I sat down with Malka — educator, community herbalist, organizer, and co-founder of the DC Mutual Aid Apothecary — to talk about honoring endings, beginnings, in-between moments, mergers, sunsets. All the transitions that, when witnessed well, can turn into wisdom instead of just abrupt, unmarked closings.

Malka spent over a year researching the closure of Movement Ground Farm, a decade-long land-based nonprofit that attempted to shift into a worker-led model and eventually decided to sunset. She wove the story of that organization into a virtual interactive timeline, drawing on 20-plus interviews (some of them four hours long with former staff). Her research has become a case study for anyone moving toward collective land-based work, especially the people asking what we can learn from projects that have shut their doors.

We talk about why so many of us leave organizations carrying rage, distrust, and shame. Why the nonprofit form so often turns into a machine for sustaining itself. What happens when a founder can't let go of power, and what shifted for the Movement Ground Farm ED once he had a year of reflection and an outside witness to help him make sense of what happened. Malka also shares where she is right now with the DC Mutual Aid Apothecary, six years in, exploring what a soft ending can look like when a project has grown so entangled with its community that ending it isn't even fully in her hands anymore.

If you've ever left a project feeling like it went up in flames, or watched one dissolve without acknowledgment, this one's for you.

In this episode:

• Why unmarked endings get carried into the next role as rage, cynicism, or a quiet loss of faith
• What happens when the nonprofit's real job becomes sustaining the nonprofit
• Movement Ground Farm as a case study, and Malka's process of interviewing people from every side of a decade-long story
• The founder's paralysis, and what shifted when he could finally make sense of what happened
• Two very different kinds of endings: organizations imposed on a community versus ones that grew out of it
• Why some things can't fully be ended, because they no longer belong to their founders
• What a "soft ending" can look like (Plant Fest, and giving away thousands of seedlings, is a good example)
• The elements Malka names for holding a closure well: an outside witness, space for community to honor the work, not hoarding what you've built, and telling the story with nuance
• The offering an ending organization can make to the rest of us as a case study, mistakes on display, humbly

Resources mentioned:

• Movement Ground Farm — harvestingforseed.com
• The DC Mutual Aid Apothecary

Connect with Malka:

• LinkedIn: Malka Roth
• Instagram: @malkaeve
• Email: [email protected]

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What Organizational Doula Work Is

• Deep witnessing and accompaniment through transitions, not framework application
• Starts with assessment: what the organization already has, its history, cultural identity, strengths
• Builds emergent frameworks tailored to the specific team, broad enough to flex but tethered to history
• Psychological safety as a core pillar: enables trial-and-error culture and generative mistake-making
• Doula as “lantern holder”: outside perspective that makes sense of what teams can’t see from within
• Individual and collective work combined: leadership and team members addressed separately and together
• Tools are maps, not plans: flexible, multi-route, oriented toward a shared North star

Who It’s For and Key Use Cases

• Teams merging, experiencing leadership ruptures, or moving toward something new
• Organizations sunsetting or closing, including unexpected closures
• Coalitions forming across very different organizations (example: North Dakota anti-trafficking coalition bringing together law enforcement, nonprofits, faith groups, government)
• Teams in conflict: conflict held as generative, not something to squash
  • Ignored conflict snowballs, teams lose talent and the ability to dream together
  • Must be witnessed from outside by someone not in the conflict
• Conferences and gatherings: drop-in support, workshops, helping excited collaborators ground new ideas into actionable maps before they leave

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Alice Ely is one of my favorite people to talk with, and I’ve been wanting to have her on the podcast for a long time. She’s the executive director of the Public Health Council of the Upper Valley, celebrating twenty-five years of the organization she leads. She’s also the person who funded my BIPOC and queer healthcare storytelling work through the Vermont Community Health Equity Partnership a few years back, so this conversation was a real coming-full-circle moment for me.

We talk about what it took for the Public Health Council to hold the VTCHEP grant in a way that served the communities it was meant for. We talk about: word-of-mouth outreach through networks the state would never have thought to use; fiscal sponsorship for organizations without institutional infrastructure; money upfront when grantees needed it; and more. 

We talk about qualitative data being treated as unreliable inside healthcare settings. We talk about what it means when N is too small to report. And we talk about the medicalization of public health, and what happens when community health workers never leave the institutional walls of the systems that employ them.

If you’re a funder, a public health leader, a community-led practitioner, or someone trying to change how your traditionally white-led organization shows up in this work, this one is for you.

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In 2019, Ethiopia's Federal Ministry of Health was doing something nobody else had done. They were building the first national Compassionate and Respectful Care initiative woven into a federal health transformation plan. And they were building it by listening.

In this episode, I sit down with three of my former colleagues from the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program to talk about our work in Ethiopia, interviewing patients, providers, community health workers, ministry officials, NGO leaders, and professional associations across Addis Ababa, Oromia, and Amhara. 

We talk about what we heard. That you cannot ask providers to be compassionate if the system isn't compassionate to them. That trainings alone don't hold unless leadership and culture hold them up. That compassion is subjective, which means measuring it without reducing it to a checklist requires a different kind of rigor. That the Ministry's incubation centers worked because facilities were given room to prototype in their specific contexts. 

We also talk about what stayed with us and the impact of watching a federal body build strategy from the ground up.

This conversation is years overdue, and I'm so glad we finally had it.

Guests: Yuki Davis and Matt Hughsam

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Crows recognize individual faces. They remember who threatened them and who helped them, and they pass that knowledge to their young, to their flock, across generations. A crow you wronged once will tell crows who've never met you to watch out. A crow you consistently fed will bring you small gifts in return. They have community memory, just like the communities we serve as health and social justice organizations.  

In this episode, we talk about listening fatigue, and why it's not apathy, it's the community's social intelligence functioning healthfully. We talk about what it looks like when an organization has already burned trust and what the slow road back requires. We make the case that reciprocity is earned through consistent behavior over time, not through better outreach materials or a flashier engagement strategy.

If your organization has ever wondered why the community won't engage anymore, this episode is the mirror.

IN THIS EPISODE

Why communities carry long memories and what that means for organizational reputation. Listening fatigue as rational community self-protection, not a communication problem to solve. How consistent follow-through earns the kind of trust and intelligence no survey can surface. What collective threat response looks like in coalition work. And the case for frameworks that read context rather than running the same playbook everywhere.

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We see the mushroom and think that's the whole organism. But the mushroom is just the visible fruiting body. The real organism is the mycelium, a vast underground network connecting root systems, sharing nutrients, sending chemical signals across the forest floor. Most of what keeps the forest alive is invisible.

In this episode, we talk about the work nobody puts on a slide deck and the gifts of decomposition as a precondition for growth.

And we talk about mycoremediation: fungi that break down toxins in contaminated soil. Because sometimes the ground has been poisoned by broken promises and extractive practices, and our work starts with cleaning the soil before we try to plant anything new.

IN THIS EPISODE

Why the most important organizational work is the work nobody sees, and what happens when you invest only in the visible outputs. Decomposition as a precondition for growth, not a sign of failure. How healthy organizations redistribute narrative capacity the way mycelial networks redistribute nutrients. And what it looks like when community engagement is genuinely symbiotic, not a one-way transaction dressed up as service.

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Cedar doesn't bloom and disappear. She stands, shelters, and heals, and the whole forest depends on it.

In this episode, we talk about what it takes to build narrative practice that doesn't burn out, dry up, or blow over when leadership changes or funding shifts. Cedar grows slowly, roots deeply, and provides shelter year-round. Her fallen needles feed the soil. Her oils protect her without aggression. In temperate rainforests, she's a keystone species: remove cedar, and the whole system shifts.

We make the case for evergreen narrative infrastructure over seasonal storytelling. We talk about why strategic pace is not the same as urgency: fast, efficient, impactful, just not urgent. 

IN THIS EPISODE

Why root work comes before visible growth, and what that means for StoryLab Sessions and trust-building. The argument against treating storytelling as a seasonal activity. How ethical storytelling guidelines and consent practices function like cedar's natural defenses. What it means to be a keystone in your organization, and why that's a vulnerability if it's held by one person. And why slow growth is key to the work of health and justice organizations.

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Beavers are ecosystem engineers. Their dams create wetlands, improve water quality, support biodiversity, and benefit species they'll never meet. That's the argument for narrative infrastructure at its most expansive.

In this episode, we talk about why a single story is not a strategy. Rather, a story bank and healthy narrative infrastructure create conditions for stories to do their work across time, across campaigns, across staff turnover. We make the case against siloing storytelling in the comms department, because beavers don't build as individuals, they build as a colony, and narrative strategy is organizational infrastructure that everyone maintains.

We also talk about planning for winter, about building narrative reserves when things are flowing so you have what you need when they're not. And about repair: the dam breaks, you fix it. 

IN THIS EPISODE

Why a story bank is a dam and not a filing cabinet. The ripple effects of narrative infrastructure. The case for making storytelling everyone's work, not just comms. Why building from existing organizational assets beats importing frameworks from somewhere else. What beavers and disaster response have in common.

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Most organizational partnerships and coalition storytelling efforts fail because they're modeled on extraction, not reciprocity. The Three Sisters give us the antidote.

The Three Sisters is a traditional Indigenous agricultural system developed primarily by the Haudenosaunee, at least 3,000 years old. Corn, beans, and squash planted together in the same mound. Corn grows tall and provides structure. Beans climb the corn and fix nitrogen in the soil that feeds everything. Squash spreads along the ground, protecting the soil and deterring pests. Together they're more space-efficient, drought-resistant, and nutritionally complete than any one crop alone.

In this episode, we talk about what strengths-based collective leadership looks like when each partner contributes what they're built to contribute. We make the case for reciprocity in storytelling: the process of gathering stories should also build trust, surface strategy, and strengthen the community's own narrative capacity. And we talk about why sequence matters, because you can't plant everything at once and expect your garden to grow.

IN THIS EPISODE

Why different contributions beat identical efforts in coalition work. The difference between extractive storytelling and ethical storytelling that returns something to the soil. Why the Story Lab comes before the strategy and the listening comes before the design. How the same framework travels but always adapts to place.

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Circulation without infrastructure is just wandering. In this episode, we meet the orb weaver spider, referred to in many Indigenous traditions as Grandmother Spider, and explore what her web-building teaches us about narrative infrastructure.

The orb weaver doesn't start with the pretty spiral. She starts with structural threads connecting far-off but key anchor points. Then she builds outward, thread by thread. She dismantles and rebuilds daily, because maintenance is not failure, it's the work. And she doesn't chase. She builds a system and then senses what it catches.

We talk about the Nepal story from John Paul Lederach's work: after their civil war in 2006, community groups formed "spider groups" that traveled to each divided community, listening, eating together, and listening some more. They called it a practice of collective empathy. Thread by thread, they built a web of understanding before anyone was ready for the big gathering. This is the episode where we say the thing we're always saying: story is not fluff, it's infrastructure. And Grandmother Spider has 3,000 species to back it up.

IN THIS EPISODE

Why narrative strategy starts with anchor points, not campaigns. How story banks work like webs: you build the infrastructure and then the stories you need for moments you couldn't predict are already there. The case against the one-and-done storytelling project. What the Nepal spider groups teach us about building understanding before convening. And what doula wisdom has to do with sensing over chasing.

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