A Side of Hope

In This Episode

• Life skills nobody covers in orientation, from folding a fitted sheet to stretching a budget
• How a dry erase calendar became the place one man made sure his voice was heard
• Why she stopped comparing hard days, and what a luau taught her about adaptability
• How a neighbor’s quick action showed what community looks like in a crisis
• Why progress is slow, why humor is survival equipment, and why hope is usually ordinary

Key Takeaways

• Family can be chosen. Staff who show up consistently can become family to the people they support.
• Someone with few words can still have a strong voice.
• Sitting with someone in a hard moment often matters more than having the right answer.
• People tend to forgive a mistake they hear about directly, sooner than they forgive an excuse or a cover-up.
• Supporting someone means respecting their choices, even when those choices differ from yours.
• Self-care matters. Melanie says she didn’t value it for most of her career, and she calls that a mistake.

About the Host
Melanie Bazile hosts A Side of Hope, a podcast for human services professionals, social workers, and people starting out in the field.

Connect
Listen to more episodes and find links at https://linktr.ee/sideofhopepodcast

What has this work taught you that you never expected to learn? Share your stories, and consider sending this episode to a colleague.

Melanie Bazile talks about the seasons when she has pushed past her limits, and why staying in this work for decades depends on refilling yourself before you run dry. Drawing on more than 30 years in human services, she walks through five buckets (physical, relational, emotional, purpose, and spiritual), explains how to spot the one running lowest, and names the grit trap: the habit of treating depletion as dedication.

In This Episode

• Why burnout rarely announces itself, and the early signs Melanie notices in herself
• The five buckets and what fills and drains each one
• Small movement habits built into the day, including squats and wall push-ups during coffee reheats
• How to tell whether a draining relationship has you carrying something that belongs to someone else
• The grit trap, and why grit alone cannot sustain you
• A gas tank comparison from social worker Anna Reed
• One small step to take this week

Key Takeaways

• Burnout can show up as less patience, less curiosity, and more reactivity before anyone names it.
• Grit helps people endure a hard season, but it cannot sustain them indefinitely.
• Recovery is part of sustaining the work.
• Choose one bucket and one small action, and start this week, before the next project.

About Melanie Bazile
Melanie Bazile is Director of Innovation and Expansion at Compass Cares and the host of A Side of Hope. With more than 30 years in human services, she speaks to the leaders, direct support professionals, and advocates who keep showing up for the people they serve.

ConnectMore episodes and resources: https://linktr.ee/sideofhopepodcast

Cara Yar Khan uses a power wheelchair and can no longer raise her arms. She says everything she does is hard, even touching up her lip gloss. She also crossed the Grand Canyon on a wild mustang. In this conversation, Melanie and Cara get into the difference between struggling and suffering, and what that difference asks of anyone who provides support.

About Cara
Cara Yar Khan is an international disability rights advocate, speaker, and founder of The Purple Practice, where she helps organizations build more inclusive and equitable futures. With a global career spanning the United Nations, the U.S. Department of State, and beyond, Cara brings both policy and lived experience into her work.

In This Episode

• Growing up with an Indian Muslim father, a British Anglican mother, and a Chinese Buddhist stepmom, and how that mix shaped her search for self-worth
• Why Cara now calls her identity challenge emotional fragility, and what it’s like when the world looks at her and sees tragedy
• Tragedy narratives and inspiration narratives, and how both feed the charity and medical models of disability
• The line between struggle and suffering, and how Cara uses it to decide when to ask for help
• Support versus care, and why Cara asks her assistant to be her legs and arms while the decisions stay with her
• How providers can tell when “protecting” someone is really about their own discomfort
• Facing the Falls: a 12-day Grand Canyon expedition, a ten-hour descent on horseback with a fear of heights she didn’t know she had, and a team where no decision was made by one person

Key Takeaways

1. Struggle and suffering send different signals. For Cara, struggle builds tenacity and gives her small triumphs to celebrate. Suffering wears down her physical, emotional, and psychological strength. That’s her cue to hand off a task, wait for support, or bring in a new assistive device.
2. Support follows the person’s lead. Cara asks her assistant, Diana, to be her legs and her arms, and the decisions stay with Cara. Care, as she defines it, means acting on what you think is best for someone without asking them first.
3. Ask, then accept the answer. Instead of deciding what a healthy life looks like for someone, Cara suggests asking, “What does that look like to you?” Then let them decide, even when you disagree.
4. Shielding someone from struggle has a cost. Cara calls it “robbing people from that human experience.”
5. Bring your expertise to the choice and leave the choice with the person. On the expedition, specialists gave Cara the information she needed and the team decided together. Melanie points to this as the model for services.
6. Seek out lived experience. Cara encourages providers and families to learn from other people with disabilities through support groups, social media, and peers. That outside voice often lands where a family member’s can’t.

Watch Facing the Falls
Cara’s 34-minute documentary, executive produced by Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, is free on YouTube with captions and an audio-described version. Organizations can host a screening, and Cara is open to joining the discussion.

Connect with Cara
Website: https://carayarkhan.com/
Facing the Falls: https://carayarkhan.com/film
TED Talk, “The Beautiful Balance Between Courage and Fear”: https://www.ted.com/talks/cara_e_yar_khan_the_beautiful_balance_between_courage_and_fear
Book Cara for keynotes and speaking: https://www.outspokenagency.com/cara-yar-khan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cara-e-yar-khan/

About This Episode

What does leadership look like when you're not the CEO? When you don't own the organization, don't get the final say, and technically don't have your name on the building, yet you find yourself lying awake at night thinking about the culture, the people, the decisions, and what comes next?

Melanie explores a leadership seat that doesn't get talked about nearly enough: the seat just below the top. She breaks down the difference between ownership, stewardship, and intrapreneurship, and shares her own journey of shifting from a burning goal to own an agency by 30 to realizing her real strength lies in building things inside existing organizations.

If you've ever felt the weight of something you don't technically own, if you've noticed problems that weren't yours to solve and solved them anyway, if you've been the person trusted with more responsibility than authority, this episode is an invitation to get clear about what's genuinely yours to carry and what isn't.

Melanie also speaks directly to the owners and CEOs listening: how to recognize the value of people in this seat, how to give them enough authority to match their responsibility, and why finding someone who feels genuine stewardship for what you've built is worth far more than another person checking boxes.

In This Episode

• The "strange seat on the bus" that sits just below the top
• Why Melanie walked away from her dream to own an agency
• The difference between ownership, stewardship, and intrapreneurship
• The shadow side of these strengths when commitment turns into overfunction and loyalty turns into silence
• A practical three-bucket framework: own it, influence it, release it
• Why caring deeply about work you don't personally own is not foolish and where the line between stewardship and self-sacrifice actually sits
• A direct message to owners and CEOs about recognizing and protecting this kind of leadership
• Questions to ask yourself about where you've accepted owner-sized responsibility without owner-sized authority

Key Takeaways

• You don't need your name on the building to care deeply, solve problems, and shape where an organization is headed. Influence and entrepreneurship happen inside existing structures.
• The most dangerous pattern: accepting responsibility without enough authority to meaningfully influence the outcome. Responsibility and authority can't stay completely disconnected forever.
• Stewardship and overidentification are different things. Stewardship says "I will care for this even though it doesn't belong to me." Overidentification says "everything that happens here is mine to carry." One is sustainable; the other burns people out.
• Your ambition doesn't have to point toward the top seat. Maybe you love the daily work more than the title. Maybe your impact is strongest in a seat you've intentionally chosen, not one you're passing through on the way up.
• If you're the owner or CEO: these people are rare. Find them, develop them, give them authority that matches their responsibility, let them disagree safely, and compensate them appropriately. Don't reward their ability to carry more by simply giving them more to carry.

About Ginger Johnson

Known as a "Chief Connecting Officer," Ginger Johnson has built a career around one core belief: everything we want in life is powered by connection. From firefighter to teacher to executive, Ginger's journey has shaped a deep understanding of what it takes to help people feel seen, valued, and part of something bigger. She's the author of Connectivity Canon: Why and How to Connect on Purpose, and offers keynote speaking, professional development programs, and Chief Connecting Officer certification.

In This Episode

Ginger challenges how we think about passion, purpose, connection, and hope. We explore why purpose might matter more than passion; why connection is something we do rather than something we have; and how the language we choose shapes the lives we create. Ginger also shares her own journey with hope—from skepticism to understanding it as thoughtful risk and a compounding force in our lives.

Key Takeaways

Purpose is the bedrock; passion can burn out like a comet. Remind yourself: why does this work matter deeply to me?

Connection doesn't happen by accident. It's something we deliberately create through conversation and presence.

Hope isn't luck. Hope is thoughtful risk—deciding where you're willing to go, what conversation you're willing to start.

People aren't broken. When we see people as complete rather than problems to fix, we show up differently in every relationship.

The language we use matters. Words like "balance," "client," and "broken" shape how we think about our work and our people.

Connect with Ginger

Visit gingerjohnson.com to explore her keynote speaking, professional development programs, and Chief Connecting Officer certification.

Read Connectivity Canon at gingerjohnson.com/shop/connectivity-canon/

Connect directly: gingerjohnson.com/connect/ | [email protected] | 515.450.7757

Follow Ginger on LinkedIn and YouTube

What Expectation Bias Costs Us in Human Services

A Side of Hope with Melanie Bazile

In this episode, Melanie Bazile explores expectation bias, the tendency to perceive, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm what we already expect to be true. Drawing on more than 30 years in human services, she unpacks how this shows up not just in daily life, but in the field itself, in referrals, diagnoses, and the labels attached to the people we serve.

Melanie opens with her own story: a craving for Chipotle chips led her to drive past the restaurant three times because it didn't match the storefront she expected to see. It's a small moment, but it sets up the bigger idea. We don't always see what's actually there. We see what we've already decided is there.

From there, she brings in a striking piece of research: a study in which participants were shown a fake scar on their face, sent out to have conversations with strangers, and reported feeling judged and treated differently, even after the scar had been secretly removed before they left the room. The expectation shaped the experience, whether or not the reality matched it.

The episode's turning point is personal. Melanie shares the story of Tim, a young man she almost declined to serve based on a referral packet that painted him as someone she "couldn't possibly" work with. The person she actually met didn't match the file at all, and the disconnect became a lasting lesson in how labels can replace the person in front of us before we've even met them.

She also names how expectation bias shows up in judgments about what's possible for the people human services professionals support, low expectations that limit opportunity, and unrealistically high ones that create their own kind of pressure. Both distort what she calls the real goal: accurate expectations, held with openness to what might still be possible.

Melanie closes with four practical shifts pulled from person centered thinking: stay curious, actively look for evidence that contradicts your assumption, listen, and separate what you observed from the meaning you attached to it.

In this episode:

• Why our brains are wired to notice what confirms existing beliefs
• The scar study and what it reveals about expectation versus reality
• How referral packets and diagnostic labels can replace the person we're meeting
• The story of Tim, and what changed when Melanie stayed curious
• Four person centered thinking tools to challenge expectation bias in practice

🎧 Connect with A Side of Hope: https://linktr.ee/sideofhopepodcast

Human services has spent decades trying to build inclusion from our side. Lisa Drennan's 40 years in the field taught her the opposite: inclusion can only be built by the side of the bridge that isn't there yet, the YMCAs, the camps, the faith communities. Her work is teaching that side how to build it.

Lisa Drennan is a nationally recognized speaker and inclusion advocate who has spent over 40 years helping individuals with disabilities experience deeper connection, belonging, and community. She challenges organizations to see inclusion not as an obligation, but as an opportunity. She founded MERGE Consulting, which helps YMCAs, camps, faith organizations, and libraries build genuinely inclusive spaces.

Her path started in the 1980s at New England Village, a residential campus south of Boston, when the job title was simply "staff." Nearly 30 years later a YMCA posting for "Director of Inclusion," the first role of its kind in the country, led to the realization that shaped her career: inclusion has to be taught to the rest of the world, one relationship at a time. She founded MERGE in 2018.

Lisa's framework runs access, inclusion, and belonging, in that order. Access means someone is genuinely invited in, not tucked into a special track on page nine of the brochure. Inclusion means being part of the class instead of the separate one running alongside it. Belonging is the goalpost, and it only shows up once the first two are in place.

They also talk through the gap between being present and being valued. Lisa tells the story of an agency that described a Dunkin' Donuts drive-through trip as "getting out in the community." Her response: being physically present isn't the same as being part of something.

Friendship gets its own section. Lisa tells the story of a boy she calls Kyle, asked to leave three camps before he came to a YMCA camp where Lisa was working. Kyle and another camper became friends over a shared love of Lego robotics and a specific way of eating a PB&J, cut into triangles, crusts off. That friendship led to Kyle's first birthday party invitation.

They also get into language: why "wheelchair bound" and "high" or "low functioning" carry more weight than people realize, and why naming the actual support need fits better than labeling the person.

Lisa closes with an invitation for every listener: an open mind and heart is 85% of the work.

Topics covered:

• Why the community being included must build inclusion itself
• The access, inclusion, belonging framework
• Specialized programming versus genuine inclusion
• Friendship as a measurable outcome of belonging
• How DSPs can facilitate connection through shared interests
• Language and how it shapes how we see people
• Lisa's on-demand learning platform and Pathways to Friendship toolkit

Lisa's on-demand learning platform launched the same week this episode was recorded. The first trainings are built for recreation and camp staff, with content for DSPs, agencies, self-advocates, and families coming later this year. Her first resource is a sensory kit guide.

Guest: Lisa Drennan, Founder of MERGE ConsultingHost: Melanie Bazile

Connect with Lisa and MERGE:

• Website: mergeconsulting.org
• On-Demand Learning Platform: mergeconsulting.org/on-demand-learning
• About MERGE and content library: available at mergeconsulting.org (add direct links when provided)
• Pathways to Friendship Toolkit, Building Friendships Between People With and Without Disabilities: Lisa co-authored the fifth toolkit in this Arc of Massachusetts series, for YMCA staff, camp counselors, faith organizations, and libraries

More from A Side of Hope:linktr.ee/sideofhopepodcast

There's a word that makes a lot of people in human services flinch. Not burnout, not funding cuts. Sales. Melanie says it out loud in this episode, and she doesn't apologize for it. But the real tension she's sitting with is bigger than one word: how did 'corporate' become an insult in a field where the stakes are this high? And what tools have we walked away from because they felt like a betrayal of the work?

Melanie isn't arguing that human services should become corporate America. She's asking a harder question: what if some of the structures we've rejected are actually the thing standing between our good intentions and the follow-through the people we serve actually need? She uses a specific example from her own department, a business certification tool called the Five Whys, originally a root cause analysis method from Lean Six Sigma, that she started applying with people receiving services, with her team, and in grant writing. If she'd written it off because of where it came from, she says, she would have lost a genuinely powerful tool. She also talks about being asked to write a business plan for the department she leads at Compass and discovering, mid-grumble, that the process forced her to get clear on something she hadn't wanted to admit: chasing every idea in the name of innovation had actually decreased her department's impact.

Most people, when they get a cancer diagnosis, think about survival. Lauren Huffmaster did too, until she realized that surviving and living are two very different things.

Lauren Huffmaster is a metastatic breast cancer survivor and the founder of Adventure Therapy Foundation, where she's working to reimagine what the cancer experience can look like. Through her work as a speaker, author, and podcast host, Lauren invites others to find meaning, connection, and even joy in the midst of hardship.

Melanie and Lauren first connected through a shared experience of moving through life with cancer, and that shared ground gives this conversation a depth that's hard to manufacture. Lauren opens with what it actually took to learn how to live with a diagnosis that never fully resolves, and how that process became the foundation for everything she now builds for others.

Much of this conversation is about grief, and not in the way most of us have been trained to think about it. Lauren describes grief as something that layers through everyday life in ways people rarely stop to name: a future that no longer looks the way you imagined, an identity reorganized around a diagnosis, relationships that quietly shift or disappear. She calls these "pinpricks of grief," and makes the case that unacknowledged, they don't go away. They accumulate.

Melanie draws that framework directly into the human services field, particularly for families of people with disabilities who carry years of unprocessed grief that the people supporting them rarely think to address.

Lauren also introduces irrational optimism, kinship groups built around shared interests rather than shared diagnoses, and the story behind her children's book The Adventure Jar, written because cancer is never just one person's experience.

Melanie closes with a reminder that lands for anyone doing this work: people are often grieving more than we can see, and presence, the genuine kind, is the work.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Grief beyond loss of life: identity, future plans, and relationships
• What families of people with disabilities carry that often goes unaddressed
• Irrational optimism and why the stories we tell ourselves matter
• Kinship groups and shared interest as a path out of isolation
• Asking for help when the need is long-term
• Dreams, courage, and declaring what you believe in

Guest: Lauren Huffmaster, Founder, Adventure Therapy Foundation
Host: Melanie Basil

Connect with Lauren:

• Adventure Therapy Foundation: https://adventuretherapyfoundation.org
• Podcast — Adventure Found: https://adventurefound.org/podcast/
• Instagram: @Lauren Huffmaster | @adventuretherapyfoundation | @canceringcollective

Lauren's Books:

• Cancering: Exploring the Seasons of Emotional Healing — https://www.amazon.com/Cancering-Exploring-Seasons-Emotional-Healing/dp/B0D6XCGMM3
• 20 Shades of Grief (contributing author) — https://www.amazon.com/20-Shades-Grief-Impacts-Experience/dp/1969864117

Free Children's Book — The Adventure Jar:
https://www.expose-mbc.com/free-mbc-childrens-book

More from A Side of Hope:
https://linktr.ee/sideofhopepodcast

There are people in human services who have been showing up for years, not because it's easy, not because the system cooperates, not because anyone is watching. This episode is about what actually keeps them there.

Melanie Basil is the Director of Innovation and Expansion at Compass and the host of A Side of Hope. With over 30 years in the human services field, she brings hard-won experience in direct support, leadership, and building systems that actually work for the people inside them.

In this solo episode, Melanie gets personal about one of the most essential qualities in human services work: grit. Not the motivational poster version. The real kind, the kind that doesn't show up on any award or go viral, but keeps people in this field doing hard things for a long time.

She opens with her own story of nearly failing lifeguard training as a young camp counselor who couldn't swim well, and what it meant to keep showing up anyway. From there, she connects that individual experience to what grit actually looks like in direct support work: walking alongside someone pursuing a driver's license when everyone else doubted it was possible, supporting families who are exhausted but still advocating, finding ways to serve people well in the middle of system barriers and shrinking resources.

Drawing on researcher Angela Duckworth's work, Melanie defines grit as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, and she makes the case for why that definition hits differently in human services. Outcomes here don't happen overnight. Progress is often measured in inches, not miles. The long game requires something that raw talent and good intentions can't fully sustain.

She also introduces the concept of "loaned grit," the idea that when the people we support lose hope, we hold it for them until they can hold it themselves. It's a reminder worth sitting with.

Melanie closes with a direct challenge to listeners: grit should never mean running yourself into the ground. Healthy grit includes support, boundaries, and sustainability. Just because someone can keep going doesn't mean we should keep asking them to.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The difference between grit, talent, and luck
• Angela Duckworth's research on grit as a predictor of success
• What grit looks like on the ground in direct support work
• "Loaned grit" and holding hope for someone else
• The GRIT acronym: Guts, Resilience, Initiative, and Tenacity
• Why grit without support can become burnout
• How Melanie uses grit as a lens in hiring and developing people

Host: Melanie Basil, Director of Innovation and Expansion, Compass

Referenced in this episode:
Angela Duckworth — Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (book and TED Talk)
Simon Sinek — concept of the "infinite game"
More from A Side of Hope:
https://linktr.ee/sideofhopepodcast