Leaving Well: nonprofit leadership guidance for workplace exits and transitions

Sarah Brune has dedicated her career to advancing progressive causes across the Midwest. She is the co-founder of Heartland Next, a marketing, advocacy, and public affairs firm that works with nonprofits, small businesses, and candidates who are committed to making the Heartland great. Sarah also leads the policy advocacy department at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, where she and her team work to close the racial homeownership gap through policy change at the local, state, and federal level.

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I understand my role in that organization as a white woman, and I think about that every day. I think it's important for me to understand what value I'm bringing. It's good to have diversity - whatever that may look like in an effort to advance racial equity. I think white women have to participate and have to lead in some ways, but not too much.

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Loneliness can be part of a transition.

To connect with Sarah or learn more about her work:

Heartland Next

NHS Chicago

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To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Lesley is an authority in developing data-driven strategies and unlocking potential in teams to achieve goals. She found her calling helping business owners and management teams multiply their impact by elevating strategy and focus and aligning resources towards a greater sense of purpose and reward.

​After leaving her corporate executive role in 2021 she launched Scale-Up Strategies with a passion to help business owners grow and scale their businesses. She earned her Certified Exit Planning Advisor designation from the Exit Planning Institute, and with this training combined with her work experience AND her firsthand experiences as the daughter and granddaughter of successful entrepreneurs, she is grateful to have found a niche within the advisory space to leverage her experience and make a difference in the lives of hard-working business owners and their teams.

Lesley lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa with her husband and 2 children. In her free time, she enjoys outdoor activities such as biking and boating.

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Working with business owners, their business becomes a sense of who they are. It's their identity. And they can't even imagine what they would do if they didn't have their business to be running every day. And who am I if I'm not the owner of XYZ business?

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There's a lot of different ways to transition ownership or leadership of a business and being able to provide that education first approach and helping them understand all of the different options that are out there and listening to them and their goals and understanding what's important to them.

I think our whole lives, we're always navigating who we are, what we want. What's for me been core is understanding my values. I will always do my very best. I will always keep learning. I will always take the high road and do what is right and good. And those kinds of pieces are more foundational to my identity than the job title I attach to my work.

Step one, hold your values close. The second part of leaving well is finding purpose or gratitude in whatever it was that you're moving on from. And then find future. What are you looking forward to next? Those three things.

To connect with Lesley or learn more about her work:

Website

Abby VanMuijen's Feelings Journey

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To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Charlene Lam is a certified grief coach and curator of The Grief Gallery. After her mother died suddenly in 2013, Charlene leaned into her creativity and instincts as a curator to guide herself through grief. Since then, she's presented multiple international exhibitions featuring the belongings of loved ones lost.

As a grief coach, Charlene helps busy individuals to unpack and process their grief after a significant loss, using the lens of curating. She believes we are ALL curators after a loved one dies. She developed her Curating Grief coaching framework to help people process grief in a creative, accessible way. Originally from NYC, she's based in Lisbon, Portugal. She is a fan of hammocks, and dumplings and post-its are her love language.

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I define curating as choosing with intention. You don't need to be an artist, you don't need to be creative, you don't need to have a gallery space, but you are choosing with intention what goes into your spaces. You are choosing with intention what you carry with you, what you pack in a bag when you go on a trip. You are choosing every day what takes up space. So to me, that's curating.

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I talk a lot about the need for grit because we have hard things to do after loss and grace, grace for ourselves and grace for other people.

We misunderstand what our role is. We think that we're there to fix it or that we can fix it or that we can save them from pain. And that's not what our role actually is as someone who's trying to support someone with loss. And equally, I think when we are the person who has experienced a job loss or a work transition, we think we can save ourselves from pain. And sometimes we can by doing some research or planning or different strategies, but we can't really save ourselves from, let's say, the essential pain of loss.

We need better ways of figuring out what's ours, what someone else's, what do we want to carry, what are we already carrying, what can we let go of? And I think curating is a beautiful way to do it.

Book

The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O'Connor

The Way of Transition by William Bridges

To connect with Charlene:

Website InstagramLinkedIn

Free Monthly Gathering for The Grief Gallery

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To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Jen Bokoff is the Director of Development for the Disability Rights Fund and the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund. She is on the Management Team and cultivates partnerships with donors.

Jen has dedicated her career to elevating marginalized voices, supporting community-centered solutions, and driving equity and effectiveness. Through frequent writing, public speaking, and facilitation, she enjoys naming tensions and connecting people to resources, ideas, and one another. Jen worked at Candid for seven years, where she developed partnerships, communications, resources, and insights to power the work of the philanthropic sector. There, she led research on participatory grantmaking that featured DRF's work. Previously, Jen was a client advocate for a community-based organization and later a grantmaker at a private foundation focused on supporting healthy food systems and the arts. She was also a paralegal for the Internal Revenue Service, which taught her the power of active listening and offered unique insight into people's lived experiences. Jen was identified by Onalytica in 2019 as a top 10 charity industry influencer and by Submittable in 2020 as a top 15 grantmaking-shaper.

A graduate of Tufts University, Jen studied community health and sociology and now serves on the Alumni Council. She is also a member of Disability Lead and serves on the boards of Rhize and Human Rights Funders Network. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, watching theater, aunting, and playing board games and bridge. She lives in Chicago with her husband and dog Bowser.

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I think we have to celebrate change and transition. I think because a lot of change and transition has some exhaustion tied to it inherently, we don't always celebrate or find as much joy in it as we should. Celebrating endings and changes are just as important as celebrating beginnings and milestones.

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I'm comfortable sitting in tension and sitting in messiness. That doesn't phase me and I feel like a lot of the time when people pretend like everything's all figured out, we're not acknowledging the constant change and transition all around us, or that's on the cusp of happening, because it's always right there.

I think clearly communicating with the people who you're in relationship with that are affected by your decision is critical. It lets you control the message. It lets you set the tone. It lets you maintain relationships that you want to maintain. It lets you be confident in your decision. And it gives you a sense of closure that you don't get in the same way if other people are controlling how you are leaving.

To learn more about Jen's work:

Jen's website

Disability Rights Fund

Buy the book: Leaving Well for the Organization is now live!

Buy it on Bookshop.org | Buy it on Amazon

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To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Brionna is a self-described multi-dimensional misfit. She started her career in law working at various firms in California before she became the second legal hire at a nascent electric vehicle company. She left her full-time role as in-house counsel 5 years ago to pursue entrepreneurship. Since then, she's facilitated corporate wellbeing workshops and guided countless people through monumental life transitions.

She's worked with everyone from C-level executives at Fortune 100 companies, to new solopreneurs, to stay-at-home caregivers, to teenagers. Most recently, she launched a new venture, The Everyday Lawyer, that's focused on teaching freelancers and solopreneurs the foundations of business law so they can make better and more confident decisions in their work. Brionna is also working on her first book (of many), a collection of essays and poems called On Remembering.

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When I look back on that time, I don't have any regrets. I know to the best of my ability with the resources that I had at the time, I tried it. everything I possibly could to make that world work for me and make myself be a fit in that world and ultimately couldn't find a place that felt good and worked for me.

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We weren't talking about neurodivergence in the way we are talking about it now, it would have helped me create boundaries and maybe manage expectations better. It also would have given me some permission to be gentler with myself when my brain wasn't dialed in and I was having a really hard time getting things to click.

One of the things about capitalism is that it does a lot of work to narrow you and tell you you are defined by this one thing, and this is the only narrow path that you're allowed to walk in this lifetime. And I think that one of the things people forget, and often don't consider about the whole idea of leaving well and transitioning and change, is that it's an opportunity to expand that pathway and reclaim your inherent multidimensionality.

To connect with Brionna or learn more about her work:

The Everyday Lawyer

Brionna on Instagram

To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

To learn more about Leaving Well

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Erin Fairchild, MSW, is the founder of Collective Action Consulting where she works with local and national partners to deepen our collective responsibility to prevent and intervene in all forms of violence and trauma. Erin obtained her Masters in Social Work from Portland State in 2009, and has worked with children, families, and communities impacted by trauma for over 20 years, in roles ranging from domestic violence child advocate, child protective services worker, child-parent trauma recovery therapist, school social worker, trainer and curriculum developer, and program and policy designer.

After 9 years of public service, her current work at Collective Action Consulting focuses on preventing violence that happens in relationships, families, communities, and institutions, through policy and program development, while also building equity centered, trauma & healing informed environments. An avid journaler and papercrafter since she was a wee one, Erin also operates a small business called Journal As Altar that offers workshops and stationery items to all those interested in a creative practice that can be both low stakes and high impact. Erin envisions a world where justice and healing flourish, through actions we take together.

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I want my values to be evident in everything I do with my friendships and my romantic partnership, with my family, with work. I want people to know that my values are real based on my actions. So that takes some reflection time, especially in this world. The sort of binaries that capitalism produces doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance.

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There's a lot of connection between how we navigate a creative practice and how we navigate oppression and trauma and grief.

Leaving well means you are able to discern what is in your power and in the realm of possibility for you to leave in a way that aligns with your values and that recognizes the both and of leaving.

One of the core components of trauma-informed practice is to humanize what we're doing in a way that doesn't ignore identity and socio-political reality that actually is rooted in those experiences and what we need to be better with each other. I'm walking towards connections and relationships that are real and at least reaching towards not being conflict avoidant.

To connect with Erin:

Instagram

Journal As Altar newsletter

This Page is a Portal website

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To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

To learn more about Leaving Well

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Kelly is the co-founder of Harp Design Co, has worked on several television projects with her husband, Clint Harp, and is finishing up a master's degree in Clinical Psychology. Kelly is a lover of just about anything on NPR, an avid reader, coffee drinker, foodie, and quasi cultural & political commentator. With a creative spirit, love for all things beautiful, and an eye for design, she is hoping each day to bring something good to the world & also ideally take a nap.

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"It's all about going inside and figuring out what are your values, and then aligning your life with your values. I guess that's the cookie, the alignment is the cookie."

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I love that we tried -well, we didn't try - we did it for quite a while and learned so much about small business, about manufacturing, about taking care of employees. All of those things.

I will say "the people" included our kids and our family: how do we make sure this transition is smooth for them as well. And sometimes I've really had to remind myself, I am a people too. I need to take care of myself.

It was really important for us to do things well and be in our integrity as we close things down, and take care of people, first, the most that we could.

Follow Kelly on Instagram or learn more about Harp Design Co.

To purchase the books we discussed:

• Real Self-Care

• Living Resistance

• Raising Kids Beyond the Binary

To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

To learn more about Leaving Well

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Carrie Melissa Jones is an author, entrepreneur, and strategist whose work is dedicated to the world of digital community and belonging. Named by Salesforce as one of the three community experts to follow, Jones has been building online communities since the early days of web forums and chat technology. Today, her work influences the world's leading brands and organizations, including Airbnb, Discord, Google, Microsoft, and two US presidential campaigns.

As the founder of The CMJ Group, she teaches and guides brands through the application of digital leadership, community building, and community strategy. Her company has worked with organizations including the American Medical Association, Equinix, The Ken Blanchard Companies, Project Management Institute, Patreon, Microsoft, and many more. Together these brands connect well over 100 million people worldwide.

Carrie's book, Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging, co-written with bestselling author Charles Vogl, helps leaders understand and explore the concepts of authentic community building. Building Brand Communities is the recipient of the gold medal in Networking & Communication from the Axiom Business Book Awards in 2020.

Beginning in 2014, Jones served as co-founder and COO of CMX Media. CMX (acquired by Bevy Labs in 2019) provides forums, events, and content for community builders around the world. It now boasts a 20,000-person and growing membership.

Her writing on communities has appeared in VentureBeat, The Next Web, and First Round Review. She has a B.A. from UCLA in both English and Mass Communication and an M.A. in Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where her research focused on online communities, belonging, and digital leadership.

Carrie's personal mission is to help everyone find somewhere they feel they belong.

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What gets created, especially in a community, is not going to look the way that you think it's going to look on day one. There's no way. It's going to be, in some ways, much more wonderful, and in other ways, much more challenging than you can possibly imagine when you're standing on day one.

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I don't know if we can ever tell the full story because we need space to really tell it in a way that we're going to be proud that we told it. Maybe that's not true for everyone, but for me, because it was so heightened, the emotions around it were so heightened, I really needed the space.

There are no definitive metrics that are going to tell you whether something's working or not. And so we often are going off of our gut. Unfortunately, our gut is often influenced by outside culture and all these other things. And outside culture is telling us more is better, try harder, rest is not productive, all these things.

Build healthy relationships, then you can navigate transitions. If your relationships are rocky, or distant, or you haven't taken the time to really get to know the people in your community, then your transitions are going to be really, really tough.

Leaving well means being kind and graceful to yourself through the leaving process and giving grace to the stayers. Any leaving is not only affecting you, it's affecting those around you as well. So, if we could fill endings with kindness and grace, I think the world would be a better place.

To connect with Carrie:

Digital programs

Website

Instagram

LinkedIn

To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

To learn more about Leaving Well

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Nkem Ndefo is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, researcher, and community strategist to innovative programs that address trauma and inequity, build resilience, and shape liberatory change for individuals and organizations throughout the US and internationally. She is particularly interested in working alongside people most impacted by violence and marginalization.

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How does your organization do supervision or mentorship? Hard things come up all the time. Are you practicing sitting with people, noticing when people are having hard times?

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They have decision fatigue. It's like a sign of decreased resilience or small bandwidth. Like, I just can't make another decision because I'm weighing so many different possibilities, many of them unknown, and the more that are unknown, the more things are there in the air, and there's more contingencies that I have to, you know, hold, not just mentally, but like energetically and emotionally, all those contingencies, and it takes energy. And if we are resource constrained with our energy, our attention, our capacity we're not resilient to make decisions.

When you see a binary, trauma is afoot. Because trauma polarizes, and so you'll see these sort of extremes, it's hard to find that nuance in the middle that can see the complexity and sit with the complexity. And so when we see these sort of extremes of I have all the power, I have no power. Somebody has all of the control or no control.

Not everything works for everybody and it may work for you sometimes and not others. And so when you have that self awareness, you have all kinds of choice opens up and the ability to attune your responses. So you're not wasting energy. In these over responses gives you more capacity to make more decisions to sit with more uncertainty to juggle all those contingencies of decision making more easily.

Transitions are hard because for most people they're associated with grief and, I'm going to say the dominant, North American, Western European, cultures are absolute, in my very professional language, shit at dealing with grief. And so we don't have good models. We don't have good skills and we need them because transitions are a change.

I try not to ask, could this be worse? Because usually the answer is yes. And, I really would rather spend my energy imagining what would be possible if we got it right.

To connect with Nkem or learn more about her work:

Website

Resilience Toolkit

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

To learn more about Leaving Well

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley

Hannah is based in Manchester, UK and has worked in philanthropy, community activation, field building, and disability rights.

She's held various roles with one of the UK's largest funders over the past eight years, including designing and developing a wide range of funding programs and managing an extensive portfolio of complex and systemic grants.

Hannah is also the founder of the Participatory Grantmaking Community, which has grown to include over 1,500 funders seeking to understand and embed approaches to grantmaking that devolves decision-making power to the communities they aim to serve.

She is a big lover of frogs and, over lockdown, spent time cultivating a tiny garden pond so it could become a home to lots of the neighborhood frogs.

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Nothing is permanent. Everything is movable. And if you don't like it, change it.

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What rituals do you build into transitions? What does a good goodbye look like? Whether that's personal, private, with your friends and family, your whole work team.

I have also made the decision to step back from that space to enable it to thrive through its myriad of volunteers that support it, and the amazing accountability circle that the community itself has elected to kind of steer the entity into whatever iteration that is next.

To connect with Hannah or learn more about her work:

Hannah's piece

Participatory Grantmakers community

Resources mentioned:

Debbie Danon

To take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz

To learn more about Leaving Well

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley