Like many of you, I’m thinking a lot about change these days.
The pace of change. The direction of change. The source and catalysts of change. The price of change.
I was about to type something like, “for the past nine months, we’ve all been experiencing an incredible amount of change.” But that’s not nearly accurate to my reality. I’d say that for the past five (5) years, at least, we’ve been experiencing a drastic amount of change. This moment is just the rapidly accelerating present of the continuum – a particle of light increasing in speed until it reaches a point of singularity and becomes both future and past simultaneously.
That may not be factually accurate, but it feels more accurate.
Like we’re swiftly slipping from a state of being that previously held more permanence, more stability, more linear continuity…and descending, face-first, into amorphousness. A state that demands us to relinquish even the illusion of permanence for something more fluid, more formless, and more unpredictable.
Again, that might not be factually true, but it feels true.
After only two (2) months on the job, I’m being confronted with multiple, unrelated-yet-somehow-still-connected realities that are prompting thought and exploration of significant change at NEW.
Like, significant change.
And not that we haven’t experienced significant change already. If you saw our 2024-25 Community Impact Report, you’ll recall that the opening letter included an outline of a number of changes we went through in the last year. Including a pretty big one that led to me writing the opening letter…
And it’s also not like we don’t expect significant change to come. As corny as it’s become, “change is the only constant,” and all that.
But I just didn’t expect to be entertaining change – magnitudinal change – so soon.
Because let’s face it – no one wants a boss that comes in and, off the rip, messes around with how things are done. Even though I’m one of the more seasoned members of the NEW team, I still planned to move back, observe, get a better sense of the pulse of things, and then make moves once I was more established and we had all settled into this new relationship. As we like to say at NEW, “we move at the speed of trust and capacity.” And that requires some time.
Yet, it seems that the universe has other plans.
And though I’m generally a quick adopter of change – when I buy into it, at least – even I’m starting to feel wary. After all, change can move us in many directions, not all of which lead to the destination or future we’ve envisioned. And while some changes are reversible, or at least repairable, others have more permanent impacts. And I distrust anyone who “knows for certain” what all the impacts of change will be.
So where does that leave us? (read: me)
For now, at least, I’m choosing to go with the current of change, to explore the possibilities that are opening up before us. Yes, this is partially motivated by my organizational and community-based responsibilities – I have an obligation to make sure we’re moving in the direction of net positive impact for NEW, our peer organizations, and the people/communities we serve. Some of what I’m contemplating is directly connected to the delivery of our impact, and can’t, responsibly, be ignored.
But on the real, I’m also going with the flow of change, because as a human being, that’s what I need to do to stay sane, to hold it together right now.
There is so much negative change happening in our communities, our country, and the global stage of the human species right now. The stress of constantly finding ways to resist the degradation of our collective future, the descent into something wholly antithetical to my core values, is simply overwhelming. Add that on top of raising two (2) small children, attending to my health, and the inherent overload that comes with working in the nonprofit sector right now, and you’ve got a recipe for burnout. So wherever I can, I have to find ways to opt-out of friction – there’s enough of that, much of it beyond my control, already.
Of course, this doesn’t mean simply acquiescing to every proposed change that comes my way. It just means embracing the possibility of change, being willing to flow down this off-shoot of the river long enough to decide whether I want to change course. And accepting that now may be the time for certain changes, even if that goes counter to what I’d previously intended.
But again, it’s only been two (2) months, so I reserve the right to change my mind on that as the year develops.
