in a flashy end-of-year report.

Some of it you literally cannot share publicly, some of it won’t be quantifiable for another two years, and some of it will only be measurable in the person it changed.

But it’s real and it counts!

So here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of doing this work myself and watching brilliant impact professionals underestimate themselves in real time…

You always own how you tell the story of your work, even when you don’t own the details.

You don’t need permission to say:

• “I spent last quarter on a strategy that helped three teams collaborate for the first time in years.”

• “I’ve been working on a really hard messaging challenge for a mission-driven client, and something clicked this week.”

• “My most recent project taught me more about staying present in my work than any other role I’ve had.”

• “I built a framework that the internal team is now running independently.”

None of those sentences reveal a single confidential detail, but all of them tell a real story.

And all of them make you more memorable and findable to the next person who needs someone who can do what you actually do.

That’s the shift.

Impact documentation isn’t about the metric.

It’s about connecting the dots, naming what you walked into, what was hard, what you tried, what shifted, and what you learned about yourself or the work in the process.

That’s a story anyone can tell, without breaking a single NDA.

The most confident impact professionals I know aren’t the ones with the flashiest campaigns.

They’re the ones who can articulate exactly what they were up against, exactly what they tried, and exactly what shifted, even when the shift is subtle, they can’t name the client, or the results live quietly under someone else’s brand.

Because owning your work has almost nothing to do with the numbers.

It has everything to do with your ability to tell the story of what you did, and why it mattered, in your own voice, without waiting for someone else to hand you permission to be proud of it.

Your “I helped someone believe in themselves again this quarter” is impact.

Your “I built a system the team can run without me” is impact.

Please stop waiting for a metric to give you permission to own it.

And as always, if you’re struggling to tell your story, don’t worry, you’re always in good company. 🤎

→ What’s a piece of your work that’s had real impact but doesn’t fit into a clean metric? I want to hear it.

Leave a comment

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• FREE 15min Visibility Coaching Calls

• FREE DOWNLOAD: The Impact Career Starter Kit - 4 guides in 1 to help you build a career in the nonprofit & impact space. Access instantly.

  • Inside you will find:

    • 27 Networking Moves That’ll Change How You Show Up in a Room

    • Finding Your “Why”

    • The Cold Message Playbook

    • Your First 90 Days: The Honest Onboarding Guide Nobody Gives You

• $27 DOWNLOAD: The 30-Minute Content Audit For Small Teams - Find the gaps in your messaging in 30 minutes or less.

  View All Free & Paid Offerings

About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a marketing and coaching practice for the nonprofit and impact world, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter today, with networking events coming soon). You can find me on LinkedIn or at www.gracefulmedia.co.

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Hi friends, Grace here!

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the best time and day to post, not for the numbers, but honestly, for my own sanity hahah So we’re moving Good Company to Mondays!

This shift gives me the room to write and edit over the weekend when I actually have space to think, and gives you a fresh Monday morning read to help set the tone for the week ahead. Win, win 🤎

So without further ado, welcome to our very first Monday issue!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the butterfly effect this week.

You know the idea where a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and somehow, weeks later a storm forms in Texas. A small, almost invisible action sets off a chain of events that nobody could have predicted from the jump.

It’s an interesting concept to think about in terms of your career.

Because when thinking about the visible actions you do today, whether that be, a cold outreach, a post, an introduction, or a portfolio, those things aren’t just a tactical move. It’s a wing flap.

And you genuinely cannot know what it might set in motion!!

Somewhere around 23, I was pretty sure that the nonprofit I was at would be my sector home for life.

Not because I loved it that much (though I loved it a lot), but because I genuinely couldn’t picture any other version of my career from where I was standing.

Everyone around me was talking about their next promotion, their next campaign, or the next fiscal year. But nobody was talking about the actual bigger question around “who do I want to become in this work?”

The senior leaders at my org had all been there for 15+ years, which caused them to have a very specific vision of what a nonprofit career should look like. And at the time, my day-to-day felt too demanding for me to zoom out.

Which meant, in my head, that version was the version. That was who I was going to become someday, whether I wanted to or not.

Looking back, that feeling wasn’t unique to me. It’s actually really common in the impact space.

Not because young people in this sector lack ambition (they’re some of the most ambitious people I’ve ever met!), but because we lack visibility of what else is possible.

Somewhere in my 23-year-old fog, I heard about “personal branding” for the first time.

And my immediate reaction was… absolutely not.

Even as a young Gen-Z marketer, the idea of posting daily, having a niche, and maybe even turning myself into a product, was NOT what I got into marketing to do.

And honestly, in nonprofit work, where everything is supposed to be about the mission, the whole thing just felt kinda gross.

So I quietly opted out and for a while, I felt okay about it.

But looking back, my rejection wasn’t of personal branding itself. I was rejecting the ‘this way or the highway’ energy around it.

What I actually needed, but didn’t know the name for it yet, was this idea of sector visibility.

Sector visibility and personal branding aren’t opposites. They’re overlapping practices that both require you to be findable, need content that connects people to your work, and both live and die on the fact that people connect with people, not just resumes.

But, sector visibility, as I think about it, is broader and more holistic.

It’s not just what you post, it’s how you introduce yourself.

• How you document what you’re working on.

• How your work travels through your sector’s back channels.

• How you’re findable to the right people, not just any people.

It’s the reputation you’re building over the whole arc of your career, not just this quarter’s content strategy.

Personal branding, as it usually gets taught, is tactical, while sector visibility is a career-long practice.

Content is part of it, but content is downstream of a bigger question: how do you want your work to be known in the sector you care about?

That’s the question I wish someone had asked me at 23.

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A year later, I was still at that same organization, but quietly starting to wonder if there was another version of my career I couldn’t quite see yet.

So I did something that felt genuinely uncomfortable! I started calling myself a freelancer.

Not because I had people begging to be my clients (lol), I didn’t.

And definitely not because I was ready.

But I wanted to see if any of the possibilities I couldn’t picture would start showing up if I made my work more visible in the sector.

So, I built a website, I started reaching out, I introduced myself as a marketing consultant, at 24, with a full-time day job.

And then something unexpected happened (a wing flap if you will).

One of the biggest voices in political journalism, Anne Applebaum, said yes.

What started as a content management role, quickly turned into platform strategy work where we landed on LinkedIn as her primary platform, and boy did it take off! We built her LinkedIn presence from 0 to 75k that year, and now, she’s over 171k self-running her account!

And that partnership genuinely changed my whole understanding of what my career could look like.

But before I continue, I want to be clear, that moment didn’t happen because I had a “personal brand.”

I didn’t have 10k followers, I didn’t have testimonials, I didn’t have a portfolio site with a fancy tagline, I didn’t even have any of the polished pieces that personal branding usually says you need before you’re allowed to start.

It happened because I made my work visible to others in the sector and my personal network.

Anne didn’t need me to be polished. She needed me to be findable and to be good at the work.

I had no idea that one uncomfortable, probably-too-early website and a few cold reach-outs would lead there, but THAT’S the butterfly effect. You don't get to see the storm forming in Texas when you're just a butterfly in Brazil.

So no matter where you are in your career, if you’re feeling a bit lost right now, I want you to hear this:

You’re not stuck. You just can’t see what’s possible from where you’re standing.

And the way you start seeing what’s possible isn’t by doing more research, waiting until you have a 10-year plan, or figuring out who you want to be first.

It’s by building sector visibility RIGHT NOW.

Because the visible thing you do today is setting something in motion you won’t even recognize in a week, 2 months, or 10 years, for yourself, and maybe for someone else entirely.

That small action, taken by you this week, could be the thing that opens a door for the person reading your post, or the reason someone finally decides to reach out to you, or maybe the first link in a chain that leads somewhere neither of you can see yet.

That’s the part I love! The butterfly effect doesn’t just apply to your own career, no! Your visibility ripples outward.

You don’t need to know if you’ll stay at your org, consult, start something of your own, or switch fields entirely. You just need to start letting your work be seen.

Because the visibility you build now is what creates the possibilities you can’t see yet.

And if you’re reading this and thinking “I’m just ‘the marketing girl’” or ‘the fundraising guy,’ you might want to pop over and read my Issue #2 ↴

Here’s what I want you to try this week.

Do one small visible thing around your work:

• Post something you learned recently

• Comment thoughtfully on someone else’s work in your sector

• Tell someone in your network what you’re actually working on right now

• Message a peer to reconnect

• Send a note about something you’re proud of

Whatever counts as “visible” for you.

Then notice what happens.

You’re never stuck, friend. There are so many more possibilities than you can see from where you’re standing right now.

And don’t worry, even when you’re feeling lost, you’re always in good company. 🤎

→ What’s the one small visible thing around your work you plan on doing this week?

Leave a comment

Stuff I Built So You Don’t Have To

• FREE 15min Visibility Coaching Calls

• FREE DOWNLOAD: The Impact Career Starter Kit - 4 guides in 1 to help you build a career in the nonprofit & impact space. Access instantly.

  • Inside you will find:

    • 27 Networking Moves That’ll Change How You Show Up in a Room

    • Finding Your “Why”

    • The Cold Message Playbook

    • Your First 90 Days: The Honest Onboarding Guide Nobody Gives You

• $27 DOWNLOAD: The 30-Minute Content Audit For Small Teams - Find the gaps in your marketing in 30 minutes or less.

View All Free & Paid Offerings

About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a marketing and coaching practice for the nonprofit and impact world, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter today, with networking events coming soon). You can find me on LinkedIn or at www.gracefulmedia.co.

She’s brilliant, she’s respected, and her work has made a huge difference across all of the orgs she’s worked with.

But when I asked her what she wanted more of, she said something that I actually hear more often then one might think:

“I want people to know the whole me. Not just the version they see in the meeting rooms.”

There’s this quiet thing that happens to a lot of us who work in the impact sector.

We all enter this space because we care, we want to make a difference, maybe we say we want to change the world.

And then, slowly, over the years, that caring gets flattened into a professional identity. You become “the human rights person,” or “the youth development person,” “a fundraiser,” “that comms person,” or whatever combination of your role and your cause area gets short-handed at parties.

And that identity starts doing something strange.

It starts crowding out the rest of you.

Not on purpose. Nobody sits you down and says “don’t mention the pottery class you’re taking on Saturdays.” But something in the sector quietly signals that your outside interests are separate from your professional self, that the mission is the serious thing, and that everything else is a distraction from it.

So you stop talking about the pottery.

Or the boxing.

Or the cooking that you’re trying to enjoy more because your partner is into it.

Or the very specific way you love throwing dinner parties.

Or the fact that you actually kind of love networking events (tea, I know).

All of that gets tucked into “personal life” while your work identity gets to expand into every meeting, every LinkedIn post, every dinner party small-talk answer to “so what do you do?”

Until one day you look at your professional self and realize you’ve built a whole identity out of half of who you are.

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With all that said, I want to say something out loud that I think a lot of people in this sector need to hear:

That flattening is NOT a personal failure.

The impact space quietly prefers its workers to be single-issue people. And I’m not saying that I think the biggest leaders in the sector sat around one day deciding that all nonprofit professionals had to be scared to build visibility. But it is something that gets accidentally taught from the second you step in the door, in the way we all talk about our commitment to the mission.

But believe me when I say this:

You do better impact work as a whole person. Not despite your outside interests, but because of them.

I’ve been boxing three or four times a week for about two years now. Not because I’m training for anything, just because I love it.

And boxing has changed how I understand my body, how I understand pressure, how I think about showing up when I’m tired, and how I go about reading a room. It’s given me an entire community of people I would never have met otherwise, and it’s shaped the way I coach clients, the way I write, the way I sit in hard conversations, and honestly, the way I move through life.

Boxing has made me better at my job.

Not because I’ve written a single essay about it here or made it my “personal brand thing.” But because being a full person makes you a better version of the parts you spend most of your working hours being.

I could say the same thing about the other examples I listed above (yes, surprise, I was talking about myself loving networking events, eek!).

Because every single one of those parts of my life makes me sharper, warmer, more curious, and more grounded. Which is exactly what makes for good work in this sector.

So why are we treating them like they belong somewhere else?

Here’s what I think is really going on.

The nonprofit and impact space has quietly convinced a lot of us that “professionalism” means shrinking ourselves down to the version of us that’s most mission-relevant.

You’re a nonprofit marketer? Great, be nonprofit-marketer online.

You’re a program manager for youth development? Great, tweet about youth development.

You care about environmental policy? Great, that’s your whole personality now.

Nobody makes you do this, but you feel it.

In the way your LinkedIn posts start to sound the same as everyone else’s.

In the way you introduce yourself.

In the way you show up to your one hundredth industry mixer with the same 60-second explanation of your work.

And what nobody warns you is that when you shrink to the professional version of you, the people around you start to know only that version. Which means the connection you’re capable of, the trust you could be building, the community you could be part of, is quietly running on the smaller version of yourself.

That is a real cost. Not just to you, but also to the mission you say you care about.

Because the people in this work who actually move things? They aren’t identity-flattened. They are multi-dimensional, interesting, relatable, and human.

And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been sitting with some version of that same feeling, I want you to hear this clearly:

You’re allowed to be a whole person in this sector.

You’re allowed to talk about the boxing, the pottery, the book club, the sourdough phase, the family drama, the vacation you’re excited about, the podcast you can’t stop listening to, the hobby you’re bad at but love anyway.

You’re allowed to be both the person who runs the program AND the person who spends Sunday mornings at the flea market.

You’re allowed to bring your dimensions into your work life instead of leaving them at the door of your first meeting of the day.

Not because it makes you more “marketable.”

Not because it grows your visibility (though it will).

Not for any strategic reason at all.

But because you’re a whole person, and the people who work with you, follow you, hire you, collaborate with you, and eventually love the work you’re doing deserve to know the whole person, not the professional silhouette.

The mission doesn’t need you smaller, it needs you fuller.

And as you know from my past essays, you never have to figure this out alone. You're in good company. 🤎

→ What’s one thing outside your work that has quietly shaped who you are as a professional?

Leave a comment

And here’s a little video of me boxing incase anyone’s interested 🤪

Stuff I Built So You Don’t Have To

• FREE 15min Visibility Coaching Calls for Impact Professionals

• FREE DOWNLOAD: The Impact Career Starter Kit - 4 guides in 1 to help you build a career in the nonprofit & impact space. Access instantly.

  • Inside you will find:

    • 27 Networking Moves That’ll Change How You Show Up in a Room

    • Finding Your “Why”

    • The Cold Message Playbook

    • Your First 90 Days: The Honest Onboarding Guide Nobody Gives You

• $27 DOWNLOAD: The 30-Minute Content Audit For Small Teams - Find the gaps in your marketing in 30 minutes or less.

View All Free & Paid Offerings

About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a marketing and coaching practice for the nonprofit and impact world, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter today, with networking events coming soon). You can find me on LinkedIn or at www.gracefulmedia.co.

“So... what does the marketing department and yourself do on a day-to-day basis?”

Not with malice and I don’t believe to make me feel small. But just genuinely curious.

Because like at most nonprofits, marketing is the first budget cut and the least understood function on the team. Even by the people running the place.

So I sat there and answered as clearly as I could.

But I remember this moment because when I got back to my desk, that was the first time realized I needed to build visibility around my work.

Not just through a personal brand directed at people outside the org, but also for the people INSIDE it too.

Because it turned out the same person asking me what marketing does was also the person I’d need to eventually go to for budget, headcount, and a raise. And if I couldn’t make my work legible to her, I was going to spend the next few years fighting the same conversation over and over again.

(Which, spoiler alert, is exactly what happened. Because I was 22, leading a growing team, and building visibility from scratch. So let’s cut younger Grace some slack, please and thank you 🤪)

But I did get to work. On my LinkedIn presence, yes. But also on the internal ways I documented, shared, and named my team’s work. So the next time someone asked what the marketing team was doing, they didn’t have to, because they’d already seen the impact for themselves.

And this experience is why I wholeheartedly believe that if your personal brand doesn't also make you more valuable to the org or clients you're currently serving, it's not really working. Not for you, not for the mission, not for the team you’re on, and then in return, not for your outside community.

Real visibility works everywhere, inside and outside. That’s what makes it powerful.

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Honestly, I think ‘personal branding’ as a phrase has been so incredibly ruined by influencer culture that a lot of people in this sector cringe just hearing it.

Which, fair.

Because when most people say ‘personal brand,’ they picture a specific thing.

Maybe a curated Instagram feed, or a LinkedIn presence built entirely of humblebrags, or someone doing skincare routines in a bathrobe on TikTok.

But as I think most marketing professionals would argue, that’s not personal branding. That’s social media.

Personal branding is way bigger and honestly, way older.

Your personal brand is what you stand for.

→ Your why

→ How you talk about your work to others

→ The reputation you build over time

→ The story people tell about you when you’re not in the room

Yes, social media is one expression of a strong personal brand, but it’s an outcome, not the brand itself.

And when we let influencer culture define what “personal branding” means, we also let it decide who gets to have one. Which usually means people in tech or content creation.

By contrast, nonprofit and impact people get quietly told: “This isn’t for you. This isn’t what we do.”

Which is honestly a devastating thing to be told, in a sector where visibility IS the mission.

The nonprofit sector is the space where visibility matters most. Not least.

In this sector, being seen isn’t vanity. It’s the whole ballgame!

→ If nobody knows what your work is doing, the work doesn’t reach the people it’s for.

→ If nobody knows who’s leading the mission, the mission doesn’t get funded.

→ If nobody in your sector knows YOUR name, YOUR work becomes invisible, and so does everyone whose life it changes.

We are the sector that most needs to be seen. And we’re also the sector that’s been most quietly convinced that wanting to be seen is somehow off-mission.

And I think it’s finally time we start changing that narrative.

You don’t have to become a LinkedIn influencer, you don’t have to post every day, you don’t have to become a ‘creator,’ you don’t even have to like the phrase “personal branding” (I have my own complicated relationship with it).

But the version of visibility you build for yourself, for your work, for your mission, quietly determines a huge amount of what’s possible for you in this sector.

Your visibility is your leverage, your reputation is your career insurance, and your voice is what tells people who you are before they even meet you.

And you get to define what all of that looks like.

You don’t have to build it the way tech people build it, or the way LinkedIn influencers build it, or the way ‘girlboss’ coaches build it.

You get to build it the way that’s honest to your professional values.

Not just for yourself, for the mission.

For the people your work reaches and for every young person coming up behind you who’s watching to see if it’s possible.

This is stuff I’ve had to figure out mostly the hard way, over years solo. And it’s stuff I’m now spending a lot of time helping other impact professionals think through, because I don’t want anyone else to feel like they have to figure it out alone.

So if you’ve been quietly opting out of visibility because it “feels corporate,” I hope this gives you permission to reconsider.

Because we need more of YOU to be seen, not less.

Don’t worry, you’re in good company. 🤎

→ What’s one story about your work that you wish more people knew?

Leave a comment

Stuff I Built So You Don’t Have To

• FREE 15min Visibility Coaching Calls for Impact Professionals

• FREE DOWNLOAD: The Impact Career Starter Kit - 4 guides in 1 to help you build a career in the nonprofit & impact space. Access instantly.

  • Inside you will find:

    • 27 Networking Moves That’ll Change How You Show Up in a Room

    • Finding Your “Why”

    • The Cold Message Playbook

    • Your First 90 Days: The Honest Onboarding Guide Nobody Gives You

• $27 DOWNLOAD: The 30-Minute Content Audit For Small Teams - Find the gaps in your marketing in 30 minutes or less.

View All Free & Paid Offerings

About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing and coaching practice, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with networking events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.

Same conversation and same explanation from HR: “You should just be grateful to be doing this work.” “It’s not really about the money for the people who choose careers in this space.”

I was also fighting, separately, to get others on my team hired full-time at a wage that would actually let them live in the city our jobs required.

And every conversation about all of it ended the same way: “well, that’s just how the nonprofit space is.”

And at some point, I started believing that sentence.

So I did what a lot of people in this sector quietly do when we don’t have language for what we’re feeling. I started job searching. I took on freelance clients on the side and I felt relieved every Friday in a way I can’t fully describe.

It wasn’t a dramatic burnout, it felt slower than that. It was the belief that the work was worth the sacrifice slowly dissolving in me, one dismissive HR conversation at a time.

When I finally walked out on my last day, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Relief. A bit of sadness for what could have been, but a lot of relief.

Here’s the part I didn’t see coming though.

Going full-time on my consulting agency, Graceful Media meant meeting impact-driven people from a completely different angle. Every discovery call, every intro conversation, every new client showed me something the in-house version of my career had never shown me: how many other ways there are to build a meaningful career in this sector!

Some were founders of their own consultancies.

Some were freelancers with rosters of orgs they loved.

Some were people at foundations funding work I’d been on the receiving end of for years.

Some were still in-house, but at orgs that valued them, paid them fairly, and treated their time like it mattered.

And at that time I realized that leaving my in-house job wasn’t leaving the sector.

It was leaving one version of what a nonprofit career could to look like.

I had been trained to see two things as opposites: doing impact work AND being paid fairly, respected, and feeling like my life was sustainable. The sector told me over and over that I had to choose.

But it turns out they aren’t opposites at all. They just aren’t automatically together in every org, or in every version of a nonprofit/impact career.

So when someone asks me now if they should leave the sector, I don’t actually answer the question. I ask them a different one:

Have you seen what else is possible inside it?

I believe the reason so many of us feel stuck in our careers isn't because we don't have options. It's because we’ve never taken the time to actually see what we’ve already built.

Your work belongs to you, not just to your org.

That’s the shift. Not “leave the sector,” not “find your passion elsewhere,” just: start treating your work like something you get to take with you, even if you never leave.

Here are the two things I wish someone had told me to start doing year one.

1. Start a wins tracker.

Not a résumé and not a formal document. Just a running list. Every campaign that landed, metric you hit, kind email from someone your work reached, project you led that performed, and every problem you quietly solved that never made it into a meeting update.

Right now, that stuff is disappearing every day. You’re doing it, and then you’re moving on to the next thing, and none of it is being captured anywhere except your org’s Slack archive, which you don’t own.

So start a doc, call it whatever you want, add to it once a week, and you’ll be shocked how fast it fills up and how much of it you would have forgotten if you hadn’t written it down!

2. Start a working portfolio, even if you’re not leaving.

A folder, a Notion page, a Google Doc, whatever works. Save screenshots, links, drafts, before-and-afters, the campaigns you’re proud of, the talks you gave, the materials you built, and/or the strategy that shifted something.

You don’t build a portfolio because you’re planning to leave. You build one because you’re planning to be findable when the right opportunity finds you. That’s a very different feeling.

So here’s what I want you to try this week!

Start your wins tracker. Open a doc, name it something silly, and write down the last three things you did at work that you were genuinely proud of. Just three, that’s enough to start.

Then next week, add three more.

Whether you stay in-house forever, move to consulting, freelance on the side, or land somewhere I don’t even have a category for yet, this is the move that quietly gives you back the version of your career that belongs to you.

That, more than anything, is what changed everything for me.

If you’re in this messy middle right now, don’t worry.

You’re in good company. 🤎

→ Comment below: what’s the last thing you did at work that you were genuinely proud of? (This could be the first entry of your wins tracker!)

Leave a comment

P.S. If you’d rather not share publicly, hit reply and tell me directly. I read every single one!

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About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing consultancy, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with coaching and events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.

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Your laptop is open, and there’s a welcome email in your inbox that says “reach out with any questions!” There’s twelve Slack channels you’re not sure whether you’re supposed to be reading and someone just added you to a recurring meeting called “Programs Sync” but you don’t know if you’re presenting or just observing OR even what “Programs Sync” is.

You want to ask, but you don’t quite know what to ask for. Which somehow feels worse than not knowing anything at all.

If you’ve had or might have this Monday in the not-too-distant future, this piece is for you.

Your first year in the nonprofit world can be genuinely confusing, but trust me when I say, that the confusion has almost nothing to do with you.

It has to do with a sector-wide reality nobody’s named for you yet. But once you understand what’s actually going on, you can build your own onboarding, on your own timeline, and stop waiting for someone else to hand you the map.

Let’s dive into how!

Why Nonprofit Onboarding Is (Usually) a Mess

Let’s name the elephant in the room: most nonprofits don’t have real onboarding.

Not because they don’t care about you. And definitely not because leadership sat around thinking “let’s make this new person’s first year super confusing.” The truth is way more structural, and honestly, way less personal.

Your org hired you because they were stretched too thin. Which means the person who was supposed to train you is now the same person whose job you’re doing half of. Which means training is happening in the margins of an already impossible workload, if it’s happening at all.

Layer on top of that:

→ Institutional knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in documents. So even when you ask the right questions, half the answers are “well, historically we’ve done it like this because of a thing that happened three EDs ago” and the person telling you doesn’t have time to explain the full backstory.

→ “We’re a family here” culture that mistakes closeness for clarity. Everyone assumes everyone else already knows what’s going on, so nobody actually communicates it.

→ No HR to run onboarding. The ED becomes the de facto onboarder, and the ED does not have time.

→ The last person in your role either just left (and burned out) or is still there (and burning out).

None of this is your problem to fix, but holy moly, is it yours to navigate!

Lucky for you, once you can see it clearly, you can stop taking the confusion personally and start building around it.

You’re not behind, trust me. You’re just new to a system that was never really designed to be joinable.

The 5 Things You’re Actually Missing (That Nobody Told You)

1. A map of who does what.

The org chart on paper doesn’t reflect how work actually moves through the org. The person with the biggest title isn’t always the person who makes decisions and the person with a lowest title might be the one you actually need to talk to for what you need.

But nobody’s going to tell you that until you figure it out yourself.

2. A history of why the org is the way it is.

→ Big past decisions

→ Programs that got killed

→ Pivots that shaped the current strategy

→ The answer to why the culture feels the way it does

Every org has this backstory, and it’s the context that makes your current work make sense. But no one has time to sit you down and walk you through it, so you’re operating without it.

3. The unwritten rules.

→ How decisions actually get made vs. how the process looks on paper.

→ Which meetings are for show and which are where things actually happen.

→ Which pieces of feedback are real and which are just people thinking out loud.

This stuff is invisible until you know it, and then it’s obvious. But it takes months to notice on your own.

4. The vocabulary of your specific cause area.

Every sector has jargon and every org has additional jargon. But nobody hands you a glossary. You just sit through meetings pretending to know what “MDGs” or “collective impact” or “P/L for Q3 vs. FY” means until you can piece it together from context.

5. What “good” looks like in your role.

Sure, you have a job description, but nobody’s told you how to know if you’re doing it well.

→ What does a good week look like?

→ What does a bad quarter look like?

→ How would your manager know if you were thriving?

You’d think this would come up in your first check-in, but it usually doesn’t.

You’re not confused because you’re not smart enough. You’re confused because five separate onboarding gaps are stacked on top of each other, and nobody’s named a single one of them for you.

Build Your Own Onboarding

Here’s the thing: you can’t wait for your org to fix this, because you’d be waiting forEVER. What you can do is build your own onboarding, quietly, in the background, on your own timeline.

Here’s the framework I wish someone had handed me at 22, broken into three phases:

Days 1-30: The Listening Phase. Your only job is to observe and collect. Every acronym, every process, every dynamic. Don’t try to solve anything yet, just log it.

Days 31-60: The Mapping Phase. Start connecting the dots. Turn your observations into questions and learn how work actually flows through the org.

Days 61-90: The Positioning Phase. Start shaping your role from within. Quietly, without ever calling it that.

Each phase has a handful of specific moves that make it work, and the difference between drifting through your first 90 days and actually building yourself an onboarding is doing them intentionally.

I’ve been working on packaging the full framework, all three phases and every specific tactic, into a free downloadable guide that will drop next week.

What to Do When You’re Still Confused After 90 Days

Because you will be. Even with the framework, some confusion is going to persist. The sector is genuinely complicated, and one person can’t fix in three months what took the org twenty years to build.

Before day 90, confusion sounds like: “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

After day 90, confusion sounds like: “I don’t understand how the grant reporting timeline connects to the program timeline.” Or: “I don’t understand why this decision is being made without the development team in the room.” Or: “I don’t understand why we say one thing publicly and do a different thing internally.”

That’s a huge shift. That’s not confusion anymore, those are questions. And questions are how you start moving from ‘learning the org’ to ‘contributing to the org.’

Give yourself permission to say out loud, to your manager or a trusted peer, “I’m still figuring some of this out.” That’s not weakness, that’s professional maturity.

The Reframe

Your first year in a nonprofit was never supposed to be seamless.

The sector doesn’t have the resources to make it that way. Your org isn’t failing you because it can’t run a Fortune 500-style onboarding for every new hire. And you aren’t failing either. You’re doing the actual, unglamorous work of learning a system that nobody handed you a manual for.

That’s not confusion, that’s competence in progress.

Every person you look up to in this sector did the exact same thing you’re doing right now and nobody told them either! They just kept asking questions, taking notes, mapping the org quietly, and figuring out where they fit.

And so will you.

You’re building your own onboarding. That’s not a fallback, that’s the actual job!

You’re in good company. 🤎

→ What’s one thing you wish someone had told you in your first year in this sector?

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About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing consultancy, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with coaching and events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.

It’s clear, it’s a little bold, it says the thing your org has been dancing around for months.

And then, one comment at a time, it starts getting softened.

“Can we take that line out?”

“Let’s not name them directly.”

“What if we said ‘community-centered’ instead of what you have here?”

By the end of the meeting, the draft that started with a point has been sanded down into something that could belong to literally any organization in your cause area. Something that says a lot of words but none of the ones that mattered.

You walk back to your desk and think, what just happened.

I’ve been in that meeting. Not just once, but many times. Sometimes as the person presenting the draft, and sometimes (this is the part nobody talks about) as the person who softened it before it ever reached the room.

If you’ve been in that meeting too and left it wondering whether you’re the problem, this piece is for you. Because you’re not the problem. Your org is scared of its own brand, and once you can see it clearly, you can actually do something about it.

Here’s how to tell what’s going on, why it’s happening, and what you can do about it this week.

Let’s dive in…

1. You’re Not Imagining It.

Most nonprofit leadership teams don’t treat brand identity the way for-profit companies do.

For-profit companies treat identity as an asset. It’s the thing that differentiates them, that makes people choose them, and grows in value the more clearly they define it.

Most nonprofits treat identity as a liability. Something that could offend a funder, something that could alienate a board member, that could get taken out of context on Twitter, and something to be managed, softened, hedged, and eventually, made vague enough that it can’t be held against them.

That’s brand fear. And once you name it, you can’t unsee it.

Brand fear is why so many orgs in the same cause area sound identical.

I’ll be in a discovery call with a nonprofit founder or ED and they’ll tell me, with real conviction, exactly what their org stands for, what they’re fighting for, and what they refuse to compromise on.

It’s clear. It’s specific. It’s exactly the kind of point of view that would build a real audience if the world could hear it.

Then I open their website, their last five LinkedIn posts, or their most recent donor email and every single one of those bold, specific, hard-won convictions has been softened. Replaced with the same “empowering communities” and “creating impact” language that every other org uses.

The point of view they described to me on the call? Gone.

The team thinks they’re standing their ground. And from the inside, they are. In meetings, in strategy sessions, in the way they talk about their work, it’s clear. But your audience isn’t in that meeting with you. They can’t feel your conviction across a table.

They only see the version that made it out into the world and that version doesn’t sound like much.

Brand fear isn’t malice. It isn’t even bad leadership, necessarily. It’s a sector-wide reflex that’s been trained into most orgs over decades. But it’s still costing you something real.

2. The 5 Signs Your Org Is Afraid of Its Own Brand

If your org checks three or more, this isn’t a communications problem. It’s an identity one, and it’s time to name it.

1. Every strong draft comes back “softened,” but no one can explain what was wrong with it.

The feedback is vibes-based. “Feels too aggressive.” “Not quite our voice.” “Let’s tone this down.” Nobody can articulate the actual concern, which means the concern isn’t strategic, it’s emotional. Someone in the room got nervous.

2. Leadership calls bold positions “off-mission,” but the mission itself is fuzzy.

Ask five people at your org what the mission actually is and you’ll get five slightly different answers. When the mission is undefined, everything can be “off-mission.” Which really means: everything can be softened.

3. Your org sounds identical to every other org in your cause area.

Swap your logo for a competitor’s. Would your last three campaigns still make sense? If yes, you don’t have a brand. You have a category description.

4. Public statements are always days late and read like they were written by committee.

Because they were. Every stakeholder got a redline. Every fear got baked in. By the time it goes out, the position has been so hedged that nobody remembers what you were originally trying to say. Neither, honestly, does the reader.

5. Anyone new who joins gets slowly reshaped to sound like everyone already there.

You came in with a voice, ideas, and strong point of view. But six months later, you’re writing the same beige LinkedIn posts as everyone else. Nobody told you to, but the culture quietly required it.

If you’re nodding at three or more of these, you’re not the problem. You’re the person who can see the problem, which is the beginning of solving it.

3. Why It Happens (And Why It’s Not Entirely Your Boss’s Fault)

Before we get to what to do, it’s worth understanding what’s actually pushing this behavior. Because the more you understand it, the less it feels personal.

Nonprofit leadership gets pressure from every direction to be safe. Funders want to know their money isn’t going to something controversial. Boards are risk-averse by design. Older stakeholders remember a time when nonprofits stayed out of politics, and often still expect that. And there’s real institutional memory (cough, cough to last year) of orgs that took a public position and lost major funding or partnerships as a result.

None of that is imagined. Brand fear is a response to genuine pressure.

But here’s the trap: safety isn’t actually safer anymore.

The orgs winning trust, funding, and next-generation talent in this sector are the ones with a clear point of view. Young donors want to give to orgs that stand for something specific. Young employees want to work for orgs whose values are legible from the outside. Vagueness used to feel like a hedge. Now it reads like an absence.

Your leadership might not see this yet and your job isn’t to make them see it overnight. Your job is to hold your own clarity while you’re there, and to know how to help them see it when they’re ready.

4. What You Can Actually Do This Week

Here are five moves you can make, regardless of your role or seniority. None of them require permission. All of them will change how you show up at work starting next Monday.

1. Track the pattern before you name it.

For the next two weeks, keep a personal doc. Every time a piece of copy gets softened in review, write down the original line, the final line, and the reason (or non-reason) given. Not to build a case. To see the pattern clearly for yourself. You’ll be amazed how fast it becomes undeniable.

2. Reframe “brand” as “internal clarity” when you bring it up.

Leadership resists conversations about “the brand.” It sounds expensive, threatening, and abstract. But they rarely resist conversations about internal clarity. Try: “Our team keeps having the same confusion about how to talk about our work. Can we align on that?” Same conversation, way lower defenses.

3. Ask one specific question in your next messaging review.

Try this: “If we could only say one thing about what makes us different, what would it be?”

Orgs afraid of their own brand can’t answer this without falling back on category language (”we serve communities,” “we create impact”). The struggle to answer is the diagnosis. And unlike broader brand conversations, this one is small enough to bring up in any meeting without needing permission or a formal agenda.

4. Propose an audit, not a rebrand.

An audit sounds diagnostic, low-risk, and curious. A rebrand sounds like ripping the org down and starting over, which nobody has time or budget for.

Suggest a low-lift audit of your current messaging: what you’re saying across your website, socials, email, and public statements. Where you sound the same as everyone else. Where the mission comes through and where it disappears. Where your team disagrees on what to even call your work.

That kind of audit doesn’t threaten anyone’s identity. It reveals the org’s identity to itself. Which is often the first honest conversation an org has had in years.

I’m actually building a short DIY audit template you can walk through with your team before you get a consultant involved. It’s the first few questions I ask every client at Graceful Media before I ever look at their copy. If you want it when it’s ready, subscribe to Good Company and I’ll send it out first.

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5. Keep an honest drafts folder for yourself.

This one’s just for you. Every time a line you wrote gets softened past the point of meaning, save the original in a folder. Not to keep score. To remember what you actually think.

That folder is your voice, protected. It’s what you’ll draw on in your next role, your next pitch, your next side project, your next essay. Your org can soften your work in the meeting. It can’t soften what you actually believe. Not unless you let it.

The Reframe

If this piece felt eerily specific, it’s because you’re not the only one sitting in that meeting wondering what just happened.

Here’s what I want you to walk out of this with:

You are not the problem. You are the person who noticed the problem. That is genuinely rare, and it’s the whole reason change is slow to happen in this sector.

Every org that got clearer, braver, and more honest about who it is had someone like you inside it first. Someone who kept asking better questions in review meetings. Someone who tracked the pattern quietly. Someone who protected their voice when it would have been easier to just let it go.

That someone is often young. Often not the loudest person in the room. Often not the one with the title. But always the one who cared enough to keep trying.

So track the pattern, reframe the conversation, ask the questions, save the honest drafts, and RUN THE AUDIT.

And know that on the days it feels impossible, there are hundreds of us doing the exact same work in different offices, in different cities, all trying to help our orgs finally sound like themselves.

You’re in good company. 🤎

→ What’s a piece of copy at your org that got softened to nothing? What did the original say?

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About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing consultancy, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with coaching and events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.

It can feel disheartening. Like running on a treadmill. And like you really need to ask yourself: is any of this actually making a difference?

I don’t think there’s a version of this work where that question never comes up. If you’ve never asked it, I’d actually be a little surprised.

In just a few days America turns 250. And the more I sit with that number, the more I keep coming back to something: this country has never once fully lived up to its promises in the moment they were made. Not in 1776. Not in 1976. Not now.

But the people who have always done good work in this country were the ones who showed up anyway.

Abolitionists fighting for freedom in a nation that legally denied it.

Suffragettes organizing for a vote they didn’t yet have.

Civil rights leaders marching for equality the law hadn’t caught up to yet.

Labor organizers demanding dignity for workers nobody in power wanted to protect.

None of them got to see the finish line clearly from where they stood. They just kept showing up and doing the work, in a country still becoming what it claimed to already be.

I think about that a lot on the hard days. Because it means the discomfort I feel right now, the sense that the gap between what we say we believe and how we actually treat people is too wide, isn’t new. It’s actually one of the most American feelings there is. The work has always been to close that gap. It still is.

Here’s what I’ve learned about that question though, asking it doesn’t make you any less committed. It just means you’re paying attention. You’re allowed to take a step back and examine what you’re doing and why. That’s not weakness, that’s honesty.

But I think before we can even answer whether our work still matters, we have to get honest about what “good work” actually means in the first place. Because I don’t think it means what those before us thought it meant, and I don’t think it means what I thought it meant when I started either.

I used to think good work meant scale. The bigger the campaign, the bigger the reach, the bigger the headline, the more good you were doing. I think a lot of us start out believing that, especially working jobs like marketing where everything gets measured in numbers.

But seven years in, and 250 years into this country’s ongoing experiment, I think good work actually means something much quieter than that.

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Good work is showing up consistently for the people or causes you committed to, even on the days the news makes it feel pointless.

It’s the unglamorous, unmeasurable parts of the job that nobody will ever put in a recap report.

It’s staying in a hard conversation instead of avoiding it because it’s easier to look away.

It’s choosing integrity over optics, even when optics would get you more funding or more followers.

When it actually comes down to it, good work is rarely about the scale you imagined when you started. When I get too far in my head about funding cuts or political headlines or whether anything is moving fast enough, this is what I try to bring it back down to.

If you work in environmental causes, it might be remembering that the animals and ecosystems you’re protecting have no other voice in the room.

If you work in human rights, it might be the one person whose life genuinely changed because your org existed.

If you work in education, it might be a single kid who got access to something they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

That’s what good work has always actually looked like, even for the organizers who came before us with far less support, far less funding, and no guarantee any of it would work. They weren’t moving mountains every day either. They were showing up for the person, the cause, the gap in front of them, the way every generation before them has had to.

Good work, in other words, isn’t about the size of the impact. It’s about the honesty of the intention behind it, and the willingness to show up for the small, specific thing in front of you, again tomorrow.

That reframe has mattered a lot to me, because if good work were only measured by scale or speed or visible outcomes, this would be an impossible season to feel okay in. The world is loud and fast and frequently cruel right now. Measured against that, almost anything can feel too small to matter.

But measured against intention, consistency, and whether you showed up honestly for the thing in front of you today? That’s the same bar abolitionists met. The same bar suffragettes met. The same bar civil rights organizers met, generation after generation, long before any of them got to see the country catch up to what they were fighting for. That’s a bar I can actually meet and the bar we can all meet together.

The big picture can feel impossibly uncertain right now. The small picture is usually where the truth actually lives. It always has been, in every era of this country’s unfinished story.

I’ve watched people leave this sector because they lost their grip on that, because the bigger questions got too loud and the hope underneath them got buried. And I don’t judge that at all. This work asks a lot of the people who do it, and burnout is real, and sometimes leaving is the right and honest choice.

But if you’re still here, still doing the work, still asking the hard question on rough days, or maybe wanting to re-enter the space in the future, I want you to know that’s not a crack in your commitment. It’s just what it feels like to care about something during an uncertain time, in a country that’s spent 250 years becoming itself one generation of good work at a time.

You’re not alone in feeling that. Most of us are carrying some version of the same question right now. And neither are you the first generation to carry it.

And maybe that’s exactly why community matters so much in this space. Not because it answers the big question for you.

But because it reminds you, on the days you need it most, that you’re not the only one asking it, and you’re not the first to ask it either. 🤎

→ What’s the small, specific thing that reminds you why your work matters on the hard days?

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1. FREE DOWNLOAD: 27 Networking Moves That’ll Change How You Show Up in a Room

2. More dropping next week ;)

About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing consultancy, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with coaching and events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.

“I do marketing for the Human Rights Foundation, one of the largest human rights organizations in NYC, and the only one solely focused on supporting pro-democracy movements within authoritarian regimes.” And I’d usually keep going, because honestly, I wanted to. I’d talk about running advertising for HRF’s Oslo Freedom Forum conference series, in a city I’d never even visited before this job and then somehow found myself in three separate times in four years leading subway takeovers, airport activations, influencer campaigns, speaker rehearsals, and so much more.

I wasn’t just managing social media, email, and a website. I was running panels at SXSW. I was leading international out-of-home activations in Taipei and London. I went from a team of one to building into a team of eight, all before I turned 25.

It was, genuinely, the coolest answer I had. And somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing it as an answer to a work question and started treating it as the answer to a much bigger one: who am I.

I built my entire sense of self around being able to say all of that out loud. In my own head, and increasingly in how I introduced myself at every party and every family dinner, I wasn’t Grace who happened to work for a nonprofit. I was “the nonprofit girl,” full stop, no separation between the two.

So when I left and started working for myself, while I did feel an enormous sense of freedom, I also felt like I’d left a piece of myself behind in that job.

Nobody warns you about that part. The work itself doesn’t end when you leave an organization, but the identity you built around it does, almost overnight. One day you’re “the HRF girl” and the next day you’re just... you, trying to figure out who that is without the title doing the work for you.

So how did I get over that and start separating my identity from the title?

1. Building a “What I Actually Do” List

The first thing that actually helped was realizing my job description had never come close to capturing what I did anyway. Nonprofit jobs almost never stay inside their job description.

You get hired as a “marketing manager” and within a year you’re also running events, training volunteers, managing a community, becoming the person activists trust to tell their story right. So instead of describing myself by my title, I started writing down, in plain language, what I’d actually done.

Not the bullet points from a resume, but the real impact. The community I helped build, the activists I supported whose work put them at real risk, the people who couldn’t safely advocate for themselves and got heard anyway.

I still have that list, by the way. I add to it now under a different name, but it started as a desperate attempt to remind myself I was more than a job title between roles. It turns out it was a much more honest answer to "who am I" than any title had ever been.

2. Practicing Introducing Myself Without My Job First

Number two is smaller, but it stuck. I started practicing introducing myself without leading with my job.

At a dinner, at an event, even just chatting with someone at a bar, I’d try to lead with something I was proud of or a project I cared about, and let the title come up later, if it came up at all.

The first few times, I genuinely stumbled. I’d start a sentence with “well, I used to work at...” out of pure habit and have to course correct mid thought. But the more I practiced it, the more it felt like the first honest thing I’d said about myself in a while, instead of the fastest, most efficient summary of myself I could give a stranger.

3. Notice What’s Still True After The Job Change

The third thing took the longest to actually believe: titles change, but the thing that made me good at any of it never did.

The care, the instinct for what a community actually needs, and the specific way I show up for people and projects I believe in.

I tested this theory more than once, every time I changed roles, every time a project ended, every time I sat in the in-between feeling untethered. And every single time, the same things showed up again in whatever came next. Not because I tried to force them to. Because they were never tied to the job in the first place. They were just tied to me.

None of that disappeared when I left HRF. It came with me, the way it always was going to.

Now, as a founder doing fractional marketing work for nonprofits and purpose-driven organizations, the title means even less than it used to.

“Marketing consultant” doesn’t tell you that I spent four weeks last month rebuilding a client’s entire audience strategy from scratch, or that I sat with a founder who hadn’t slept properly in months and helped her see, for the first time in a while, what her organization was actually trying to say to the world.

It doesn’t capture the late night Slack messages, the strategy decks rewritten three times because the first two weren’t honest enough, or the genuine relief on someone’s face when a plan finally feels clear instead of overwhelming.

“Founder” doesn’t tell you that some weeks I’m doing the deep, unglamorous foundational work nobody sees, and other weeks I’m the person reminding a client that their work matters, that they’re not behind, and that good marketing takes the time it takes.

The trust built, the strategies shaped, and the outcomes we create together that genuinely change how an organization shows up in the world. None of that fits in a title, and at this point, I’ve stopped expecting it to.

I think a lot of us in this space build our identity around our titles because, for a while, the title is the most efficient way to explain something that’s actually much bigger and harder to summarize. But the title was always a placeholder. It was never the whole story.

If you’ve left a role and felt like you left a piece of yourself behind too, I want you to know that feeling is real, but it’s also temporary. The piece of you that mattered wasn’t the title. It was everything underneath it. And that part comes with you.

→ What’s a title you’ve held that never came close to describing what you actually did?

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Stuff I Built So You Don’t Have To

1. FREE DOWNLOAD: 27 Networking Moves That'll Change How You Show Up in a Room

2. More dropping soon!

About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing consultancy, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with coaching and events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.

The world is... how do I say it… a lot right now. But I’m beyond honored you’ve chosen to spend the next few minutes here, I promise I won’t waste them.

Each Wednesday you'll find a thought, realization, or story from my own career in the impact space that I can't stop thinking about, and at the end, a question I genuinely want the answer to. Simple as that, with a few fun and maybe even spicy add-ons coming down the line!

However you found your way here, welcome. You’re in good company. 🤎

A few weeks ago I was sitting at a cute restaurant in central Athens on one of my final days in Greece after a five week co-working trip.

My laptop was open and I had my phone right next to it. I had Slack, LinkedIn, emails, and about 47 unread messages from clients, community members, friends, and family all competing for my attention at the same time.

But I was still sitting there completely alone.

Isn’t that the weirdest thing?

We have more ways to reach each other than any generation that has ever existed. I can FaceTime a friend in London just to chat, slide into a stranger’s DMs to talk about how they landed their last job, join a Slack community of 10,000 people, and post something that reaches thousands of people before I even finish my morning OJ.

And somehow we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic.

I’ve been thinking about why that is a lot lately. And I think part of it is that our generation is doing life differently. We’re waiting longer to get married, longer to have kids, longer to build the traditional structures that previous generations used as their social foundation.

And I think that’s genuinely great. We’re figuring out who we are first. We’re choosing intentionally instead of just following “the path'“.

But it also means that an entire generation of people in their 20s and 30s are out here trying to build their own version of family from scratch. Run clubs, book clubs, gym communities, networking events up the wazoo. We’re not waiting for life to hand us our people, we’re going out and finding them ourselves.

But here’s the thing nobody talks about enough.

For those of us working in the nonprofit and purpose-driven space, that loneliness has an extra layer.

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Most nonprofits run on tiny teams. Two to ten people, maybe more if you’re lucky. You spend your days doing deeply meaningful work with a small handful of colleagues, and then you go home. And unless you’re actively seeking it out, your professional world stays very, very small.

As young adults in this space, we see each other on LinkedIn, we like each other’s posts, we occasionally comment “this is so real” on something that hits too close to home. But we don’t actually meet. There’s no central place for us to find each other, to compare notes, to say out loud the things we’re thinking.

For most of my early career I’ve had a version of the same conversation over and over again…

A friend asks how work is going. I start to explain the campaign I’m working on, the funding crisis, how politics is truly effecting my day-to-day, and the emotional weight of working on issues that aim to make a difference for others, but somewhere around sentence three I watch their eyes glaze over.

Not because they don’t care about me. They do.

But because they don’t really get it. And how could they? Most of my closest friends have never worked at a nonprofit in their lives.

So I smile and say “it’s good, busy, you know how it is” and move on. Because explaining feels harder.

Last year I ran a networking event in New York City for young purpose-driven professionals.

I had never met most of the 50 people who showed up.

And almost everyone I spoke to that night said some version of the same thing:

“I’ve never been to anything like this before.”

“I always feel uncomfortable and like the youngest person in the room.”

“I didn’t know there were this many of us!”

In that moment, in a room full of strangers who had simply shown up because they saw my LinkedIn post and thought, “finally, something for me!“ I felt immensely proud.

After years of glazed eyes and “you know how it is,” I found !!!my people!!!

And even after everything: the apps, the platforms, the group chats, and the follower counts, the way most of us actually want to connect is still the same way humans always have.

In person, face to face, and in the same room.

We’re not waiting for life to hand us our people anymore. We’re building tables big enough for everyone and showing up for each other deliberately, intentionally, and on purpose.

Good Company exists because of that room of strangers.

Because belonging shouldn’t be something you stumble into at a random event. It should be built on purpose, with intention, and for the young people who chose this work deliberately and who deserve a community as meaningful as the missions they serve.

If you take one thing away from this first issue, let it be that you're not alone in this. You just needed somewhere to land.

So welcome 🤎

→ When was the last time you talked to someone who really got it, and what did that feel like?

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About Me: Hiya, I’m Grace! After 7+ years in nonprofit marketing, I’m exploring what it really means to do good work, build a meaningful career, and find your people in the impact space. I’m the founder of Graceful Media, a purpose-driven marketing consultancy, and the creator of Good Company (a newsletter for now, with coaching and events to come). You can find me on LinkedIn or at gracefulmedia.co.