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It’s December, Subscriber First Name. We made it. If you’re like me, you’re ready to kiss 2025 goodbye ✌🏽 But like all difficult years, they don’t just end. The experiences we had and the things we witnessed stick with us. They lodge into our memories. They even get stored in our bodies. And if we allow them to, difficult years can become critical catalysts for the next chapter in our story. When people ask me about when and how I started Do Good Leadership Collective, I usually tell them that I formalized in 2023. However, 2020 was the catalyst behind the work. And at midnight on December 31, 2020, I was also eager to kiss that brutal year goodbye. Just like 2025, 2020 took a lot of out of me, and a lot from me. It took loved ones, my housing stability, my psychological safety at work, and much of what I thought I knew about leadership. It felt like the world was ending. But five years later, I understand now what I couldn’t see then: “It’s not the end, it’s the making of.” - Olivia Dean This year has shifted a lot for those of us in the nonprofit and social impact sectors. The administration and damning executive orders have forced layoffs for tens of thousands of nonprofit employees. It’s forced nonprofits to close their doors—even as community needs continue to rise. This year demanded endings: endings to the way we’ve always done things. Endings to assumptions about what our work would look like. Endings to systems that already weren’t working. Endings are only one side of the story. These endings create space for the making of: New opportunities to reshape what it means to be in social impact work, both for ourselves and for future generations who want to see a world grounded in justice, care, and fairness. One of DGLC’s own endings this year was letting go of our original strategy for how to support nonprofits with wellbeing. The process of letting go was disorienting and stressful. But in that ending, a new strategy emerged:
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