I’m back in San Francisco from teaching Your Best Public Health Life at Emory last weekend. It is a life-affirming, future-inspiring experience to see folks come in stuck, lacking hope, or overwhelmed and ultimately articulate their why, what they are for. This is not a simple process, nor is it easy to do alone.

Amidst an era-defining shift, we may begin by recognizing what no longer works for us, or find that our values or beliefs are in opposition to the environment we are in. This is the beginning, the first phase of shifting. But we can get stuck here.

So, some of us, get really good at knowing what we’re against. We have a well-articulated argument, our analysis is sharp, we are often grounded in theory, lived experience, or both. The analysis is so refined, it’s become so correct, it’s impenetrable. But it’s not an analysis that leads us to a different future.

What the analysis lacks is a bridge—it’s not a bridge from here to there.

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When analysis keeps us stuck

The problem is when the analysis becomes our familiar, our companion, our reaction to every prompt. We find ourselves stuck in a loop, driving a roundabout without knowing which turnoff is ours. Inertia.

When we’re stuck. In the wake of a betrayal, by another human or by a system. When we’ve had an awakening, when new data comes in, or we have an insight that we didn’t have before.

I’ve experienced this myself, seeking support because I wanted something to change. Almost immediately, I began drafting an essay in my head: bold headings and some all-caps insights (they were genius!), my ready analysis of what was wrong.

I caught myself. Hey girl, the job here is to see beyond what is right in front of you, beyond what is familiar. To believe another response is possible.

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Knowing what we are for

When we are ready for a change, whether that is shifting from burnout to thriving, finding a different job, or setting an ambitious goal—we need a why linked to a vision for the future. We have to imagine and describe what we are for.

If I were to talk to my stuck self in that situation above, where I was armed with my righteous analysis, I’d say:

I’m going to say something that may feel confrontational. I’m saying this because I know you want to make a shift, and I see that you are stuck. Rather than describing what you’re against, I need you to tell me what you’re for. The process can begin with what you dislike, what you hate, what you are against. But it can’t end there. What you are for is organic, is yours, from your bones, what you are alive for.

The truth was, I did not yet know what I was for. Just that I was fed up with treating the symptoms, I was against what is, and I wanted to believe that something else could be. But I nearly thwarted myself with the analysis, a skill that got me to the beginning of a change process but would not bridge me to a future.

What a beautiful experience to be with folks in the Emory course as they did the work, dug deep, got caught in familiar thinking (as we do), and ultimately found their personal whys. Some stayed close to their current area of work, deepening themes or tightening their focus. Others went further afield. Each person shared their why with a smile, and a few of their whys gave me goosebumps as they were so specifically true for that person. It’s a kind of aliveness that can’t be borrowed; it can only be discovered.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

P.S. If you are in a threshold moment, another way to think about finding a way forward. It’s about the way these breakings, betrayals, and ruptures can give us new sight.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is an organizational resilience architect. She partners with organizations to transform vague values into concrete workflows, relational infrastructure, and accountable practices that sustain teams through crisis and change.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis, offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change. Shannon teaches Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact at Emory University.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

Over 50 people registered, including nonprofit executives, managers, board members, consultants, operations staff, funders, and practitioners across public health, healthcare, nonprofits, philanthropy, and community organizations. When they registered, we asked folks hoped to gain and about their most pressing culture challenges. While their missions and organizational contexts differed, their responses shared common themes across organization type and size.

Culture builders are also navigating burnout and exhaustion, distrust of senior leadership, unclear decision-making, silos, disconnection in virtual and hybrid work, leadership transitions, funding uncertainty, external policy threats, and the gap between an organization’s stated values and people’s everyday experience of work.

Whew! This is the work. Our collective sense of uncertainty and the relentless attacks on communities are illuminating what was threadbare, what needed attention in our movements.

Mission tells us why the work matters. But mission alone does not sustain capacity.

Which makes culture an essential component of an organization. Culture is how we do the work.

Culture is not office snacks, a wellness event, or even a well-planned staff retreat. It is also not a values statement. Culture is expressed in the day-to-day of our work: what gets noticed, what gets prioritized, who is trusted, how decisions are made, and who has the authority to act.

Culture exists whether we pay attention to it or not.

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How this shows up in our organizations

One participant shared about an organization with “two completely opposite cultural structures, with polar opposite cultural expectations.” Several shared examples of employee distrust of senior leadership, burnout amid an evolving funding landscape, and teams that do not know each other outside virtual meetings. Another shared how staff disengagement can grow when an organization’s stated values do not match daily leadership behaviors.

A frequent solution is to focus on the symptoms: the burnout, the complaints, the conflict. However, treating the symptoms won’t necessarily solve the problem. The answer is not to focus on individual solutions, to ask people to be more resilient on their own. Rather, we build better scaffolding within the organization so a healthier culture can grow. We change the conditions.

Four practices for culture work

During the workshop, I shared my framework. The Architecture of Resilient Care^TM, four practices to address the conditions underneath the concerns.

1. Systems Listening

What conditions are shaping people’s experience?

Systems Listening is about what patterns, harms, assets, incentives, norms, constraints, and power dynamics are shaping people's experience, rather than just engagement scores, complaints, or recurring tensions.

While the symptoms will be what we first notice, when we listen at a systems level, it helps us to describe the conditions. When well done, an organization can build what I call remarkable alignment where people can see their experience reflected in how the problem is framed, understand the constraints involved, and recognize how possible solutions are being identified.

2. Purpose + Priorities

Make mission-aligned choices about what to prioritize and deprioritize.

Without priorities, we don’t know where to focus. Purpose + Priorities asks organizations to connect their mission and values to decisions about time, resources, workload, and attention.

Every “yes” spends capacity. When tradeoffs aren't discussed, they tend to be absorbed by employees in the form of longer hours, moral distress, and invisible labor. A priority is a commitment to the impact you want to make and the people who make that impact.

3. Micro-Prototyping

Test small, practical changes.

Big initiatives may look sexy, come with a fun tagline and swag but they may not solve nuanced culture challenges. An experimental approach helps us see what will stick, where changes can connect with existing routines or norms, and what needs to be paused or stopped.

Start with one recurring friction or condition. Then ask, “What is the smallest shift we can try?” Small does not mean insignificant. It means it is possible to test, learn from, and revise without holding too tightly to it.

The goal is not to solve everything at once. The task in this phase is to move from discussion to action, learn from what happens, and build momentum without asking already-stretched people to simply do more.

Little and often beats big and not begun.

4. Distributed Authority

Build shared authority so care does not depend on one person or on overfunctioning.

Shared responsibility without shared authority is an invitation to overfunction. Distributed Authority means placing meaningful decision-making as close to the work as possible and being clear about who has input, who recommends, who decides, who implements, and who is accountable for follow-through.

It also means noticing invisible authority: who actually influences decisions, who is routinely asked to carry relational labor, and who is held responsible without the power to change the conditions.

Care cannot depend on the unpaid labor of the people who care most.

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Where do we begin?

The challenges we face are real and formidable. Better culture will not solve a funding cliff, reverse harmful policy, or eliminate conflict.

Choosing to focus on and invest in culture work is choosing to build a different future. Just like the work we do matters for the communities we serve, the cultures we tend to matter for the people doing the work. Learning to listen for patterns, bravely prioritize, experiment with small changes, and support stewardship of the work throughout the organization changes how we get where we are going.

This is culture at work. The culture building we need to stay the course in consequential times.

Mission tells us why the work matters. Culture is how the work gets done.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Shannon Weber (she/her) is an organizational resilience architect and facilitator specializing in people-first operations, culture strategy, and leadership development. Shannon partners with organizations to transform vague values into concrete workflows, relational infrastructure, and accountable practices that sustain teams through crisis and change.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis, offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change. Shannon teaches Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact at Emory University.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

Over the last few weeks, in my workshops and work with leaders, the work of creating boundaries has surfaced with consistency. Conversations keep turning back to capacity and prioritization. How do we protect our ability to care (to show up big with our wild open hearts) over the long haul without burning out, losing ourselves, or becoming unmoored?

It’s clear this is deeply UP for us right now and it makes sense. We are navigating myriad crises and are forced to assess capacity and right size the containers for the work and ourselves in these times.

When I first developed the boundaries as containers framework you likely know my book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis, I wanted a practical, proactive tool to help us rethink boundaries. So often, boundaries are framed as rigid lines in the sand, a reactive “no,” or the limits with think about after a boundary has already been crossed. But for those of us doing relational work, with stewardship, and leading change—for people who care a lot— we need something proactive and adaptable.

I use the everyday metaphor of food containers: we naturally choose a lunch container with a snap-on lid, a thermos for temperature, or a small Mason jar to hold something pretty. It depends on what the container will hold and where it will be held. We have food containers specific for events (rainbow and unicorn plates for birthdays) and we save recyclable containers to send friends home with leftovers. Boundaries work the same way; they can be specific for the what and where of the relationship or the work. A container isn’t built to keep people out—it’s built to hold what’s inside thoughtfully.

(If you want to revisit the original deep dive on this tool from my book, you can read my previous Substack essay: Building Better Boundaries: An Essential Tool for Purpose-Driven and Empathetic Leaders).

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What Happens When We Practice Out Loud

I love so much watching the containers framework come alive in small groups as it did in two recent workshops. I was reminded why this work is so transformative, and why it is important to revisit again and again.

During a session with the Mentoring the Managers program (a national leadership cohort offered through the Center for Learning and Innovation at San Francisco Department of Public Health) one of the participants, Leanne Chouinard, shared a realization that resonated across the whole group.

When discussing containers as boundaries and our work, she laughed and admitted:

“I tend to lead like a 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffet. Available all the time. For everyone. With free refills.”

She captured the trap we have all created for ourselves at one time or another. As Leanne later reflected on LinkedIn: “Boundaries aren’t about caring less. They’re about creating the conditions to care well over the long haul. If I’m constantly leaving the buffet open, eventually there’s nothing left to serve... Boundaries don’t limit our impact. They sustain it.”

In another recent boundaries workshop with TOUCH: The Black Breast Cancer Alliance, as we discussed how we might shift the shape of our containers, one participant said she reminds herself always, “It’s never too late to press pause.”

During that same gathering, Hayley Brown—a long-time friend of this work who frequently gifts Show Up Hard to colleagues—shared a metaphor that also reinforces the importance of practice and returning to the work. She said coming back to a containers workshop, even as someone familiar with the concept, felt like a seasoned dancer returning to a beginner ballet class: it’s an opportunity to re-align with the fundamentals, adjust our posture, and check our form.

When participants workshop together in small groups and describe their containers out loud, things profoundly shift. There is something quiet and powerful about saying to peers: Here is the shape I’ve been using, here is why it’s leaking, and here is the shape I am choosing next.

Returning to the Practice

If you’re feeling the pull to reshape a container in your life, here are a few ways to engage with the practice:

• Listen: I joined the Compassion Revolution podcast, we talked about how my interest in boundaries and creating containers, the way resentment helps notice what is not quite right, and how we sustain ourselves in the work.

• Reflect: Ask yourself about one relationship or area where you feel resentment or tension: What container am I currently operating in? Am I trying to run an all-you-can-eat buffet on a coffee-mug budget? What is one shift in time, topic, or medium that would bring immediate relief?

Our care may be infinite, but our time and energy are finite. Creating containers allows us to stop overpromising and actually show up fully for the commitments we make and the work that matters.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

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Invitations

As we roll into planning season, I have space to welcome two new client partnerships. If your organization is navigating transitions, ready to focus on team culture, or preparing for next year’s strategy, I’d love to talk. If you think that might be you (or someone in your network), reply and let me know.

• Join us for the final session in the BELONG series for Black community health leaders and their allies. Registration is free.

• Join me for a weekend retreat at Emory University. More information and registration here.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is an organizational resilience architect and facilitator specializing in people-first operations, culture strategy, and leadership development. Shannon partners with organizations to transform vague values into concrete workflows, relational infrastructure, and accountable practices that sustain teams through crisis and change.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis, offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change. Shannon teaches Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact at Emory University.

For hope to be functional, it has to be rooted in reality.

True, functional resilience doesn’t ignore friction. Our systemic grief, fear, and daily exhaustion can exist at the exact same time we choose to build a completely different operational future.

In this short behind-the-scenes look at the Hope Factory workshop, watch what happens when teams move from identifying operational barriers directly into structural, practical pathways for taking action.

One participant came to the session believing it was impossible to cultivate hope within her current ecosystem, and left knowing how to build with her peers.

Teams that build hope together do more than survive uncertainty. These hope-full teams achieve their goals.

Let’s look at your team’s architecture, your pathways forward. Click through to watch the full Hope Factory film.

Full Hope Factory Film

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Free Online Workshop for Culture Builders

On September 10, I’m co-hosting an interactive online workshop with San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) CEO Dr. Tyler TerMeer and SFAF Senior Director of Equity and Organizational Culture Mazdak Mazarei:

MORE INFO & REGISTER HERE: Beyond Policy: How to Build the Relational Infrastructure for Organizational Resilience

We’ll share how SFAF treated culture as core operational work—not a side project—and embedded a three-year culture strategy in its 2026–2030 strategic plan. The work contributed to a 9-point increase in employee engagement and a 13-point increase in staff perception of transparent leadership communication.

This is for CEOs, executive directors, chiefs of staff, HR/People & Culture leaders, and program or division directors who want to move beyond surveys, wellness activities, and one-off events toward structural change.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is an organizational resilience architect and facilitator specializing in people-first operations, culture strategy, and leadership development. Shannon partners with organizations to transform vague values into concrete workflows, relational infrastructure, and accountable practices that sustain teams through crisis and change.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis, offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change. Shannon teaches Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact at Emory University.

Hello All the Care Community -

We know another world is possible. But how do we get there?

Real organizational alignment is co-written into existence by regular people performing mundane, everyday actions.

To do that, teams must step outside their usual corporate constraints.

In this second look at The Library of All Possible Futures, we look at the tactile, sensory aspect of the workshop—utilizing actual snapshots from a shared future to serve as real-time strategy inspiration.

If you want to create a shared future, are planning an upcoming executive alignment or leadership session, click below to see how this immersive experience works, or reply to this email to discuss your team’s timeline.

Watch the full video.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Free Online Workshop for Culture Builders

On September 10, I’m co-hosting an interactive online workshop with San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) CEO Dr. Tyler TerMeer and SFAF Senior Director of Equity and Organizational Culture Mazdak Mazarei:

MORE INFO & REGISTER HERE: Beyond Policy: How to Build the Relational Infrastructure for Organizational Resilience

We’ll share how SFAF treated culture as core operational work—not a side project—and embedded a three-year culture strategy in its 2026–2030 strategic plan. The work contributed to a 9-point increase in employee engagement and a 13-point increase in staff perception of transparent leadership communication.

This is for CEOs, executive directors, chiefs of staff, HR/People & Culture leaders, and program or division directors who want to move beyond surveys, wellness activities, and one-off events toward structural change.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is an organizational resilience architect and facilitator specializing in people-first operations, culture strategy, and leadership development. Shannon partners with organizations to transform vague values into concrete workflows, relational infrastructure, and accountable practices that sustain teams through crisis and change.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis, offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change. Shannon teaches Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact at Emory University.

Hello All The Care community -

I am the midst of finishing a big project and designing a new retreat while also deep in San Francisco summer delights, hosting “Camp Shananigans”—the summertime ritual where my nieces spend time with me. Don’t mind me while we do all the fun, touristy, teenage things we can pack into a day.

I’ve also been at work behind the scenes on a project that will launch this next week. Watch your inboxes for the big reveal! I’m so excited to share what I have been working on with you!

In the meantime, whether you are in a summer season or in the Southern Hemisphere in the midst of a winter hibernation vibe, today’s newsletter is a Link Love - a list of recordings and readings that have recently resonated with me, in pursuit of deepening our collective care practices.

• For navigating transitions with deep intention and care: The Tending to Endings First Edition Deck and Facilitation Guidelines is a beautiful, newly released digital card deck and companion guide created by Ally, Will, and Heather. It is built to help us hold the weight of endings, both in our personal reflections and when holding space for groups.

Takeaway: We often avoid endings or think of them as failures to avoid. Rather ends are transitions, thresholds worth acknowledging and creating practices to let the learnings compost or go to seed.

• For holding the grief of our times without crumbling: The episode The Wild Edges of Sorrow with Francis Weller on the Becoming the People podcast with Prentis Hemphill offers an tender and moving conversation on the realities of grief in our modern times along with discussions about collective practices, the role of ritual in healing.

Takeaway: Grief is not an individual problem to solve in isolation; the more we can create communal ceremonies and shared grief practices the more we can tend to what no longer is in ways that connect us to broader meaning.

• For thinking about accountability and holding the reality of what is: The book Be Better Broken: In Service to Liberation by Yaffa is a collection of essays grounded in trauma-informed care and Black feminist liberation that asks us to look at accountability in our work, notwithstanding traumas that have or are occurring.

Takeaway: Nuanced and practical conversations around how to be accountable and what accountability can look like, even in the process of healing, is essential for our practical skill-building to avoid canceling and removing others.

• For learning how ordinary people and daily routines can transform into mutual protection: The Mother Jones deep-dive article, The Architecture of Resistance: America’s Year of Taking On ICE, features powerful first-person accounts from run club dispatchers, neighborhood groups, and local clergy across the US who have taken practical and daily approaches to documenting and defending neighbors against ICE.

Takeaway: What looks like spontaneous, rapid-response community defense is actually built on years of relationships and organizing, along with a shared belief that protecting each other is an act of love.

• For exploring the personal politics of radical interdependence: Enough: The Anthology (enoughenough.org) is an online anthology and archive co-created by Tyrone Boucher and Dean Spade that brings together incredible voices exploring transformative justice, class accountability, and disability justice.

Takeaway: Building a different future requires we each shift our habits and build our skills with local, small experiments in collective care and radical interdependence.

• For maintaining true, practical hope amidst massive global shifts: The book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit is a series of essays that survey social and cultural change over the last several decades. (If you prefer audio, you can also listen to her expand on the book toppics The Atmos podcast or NYT The Interview. For The Wild podcast).

Takeaway: Systemic change is not only possible, it is happening. And it’s ultimate shape depends entirely on our willingness to show up and participate together.

A theme for these links is about that which is not visible, but is also that which is carrying us through.

Whether you are in summer mode or winter hybernation, let me know if these resonate or if you have other learnings that you are carrying with you in these times.

See you in your inbox next week for the big reveal!

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Join me online!

Join us this week in this free session for Black community health leaders and their allies as we focus on purpose.

Details and registration here.

Join me at Emory!

Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact is an in-person 1.5-day retreat at Emory designed for public health professionals navigating funding shifts, changing priorities, and organizational uncertainty who want space to reconnect with their purpose and create a 90-day action plan.

From the Community

As independent practitioners, consultants, and leaders, we know that building a practice is a skill that requires intentional nurturing. My brilliant colleague, Bergen Cooper, and the team at The Torchlight Collective are expanding their wonderful learning offerings this summer with a special two-part workshop series.

Whether you are just stepping into independent work or looking to bring deeper intention to your established systems, these practical sessions are designed to help you flourish:

• Part 1: How to Be a Consultant: Building a Practice that Lasts Thursday, July 30 | 10:00–11:30 a.m. ET If you are defining your foundational frameworks, establishing sustainable business systems, or learning how to steady your practice financially, Register for Part 1 here.

• Part 2: How to Deliver Great Client Work: The Five Practices of Great Consultants Thursday, August 6 | 10:00–11:30 a.m. ET If you want to focus on the human side of the craft—leading projects with confidence, building deep trust, navigating complex transitions, and creating experiences that bring clients back—Register for Part 2 here.

Note: If you plan to attend both to support your practice, you can use the code TORCHLIGHT at checkout to save $29.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is a coach and facilitator who helps purpose-driven people and teams flourish amid uncertainty while avoiding burnout. She applies systems thinking and compassionate approaches to complex challenges.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. Shannon’s “Radical Resilience: Cultivating Hope“ 100-day program serves as an antidote to cynicism and despair. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change.

Thank you to the many folks who’ve reach out or respond when I publish a newsletter to tell me what resonates. I’ve heard from many that you find these missives grounding, provocative in a caring way, or resonant. Nothing means more to me as a creative, as a writer, and as someone who cares so deeply.

I catch my breath and find myself almost blushing when I hear from certain readers. Who knew my beloved mentor from my twenties—working in the intimate partner violence space in New Orleans, Louisiana, from whom I learned so much about feminist theory, advocacy, and solidarity—would be reading my newsletters and responding? (Hi Pat!) I love hearing it, too, when I meet with clients and collaborators and they reference a post. All of which is to say: thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of this group of people who care so much, and thank you for letting me know that these words matter.

I don’t consider myself a trend follower, though it’s not hard to track what is trending these days with a quick scroll—Doomer or otherwise—on the internet. Recently, I’ve been struck by the hyper-trend to optimize. It isn’t actually new; we’ve long been obsessed with scale [Read: What if working at scale does not mean bigger? Lessons on scale from Bad Bunny and a small nonprofit.] and perfecting ourselves. But lately, there is an absurdity to how it is named. There is looksmaxxing, proteinmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, fibermaxxing, girlbossmaxxing.

Well, that got me thinking. I wonder what would need to be true so that we could collectively be caremaxxing?

What would it look like to caremax—not in service of just ourselves, but to imagine the relational architecture needed to sustain us? I think caremaxxing is an antidote to the silos and divides of these times. It is a soothing reset to imagine what would need to be true for us to care so much in the face of fear.

The news cycles train us to scan for threats (increasingly pointing at each other), feeding on our evolutionary instincts in favor of clicks. And no doubt there are real threats—from gun violence to depleting public infrastructure, and the all-out attack on trans people and immigrants. Fear as a response is real, and yet, so is care, so is tenderness.

Increasingly, I am convinced that care and tenderness are among the most serious, most rigorous responses we can have to these times. Not as a soft-skill add-on or something we do after the fact, but as a core practice of survival, resistance, and world-building.

I don’t want to caremax to optimize because I want another metric or to do list. [Read: Is it Well-being or Are You Well-Doing? Even with the best of intentions, I bullied myself into a draining routine.] But I do ask myself and pose to you: what would it look like to center care—to build care—in an age of fear and growing authoritarianism? What does care look like in a time of control?

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Care is not innocent. It is not naive. Care can be used to justify control. But we also know that neighboring—the practice of caring for our neighbors as an act of solidarity and mutual aid—has been a formidable response to terror throughout history. In other words, care is already doing the work. Care is doing the heavy work of holding us together. The real question is: will we name it for what it is, resource it, and figure out how to protect it? We must protect both the care we experience between each other as interdependence, and the care that is part of the infrastructure we need to thrive.

As someone who wants to be in my caremaxxing era, I am choosing collective care as part of how I show up. I am committing to building the inner and outer resources that make this kind of care possible. I will choose my tenderness as a political force, not a hobby, and ask again and again: what would it take to make care durable?

This is not about perfect routines or performative self-care. I am not looking to craft another version of reality for us to perform. Instead, I am asking to explore what kinds of care we need now, and how we can make them shared and lasting. One of the quiet violences of our time is the expectation that we will care endlessly while being under-resourced and harmed. But the solution is not to stop caring. The solution is to figure out how to resource ourselves to care in the ways that matter.

The problems of our time will not be solved with caring alone. But I refuse to let fear and scarcity be the defining characteristics of the future we are creating. I am seeking ways to expand my heart and my capacity for caring that are sustainable for the long haul—so that as we build that future, it is one that is full of care.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

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JOIN US! Lead From Here, Not From Burnout

I am delighted to be partnering with TOUCH for their upcoming series: Lead From Here, Not Burnout: A Leadership Series for Black Community Health Leaders.

If you are a community-based leader, caregiver, volunteer, or staff member navigating the responsibilities of leadership and community care, this space was built for you. This free, three-part online series is designed to offer practical tools for clarifying purpose, creating sustainable boundaries, and investing in resilience.

If you are leading with care while carrying a heavy load right now, please take this as your invitation to step out of the swirl and join us.

👉 Learn more and register here.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is a coach and facilitator who helps purpose-driven people and teams flourish amid uncertainty while avoiding burnout. She applies systems thinking and compassionate approaches to complex challenges.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. Shannon’s “Radical Resilience: Cultivating Hope“ 100-day program serves as an antidote to cynicism and despair. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change.

I love making a to-do list almost as much as I love crossing things off of it.

I have to-do lists in digital and analog form—in Trello, Notes, Google Keep, and Tasks —along with the lists I write on stray scraps of paper. There might be a personal list on a notepad in my kitchen and a work list on my desk. I love organizing them, crossing off the completed items, and tearing up and recycling the handwritten sheets when they are done.

To-do lists have a real purpose. Writing and organizing them helps us remember tasks, see where items can be bundled, and figure out what to delete or delegate. There is absolutely a function for lists of things helping to inform a vision or an approach.

The trick is, busyness can create the illusion of a vision, and the to-do list can easily become a replacement for a strategy. To-do lists and being busy do not—never have, never will—equal impact.

The Audacity of Vision

To create impact, we need a strategy. A strategy is informed by the vision of where we are going. The strategy is how we will get to that horizon—that future that is possible but not yet here. The tactics are the to-do list. Impact is created from having a vision with an accompanying strategy, and then being about the sometimes tedious, could-be-boring work of implementing that strategy in service of that vision.

We would be mistaken to start with tactics, or the to-do list, and try to build a strategy from there. It won’t be informed by the audacious possibility of a vision. To create real impact, to innovate, to be a change-maker, to seek justice, to imagine another way requires a vision to anchor ourselves—and our work—to.

A challenge with to-do lists is that they only get shorter when we complete something and check it off. The reality of our to-do lists (both personal and within organizations) is that they mostly get longer. They can stagnate. They can definitely contribute to overwhelm.

What a strategy gives us that a to-do list cannot is permission to say no, and the ability to define focus.

When Triage Becomes the Status Quo

Without a strategy and clear prioritization, we inevitably find ourselves caught in the swirl of overwhelm, stuckness, or worse—burnout.

When we don’t have a strategy (or have a strategy but don’t effectively implement it across an organization or effort), then everything feels urgent. Every email, every text. We default to triage mode. Triage becomes our status quo. This is not a sustainable approach. Nor will it lead to the most impact. It also leaves us already depleted and distracted when a real crisis arrives.

Let’s leave triage for when it is intended—an emergency—and build our routine day-to-day anchored to a vision, focusing on the strategy we have agreed upon to get there.

Triage will always have its time, like when we face an unexpected health crisis, a climate disaster, or sudden sociopolitical upheaval. (We experienced this deeply throughout 2025 with multiple federal actions that disrupted long-standing strategies).

As a public service reminder: as a leader, one thing we must do is actively plan for crisis to happen. We don’t put off planning for them; we build the approach so that we have the capacity to weather them.

Read more: Preparation is Power: Navigating Crisis Close to Home — Understanding the time-limited nature of a crisis as imperative to leading through challenging times. Tending to ourselves as we mind the gaps.

The Physical and Institutional Cost of Overwhelm

In my course at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory, Your Best Public Health Life: Well-Being and Impact, we teach a mindset shift where folks map out their “domains of influence” and rank the importance of those relationships. It helps us make sense of our priorities, and see who is missing from the page.

I realize I am not on my own to-do list when I ignore my own basic needs—when I ignore that I need a bio break and choose instead to stay trapped in back-to-back Zoom calls or tethered to responding to text messages. Treating myself as something to maximize or push harder makes me distant from my own ability to be adaptable.

Just as individuals push off bio breaks or neglect our own preventive health, organizations push off institutional care. Most care-focused organizations will talk about their people being their biggest asset. Yet, it’s easy to push off skill-building, delay professional development, and avoid the necessary, messy work of relationship repair, rationalizing: We will do that later, when things calm down, when we are better resourced.

Scrolling social media is not part of my business strategy, yet my screen time sometimes tells a different story of my priorities. Organizations can do the same thing. The organizational version of this priority misalignment is spending a two-hour leadership meeting entirely in reactive mode, rather than carving out the necessary time required for strategy and alignment. Or, yikes: making the same decision over and over again because there is no strategy and role delineation to anchor it.

The Tool: Creative Alternate Ranking

When I work with leaders and organizations experiencing paralysis from the to-do list and a lack of prioritization, I use a process called alternate ranking.

We take their strategy and rank it chronologically and weight-wise from 1 to whatever. This creative facilitation process honors the reality that we are only able to do one thing at a time, and clear priorities help us know what to do next.

This does not mean we don’t value priority #3. It means that when push comes to shove, we fiercely protect and focus on #1 and #2 until they are done.

And let’s be honest: we are currently living and working in a time of push comes to shove.

To be about the business of building a better future—and doing so with great care about how we get there—means that we are devoted to an ongoing, iterative craft. It’s much less like the quick satisfaction of crossing something off our to-do list, and much more about the deep experience of caring so much about the vision that you stay devoted to the strategy.

Even if it means, for today, the to-do list will be ignored.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

P.S. If you or your organization could use a thought partner in crafting, ranking, or implementing a strategy for a better future, let’s book a call to see how I can support you.

An Invitation: Lead From Here, Not From Burnout

Speaking of moving past permanent triage and putting yourself back on the list...

I am delighted to be partnering with TOUCH for their upcoming series: Lead From Here, Not Burnout: A Leadership Series for Black Community Health Leaders.

If you are a community-based leader, caregiver, volunteer, or staff member navigating the responsibilities of leadership and community care, this space was built for you. This free, three-part online series is designed to offer practical tools for clarifying purpose, creating sustainable boundaries, and investing in resilience.

If you are leading with care while carrying a heavy load right now, please take this as your invitation to step out of the swirl and join us.

👉 Learn more and register here.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

Shannon Weber (she/her) is a coach and facilitator who helps purpose-driven people and teams flourish amid uncertainty while avoiding burnout. She applies systems thinking and compassionate approaches to complex challenges.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. Shannon’s “Radical Resilience: Cultivating Hope“ 100-day program serves as an antidote to cynicism and despair. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change.

Other years, the word is more of a vibe than a discipline. An example is the year “vista” hung onto me until it became my word. I spent those twelve months not knowing exactly what I was exploring, but always finding a new relationship to horizons and what I could see, both literally and figuratively.

As the calendar turned to 2026, I chose two words and joined them with a plus sign to make my phrase for the year: Craft + Pocket

As in, I’m devoting myself to my craft. As in, I am seeking pockets of people or places where I experience profound belonging. Both words can lead me to a near-existential point of overwhelm if I attempt to clearly define them.

Take craft. To define my craft would be to know exactly who I am and what I am doing. Or to answer: Who am I to claim a particular craft or lineage of craft? It easily slips into an identity crisis of who I am and what I do. What is the craft of a social worker, writer, artist, facilitator, instructor, coach? These are all just names for the things I do to connect with you and build our human infrastructure in the midst of this chaos that is life.

Avoiding a definition and finding myself in devotion instead, I’ve been delighted with the outcomes of honing my craft so far this year. This has essentially meant giving myself permission to be EXTRA—to go all in, to not hold back, to care all I can. I feel so alive in the process, and this aliveness has been reciprocated.

An example: The People’s Manager™ is the training series I created, building on the concepts in my book about how to show up with empathy and avoid burnout. This training series helps leaders develop the practical skills and mindsets needed to be a manager who is not about power over people and wants to be in the business of creating impact together.

I wrote about the Gallup Poll data last year: it showed decreasing staff engagement, with managers serving as the lynchpins of organizations. This means the best thing we can do to increase employee engagement (which reduces turnover and decreases interpersonal challenges) is to ensure our middle managers are trained and supported. In 2026, the data was even worse. My love for middle managers has never been greater.

So when I had the chance to facilitate The People’s Manager™ over a series of months—in person, for a group of frontline staff turned managers—I approached each session as a challenge to hone my craft. This meant taking risks. I leaned into co-creating each session with the participants so the approach would match their harm reduction values. For the grand finale, I presented printed workbooks designed just for this team (this crew appreciates the analog just like I do!) Imagine the shared delight.

Last week, I facilitated a team retreat for a city emergency response department. Their request was simple: creativity and connection. Challenging myself to hone my craft, I wondered what was possible within the allotted time. I stretched myself to prototype and develop an agenda that allowed each person to use a print block to immortalize a symbol of the city they are devoted to. The prototyping took several sessions over a few weeks until I knew I had streamlined and simplified the process, solving potential challenges so that every single person could leave with at least one print. Oh my gosh, the delight in their eyes as they peeled back those prints! I was beyond moved by the gallery of works that emerged.

For another team that had planned an ambitious, two-day retreat requiring emotional labor, deep discussions, and coming to consensus—I brought flowers. During the room setup, I placed small vases at each participant’s settings.

And for my two-day course at Emory, we decided to forgo sticky name tags, which never last. I didn’t want corporate-looking printed tags on lanyards either, so I used liquid watercolor and sea salt to design custom beauties. I think the participants will be so pleased when they arrive and find their names.

If you asked me today, I still couldn’t give you a definition of my craft. But I know that being extra, being me, and keeping things human, analog, and sometimes weird is my craft. I’m wrapping up a big client project this month, and I will be turning my full “Hone Your Craft” attention to hope next. Stay tuned. Hope building is on the horizon.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Shannon Weber (she/her) is a coach and facilitator who helps purpose-driven people and teams flourish amid uncertainty while avoiding burnout. She applies systems thinking and compassionate approaches to complex challenges.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. Shannon’s “Radical Resilience: Cultivating Hope“ 100-day program serves as an antidote to cynicism and despair. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change.

P.S.

I so enjoyed Funny AF with Kevin Hart on Netflix (aside from the episode on roasting, a comedy practice I do not understand) for a peek into how comedians hone their craft. What immense creativity and effort it takes to find the openings, move the crowd, and stay adaptable in the moment.

I also loved listening to David Sedaris’ interview on NPR about his new book and his process for refining his writing by reading it live to audiences. Don’t miss the end, where he talks so earnestly about just wanting to get better. Inspired!

P.S.S.

All this being extra IRL means I missed writing you. Though I’m a Gemini with a lot of ideas I am still human with just one attention span, and ever juggling the more ideas than time conundrum. I’ve missed writing you and hope to be back on the regular over this summer.

Other Bits I Keep Thinking About [Loads of Links I Love]

• What if structure impacts outome as much (or more) than purpose?? Jeanne Bell’s piece on org design for justice-committed nonprofits: the idea that how we structure teams is as important as what we do, and that intentional design is how mission actually moves through an organization. For a mini masterclass in organizational design, listen to Jeanne Bell on Nonprofit Mission Impact podcast

• What happens when we tend to the invisible skills that hold teams together? Safe Danger by Ben Swire: a framework for thinking about team building, retreats, and offsites as the place where we deliberately build the connections and trust that make everything else possible.

• Is community the strategy, or is community what makes strategy actually work? From Choose Democracy and published in Waging Nonviolence: a reminder that tactics without community don’t hold, and that building the relational foundation is the actual work.

• What does it mean to stress-test your organizing, and who needs to be in the room when you do? Also from Choose Democracy and published in Waging Nonviolence: labor and intersectional thinking have to be in the room when we’re building toward freedom, not added on later.

• What does freedom actually look like when everything feels gutted? Ash-lee from the Working Families Party, reframing the vacuum after the voting rights act gutting as an opening: “I love you, I want you to be free.”

• What does wellbeing actually look like for people working in public health right now? Kelly Jordan’s article in Rollins Magazine on the upheaval in the public health job market includes a sidebar on workplace wellbeing featuring my course, Your Best Public Health Life, as a resource for people trying to do meaningful work without burning out.

• What does the data confirm that we already know in our bodies? Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace: manager engagement is cratering, but organizations that invest intentionally in their managers hit 79% engagement vs. 22% globally. That gap is real and also solvable.

• What if being in the feels and music can inspire us? Or change our minds? New-to-me artist, Carstie Blanston, singing “Hello comrade.” Making art from pain, ever onward.

Joining any zoom meeting or walking into a facilitation, it seems there is no one who has not been directly impacted by the myriad of cascading actions taken by the current administration. So much so that to also do the work of defending, repairing, building means we are also deeply mindful of the current condition of us, the collective us.

I’ve often thought about this on an individual level, or more specifically a personal level. Which means I’ve long ago realized my ability to have my heart broken, my willingness to carry on or to keep going in companionship with heartbreak is part of what it means to be unapologetically empathetic and to show up with all the care in the world.

In my TEDx talk I talked about the broken heart as an net benefit “A broken heart has much more surface area for radiating and receiving love.“

This approach is counter to the popular narrative that one might die from a brokenheart popularized through many songs, The Wallflowers “she died easy of a brokenheart disease” my favorite. The heartbreak as romanticized, if not something to avoid or get over.

I’ve been so taken with something I heard last week on the podcast Love in a Fucked Up World, Dean Spade’s conversation with Eli Clare. Eli suggested we consider how “to live with a broken heart is a long haul condition of these times.”

Eli Clare’s framing adds another approach to consider. I’ve been considering the broken heart as an event or phase — something that happens, cracks you open, and then (if you’re lucky, if you’re paying attention) enlarges your capacity to love. What Eli is naming is different. It’s not a one-time event, it’s the condition, it’s the weather if you will. It’s what we’re living inside, together, right now.

If broken-heartedness is a long-haul condition (and what other way is there to respond to these times other than having your heart broken over and over again), then the question becomes how do we tend to ourselves and each other. How do we cultivate relating with broken hearts or with a broken-heartedness? From this place, broken open and surface-area-rich, we can build the world we’re imagining.

As leaders, the ones who show up with all the care in the world, the question isn’t how to protect our hearts or move past heartbreak. It becomes a question of resourcing ourselves and our teams to do this work from within the condition of broken heartedness, rather than defended exhaustion.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Shannon Weber (she/her) is a coach and facilitator who helps purpose-driven people and teams flourish amid uncertainty while avoiding burnout. She applies systems thinking and compassionate approaches to complex challenges.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. Shannon’s “Radical Resilience: Cultivating Hope“ 100-day program serves as an antidote to cynicism and despair. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change.

Join me IRL! Your Best Public Health Life: Well-being and Impact

Deadline to apply: April 30 (Jun session), August 15 (Aug & Oct sessions). Space is limited to 25 participants per weekend.

Learn more → https://sph.emory.edu/degrees-programs/professional-development/rollins-health-education-institute/your-best-public-health-life-introductory

Ready to join or have questions? Click here and we’ll follow up with next steps.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

There is a gaze of overwhelm I am quite familiar with, you are probably, too. It’s the present yet not, somewhat catatonic, wide-eyed, wishing I were somewhere else look that can come from digesting the news, or processing yet another true horror story.

There is a gaze of overwhelm in management teams and leaders’ circles, too. Born of competing priorities and no clear sign of what to choose, we default to what we have practiced.

Where we fix our eyes is one of the most consequential decisions we make as leaders and as individuals right now. There is an incredible opportunity to be an active participant in choosing where to fix our gaze, rather than being unconsciously guided or reverting to what is known and therefore comfortable.

Which I often translate to mean it must be the right work if we are doing it. Why else would I be doing it? Except for when I have unconsciously followed or allowed my gaze to revert to a known horizon. Then is it the right work?

The amount of time we have is set, not negotiable, all the efficiency hacks be damned. It’s a matter of discernment, of thoughtfully selecting that focus. The right work.

A knowing, a clarity. Followed by a choice. Made possible by devotion.

Rebecca Solnit, in conversation with the New York Times, reminds us that despair and amnesia go hand in hand, as do hope and memory.

Meaning, we don’t have to rely on our own sense of what was to define what could be. We can source the memories of others and the memory of our past selves to guide us away from despair and towards hope, as a method for finding a new horizon. Rebecca has previously talked about this in her book No Straight Road Takes You There as taking a long view as in becoming long-sighted, rather than short-sighted.

We can trip over our own short-sightedness (I do this daily), and not even notice it is our own misstep, our misplaced gaze on the not right horizon.

Hildy Gottlieb discussed this trend of short-sightedness as it relates to organizational planning in her article for Community-Centric Fundraising. She writes about how, every time there’s a crisis, experts rush to tell nonprofits to shrink their planning horizons. Focus on survival. Stay flexible. Keep it short. And every time, she argues, we come out of the crisis no stronger than before. Meaning we are still vulnerable, still reactive, still playing defense. Her reframe: this is precisely the moment to reach for the most ambitious horizon, not the nearest one.

In order to jointly set sights on that new horizon, to come together in service of the right work we need trust, which might need to be built and always needs to be tended to. Trust is one soft asset we never take for granted. Practical approaches for steadying teams in anxious times are featured in this Harvard Business Review roundup on building trust.

Where is your gaze these days? And your organization’s gaze? What will it take for our horizon, the focus of our map-making and planning, to be one of collective care and liberation?

Not all people nor all organizations need the same horizon. We’ll shape and reshape these views as we learn along our journeys as the maps are made and paths are forged.

I’m inspired by learning from those who’ve blazed trails towards ambitious horizons before. And I find myself so alive in the conversations with collaborators and comrades through consulting and in the street around how do we not just get through but what are we building even as we defend and take good care?

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What does this collapse teach us is necessary for a new world?

Where is the pocket of people with whom you are ambitious in your sight, not in spite of the difficulty but while inside it?

That is the both/and I am living inside. Caring tenderly for what’s right in front of us. And keeping our gaze on something further out, something still taking shape.

May we find those pockets of people. May we imagine and detail the horizon we’re actually trying to reach. May we cultivate our long-sightedness as a tool for world-building.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Shannon Weber (she/her) is a coach and facilitator who helps purpose-driven people and teams flourish amid uncertainty while avoiding burnout. She applies systems thinking and compassionate approaches to complex challenges.

Her book, Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis offers practical frameworks for leaders navigating uncertainty and overwhelm. Shannon’s “Radical Resilience: Cultivating Hope“ 100-day program serves as an antidote to cynicism and despair. All The Care In The World is her bi-weekly love note in your inbox with actionable strategies for developing fortitude, building resilient teams, and creating change

Subscribe now

Rethinking Burnout, Imposter Syndrome, and Leadership with Shannon Weber

• A powerful reframe on burnout and why it may not be a personal failure

• The connection between imposter syndrome and presence

• Why self-care isn’t enough and what real resilience investments look like

• How small, intentional shifts can create meaningful change in leadership and culture

• The importance of modeling self-love for the next generation

Your Best Public Health Life: Well-being and Impact will be offered three times in 2026!

Dates: Jun 6-7, Aug 23-24, Oct 10-11

Location: Emory

Cost: Covered by the Emory Courtesy Scholarship for eligible faculty and staff.

Deadline to apply: April 30 (Jun session), August 15 (Aug & Oct sessions). Space is limited to 25 participants per weekend.

Learn more → https://sph.emory.edu/degrees-programs/professional-development/rollins-health-education-institute/your-best-public-health-life-introductory

Ready to join or have questions? Click here and we’ll follow up with next steps.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

I was in the audience at City Arts and Lectures last fall when Arundhati Roy promoted her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. The room full of women of diverse ages and in various groupings - mother-daughter pairs, couples, friend groups. I sat down with my former co-worker, delighted with our view of the stage when Angela Davis seemed to appear right next to us, as she emerged from the backstage door next to our row. My friend and I were awed at what conversations might have occurred backstage and who the other women were emerging from the backstage door.

I did not know much or enough about Roy having only read her book The God of Small Things. I bought tickets based on my obsession with her most repeated line, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” I went hoping, if not expecting, to be inspired about this possible other world.

The gifts from that evening and from reading her memoir, referred to by The New York Times as “unsparing“ have stayed with me so deeply and been relevant in unexpected ways. I’m writing to share with you as I’m interested in your experience with narratives in these times.

Roy opened the evening by reading a chapter from her memoir, we are introduced to her mother and her brother and Roy as child. We start to understand Roy’s mother’s lifelong pursuit of gender equity. And there is a moment when Roy is reading, where the audience laughed. I laughed. You don’t hear it well in the recording of the event but the laughing was near universal.

Audiences are strange creatures—both fully alive and somehow unknowable, shaped by who is gathered and why. With aliveness comes awkward moments when we laugh at a truth said aloud, or ourselves, or when a performer has choreographed a moment when we will laugh. Laughter can produce vulnerability and lead to intimacy. It’s a helpful tool for a collective experience.

But we had laughed at the expense of someone, and that had not been her point.

Without pausing, mid-sentence she says to us, “No, really it’s not funny to say that to a child.” That was my first signal of the singular clarity of her work and purpose, and the power of her not needing the audience to be “with” her.

Later, in conversation with Deepa Fernandes, Roy explains her memoir intention: she wanted to write her memoir so that readers could not make up their minds about the main character—her mother. Initially, I found that odd. Why write if not to construct a hero’s narrative, or at least a clear moral arc? And as I learned more of her complicated and troubled childhood, it’s clear Roy could have written the memoir another way.

“She was my shelter and my storm,” Roy writes about her mother.

Roy presents the people in her life, including herself, as neither good nor bad. She presents all the flaws and triumphs that are the experience of being human without leading the reader to a neat narrative or come to a comfortable closure.

In this refusal, she did not let our laughter connect us in ways that would be a shortcut, or to reduce her writing to something easy to digest. Which also connects to her refusal to make a hero or villain out of any of the people in the book.

This has stayed with me for months, after listening to the recording multiple times and devouring her book. If we spoke last fall, I’m sure I evangelized the book to you—and it seems I’m about to do it again.

I noticed how often I’m drawn toward simplifying stories, wrapping them up into good or bad, victim or villain, helper or helped.

I’m not alone in this seeming shortcut. The hero’s journey is an archetype we are explicitly taught in storytelling and implicitly learn in the form of fiction and movies and often the way history is told.

Roy never asks the reader or the audience to take on the same task. She even writes that this form of narrative may be a betrayal of her younger self. But I was floored by the expectation she set for herself. Why, when your mother is dead, would you task yourself with such a role? That commitment struck me so deeply that I’ve tried to practice it in my own life over the past half-year.

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Humanizing the complexity is the work.

In fact, this approach requires an epic amount of compassion to not reduce someone to the flatness of a hero or villain or to pedastal some one, trapping them on that small square footage. Making someone this dimensional and human is a devotion, a peeling back of layers, a trying on of a situation from multiple vantage points. It’s a contextualization that requires patience.

What happens when I humanize each person—myself included—with intricate detail?

We are living in times that demand we break apart what no longer serves us and imagine new arrangements. The silos and divides we see in the world—between disciplines, across movements, within organizations—often mirror the silos and divides within ourselves. We hold people as heroes or villains. We hold ourselves as either enough or not. What if embracing the complexity might illuminate a new way?

Finding pathways for world-building.

But shapeshifting—the kind Roy models, the kind I’m learning to practice—requires that we first shapeshift internally. When I stop needing to make people into heroes (or villains), I can see them clearly. When I stop trying to make myself into a simple story, I have more capacity to adapt, to move, to respond to what’s actually in front of me.

In what ways does your leadership shapeshift if you refuse heroes and pedestals? What happens when you bring that unflinching witness to the details of what is?

Perhaps this is one way new worlds can get built.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📣 Share this post with someone who cares so much.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Workshops. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

ICYMI: Hand-to-Hand Connection — Why in-person is a lifeline to finding ourselves in the midst of so much change.

I bumped into a sign this week that I hung up a few years ago without permission. It was hanging on a chainlink fence on a street I was walking for the first time in a volunteer role—observing for ICE activity in our neighborhoods. The sign now has a graffiti message in return but still carries the YOU ARE ENOUGH message for those waiting at the nearby bus stop.

Last fall I was trained to be a street monitor, walking neighborhoods at higher risk of targeted ICE activity for two-hour shifts. During the training we learned about our rights as an observer and our neighbor’s rights. We wear whistles and are trained in the SALUTE method for reporting ICE activity to the local Rapid Response number. While targeted ICE activity in San Francisco has been minimal, the increased ICE presence in other large cities has us preparing here.

Walking up to the school for my first shift, I felt that sign meet me like an old friend.

I had the feeling of being in the right place. That feeling rushing over me a second time as I met the anonymous person from Signal who would orient me to this schools protocols— turns out to be an incredible woman I worked with years ago.

As she walked me around the school, identified the priority entrances, pointed out the bus stops, introduced me to school staff and a neighborhood dog who enjoys being petted by volunteers, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for how much I’ve learned in the streets, but particularly in this last year. The kind of gratitude that comes from showing up long enough you learn the things that would never make sense if only read in a book.

The learnings that come from finding your people and building infrastructure with people you are traveling with.

I’ve learned:

• it’s empowering to understand my right to assemble in public places and my neighbors’ rights to refuse.

• fear is a response and courage is a choice. I can recognize my fear, shake hands with it, and choose courageously in the moment.

• I don’t have to love everything about an event or action. My job is to show up and contribute, to learn, not to critique.

• if we can’t figure out how to get along and how to work together in low-stakes events then we will fail at higher stakes ones

• I’part of showing up with each other is learning each person’s fears, preferences and risk tolerance.There are many roles and we work best when we know each other.

I’ve glad to have grown my habits of observation and noticing. I’ve grown my capacity to be connected and to abide with people even when things are uncertain or scary.

What are you noticing these days? What’s one way you’re learning to stay human in uncertain times?

I’m curious about what you’re discovering in your own neighborhoods, your own circles. Share with me if you want.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

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Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

ICYMI: Operationalizing Feedback: Practical Tips for Implementation — finding ways to make feedback part of our daily life.

“It’s good to see you,” I said during a coaching call this week.

“It’s good to be seen,” my client responded.

There was a pause. Then: “There is so much death right now.”

They were talking about the deaths in their family, the mix of grief and logistics overwhelming. The comment struck deeply in me in a much larger, more collective sense, as we are individually juggling the reality of carrying on with our normal responsibilities, as we also witness the public execution of peaceful protestors in Minnesota, the deaths during civil unrest and uprisings in other countries.

There is also the death of certainty itself.

While there is always a deepening as we slow to truly see people and allow ourselves to be seen by another, there is something poignant and tender about seeing and being seen in times of sorrow.

In times of uncertainty and loss, we tend toward the things that feel safe, we default to what we know. This is why we practice, we hone our resilience skills, making default our ability to care expansively so when we are overcome with fear or are thrust into crisis mode, our people-centered skills are easy to grasp and repeat.

Wise leaders also look for the “gaps” in the midst of uncertainty, in other words, they look to find the possible. Within the off-beat pause brought on by the disruption of a crisis state, might there may be an opportunity to insert a practice, or to suggest a new way to rebalance the system, or to lower the bar for engagement with a healthier approach. Leaders building better futures look for those gaps as a chance to bridge towards connection.

One of the ways we can support people in being seen is to look for small, real, repeatable ways to integrate micro-feedback moments. Developing this culture of positive feedback supports a resilient workplace, and not in a performative way, but by making visible what would otherwise not be seen. By providing the mini platforms for elevating the invaluable resource that is our relational infrastructure.

One small, repeatable ritual that has worked for decades for me is writing love notes or affirmations or gratitudes. An homage to all things analog and honoring the handmade as the highest value. It started as a childhood tradition. In grade school, my siblings and I would spend days creating glitter-covered, yarn-laced, sticker-adorned homemade Valentine cards. My mom insisted that we give a card to everyone in our class. Yes, even the kids who did not give us cards or who we did not particularly care for. I learned that love notes are for everyone.

This practice shaped LoveYou2.org and my love note-writing practices today.

Love notes are an everyday thing for me. A love note a day or piles of them a week...it does something for my heart. It works my heart muscle, even when my heart is otherwise spent. Love notes keep me in a practice of being tender, even when my defenses might try otherwise.

In the workplace, love notes become radical in the attention economy, the chance to presence ourselves and reflect. Think about it as real-time feedback that costs nothing and just might change the outcome.

You notice someone held space beautifully in a meeting. You see a colleague navigate a difficult conversation with grace. You watch someone show up even when they’re exhausted. You catch the thing they did that mattered.

Instead of waiting for a performance review in six months, you write it down. You tell them about it in one or two sentences. You give them the gift of being seen.

Are you afraid of it feeling like toxic positivity? Make the acknowledgement so small or so real there will be no mistake. Are you afraid all the positives mean you are glossing over real problems? Then build observational feedback skills at the same time. (I argue for the ability to notice the details of the positive things as also honing our ability to describe the changes that need to be made.)

This practice of small affirmations is about creating the conditions where people feel they belong, where they know their work matters, where they can trust that feedback—including the hard kind—comes from a place of care.

I’ve shared 13 ways to use love notes at work in a talk you might find useful. The mechanics are simple and the possibilities are endless.

What would change in your immediate network if people knew—not theoretically, but with tiny proofs in the form of small paper notes—that they are seen?

You can begin this week. Printable love note templates in six languages are waiting. You can be brave and give them in person. Or be sneaky and drop them off or mail them anonymously. Slip one into someone’s bag. Leave it on their desk. Add a stamp and pop into the mailbox.

The form matters less than the effort, followed by the practice.

Love notes for everyone.

Take good care,

Shannon

P.S. Who is one person at work you’ve been meaning to thank but haven’t? What would it feel like to write them a love note this week?

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Subscribe now

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

Both in my chosen family and amongst several of my clients, we’ve been tackling the challenge of being a helper, a person who typically provides great care to others, and finds ourselves needing that care ourselves. Whether it is a health diagnosis, a family member’s urgent needs, an aging parent, or an unexpected loss—we’ve needed to figure out how to be about the business of resourcing ourselves.

For many of us, asking for help feels impossible. We’ve built our identities around being the strong one, the reliable one, the person others turn to. When facing our own challenge, the shift from helper to the one who needs help can feel startling.

The reality is, most of us were never taught how to identify our needs and how to ask for help. And when those who care about us offer blanket statements like “I’m here if you need me,” or worse, avoid us because they genuinely don’t know what to say or do, that gap can feel like we’re too much, or that our needs are too big.

Letting the people who care about us know how they can show up for us is an act of generosity both to ourselves and to our people who want to help.

I created the Know, Name, Frame framework to help us sort through our overwhelm and connect the dots between what we need and what others want to give.

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Know: Excavating Your Actual Needs

The first challenge is figuring out what you actually need. As lifelong helpers, many of us are not as connected to our own needs. Additionally, during a crisis our needs can shift, we are getting familiar with these new needs. And what you needed yesterday might not be what you need today.

Start by paying attention to your daily reality rather than what you think you should need. Notice when you feel frustrated, overwhelmed, or stuck. What would make those things easier?

Maybe you discover that you need someone to sit with you during a difficult appointment Or that grocery shopping has become overwhelming. Perhaps you realize that well-meaning check-in calls drain your energy, but texts feel manageable.

Practical exercise: Keep a simple log for a few days. When do you feel most supported? Most drained? What tasks feel impossible versus just annoying? Your patterns will help you identify what you actually need right now.

Name: Getting Specific About Your Asks

We’ve all made a vague offer of help to people we cared about, “Let me know if you need anything.” And while we meant it sincerely there is no way for the person in crisis to say “yes” to that offer.

We can help people know where to start be naming how they can help us.

Instead of “I need help with meals,” try “I’d love if someone could bring dinner on Tuesdays after my appointment—something simple like takeout or a casserole that freezes well.” Instead of “I’m struggling,” try “I need someone to drive me to my appointment Thursday at 2pm and wait with me for about an hour.”

The more specific you are, the easier you make it for people to decide if they can help. You’re not being demanding. You’re being clear. And clarity is such a kindness—it means the person saying yes actually knows what they’re saying yes to.

Practical tip: Make a list of specific tasks that would help. Include timing, preferences, and any important details. This becomes your “help menu” that you can share when people offer.

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Frame: Setting Context and Boundaries

Here’s where we shift from just asking to actively managing how care flows around us. Framing your asks means giving people the context they need while protecting your own energy.

This might sound like: “While I’m navigating this, I prefer texts over phone calls and no drop-in visitors. I’m most up for company on weekends, and I’ll let you know if that changes.”

Or: “I can’t be everyone’s emotional support right now. What would help most is practical support and conversations about your life.”

Or: “Please send cat memes.”

Good framing acknowledges that people want to help but might not know how. It also recognizes that you can’t manage everyone else’s questions or concerns about your situation.

Practical approach: Create a simple copy/paste note: “How to Help Me Right Now.” Include your communication preferences, best times for visits or calls, types of help that work best, and what to avoid. Share this with close friends and family, and update it as your needs change.

Asking May Feel Impossible

Some of us carry internal messages that make asking for help feel like a betrayal—of our culture, our family patterns, or our own identity. Honestly, the first time I was in full blown crisis I felt so much shame accepting help. Some of us have asked for help before and been disappointed, judged, or given help with strings attached. The fear of repeating those experiences can make asking feel too risky.

Truthfully, doing this pre-work takes energy upfront when you’re already managing a crisis. The thought of also managing other people’s need to help can feel like one more burden you can’t carry.

Begin anyway….start small. Practice with one person who feels safe. Give yourself permission to be imperfect at asking. Asking is a skill, and skills develop over time.

The Ripple Effect

When we get better at asking for help, something shifts. We don’t just make our own lives easier. We show the people around us that it’s okay to have needs, to set boundaries, to be human. We model that receiving care with grace is its own form of strength.

Clear, specific asking creates space for genuine care to flow.

Here’s to an infinity loop of reciprocal care. May you be tended to in the ways you need so that we can be about the business of tending to each other and the new worlds we are creating.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

I’m taking a Substack holiday for the next month and will be back in your inbox the third week of January. Wishing you the time to reflect as this year ends with plenty of connection and care with those in your circles.

As I reflect on this last year, often referred to as unprecedented in various forms, I’m sitting with what it takes to remain human when everything is shifting. Being human is hard, to begin with. Staying human in the face of uncertainty takes devotion.

It’s not about optimism, nor is it about pushing through. And it is definitely not about having the answers. It’s about something quieter, something more durable. And it begins with showing up.

I frequently write about what it actually takes—the practices, the permissions, the small rebellious acts that keep us tethered to ourselves and each other.

I’ve gathered here a few of the more resonant pieces for you not as a roadmap but as a bundle of practices we can return to as part of our commitment to caring our way forward.

Beginning With Permission

So much changes when we give ourselves permission—What if you had permission?

What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you be? How would you act?

Giving ourselves permission signals a commitment to begin. There are so many times we can begin, and begin again. A new year seems obvious. Ordinary Mondays also work. Fanfare is not required.

Naming What We Carry

Beginnings follow endings. And before we can create something new, we have to reckon with what we’ve been carrying. We must let go.

In Ghost Stories: What Organizations Carry Forward (And What They Should Release), I wrote about the narratives—personal and collective—that served us once but may now haunt us. The question isn’t to abandon or reject them. It’s to ask: What would become possible if we released this?

Noticing and naming help us to separate from a certainty or an identity. And allow possibility more space.

Resourcing Ourselves

It is impossible to be or stay human without attending to simple and repeatable acts of self-care.

Not the comercialized or performative self-care, not the kind that gets co-opted and turned into another task on an endless list—Is it well-being or are you well-doing?

Deeply resourcing ourselves prepares us for the emotional agility we need to navigate overwhelm, find groundedness within as we face uncertainty. It’s recognizing that our commitment to taking good care of ourselves is how we can care for others and co-create new worlds.

Finding Tiny Joys

In the midst of overwhelm and grief, there’s an act of resistance that keeps me tender and helps me to stay connected with the present.

In Knitting Together Tiny Joys: Because Giving Up is Not an Option, we gathered joys the way you might thread flowers into chains as a child. A swimming award. A song on repeat. Dancing. A meal shared. We knitted them together like life preservers to stay afloat in it.

You sent me your joys and I knit them in with mine, held them tight.

Imagining Together

There’s a specific kind of power that emerges when we stop trying to solve everything alone and start imagining together. Particularly radical when we can cast our view on a horizon beyond our current reality.

Radical Imagination: Collaborating Our Way Toward Possible Futures is about recognizing that hope as a collaboration with the future is a way to create together in the face of all that is unknown.

Thank you for being here. For all the care you are in the world. For staying human with me in this uncertain time.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Subscribe now

From Our Community

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Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤 Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

When people say “I’ve lost all hope,” they name something real. Yet hope isn’t a feeling we either have or don’t have—it’s a practice, a noticing, a skill we can build, we can learn from each other.

Think about how we talk about hope in our everyday language. We say “I’ve lost all hope.” We talk about “holding on to hope” or a “glimmer of hope.” In nearly every phrase with hope, our language frames hope as something that is given to us, or something that may elude us. Something external. Something we can lose. Something we desperately cling to.

In response to the prompt for my Maker in Residency with Compassion Revolution, I created a Hope: Lost & Found.

What is Hope: Lost & Found

I spent three weeks in Tarntanya-Adelaide as Maker in Residence with Compassion Revolution, hosting Hope: Lost & Found. This work builds on the activations I did at the Compassion Revolution conference—the Hope Factory, where we learned the skills for building hope together and the Library of All Possible Futures, a performance-installation-keynote about collectively imagining new futures.

Hope: Lost & Found was part archive, part installation, part community experiment. I wanted to understand: when people say they’ve lost all hope, or found it—what are they really talking about? Where does hope live in a community? What persists in spite of uncertainty and overwhelm? And are there things we should lose hope in, and if so, how might we grieve that loss or hold the accompanying rage?

For Hope: Lost & Found, I collected data in three ways. First, from responses at the Compassion Revolution conference. Second, from my own hope-noticing field trips around Adelaide, where I went out into neighborhoods and institutions and captured where I noticed hope. And third, through four pop-up events where I went directly into the community to collect public hopes.

For the pop-ups, we designed a collection form. The questions were simple: What is one hope story? Is this a lost or found hope? And what’s something you notice about hope? I set up my hope collection using clipboards and pens at the Adelaide Central Markets, the Botanical Gardens, and the South Australian Department of Health and Wellness. (We had planned on popping up at Feast Fest, but the rain spoiled those outdoor plans.) People filled out the forms, I’d stamp the forms so the hopes were officially received and tended to, and I’d give them a receipt for their hope collection.

I had imagined filing the hopes into envelopes by category: Found hopes, Lost hopes, Other hopes.

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The Data: 78 Field Notes

In total, I had 78 field notes to analyze. Early on in the project, I realized I was collecting two different kinds of hopes. One was very individual responses—personal stories. And the other, particularly from my own noticing, was about community infrastructure and practices—the larger systems and lineages that create the conditions for hope to exist.

But here’s what surprised me: not one submission was either lost or found. It was all nuanced.

This is the biggest insight from this work. The biggest challenge with the intake form was the assumption that hope is binary—either lost OR found. But that’s not how people experience hope at all.

One person told me he’s “only ever partially lost hope because he has God. Not ever completely lost.” Another shared a story about despair turning to hope: they felt complete lack of hope at the beginning of an algal bloom, not seeing action happening. But then, over the course of less than a year, their community came together. They worked together. They took small actions. And now they have a renewed sense of hope.

One participant said it directly: “Hope is an action, and due to our use of the word today, it has become more like saying prayers and thoughts...I use to feel despair, now I see community coming together to take actions.”

While it might seem obvious in print, it is less apparent in our language and responses to despair or cynicism: Hope and despair are not like a light switch, either off or on. Hope isn’t binary. Hope can be both lost and found. Hope is a practice, an action.

Four Themes from Tarntanya-Adelaide

As I analyzed the 78 field notes, looking for patterns and what they reveal about hope, four themes emerged.

1. Connection as the Through-Line

Connection appeared in about a third of the field notes. With connection being a double winner, if you will - it goes both ways. Despair = disconnection; hope = reconnection to people, land, self, community.

One person shared how they noticed the simplicity of hope through loving connections—in their family, their chosen family, their community. Another person talked about queer young people as hope-builders and creators of connection.

But we also saw the inverse. Toxic work dynamics signalling disconection and a sliding towards a lack of hope. When systems (or leaders’ practices) block connection, hope becomes harder to sustain. This mirrors what I’ve learned in other hope work and one of the frameworks we learn in Hope Factory: cultivating practices of connection and belonging for ourselves and others is a core factor of hopeful people.

A beautiful learning about the multi-layered possibility of connection from Aboriginal wisdom, as an Aboriginal participant shared: “We have survived 60,000 years by our collective connection. We have spent our time not on creating structures and monuments to our existence. We have done so by investing in our connections with each other, our social structures, our connection to our environment, to our land.”

2. Infrastructure as Invisible Hope

Though I’ll argue every time for making hope deeply personal, hope is not only personal—it’s structural. Hope is built into the places we inhabit and the policies we live with. I saw the infrastructure of hope in Tarntanya-Adelaide in two ways: Places and Policies.

• Places: I was delighted to go into the downtown library in Adelaide and see a plaque from 2014 dedication when the mayor proclaimed the library “a place of possibility.” Inside, there are toiletries in the bathroom. A justice of the peace with open office hours. Free Wi-Fi. A home visiting librarian service for people who can’t get to the library. Language services. It’s truly a hub of connection and services.

I also noticed parks and gardens throughout Adelaide. This is a city really invested in public green spaces, wrapping the whole city in pockets of green and vibrancy.

• Policies: I learned at the South Australian Museum that Adelaide is the first municipality in Australia to receive native title—a 14 year process that I am sure involved so much work before those years even started. (Native Title is the formal Australian practice of recognizing the cultural and land rights of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people.) At the downtown library, I learned through an installation for Pride—Adelaide is celebrating the 50th anniversary of being the first state in Australia to decriminalize homosexuality. So Adelaide has no problem with going first on these things of great significance, that take effort.

In visiting the Migration Museum, I learned that hope is one of four reasons people migrate to Australia—to seek asylum, to be refugees. But I also learned that in 2014, policies shifted, making it more challenging for people to seek refugee status. So we can see how policies contribute to hope or to despair.

A question this raises for me is, what else might Tarntanya-Adelaide like to be first in? Or hold out and be last?

In Hope Factory we learn these lineages of hope are how we can think about accessing where hope already exists and can help us think about how to create our own legacies of hope as individuals or organizations.

3. Practices Make Hope Accessible

It’s not about “having hope” but about “practicing hope.” Not waiting for hope to arrive. Building it. Tending it.

One person shared they challenge themselves to do one small thing every shift that cultivates connection. Another example: tiny actions that scale. I found a community in Henley Beach on Military Road that had organized to create above-ground native gardens. And then, collectively, they worked to build a native bee hotel. There’s a sign on utliity poles that says come on Saturday, help us build the next garnens, bring your own mug for tea afterward.

These are small, tiny actions that build upon each other. From the practices, we really can see how hope is active. It’s not something that you have. It’s something that you do. It’s something that you practice. It’s a skill we can build.

This relates to frameworks we learned about in Hope Factory like Active Hope and Wise Hope—the idea that hope is something we cultivate through action, not something we wait for. Don’t wait for big, be brave enough to start small.

4. Both/and Thinking Matters

You might have noticed when I designed the collection form—I thought I would file hopes into categories. Lost or found. But nobody’s hope was either lost or found. All of the collections were nuanced and somewhere in between.

Hope and despair are not an either or situation. Hope isn’t binary.

You can be grieving and generative at the same time. You can be holding despair and noticing possibility simultaneously. This is both/and thinking—resisting the either/or binary that limits what we can see and do.

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Three Takeaways: What This Means for Hope Work

Takeaway One:

Hope work may go by other names.

The concept or invitation of hope worked for those who participated in Adelaide (and San Francisco, and my online offering too.) It worked for 165 people at the Compassion Revolution conference—revolutionaries committed to building a more compassionate future. But when I took the hope inquiry into Adelaide’s general public—at markets, festivals, gardens—hope didn’t always resonate the same way.

So when we think about how we build on our hope work, we might think about other words or phrases to bridge to this work. Instead of “hope,” we might ask: What keeps you going? What are you noticing? What matters? What keeps you tethered? How do you avoid cynicism?

Takeaway Two:

Resist binary thinking

Hope isn’t lost or found, hope is not a binary. But this could also be about resisting colonial thinking. The Aboriginal wisdom I mentioned earlier shows a whole different way of thinking about connection and hope—not as individual achievement, but as a way of being together, a lineage, a practice of collective survival for 60,000 years.

When we resist binary, yes/no thinking, and when we think in both/and terms, we work in the space of nuance. We avoid the tunnel vision that comes from either/or thinking. This is essential work right now, not necessarily easy to let go of labels or shortcuts, but also essential to find ourselves on a pathway forward.

Takeaway Three:

First, notice

Before we begin any hope interventions, before we keep company too long with cynicism, ask: What hope infrastructure already exists here? What lineages of hope live in this place? Or within me?

One of the true gifts of this residency was going on my own hope-noticing field trips. The gift of wandering for the point of hope data collection, really noticing and asking questions, staying too long somewhere with the inclination that another piece of data might reveal itself. Learning to see what already exists, what’s already working, what’s being tended to is essential hope work.

Any of us can take hope-noticing field trips in our own communities or neighborhoods, through our own ancestry. We can pause to notice. And then to ask ourselves: Where could I be a plus one? Who could I partner with? What’s someone else doing that I might adopt in my own life?

A Hope That Stays With Me

One of the first people I met while collecting hopes shared something that stayed with me. He told me he lost hope a long time ago. His relationship with hope was one that he felt you lost hope once in life and when you found it again the going would be good. He told me the story of losing hope as a young man and the unconventional path that had kept him tethered since.

I asked him: “What advice would you have for someone who has lost hope?”

He said:

I really love that idea—the concept of trying for the sake of trying and the only real figuring out being choosing what is the next right thing to try.

What if the antidote to collapse isn’t optimism, but noticing? What if hope isn’t something we find within ourselves, but something we create with each other, with the land, with the stubborn beauty that persists?

I am so grateful to Mary Freer and the Compassion Revolution for creating space for this inquiry. And to the people in Tarntanya-Adelaide who shared their hopes, their practices, their tetherings. Your stories have deepened my understanding of how hope works for all of us.

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📣 Share this post with someone who cares so much.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

THE INVITATION

When Mary Freer invited me to speak at Compassion Revolution’s conference on Futuring Compassion, I wanted to create a collective experiment to be in relationship with hope (and as you know, I believe hope is a skill) as a collaboration with the future.

I knew in order to teach this principle from a stage and to an audience of 160+, I’d need to design an experience. Given the little time we typically spend in detailed imagination, I carved out time and devoted myself to first imagining what would invite people into a shared space with me. And then I imagined what would broaden our field of vision beyond our day-to-day vision of the possible.

I crafted a wild and imaginative plan—a performance of sorts grounded in research and curated with delightful details to engage the participants in staying in this collaborative space together.

WHAT THIS WORK ACTUALLY IS

This work of radical imagination is not an escape. Nor is it idealistic. I think of it as hope work. Imagining together, we can collaboratively create new infrastructure, new meaning, new care paths in the face of collapse. We can suspend our conception of time, expand our idea of what is possible.

Imagining new possibilities for structural or systemic issues is not a simple task. We can’t ignore human nature, our own failings, or what is typically challenging. In fact, we must know these things so well that we build real-world solutions around those tensions.

SCAFFOLDING, NOT AUTHORITY

I didn’t want to position myself as the expert standing on stage telling you what’s possible. That would be the opposite of what I was trying to evoke.

I created a box to be delivered as an interruption on stage—a special delivery from the Official Librarian at the Library of All Possible Futures. The box contained a book with chapters of possible futures. Here was the scaffolding, leaving the audience with the expertise. I was a participant in the active collaboration process with the future, not the authority. (Who could be an authority about the future, after all?)

This freed me to be curious with the audience, not at them.

I wanted to maintain a bit of possibility within the scaffolding as well, meaning I did not want the initial story and prompts to make sense to everyone in the room. My goal was that 80% of people at a table would mostly “get it” and then in discussions, they would find their way forward.

EMPATHY ADVENTURES INFORMED MY IMAGINING

Before I arrived in Tarntanya-Adelaide, I went on an Empathy Adventure at three levels (this is old school, classic social worker moves!):

• Individual: What is each person in that room facing? What are their fears? Their hopes? Their exhaustion?

• Organizational/Community: What systems are they navigating? What contradictions do they hold—knowing what works while building what doesn’t?

• Systemic: What larger structures need to shift for the futures we’re imagining to be possible?

I was also realistic about what makes our current approaches tough, being honest with myself about where and how I fail with my own ambitions to do better, or how I avoid the very things I seek to move beyond. (Oh, hello resentment, or the avoidance of conflict, or the overpromising, or the giving up.)

These empathy adventures helped me to identify themes and gaps, possibilities to create into, to imagine toward. With this scaffolding, I could then imagine which letters to write, how to frame them, what tone to hold, and where to create an interruption.

INTENTIONAL INTERRUPTIONS

I knew that breaking up what people are used to doing in brainstorming and conference spaces would help them find their way forward towards imagining these possible futures.

The box delivery was timed to interrupt me in the middle of defining hope. It’s a setup, but it arrives as a gift—as if the future was delivering itself right into the present moment.

I pinned artistic items sent by the Library of All Possible Futures to my dress —visual, unexpected, tactile signals that something different was happening here. And I brought textures all the way from San Francisco to deliver to each table. I knew that I needed people to touch things, not just listen. I needed to engage the body, not just the mind. I needed to break up what people are used to doing so that we could find our way forward towards a wider, more hope-full future.

(Shout out to my service design daughter who coached me on the final details, particularly about the textures, for my talk.)

DETAILS TO LONG FOR

I knew that in order for me to get the audience to a place where they could want to “work” towards these imagined futures, the futures themselves had to have the kind of detail that could also bring someone to their knees, or get them to argue for. I wanted people to long for these futures, to spark a desire that would compel us beyond our everyday.

Specificity is how you make the future real enough to know what you are working towards.

MULTIPLE PATHWAYS (HOPE ARCHITECTURE)

I couldn’t be prescriptive about what the future should look like. I had to create conditions for their imagination, not tell them what to imagine.

What I really wanted to happen in the audience is that we used this goal—this future goal, this possible future—and then imagined many ways to get there. For an audacious hope, you need to be so in love with that future that you’re willing to work for it. That you’re willing to set aside something you believe now or a privilege that you have now or an asset that you have now in service of this possible future. Even when it’s not guaranteed.

Nothing could be so scripted that it felt prophetic. People needed to find multiple possibilities, not one answer.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The box arrived on time. I managed not to trip or drop a prop. I did have a major user error with the slide clicker—no matter. Mary came onstage and helped.

When the first audience respondent said they did not “get” the prompt, my heart skipped a beat, wondering if this was a signal for the whole audience. And then, bam — in community at their table she had found her way forward and described wild possibilities for knowing each other. Participants left discussing new ways to be in relationship. Their repair skills. Their role in tending these possible futures.

One participant talked about increasing their capacity for holding rage.

Another spoke about their devotion to small ways to be with uncomfortable feelings.

We imagined more concrete care practices in our families, our organizations, our communities.

What if this kind of radical imagination is an act of care? What if, combined with the people willing to do the work together, this is hope in action?

What if the future is longing for you, too?

Take Good Care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

Join me at Hope: Lost & Found

Hello Tarntanya-Adelaide! I’ll be here for three weeks in residency with Compassion Revolution. Please join me at a Hope: Lost & Found event. Pop-up events around Adelaide and a closing celebration on November 27th. Details here.

OUT The Community Survey

Federal research on LGBTQIA+ health was cancelled in 2025. Help us document the impact by taking this 25-minute community survey—open to everyone whose life or work connects to LGBTQIA+ communities. Survey is in English & Spanish.

ICYMI: From Overwhelm to Hope: What I’ve Learned About Leading Through Uncertainty

I often work with clients to develop the mindsets, routines, and practices to be able to work at scale. And by scale, I’m not talking about tech or business 10X anything. I’m talking about scaling equity, scaling liberation as we work at the pace, level, ambition, and reach that we feel called to at this time. Sometimes that means zooming out. Sometimes that means getting into the weeds or the root of the matter. Yes, it most often means we are working at the edge of our comfort zone and pushing ourselves to either do more or go deeper—because the work matters and we care deeply about making change.

My favorite example of working at scale: Dale Cain

One of my very favorite examples of working at scale is Dale Cain, Founder and Executive Director of Advocates for Community Wellness, a faith-based, holistic health promotion program in Chicago. This small but mighty organization works at scale. Their work focuses on three neighborhoods on Chicago’s Southside where the staff, board, and volunteers all live and worship. Walking down the street with Dale between a coffee shop and a new community hub, she is stopped by someone who joined one of her online nutrition classes. Dale walks into the community hub and greets everyone by name, with hugs in return. Dale can tell you the shifts of breast cancer diagnosis by block. Without checking any notes, she knows the bus lines people would need to take to get to a state-of-the-art mammogram.

Yes, this is scale. Because bigger is not always better. Better is better.

My second favorite example of working at scale: Bad Bunny

I’m also inspired by Bad Bunny for this reason: the way he has only become more himself, more what he believes in, more specific as he has achieved more fame.

As Kelefa Sanneh writes in a recent New Yorker piece, “one of the keys to his success is the bigger he gets, the more local he seems.”

Bad Bunny didn’t chase a universalized version of success. He got bigger by being MORE of who he actually is.

This is the scale I’m interested in. The kind where we work at the depth, the width, the ambition, and the reach that feels true to our mission and our capacity to stay tethered to what actually matters. It’s unapologetically rooted. It’s staying faithful to our purpose, our people, our place.

Operating at scale means we never lose sight of the purpose and vision, even as there are external pressures to shift. In times of uncertainty, it can be easy to get distracted by the overwhelm or frequently consider pivots.

Here’s what I notice: there’s a pervasive narrative—also true for values-driven, people-centered work—that scale means growth. Growth means more. More staff, more programs, more reach. The assumption is that bigger is the path to impact. What happens when we focus solely on growth and not depth is that we can lose sight so quickly of our ability to make impact. And when creating change is what matters, impact is where our focus stays.

The question isn’t: How do we grow? The question is: What is growth? At what pace, level, ambition, and reach do we feel called to work right now? And can we stay focused on our purpose while operating there?

I’m practicing this myself right now. I’m soon leaving for a month in Adelaide, Australia where I’ll be in residency with Compassion Revolution, responding to the prompt “Reasons to stay hopeful in uncertain times.” I’m delighted to have this opportunity to practice deep relational work in community and with a place-based focuse. Exploring what is possible, investigating answers to these questions in collaboration with an organization committed to this kind of specific, rooted impact.

Scale as better. Scale as on purpose Scale as impact.

What does it look like when you work at scale?

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

P.S. If you have any recommendations for Adelaide, Australia please send them my way. I’ll give an update on my residency in the next newsletter.

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book, and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.

I get calls from leaders who want to create a memorable conference, offsite, or retreat but also fill the agenda with heaps of the usual. This wasn’t one of those calls.

This leadership team had data—and understood what it meant. They had the right people, the right skills, high mission alignment. What they didn’t have? Ways for all that expertise to connect across silos. They knew their challenges: rapid growth had created isolated lanes of knowledge.

What made them different? They wanted to embrace both the problem and the not a problem. They were willing to pause in the midst of rapid transformation to ask: What if good enough could be better? They assembled a retreat planning team. We spent weeks designing a retreat to transform how they connected and worked.

I created the retreat to illuminate their collective wisdom. My assumption? Everything we need to know already exists in the room. The social worker in me never leaves—it’s like doing a home visit every time I’m invited into an organization.

All that wisdom was invisible—hidden away in individual heads, never shared, never leveraged, never celebrated. What was invisible was also of high value, the incredible expertise scattered across this diverse team.

Here’s what I know about making the invisible visible: you need a mirror.

Even with the best of intentions, we can’t see what we’re swimming in. We’re all invested in the status quo, even when the status quo isn’t ideal. Within organizations, we’ve learned what’s valued and what isn’t, what gets named and what stays quiet. When the work is fast-paced, both urgent and important, it’s challenging to find the time to reflect, let alone find a mirror to illuminate what is and help us create a vision of what could be.

So at this team retreat, we developed a Tiny Library of Expertise. I created a zine template. If you know me, you know my delight in the analog, in the hand-made, in the “two small to fail” things that are possible to replicate. Each person completed their own zine of expertise as a folded booklet from one sheet of paper. The prompts were simple. The results were stunning.

I designed a Tiny Library to house their expertise zines, now kept as a resource in their command center.

People made zines about engaging with stakeholders. About staying calm in chaos. And Excel tips. About community partners. About how to make a great cup of coffee.

We made the invisible visible. We created an actual library—a box that now lives in their conference room. When someone’s overwhelmed or a new person joins or the team is activated for an emergency, they can reach for collective wisdom instead of figuring it out alone.

Beyond the tiny library of expertise, this team now had a practice of sourcing (and delighting in) wisdom from across silos and celebrating hidden superpowers.

There are many things that stay invisible in organizations:

• Emotional labor and who does it

• Unspoken expectations and who already knows them

• Power dynamics and who benefits

• Care work that keeps everything running

• The toll of being “fine” all the time

• Patterns of behavior we’ve normalized

• What’s actually working (when we only focus on problems)

• Who makes decisions and how

• What actually drains or sustains people

• Knowledge that lives in people’s heads, not in any system

• The wisdom of lived experience

• What people need to do their best work

These things are real. They shape everything—culture, retention, effectiveness, staff well-being. But because they’re invisible, they go unaddressed. They become “just how we do things here” even when they’re slowing us down or, worse still, harming us.

Making things visible is how we make them addressable. Approachable. Changeable. Something we can intentionally dial up or down.

This is the work of leadership. This is also work most leaders can’t do alone, because we’re all inside our own systems. We need someone who can see what we can’t see. Someone who can reflect back what’s there. Someone who can hold space for what needs to change.

In my work with organizations, I use tools like the resource survey and creative prompts to make visible what we intuitively know but don’t discuss. Creating retreat experiences where people can name what’s been invisible is one of the many benefits of stepping away from the day-to-day and joining together in person.

As the frontline worker of our own internal narrative, we must first see what’s there. Then map what is invisible around us. We must name it, connect the dots, make it visible, in order to change it.

This is the work. Patient, intentional, necessary. Done with all the care in the world. Making the invisible visible so we can create cultures that support people creating the impact.

What’s invisible in your world or organization right now? What wants to be seen?

Take good care,

Shannon Weber

Author | Facilitator | Coach

Transforming how we work together—through organizational culture work, team retreats, and executive coaching.

Website | Substack | LinkedIn

P.S.

I’m booking retreat and organizational culture work for 2026. If you’re ready to make the invisible visible, let’s connect.

Link Love

• There are three spots left in my Hope Factory masterclass before the Conference for a More Compassionate Future in Tarntanya-Adelaide, Australia. If you are looking to bring hope to your organization or integrate hope as a leadership practice, please join this incredible group gathering! Register here.

• The Torchlight Collective presents How to Be a Consultant in a World That Needs You: A Practical Guide for Transitioning Professionals. This 90-minute webinar offers a grounded introduction to consulting that centers sustainability, values, and care. Think of it as Consulting 101 — practical tools, real talk, and a space to imagine what consulting can look like for you in today’s world.

• All you animals at No Kings rallies yesterday. 🐸

Continue the Momentum

📖 My book Show Up Hard: A Road Map For Helpers In Crisis. Available in print, e-book and audio format.

📧 Find the archive at All the Care in the World for strategies on navigating uncertain times, leading with empathy, and avoiding burnout.

🎤Work with me: 1:1 Executive Coaching + Retreats + Organizational Culture Transformation. Clients appreciate my connected approach with actionable tools and frameworks.