A packed room, a generous partner, and a conversation that did not want to end.
June’s Community Meeting was full of honesty, warmth, and the kind of nodding-around-the-room that tells you the topic was overdue. Every seat was taken. Thirty practitioners came ready, and the conversation carried well past the official close.
Thank you again to Lena Pope for hosting us and for opening your doors to a conversation that is rarely held in our sector. The morning would not have been what it was without the time, the team, and the space you gave us.
In case you missed the meeting, you can catch up below with the recap, the presentation, and the takeaway packet.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
— Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988)
The People Side
The morning ran on one thread with three turns. What burnout looks like before anyone names it. What boundaries hold up when the mission feels more urgent than the line. Where influence lives for the practitioner who is not running the organization but still has to navigate it. Underneath all of it sat one idea worth carrying. By the time someone uses the word burnout, the moment to act on it has already passed. The earlier signals are the ones worth learning to read.
The Takeaway
The packet opens with the five early signals of burnout, written for what they look like before anyone uses the word. It moves into the boundaries framework, the three tests every real boundary gets put through, with one situation walked from setup to test to held line. The third section covers the four moves that shape culture from any seat, including the one most leadership content skips. The packet closes with the One Question, Your Table prompt so you can run a version of the activity with your own team.
The Leadership View, with Lena Pope
Robert Ramirez, Keegan Hand, and Victoria Sendejo opened the morning with their leadership perspective on building a healthy team. They walked through what a culture of positive collaboration looks like inside an organization, how Lena Pope thinks about preventing burnout at the team level, and what their leadership pays attention to before it becomes a bigger conversation.
The most useful thing they did was something we did not plan. They walked straight into the four moves that shape culture from any seat.
Robert, Keegan, and Victoria brought clarity, generosity, and a real belief that healthy teams are built on purpose. Their fingerprints are on this meeting in the best way.
Building Culture Across Distance
On the way out Tuesday, one practitioner stopped to ask what this conversation looks like when your team is mostly remote. It is the right question, and it deserves a real answer.
A few anchors worth carrying back to a remote or hybrid team:
Cadence over chemistry. In an in-person office, connection happens in passing. On a distributed team, what happens in passing has to be scheduled. Standing one-on-ones, predictable team check-ins, and reliable touch points are not bureaucracy. They are the structure that lets relationships do their work.
Written norms over implied ones. Remote teams that struggle with boundaries usually struggle because the norms were never named. When does the team expect a reply. What hours count as working hours. Which channels are urgent and which ones can wait. Putting these in writing once removes the daily renegotiation that wears people out.
Visibility without surveillance. A manager who cannot see their team in person has two options. Check in more often, which starts to feel like watching, or build shared visibility into the system itself. Shared progress trackers and predictable reporting moments help leadership see the work without interrupting it.
Belonging is built, not assumed. The kinds of moments that signal belonging in person, a quick laugh in the hallway, a shout out at a staff meeting, lunch together on a hard week, have to be intentionally created when the team is distributed. Schedule the things that used to happen naturally. They matter more than the all-hands.
What’s Next….
🌱 Community Meeting
🗓️ July 09
📍TAFB
⏰ 12 pm - 1 pm
This session is a grounded conversation about where your organization's money actually comes from, what that mix shapes about the work, and what practitioners can read in the patterns even when they aren't the one writing the budget.
🌱 Community Meeting
🗓️ July 16th
📍The Cause Agency
⏰ 8 am - 9:30 am
This session is designed to give you a clearer picture of how funding decisions connect to organizational priorities and provide a better understanding of what diversification really means for sustainability.
🌱 Connection Circle
🗓️ July 23rd
📍TAFB
⏰ 12 pm - 1 pm
This session is a grounded conversation about the strings attached to the money, what restricted and unrestricted dollars shape about how programs run, and what practitioners can notice in those constraints even when they aren't the one negotiating the grant terms.
What's Happening in Our Community
There is a fresh look to the Roots to Leadership website, and with it comes something new the community can put to use right away. Under the Community Board, you will now find Community Events, a running calendar of nonprofit events happening across the area throughout the year.
This calendar is being built alongside our friends at Fundraising Fanatics, a local virtual meetup for development and fundraising professionals. Their work makes this resource possible, and we are glad to be building it together.
A few ways to put it to work:
See what your partners and contacts are up to. The calendar makes it easier to stay close to the work happening across the sector in any given month, without chasing down every individual invite.
Plan your own events with the bigger picture in view. When too many galas, fundraisers, or community gatherings land on the same date, partners and funders are forced to choose between them. A quick check before locking in your event saves your team, and the community around it, real headaches.
Avery Montez is the founder of APMdigital, a creative business specializing in social media, advertising, and digital marketing. With experience in content creation and campaign strategy, Avery brings a creative, collaborative, and audience-focused approach to every project.
Download photos and the video from Tuesday’s Meeting.
If you are interested in learning more about Avery’s work, contact her today!
Until next time,
Founder & Executive Director
Empowering nonprofit leaders to grow and lead with purpose.
