A Year of Listening, Learning, and Choosing Another Way

Nurturing the Practices to Co-create Healthy Organizations and Inclusive Relationships (CHOIR)

As 2025 comes to a close, we find ourselves returning to a simple but grounding truth: people are hungry for spaces where complexity is welcome, where wisdom is shared across difference, and where we can practice being together while the world feels anything but stable.

Last year, CHOIR Conversations became exactly that kind of space. Month after month, we gathered educators, organizers, nonprofit leaders, artists, healers, policy thinkers, and community builders to ask honest questions about leadership, power, belonging, and what it will take to meet this moment without losing ourselves or each other.

What emerged was not a single answer, but a shared practice.

Leadership for a Fractured Moment

Early conversations centered on the reality many leaders are living with: burnout, political polarization, moral injury, and the pressure to “hold it all together” inside systems that feel increasingly brittle. Rather than offering quick fixes, CHOIR created space to slow down and ask deeper questions. What does leadership look like when certainty is gone? How do we build the emotional and relational capacity to lead through fear, conflict, and change?

One participant captured the tone of the year perfectly: “I don’t need more tools. I need space to think with other people who understand the stakes.”

Again and again, we returned to the idea that leadership today is less about control and more about clarity, care, and collective sensemaking.

Intergenerational Power and the Wisdom of Youth

One of the most resonant themes of 2025 was intergenerational power. Across conversations and blog reflections, we explored what becomes possible when youth leadership is not treated as symbolic, but as essential. Young people are already responding to this moment with creativity, courage, and moral clarity. The work, as many participants noted, is for adults to learn how to listen without defensiveness and to share power without fear.

This theme echoed the practice of “freedom dreaming,” a concept articulated by thinkers like Tourmaline, reminding us that imagination itself is a political act. When youth are invited into real decision-making, communities don’t just feel more hopeful; they become more effective.

Conflict, Repair, and the Courage to Stay

Several conversations this year grappled directly with conflict. Not as something to avoid, but as something to meet with skill and humility. In a time when walking away can feel easier than staying in relationship, CHOIR participants practiced another way: naming harm, committing to repair, and recognizing that conflict handled well can deepen trust rather than destroy it.

One reflection from a session stayed with us: “Repair is not about being perfect. It’s about refusing to disappear from each other.”

Preparing for What Comes After

As the year progressed, conversations turned toward the future. What does it mean to prepare for the “other side” of this moment, even when we can’t yet see it clearly? Participants spoke about grief, rage, exhaustion, and also about the quiet work of laying foundations: building relationships, strengthening networks, and developing leaders who can move with both urgency and care.

Rather than predicting what comes next, CHOIR focused on readiness. Readiness rooted in values. Readiness grounded in community. Readiness is built through practice.

What We Carry Forward

Looking back, 2025 was not defined by a single theme, but by a shared posture. We chose curiosity over certainty. We chose relationship over speed. We chose to keep asking questions together.

These conversations reminded us that another way is not something we wait for. It is something we practice, month by month, conversation by conversation, in how we listen, lead, and show up for one another.

As we step into 2026, we do so with deep gratitude for everyone who lent their voice, their questions, and their presence to CHOIR this year.

After the Fire: Rebuilding Together

As we look toward 2026, our conversations will move intentionally into a new shared focus: After the Fire: Rebuilding Together.

Many of us are arriving at this threshold carrying loss, fatigue, and hard-earned clarity. Some systems have burned down. Others are still smoldering. What 2025 made clear is that rebuilding cannot be rushed, outsourced, or done alone. It must be relational. It must be honest. And it must be collective. And we must be ready.

In the year ahead, CHOIR Conversations will explore what it means to rebuild with dignity and imagination: how we tend what remains, how we strengthen our capacity for repair, and how we design what comes next without recreating the harms we are leaving behind. We will hold space for grief and for vision, for strategy and for care, trusting that both are necessary if we are going to build something that lasts.

If you are longing for spaces that help you think, breathe, and rebuild alongside others who understand the weight of this moment, we invite you to join our Community of Practice. CHOIR Conversations continue every month, and we would be honored to be in community with you as we step into what comes next.

If you weren’t able to join us for these conversations last year, you can participate in a sampling of the videos, discussions, and resources here.