In the advancement world, we tend to celebrate the ask: the meeting that ends in a “yes,” the transformational commitment, the moment someone decides to invest in a future that doesn’t yet exist. And I understand why. I love the solicitation, too. There is something extraordinary about inviting another person to act on their deepest values and participate in something larger than themselves.

But before I loved the ask, I loved stewardship. I loved sitting with the weight of another person’s trust.

One of my favorite compliments is to tell someone they have a stewardship heart. In our profession, it means more than being skilled at writing thank-you notes or producing thoughtful impact reports. It describes a person’s deepest motivator.

People with stewardship remember birthdays and important dates and honor promises. They want others to understand that their generosity mattered. Recognition isn’t what motivates them. Protecting trust does. They feel responsible for helping another person see the possibility and legacy that their gift has set in motion.

Because we use the word so often in advancement, I spent years thinking stewardship was just another function of our profession.

Our profession merely borrowed the word.

Stewardship is older than philanthropy, and older than institutions. It is one of the oldest ways human beings make meaning of our brief place in the world.

None of us begins with a blank slate. We inherit language, stories, traditions, landscapes, communities, and institutions that we did not create. We are shaped by sacrifices we never witnessed and protected by decisions whose authors we may never know. Even the most self-made among us has received more than any one person could possibly build alone.

Every generation inherits more than it creates. Every generation decides what will become of that gift.

That, to me, is stewardship.

It begins with the recognition that ownership is far more temporary than we like to admit. We speak easily of my organization, my home, my reputation, my children, or my time. Yet much of what we call ours is ours only briefly. We receive it, shape it for a season, and eventually release it into hands we may never know.

Stewardship begins when we stop asking, What belongs to me? and start asking, What has been entrusted to me?

That shift changes everything.

Leadership becomes less about authority and more about responsibility. Parenting becomes less about control and more about preparing another person to flourish beyond us. Success becomes less about accumulation and more about what we cultivate, repair, renew, and pass forward.

It even changes our ambitions. We become less interested in building monuments to ourselves and more interested in laying foundations that may remain invisible beneath someone else’s achievements.

When I worked at Simmons University early in my career, our Vice President for Advancement, Marianne Lord, often described us as “candlemakers on the threshold of the revolution.” At the time, I understood it as an invitation to believe we stood on the edge of unimaginable possibility. All these years later, I see that it’s so much deeper.

Every breakthrough rests on generations of people who kept tending the light until someone else learned to carry it farther. Electricity did not make the human effort to illuminate the darkness irrelevant; it inherited that effort. The candlemaker and the electrical engineer belong to the same story. Each received the same enduring human task and advanced it with the tools available to them.

History celebrates the inventors and the revolutions, but we know far less about the countless people whose steady work and care made those breakthroughs possible.

Every revolution is an inheritance.

It emerges from accumulated knowledge, repaired failures, preserved institutions, passed-down wisdom, and ordinary people who continued their work before they could possibly know what it would make possible.

That is how I’ve come to understand that stewardship is not the opposite of innovation, but what allows innovation to matter.

Without stewardship, innovation becomes novelty—change untethered from memory, responsibility, or purpose. Without innovation, stewardship can become preservation for its own sake. True stewardship requires us to discern what must be protected, what must be repaired, what must be released, and what must be reimagined so that the deeper purpose can endure.

The goal is not to preserve the candle forever, but to keep bringing light into the world. This, I think, is why stewardship is so deeply unifying.

Every one of us has been entrusted with something. For one person it may be children; for another, a school, a business, a neighborhood, a friendship, a stretch of coastline, or a tradition. The responsibilities are different, but the posture is the same. We receive an gift, care for it faithfully, leave it stronger than we found it, and entrust it to those who come after us.

Stewardship reminds us that we are not the culmination of history, but one link in a much longer chain. We are heirs to lives we did not live and, if we are fortunate, ancestors to people we will never meet. That perspective is both humbling and demanding.

We must consider not only the immediate consequences of our choices, but the ones we may never witness. The institution we weaken may struggle under someone else’s leadership. The trust we erode may take a generation to rebuild. The child we encourage may one day carry courage into a room we will never enter.

Many of our greatest challenges are, at their core, failures of stewardship. We consume more than we restore. We inherit institutions without strengthening them. We reward extraction and call it growth. We ask what we are permitted to take before asking what we are obligated to leave.

Stewardship disrupts that instinct. It invites us to measure success not only by what we accomplish during our lifetime, but by whether the people, places, and institutions entrusted to us are stronger because we passed through them.

Sometimes stewardship means protecting what is fragile. Sometimes it means dismantling what no longer serves. Sometimes it means building something whose completion we will never witness. What unites those choices is hope.

Stewards act without the guarantee of seeing the final outcome. We educate children for a world we cannot predict. We strengthen organizations for leaders we may never know. We cultivate and protect trees whose shade will belong to someone else. We invest because the future matters, even when it will not belong to us.

Maybe that is the deepest meaning of philanthropy.

A gift is more than the transfer of resources. It is an act of trust placed into motion.

The long cultivation and, ultimately, the solicitation begin that relationship. Stewardship gives it meaning.

Maybe we are all candlemakers on the threshold of a revolution. Not because our work will become obsolete, but because the light is always moving into new hands and taking new forms. Our task is to remain faithful to the light: to tend it while it is ours, strengthen it where we can, and place it, with care and hope, into the hands of those who will carry it farther than we ever could.

July 1 is a crisp, new page. A new fiscal year with untouched budgets, fresh goals, new trustees and committee chairs, annual funds reset to zero, dashboards clear, and strategic plans entering their next chapter.

There is something deeply hopeful about today. We are standing on what feels like a clean slate.

Since my last Tide Report, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with girls’ school leaders at the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools Global Forum in Toronto, onboarding incredible new Tidemark clients, joining the Board of Trustees at The Woodward School, beginning service as an elected member of my town’s School Committee, and, like many parents this time of year, spending mornings on docks, evenings at the beach with my children, and cutting basil from our backyard garden for simple summer dinners.

Maybe these experiences seem unrelated, but they do bring me back to the same question:

What actually creates meaningful change?

We welcome July 1 with hope, and not because organizations change when the calendar changes, but because leaders truly can.

Organizations change, grow, expand, and lift off because leaders make deliberate choices to move differently.

Those choices may be cultural: naming aloud what has gone unspoken, rebuilding trust, clarifying expectations, or creating an environment where people feel further seen, challenged, and valued.

They may be operational: adopting new systems, retiring outdated practices, simplifying processes, or creating healthier rhythms of work.

They may be strategic: choosing where to invest limited resources, focusing attention on what matters most, or having the courage to stop doing things that no longer advance the mission.

Real growth doesn’t come from the reset itself, but from what leaders choose to do with it.

Today, leadership teams across the country are focused on budgets, fundraising goals, campaign milestones, committee assignments, and strategic priorities. All of those matter!

And July 1 offers another leadership opportunity that deserves just as much attention.

Energy.

The goals are set, the budget has been approved, the board has been seated, and the strategic priorities are clear. Now comes the work of pursuing them.

That is why I think leaders should let July 1 feel as significant as it is.

Pause. Breathe. Allow yourself to feel both the privilege and the possibility of leading an organization entrusted with meaningful work.

Then prepare, not only your plans, but your people.

As funny as it may sound, achieving ambitious goals often depends on how intentionally we use these looser weeks of summer.

The recharge has to happen now. And I learned that lesson the hard way.

Earlier in my career, I was beginning my second tour as a Chief Advancement Officer. I was eager to prove myself in a new-to-me institution, determined to exceed expectations, and convinced that successful leaders simply keep pushing.

So I worked straight through the summer. (I do not recommend this, so please heed my warning.)

By the time I limped toward winter break, I realized I hadn’t done myself any favors. For a stretch, I was no longer leading from a place of energy or creativity, but simply surviving. The silver lining is how that experience changed how I lead.

As I went on to lead larger teams and more ambitious campaigns, I encouraged people to take time away, especially during the summer. And not because rest is disconnected from performance, but because it is essential to it.

The work we do is deeply meaningful. And because of that, it is also demanding.

As the year continues, campaigns will accelerate, budgets will tighten, unexpected opportunities will emerge, and we will need energy stores for all of these moments.

Students, donors, boards, and communities all need us, and we want to show up for them. There will be seasons of exhaustion ahead. Those are inevitable. What is within our control today is how, and whether, we prepare for them.

The strongest organizations I’ve encountered don’t necessarily have the most complex strategic plans. They have vision, trust, clear priorities, and leaders who understand that ambitious goals are achievable when people feel aligned, supported, and cared for.

Culture is the environment that makes execution possible. It’s reflected in how decisions are made, how disagreements are handled, how information is shared, how people care for one another, and how leaders show up every single day.

That is why I find this season so fascinating.

Summer creates just enough breathing room to notice what the pace of the year often obscures. The inbox quiets (at least a little). The routines loosen. And what’s left is revealing.

How does your organization function when the calendar isn’t carrying it forward?

What habits remain?

What relationships prove strongest?

What must be reset, or reimagined, before September arrives?

So today, before the meetings begin again and the calendar fills, take a breath and celebrate the opportunity that July 1 represents.

Honor the work you’ve already done. Rest without guilt. Encourage your team to do the same. Then return ready to build something extraordinary.

Because every ambitious campaign, every strategic plan, every transformational institution is built one leadership decision at a time.

The calendar offers us a fresh page, and leadership determines what gets written on it.

I've read a number of articles lately exploring women, wealth, and the future of philanthropy.

Most focus on women mega donors and the unprecedented transfer of wealth underway. The stories usually center on figures like MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others whose giving is reshaping entire sectors.

The attention is warranted. Their philanthropy is highly significant, influential, and worthy of study. At the same time, I wonder whether we are looking adequately at the full picture, and whether some key insights into this moment may already be in plain view.

If we want to understand how women's philanthropy is evolving, we should also study the institutions that have spent decades engaging women as volunteers, leaders, advocates, trustees, and philanthropists. While the sector is increasingly treating women's philanthropy as an emerging phenomenon, many organizations serving women and girls have been learning from women donors for generations.

Women represent roughly half the population, yet organizations serving women and girls receive just 1.9 percent of charitable giving in the United States, according to the Women & Girls Index. That figure has remained stubbornly low over time. For decades, institutions dedicated to advancing women and girls have often been treated as if they occupy a niche corner of the nonprofit sector. But women are not a niche, and women's philanthropy is not either.

This subject is professional for me, and it is also personal.

As a kid, I attended a girls' school for a brief time during a period of significant transition in my life. That community fostered confidence, belonging, and a sense of possibility that has stayed with me ever since. Later, my advancement career became rooted almost entirely in institutions dedicated to advancing women and girls. Long before I launched Tidemark, I had the privilege of partnering with women as alumnae, parents, trustees, volunteers, and donors. I have also been fortunate to learn from exceptional women leaders and mentors whose guidance shaped my understanding of philanthropy and leadership.

Those experiences influence how I view this moment. What I see in today's conversations about women and philanthropy is not the emergence of something brand new. As someone who has served girls’ and women’s institutions for most of my career, I see long-standing patterns finally receiving broader attention.

Across philanthropy, there is a growing interest in questions of trust, community, participation, visible impact, shared leadership, and values-driven decision making. These themes are often presented as emerging trends or new frameworks for engaging donors. But institutions serving women and girls have been working within these dynamics for decades.

Long before trust-based philanthropy became a widely discussed concept, many organizations serving women and girls were building cultures of engagement rooted in relationships, shared purpose, volunteer leadership, collective action, and community. They were learning how women build trust, how they evaluate impact, how they make philanthropic decisions, and what inspires long-term commitment.

Research from the Women's Philanthropy Institute has been telling us for years that gender can influence how donors approach giving, including the role of values alignment, relationships, collaboration, and impact. While no group is monolithic, these themes appear consistently across studies of women's philanthropy and are now reflected in broader philanthropic conversations.

Today, those same patterns are visible across the donor landscape.

They appear in giving circles and family philanthropy, annual giving programs, campaign leadership structures, volunteer engagement models, major gift conversations, and more. They influence how donors evaluate institutions and how they decide where to invest their time, talent, and resources.

This is one reason I believe girls' schools, women's colleges, women's foundations, and organizations dedicated to advancing women and girls may be entering a moment of unique opportunity.

For generations, these institutions have built relationships with women not only as beneficiaries, but also as leaders, learners, advocates, volunteers, and philanthropists. They have spent decades listening to women, understanding their motivations, and observing how generosity takes shape across different stages of life.

At a moment when the broader philanthropic sector is asking new questions about women and wealth, these organizations possess a depth of experience that is often overlooked.

In some respects, institutions serving women and girls may be among the clearest laboratories for understanding women's philanthropy and the future of fundraising.

The lessons emerging from these communities are no longer relevant only to organizations focused on women and girls.

If women are exercising greater influence over philanthropic capital, and if their approaches to giving are increasingly shaping broader philanthropic norms, then every nonprofit leader has a reason to pay attention.

What can we learn from institutions that have spent decades engaging women in meaningful philanthropic relationships? What might they teach us about trust, participation, community, leadership, and generosity? What insights have they developed that could help organizations across sectors better understand the future of philanthropy?

These are some of the questions I am excited to explore later this month at the International Coalition of Girls' Schools Global Convening in Toronto.

This moment reflects changes in who holds influence, how philanthropic decisions are made, and what donors increasingly value in their relationships with institutions. And if nonprofit leaders want to understand where philanthropy is headed next, they may find important clues not only in the stories of high-profile donors, but also in the organizations that have spent generations learning alongside women as philanthropists.

The future of philanthropy may already be visible there! Hope to see many of you in Toronto.

An app helped us recognize them as Venus and Jupiter. Wow. Just wow.

Entire planets suspended over us while we stood on a spinning rock hurtling through space at impossible speed, surrounded by distances our human minds just can’t comprehend. Better yet: two planets so impossibly far away that they look like tiny pinpricks, yet close enough that we can see them with our bare eyes from a small-town backyard. (And I didn’t even have my contacts in.)

The kids stood in wonder for a bit before running off to the swing, but I stayed planted in the grass for a few more minutes trying to wrap my mind around the enormity of it all. The distance between us and those tiny lights and the vastness surrounding our little backyard. The fact that there are entire worlds beyond our own, carrying on completely indifferent to our schedules, ambitions, meetings, worries, and plans.

Wow. To find awe in my own backyard and to feel so small.

By morning, I was back in the immediacy of ordinary human concerns: emails, presentation prep, limiting my kids’ screen time, community responsibilities, budgets, deadlines, people needing things from one another.

How can both things be true at once? That we are unimaginably small in the universe and that our choices still matter so deeply?

And yes, I’m tying this back to leadership. I think about this often in these spaces.

In nonprofit organizations, schools, boardrooms, and civic life, it’s easy for every obstacle to feel existential. A difficult meeting can consume an entire week, and a leadership transition can feel seismic. Organizational tensions can begin to eclipse perspective itself. Institutions sometimes start behaving as though they are the center of the universe instead of what they actually are: temporary collections of human beings trying their best to build something meaningful together. Perspective really matters.

The summer night sky reminds us that most of what builds up our egos will eventually disappear. Titles, influence, reputations. None of it is permanent. Organizations evolve, and every leader eventually becomes part of the institution’s history.

And how we show up in our impermanent chapters is enormously consequential.

The universe may not know about a board meeting, but the child impacted by a school decision certainly does. The stars are unaware of whether a nonprofit survives difficult seasons, but the families who rely on its services do. Jupiter and Venus still look the same regardless of whether a board governs wisely or poorly. But students, employees, donors, and communities deeply feel the consequences. This is the paradox of human life: we are tiny in scale and enormous in consequence to one another.

The older I get, the more I understand that healthy leadership requires balancing both truths at once.

We need enough perspective to remember that we are not the center of everything, and enough responsibility to understand that we are accountable for something meaningful.

The leaders I admire most are the ones who understand proportion. They know how to zoom out without disengaging, resist institutional melodrama, and stay steady during conflict because they understand that urgency and importance are not always the same thing.

They know how to look up, and then how to look back down again with perspective.

Maybe this is why moments of awe feel so restorative. They interrupt this illusion that our immediate surroundings are all there is, and remind us that life is fleeting and extraordinary. That our time here is brief and that this is exactly why our impact matters.

Two things can be true at once. The universe is immeasurably vast, and our lives unfold at human scale around dinner tables, inside schools, within communities, through friendships, through grief, through stewardship, through the big and small ways we care for one another while briefly sharing this spinning rock together.

I went inside to start the familiar bedtime routine with my kids, but for a few minutes, standing in the grass looking up at Venus and Jupiter, the scale of things felt exactly right. Tiny pinpricks of light visible above us, and summer grass tangible below us. And all of us, somewhere in between, trying to make meaning of it all.

In the story, a woman travels the world and eventually fulfills her grandfather’s request to “make the world more beautiful” by scattering lupine seeds wherever she goes. My children and I still read it, and I think about it often while gardening (we’re planting lupine seeds in our own garden this year) and when we get to be part of something that feels like it is making the world more beautiful.

Photo by Clark Brewer // Styling + Art Direction by Meg Carrigan for Minnow

I think about it because, at their best, philanthropy and leadership are about helping make the world more humane and connected, more honest, and more alive to the dignity and potential of other people.

Mrs. Rumphius did it by scattering seeds, and the rest of us “scatter seeds” when we demonstrate by example and share our experiences.

I’ve become addicted to gardening. Having my hands in the ground, learning where the root systems are, clearing beds, taking my children to choose flowering plants, and caring for them in anticipation of what they will grow to become. Each morning, we water the flowers and notice what’s growing. A hummingbird has been visiting our new dahlias, and the other day, we found a tiny hatched bird egg tucked into the garden, too.

We make decisions with an awareness of the conditions. Sunlight, temperature, water, soil, seasonality, and shady hours of the day all matter. Plants do not thrive because we demand that they do, but because we create the conditions that allow them to.

Institutions are not so different.

Over the years, I have worked inside schools and nonprofits filled with brilliant, mission-driven people. Places doing meaningful work in the world, and places I care about deeply.

And over time, I’ve learned that institutions, like gardens, are shaped by conditions.

Wetland woodland the kids explore in our neighborhood. “The natural playground,” they call it.

Even strong organizations can become strained when overextension becomes normalized, communication weakens, or people spend more energy adapting to tension than tending to the work itself.

Culture is rarely created by one person alone. Usually, it develops slowly, and through patterns people stop noticing because they have become accustomed to carrying them.

I think women leaders, in particular, are highly skilled at adapting themselves to difficult conditions rather than questioning the conditions themselves. As women, we tell ourselves we need to be more resilient and less sensitive. Maybe we need to be more politically strategic, or warmer, or accommodating and less affected.

Over time, we become so accustomed to carrying tension that we stop noticing the weight of it. But eventually, distance changes what we can see.

I have learned through experience that distance can clarify what we could not clearly see while we were inside it. Sometimes the most important leadership insight comes after we have stepped far enough away to understand what certain conditions were requiring of us.

And when the conditions change, it becomes possible to notice what returns: ease, creativity, presence, and joy. Like gardeners, the best leaders are attuned to the ways institutional conditions shape people, and they build environments deliberately so their communities can thrive.

The work of good leadership is not asking people to endure difficult conditions gracefully. It is doing the deeper, harder work of cultivating conditions where trust, creativity, courage, generosity, and joy freely grow.

Morning watering in our backyard.

I think often about Marianne handing me that book nearly a decade ago. At the time, I understood it as a beautiful story for a new mom. Now, I understand the deeper lesson.

The hardest seasons of our lives teach us what we do and do not want growing in our gardens. Admittedly, I would not choose every season I have lived through. But I can see now that even the difficult ones have made me a better person and a better leader. They have shaped what I notice, what I value, what I will not normalize, and what I want to make possible for others.

Those are the seeds I want to scatter through my practice, my leadership, my parenting, and my life. Not perfectly or everywhere, but intentionally and where it matters.

In the institutions and leaders I support, in the cultures I help cultivate, and this year, in my own garden, where our very own lupines will now grow.

Books have widened my aperture. Some punctuate my conviction that women are allowed to boldly claim agency and voice in telling about their own lives. Some books brought me closer to my children. Some gave me the quiet space to hear myself think again. And taken together, they grounded me.

What I did not fully expect was how deeply this season of reading would shape my own voice, not only personally, but professionally. The women I advise are leading institutions, teams, communities, and families in an era that still rewards women for being agreeable and endlessly accommodating. I find myself drawn to stories that resist that instinct entirely.

Not every book I read carries the same theme, but taken together, they reflect a belief I hold deeply: women do not need to diminish themselves to lead well.

Option B by Sheryl Sandberg helped me think about resilience not as a personality trait, but as something built slowly in the aftermath of loss. The Tell by Amy Griffin resonated for its vulnerability and emotional courage. Conform and Beneath by Ariel Sullivan ignited my imagination, grounding me in the briefness and privilege of a human life while also reminding me how exhausting it can be to live too far from yourself.

Yesterday evening, I heard Belle Burden, author of Strangers, speak about the coexistence of life and work, and the bravery with which she shared her own experiences of pain, reinvention, and becoming. I found myself thinking again about the courage of the telling. There is a kinship among women refusing to become quieter, more convenient, or easier to digest in order to protect other people’s comfort.

Other books widened my horizon again. Sharing Space by astronaut Cady Coleman, my current read, is reminding me with each page how discipline, curiosity, ambition, and humanity can coexist in the same life. Imperfection, imposter syndrome, enormous ambition, and extraordinary accomplishment can coexist too. And representation deeply matters. I have been drawn to women narrators who write with authority without losing warmth, depth, or wonder. That feels deeply connected to the best version of women’s leadership.

And then there have been the books woven into family life: The Mouse and the Motorcycle trilogy with my son. And Pippi Longstocking with my daughter, which feels exactly right for a little girl learning that spiritedness is not something to outgrow.

I loved The Correspondent, Small Things Like These, Bewilderment, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Stories about tenderness, morality, loneliness, the many stages of reinvention within a single life, if we are so lucky, the connection that shepherds us through those seasons, and the private worlds people carry inside themselves.

Reading has become both restorative and expansive for me lately. It has guided my return to intellectual and creative life in a fuller way. And increasingly, it has reinforced something I want the women I work with to feel permission to claim:

There is room for your full humanity inside leadership.

Your authority can grow alongside your warmth, imagination, humor, tenderness, ambition, and truth.

Your effectiveness does not depend on becoming agreeable, convenient, or easy to manage.

The women reshaping institutions, culture, philanthropy, business, politics, and public life right now are becoming more fully themselves, not less. And that work is better when we do it together.

In community, we borrow courage, remember what we already know, listen to the powerful voice inside us named intuition, make each other braver, steadier, and less willing to quiet.

Books connect people, and so does brave storytelling. And so does the willingness to share a life honestly.

Women rule. Books rule.

The work of governance is not to own the harbor, but to help mark the channel.

The distinction I keep returning to is simple on paper and admittedly much harder in practice: boards do not own the mission. They steward the mission.

Most trustees understand this. They come to board service because they care about the institution and want to help secure its future. They bring history, generosity, relationships, expertise, and loyalty. In many organizations, board members are among the institution’s most committed champions.

That commitment is essential to nonprofit life. It is also why governance requires discipline.

In high-stakes seasons, including campaigns, strategic planning, financial strain, public scrutiny, or institutional turbulence, the board’s desire to help can naturally intensify. Trustees may want more information, more visibility, more access, or more involvement. None of that is inherently wrong. In many cases, it reflects responsible concern.

The challenge begins when the institution has not clearly defined how board care should be invited, structured, and expressed.

Without shared boundaries, engagement can become confusing. Individual trustee perspectives can begin to shape institutional direction outside collective decision-making. Leaders can find themselves managing personalities instead of strategy. Staff can receive mixed signals about who is empowered to decide. Community anecdotes can be treated as evidence. Donor preference can be mistaken for mission clarity.

The institution then spends too much energy managing governance ambiguity and not enough energy advancing the work itself. Many nonprofit leaders will recognize this pattern, and almost always in boards filled with wonderful people who care deeply and are genuinely trying to help. That is the cost when commitment begins to function like ownership.

Nonprofit governance is fundamentally different from ownership in a private enterprise. Nonprofits are mission-bearing organizations held in trust for a larger purpose. A board carries real authority: it hires and evaluates the chief executive, safeguards financial integrity, approves major strategy, and protects the mission over time. But authority is not ownership. Trusteeship is powerful because it is bounded.

A mature board understands how close to get to the work.

When a board stays too far above the work, it can become ceremonial. It may miss emerging risk, rely too heavily on polished reporting, or fail to ask hard questions until the consequences are already visible. When a board moves too close, it can become operational. It may slow decisions, create parallel authority, weaken executive leadership, or blur accountability.

The strongest boards know how to stay usefully engaged without becoming managerial. They ask hard questions. They bring perspective. They name risk. They expect accountability. But they do this in ways that strengthen leadership rather than displace it.

That balance is difficult because trustees are often selected precisely because they are accomplished problem-solvers. Many have led organizations, managed resources, built networks, and made consequential decisions. Those strengths matter in the boardroom, but board service asks trustees to exercise them differently.

A trustee’s role is not to personally solve every institutional problem. It is to ensure the institution has the leadership, strategy, resources, and accountability structures required to solve its problems well.

Institutional leaders have responsibilities here, too. Boards do their best work when leaders give them clear context, thoughtful process, honest information, and well-framed decisions. The goal is not to keep trustees at a distance. It is to give their engagement a form that is useful. A board cannot steward well if it is under-informed, over-managed, or only brought into conversations once a decision already feels inevitable. Healthy governance depends on leaders who know how to invite board wisdom without blurring authority, and on trustees who understand how to offer that wisdom without absorbing the work of management.

This is where boundaries become essential.

In nonprofit life, boundaries are sometimes treated as bureaucratic or defensive when in reality, they are a sophisticated governance skill. Boundaries allow a board to ask serious questions because the structure is clear. They allow a CEO, executive director, or head of school to lead with confidence because authority is understood. They allow staff to do their work without navigating competing signals. They allow donors to be engaged through clear and ethical channels. Boundaries also protect the institution from confusing commitment with access.

The most valuable trustees do not need to be involved in everything. Their value is measured by the quality of their judgment and their ability to keep the institution’s long-term mission at the center. They understand that individual trustees may have influence, but only the board as a body has authority. That distinction matters.

A single trustee can have wisdom, generosity, history, expertise, or deep relational capital. But a single trustee is not the board. When this is clear, an institution can benefit from trustee wisdom without being distorted by trustee preference.

These dynamics become especially visible during high-stakes institutional moments: a major fundraising effort, a strategic planning process, a financial challenge, a reputational issue, or a significant change in direction.

In those seasons, boards have an important role to play. They can help clarify priorities, test assumptions, surface risk, and protect the integrity of the process. But the value of board engagement depends on whether it strengthens the institution’s capacity to move forward, or complicates the lines of authority needed to do so.

The same is true in fundraising.

Governance is inseparable from fundraising readiness, though we do not always say it that way. When institutions prepare for large-scale fundraising, the conversation usually begins with the external tools: the case for support, the prospect pipeline, the campaign goal, the donor strategy, the communications plan.

Those tools matter. But donors are also reading the institution beneath the materials.

They are looking for confidence and coherence. They want to understand where the institution is going and whether leadership can deliver. They want to see that the board and executive leadership are aligned around the future being presented.

A compelling case will open a conversation. Institutional trust closes the distance between interest and commitment.

When governance is clear, fundraising can move with confidence. When governance is fragmented or overly personalized, fundraising slows. Donors may not name the issue directly, but they can sense uncertainty. Staff feel it as well. Momentum begins to carry the weight of unresolved internal questions.

Large-scale fundraising is not simply about asking for more money. It requires an institution to build enough confidence that people are ready to invest in its future and in the leadership entrusted to deliver it.

For boards and executive leaders who want to strengthen stewardship, the work begins with honest self-examination. A few questions are worth bringing into board retreats, strategic planning, and campaign readiness conversations:

Where are we adding clarity, and where are we adding noise?

Where are we strengthening executive leadership, and where might we be unintentionally weakening it?

Where do we need more information, and where are we seeking proximity because we are uncomfortable?

How did our committees advance governance work this year? Where did they drift into management work or require too much staff time to shepherd them?

Do trustees understand when they are speaking as individuals and when they are speaking as the board?

Are we hearing from the community through broadly representative channels, or are we reacting to whoever has the most access?

Are we making decisions through process or through influence?

Do our board conversations leave institutional leaders stronger and better equipped to lead?

Are leaders giving the board enough context and structure to govern well?

These questions can be uncomfortable, but they are useful because they move the conversation away from intention and toward impact. Most trustees intend to help. The harder and more important question is whether their form of engagement strengthens the institution’s ability to lead, decide, and move forward.

That is the heart of stewardship.

The mission does not belong to the board, but to the community the board serves, the future it is building, and the public good it exists to advance. The board’s job is to hold that mission with care and discipline. Not as owners, but as stewards.

Continuing the conversation

I’ll be hosting Going Big in FY27: A Leadership Framework for Larger-Scale Fundraising for presidents, heads of school, advancement leaders, trustees, and institutional decision-makers preparing for ambitious fundraising in the year ahead.

This essay touches one piece of that larger readiness conversation. The webinar will look more broadly at what institutions need in place before they pursue bigger goals, from donor strategy and internal alignment to the choices that turn ambition into momentum.

Register here.

April in Boston is cathartic. Opening Day at Fenway, Bean boots shoved back into closets, daffodils in bloom where snowbanks stood just weeks ago, and Marathon banners going up across the city. After a long New England winter, Boston starts to feel like itself again. This has all made me nostalgic for last April.

Last year, I ran the Boston Marathon and launched Tidemark within six months of each other. All this time, I’ve thought of them as completely separate events. One was a physical feat, the other was professional. One required endurance, and the other reinvention. Now, I see them as deeply interconnected.

Both required me to move before I had all the proof I thought I needed.

Before training for Boston, the longest distance I had run was a half marathon, which I completed for the first time only the fall before. There was nothing in my history that made 26.2 miles seem inevitable. I had training, commitment, a “why” that mattered deeply to me, and a growing sense that I was capable of more than I had yet proven.

Launching Tidemark came from a similar place. In some ways, training for Boston may have prepared me for it more than I realized at the time.

I was not building from nowhere. Tidemark is my second entrepreneurial venture. I was building from experience, judgment, pattern recognition, and a deep understanding of the work I would lead. But it still required me to move before every external marker was in place, before there was enough distance from what had come before, and before every “what if” could be unequivocally debunked.

That is what made the two experiences feel so connected. Both only worked once I trusted what I knew myself to be capable of before I had fully proven it.

Like many women shaped by high-performance cultures, I had learned to trust my judgment most fully only after it had been validated. More evidence meant more certainty. My preparation, my instincts, even my own readiness did not always feel sufficient on their own.

I had grown used to treating my own knowing as provisional until something outside of me confirmed it.

I have been thinking a lot about the cost of that, and I am sharing this in the hope that other women might recognize the pattern in themselves earlier than I did. It shows up in leadership all the time.

Women in leadership are often conditioned to over-prepare and overfunction. We are rewarded for being thoughtful, steady, deeply competent, and low drama. These are real strengths. But there is a shadow side to that conditioning. It can leave highly capable women requiring an exhausting amount of proof before acting on what they already know. It can keep us in situations longer than wisdom would advise. It can make delay look responsible when it is really a form of over-accommodation.

It can also make burnout harder to see for what it is. For a long time, I carried symptoms of burnout without fully recognizing them. That is common among high performers, especially in mission-driven settings, where women become skilled at absorbing strain, keeping things moving, and carrying responsibility with very little room to ask what that pattern is costing them.

From the outside, this can look like resilience. Sometimes it is resilience, but sometimes it is over-functioning, and that distinction matters.

One of the harder truths I have come to see is that high-capacity people tend to carry more because they can, and because many of us have been taught, explicitly or not, that this is what leadership looks like.

But the body keeps score. Eventually, what felt manageable starts to feel expensive. What we have previously rationalized begins to register as unsustainable.

In that sense, Boston and Tidemark were not just acts of ambition, but of clarification. Both brought me back into my body, back into my writing, and back into my own voice. Both sharpened my sense of which experiences were life-giving and which were depleting.

That may be one of the less discussed lessons of endurance. It builds capacity, yes, but it also reveals congruence.

The marathon made that lesson literal. There is no bluffing 26.2 miles. There is no shortcut or outsourcing. The distance is yours, and yours alone, to carry. It reveals you. And it taught me more than I even expected. When I shared publicly why I was running, and the story behind the charity I was supporting, my truth became connective, drawing the right people closer and making room for a more integrated version of me to exist.

Building Tidemark did something similar. It required me to stop organizing my life around external permission, or treating intuition as secondary to validation. I had to stop assuming that the most responsible move was always the one with the most precedent behind it, and trust that experience produces its own kind of intelligence. It made me accept that not every next step can be proven in advance.

This is deeply relevant to my understanding of successful leadership.

So many women over-index on proof. They are often carrying a level of rigor that far exceeds what their environments require of others. They do not need one more instruction to be brave, but healthier cultures, better signals, and more permission, including from themselves, to treat their own knowing as meaningful earlier.

Because there is a cost to waiting too long. There is a cost to overriding your own signals until the case is airtight. There is a cost to believing that intuition only counts once it has been translated into language the system respects. There is a cost to confusing loyalty with self-abandonment.

Leadership does require endurance. It requires us to stay with difficulty, build capacity, take the long view, and remain steady when outcomes are not guaranteed.

But leadership also requires discernment. And the ability to recognize when perseverance is building something meaningful, and when it is simply prolonging misalignment. It requires the maturity to ask not only, Can I carry this? but also, Should I? That question changed a great deal for me.

For me, I do not think the deepest lesson of that season was that I became someone new. It was that I needed fewer proof points to trust what I already knew. I became less willing to treat my instincts as provisional. I became less interested in waiting for consensus before honoring what my own experience had already made plain. And I’m no longer available for ways of working that demanded contortion as the price of belonging.

Because true leadership is not endless accommodation, or performing steadiness while absorbing harm. Leadership means forging an honest relationship to truth. And truth requires us to discern whether delay is due to wisdom, or when delay is really fear, conditioning, or over-compliance.

I am building with different materials now. More self-trust, and more alignment between what I know and how I lead. That is what last year gave me.

When certainty and a perfect blueprint are rare, intuition and self-trust matter even more. Last year gave me a clearer sense of what deserves my endurance, and what does not. Women have been taught to wait too long before trusting what we already know. As relational, intuitive leaders, we do ourselves and the people we serve a disservice when we discount that knowing. My hope is that more of us lean into this moment, and into our own intuition, together.

Why culture, leadership, and fundraising can no longer be treated as separate

Over the past week, I’ve been in a few distinct rooms that left me both fired up and strong in my conviction of what many of us are arriving at together: the ground has shifted beneath our feet, and our systems must evolve to meet this moment.

The urgency was palpable across each of these spaces. Too many of our systems have not changed with the moment itself, and we cannot afford stagnation.

Last week, I joined advocates at the Massachusetts State House on behalf of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, sitting with legislators, state representatives, and staff to talk about policy and the human stakes behind it.

The next day, I was at the Boston Globe Working Mothers Summit, in a room of five hundred working mothers and allies listening to women leaders, beginning with the First Lady of the Commonwealth, speak about leadership, health, equity, and the structures that still fail to reflect how women actually live and work.

And I’ve just returned from Chicago, where I spent two days at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute Symposium in another room of five hundred women grappling with how money translates into power, influence, leadership, and change.

As women stand at the threshold of a seismic wealth transfer that will place more private wealth in their hands than at any other point in our nation’s history, they are poised to exercise unprecedented influence over what gets funded, what gets built, what change becomes possible, and who is at the table when it all happens.

These were not rooms full of women content to simply name what is broken, but women ready to do the work of examining systems, questioning assumptions, challenging biases (including facing our own), and pressing for change with courage, while committed to leading that change now. There was a brazen refusal to settle for more conversation around the same old problems.

One line from Natanja Craig Oquendo, Executive Director of the Boston Women’s Fund, has stayed with me since this morning:

“Redesigning (systems) means asking who the design was for, and who was left out of the blueprint.”

This is the question facing our institutions, and all of us, right now.

These conversations, across several days and very different rooms, brought me back to a core thesis of my work:

Culture, leadership, and fundraising can no longer be treated as separate categories.

They are not separate in lived institutional life, and they cannot remain separate if we want our institutions to meet this moment with integrity. Successful fundraising and meaningful community engagement depend on the authentic integration of culture, leadership, and fundraising.

Instead, culture gets relegated to HR. Leadership gets split into camps, with board governance in one lane, senior administration in another, and faculty, staff, and volunteers somewhere else entirely. Fundraising gets treated as a function apart, as though advancement can outperform the institutional experience people are actually having. But it cannot.

In an era shaped by trust-based philanthropy, where diligence is front-loaded and communities are paying closer attention to institutional coherence, these elements must be woven together. Trust does not emerge from fundraising strategy alone. It is built through culture and reinforced, or undermined, by leadership. It is experienced in governance, communication, decision-making, and in the alignment between an institution’s stated values and its lived reality.

Because fundraising serves as a bellwether, institutions frequently feel the effects there first. Campaigns gain momentum or lose it, donor confidence heightens or wanes, community engagement becomes energized and participatory, or it hesitates and misses the intended mark. These are critical signals of whether culture, leadership, and fundraising are working in symphony, or whether fundraising is expected to compensate for misalignment elsewhere.

If institutions want stronger fundraising outcomes, they need stronger alignment. And trust, the key to unlocking our greatest fundraising potential, follows from that alignment. As does the kind of engagement that is deep, durable, longstanding, and values-aligned.

The current system excludes critical voices and delays the change required to build a more just and equitable world. Women and gender-expansive leaders cannot be treated as symbolic participants in that future. They must be fully present in shaping it. And this is not about asking them to step up. It is about dismantling and rebuilding the structures that have kept them from full authority in the first place.

Who is in the room shapes what gets funded, what gets protected, what gets measured, and what becomes possible. When women and gender-expansive leaders are missing from the table, or present without real authority, the future is being designed without the full range of wisdom, lived experience, relational depth, and urgency this moment demands.

This is a call in.

Our systems need redesign, and urgently. That requires honesty about where change actually happens. Institutions are not separate from the people who lead and sustain them. The responsibility to act sits with all of us.

Boards must examine how governance truly functions in practice, not only in intention. CEOs and EDs must ask whether the experience of leadership inside their institutions reflects the values they promote. Senior teams need to examine whether trust, decision-making, and communication are strong enough to support the kind of community engagement they say they want. Advancement leaders must resist the temptation to solve structurally what is cultural. Staff and volunteers must be recognized as part of the leadership ecosystem, not as people downstream from it.

None of this is peripheral to fundraising or community engagement. This is the work.

What moved me over the past week was not simply the intellect or influence in those spaces, but the refusal to pretend that better outcomes will come from institutions that remain structurally unchanged. It was the insistence that culture matters, leadership matters, design matters, and systems produce exactly what they are built to produce, unless someone with power decides to change them. That is the call in.

Not simply to express concern or gather again around truths we already know, only to leave them unaddressed. The call is to examine what our institutions are producing, who they are leaving out, and whether the structures beneath them are capable of delivering a future we will be proud to claim as our collective legacy. Until we achieve that, the work is redesign.

This is the charge and it is ours to meet.

This is a picture of me and my daughter before a dance competition, where I get to witness her learning to take up space.

As a mother, I have come to understand that encouraging your child to take up space also requires modeling it. In practicing that awareness, I have realized something deeper: motherhood may have awakened this consciousness in me, but it is not exclusive to it. We all carry it.

It is the responsibility to show others, and particularly women coming up after us, what is possible. Modeling becomes a form of dismantling, a way of reshaping structures that were never designed to hold us fully. It is not always easy, but it is powerful, because our choices shape how others come to understand what is possible.

Of course, my children are watching me, and that is the most immediate and sacred layer of this. I see it in them as they learn resilience through trying, sometimes getting it wrong, and trying again anyway. I see it in the confidence they carry, something that is both innate and growing, and something I feel a deep responsibility to protect.

The kids and I talk about it in simple terms, borrowed from something another mother shared with me. Each of us carries a flame, and our job is to protect it. Just as importantly, we make decisions about who we surround ourselves with, choosing people who will protect that flame rather than dim it when it burns brightly. It sounds simple, but it is not.

I have learned that this dynamic does not disappear with age or experience. It follows us into adulthood and into our careers, and appears more prominently where the stakes become higher and the consequences more visible.

There are other eyes on us. Women earlier in their careers, and those deciding whether to stay or to leave, whether to speak or to remain quiet, or whether to build something of their own rather than continue trying to fit within something that no longer serves them. I think about them often.

I think about them when I make decisions that would have felt impossible to me at another point in my life, and when I choose not to shrink to preserve someone else’s comfort. This is not driven by a sense of being watched in any performative way, but by an understanding that what we model becomes, in some small but meaningful way, permission for someone else. I was reminded of this in a way that I carry with me still.

After the most difficult season of my professional life, I received a handwritten note from a young woman. She wrote that watching how I navigated a situation that was unmistakably unjust, leaving no ambiguity in my understanding of what was right, gave her an understanding of what it looks like for a woman to hold her ground when it matters. What she could not see was the calculation behind those choices.

I knew the road ahead would not be easy, but I never questioned how I would respond. I was thoughtful in how I moved through it, aware of both the weight of the moment and the responsibility that came with it. And I did not do it alone.

This was a moment when women showed up for me in a way I will never forget, with conviction and steadiness. Some brought expertise, while others offered perspective shaped by their own experiences, including women in my own family who had carried similar moments long before me. Others simply said, “We are behind you.” That steadiness mattered. It gave me the strength to move through the situation in a way I will never regret, and it is something I carry forward.

It also clarified something for me. Motherhood did not make me more cautious; it made me more clear. This is the radicalization of motherhood, and it is a gift.

It sharpened my sense of purpose and collapsed the distance between my personal and professional identities in a way I no longer feel any need to separate. I am no longer interested in building a life where those parts of me are compartmentalized.

Motherhood and entrepreneurship, to me, are both forms of legacy building, grounded in a responsibility not only for outcomes, but for the very conditions in which those outcomes take shape.

I felt this deeply at the Boston Globe Working Mothers Summit, surrounded by women who are navigating both ambition and responsibility in real time. There was a shared recognition that we are not simply moving through existing systems, but actively reshaping them.

I want my children to understand why I leave for a day in the city, or board a plane to attend something like this week’s Women’s Philanthropy Symposium. I want them to know that the world is expansive, and that we step into it not only to grow, but because we have a role in shaping what comes next.

I want them to see that this can be done without shrinking, and without fragmenting yourself into more palatable versions of who you are. If anything, motherhood has made that fragmentation feel impossible.

Because when you understand that there are eyes on you, not just watching what you say, but how you live, you begin to make decisions differently. You live with greater alignment, steady in your truth, and willing to hold the line, even when it is not easy.

And once you understand that, you no longer contort yourself to fit what was never built to hold you. You build differently, and expansively because someone is watching. And they are learning what is possible from you.

It is easy to say philanthropy is changing. What’s harder to name is how, and what the moment requires of us right now.

The data points to a real, measurable shift. Fewer households are giving, even as total dollars remain strong. The adage holds: donors are down, dollars are up. The latest Bank of America Study of Philanthropy shows participation declining while giving per donor increases. Recent insights from CCS Fundraising and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy reinforce the same trend. A smaller group of donors accounts for a growing share of giving, and those donors are more deliberate in how they decide where to invest.

The signals are in plain view, even if the full picture of the shift is still unfolding. That is part of what makes this moment both energizing and, at times, difficult to interpret. It also means institutions need to stay in closer conversation with one another so that understanding the moment can keep pace with change.

We know this is not a short-term fluctuation. The data reflects a broader shift in how people relate to institutions and to giving itself.

And there’s a paradox at the center of it. Participation has declined across income levels, while total giving in the United States approached $600 billion last year. We must be clear that the growth reflects market conditions and concentrated wealth more than a broad expansion of donor engagement.

So what does this mean in practice?

The pipeline is narrowing. And at the same time, expectations are rising. Institutions need to continue deepening major gift work while also creating new pathways for donors to enter and grow over time.

Engagement is evolving, too. Access and recognition are no longer enough. Donors want to see real progress and understand how institutions operate. They want to understand what they are supporting and why it matters. Many want to stay connected to the work as it unfolds. That places more weight on how relationships are built and sustained, and less on recognition as an endpoint.

For many institutions, their current operating model still reflects a bygone era. It assumes steady participation and predictable patterns of giving. It treats fundraising and institutional direction as related, but separate. That distinction no longer holds.

Fundraising now sits at the center of how institutions define and communicate their purpose. The work requires a level of integration that goes beyond coordination. It asks leaders to think about relationships, strategy, and direction as part of the same conversation.

This has implications for leadership.

Boards need to create room for heads and presidents and advancement leaders to test new approaches and learn from them. Familiar practices will not carry the same results in a different environment. Progress will depend on a willingness to try, assess, and adjust.

It also calls for patience and follow-through. New approaches take time to take hold, and early signals are not always conclusive. Leaders need to be thoughtful about where they focus and disciplined in how they stay with the work.

This is where New England has an advantage.

The region brings together a dense network of schools, universities, cultural institutions, and civic organizations. These institutions sit close to the communities that support them. People know them, talk about them, and hold expectations that are both visible and immediate.

There is also a long tradition of civic responsibility and educational leadership. Many donors maintain relationships with institutions over time and across generations. That continuity creates the potential for deeper connection between mission and support.

Those conditions favor a more relational model of philanthropy. They also raise the standard for how institutions show up.

Success in this environment depends less on proximity and more on substance. Institutions need to be clear about what they stand for and able to show the impact of their work in ways people can understand. They need to create ways for donors to remain connected over time, not just at the moment of a gift.

Leadership, in this context, is less about reacting and more about staying oriented.

It means holding a clear sense of purpose while navigating change. It means communicating directly about priorities and tradeoffs. It means building trust through what people can see and experience over time.

It also means recognizing that donors have more choice, more information, and higher expectations than before. They respond to institutions that demonstrate thoughtfulness and consistency in how they operate.

This moment offers more than a need to adjust, but a chance to shape what comes next.

Philanthropy has always depended on generosity, and today it depends just as much on credibility.

New England, with Boston at its center, is well positioned to lead. The institutions are strong, the communities are engaged, and expectations are rising in ways that reward thoughtful and bold leadership.

The path forward is not complicated, but it does require focus. It starts with building relationships that people want to stay in. It continues with communicating impact in ways that feel clear and grounded. And it depends on creating meaningful ways for people to remain connected to the work over time.

This is the work and this is the moment to lead.

Independent schools have experienced a remarkable number of leadership transitions in recent years. Head tenures have shortened across the sector, and many institutions have welcomed new leaders in just the past two years.

Each transition arrives with the community anticipating a definitive question: will this moment slow momentum or ignite a new era? Advancement teams understand how consequential that question can be.

In some transitions, the announcement itself sparks acceleration. Attendance rises, volunteers step forward, major gifts move ahead with profound energy, and the community nearly immediately senses that something meaningful is underway.

In other transitions, the response is more measured. Donors take time to understand the direction ahead, faculty and families watch closely as the new chapter unfolds, and momentum develops more gradually.

Communities form these impressions quickly.

In my recent work with institutions navigating leadership transitions, I’ve seen both patterns. These different responses raise an important question: what helps leadership transitions generate momentum?

The answer rarely rests on a single factor. Instead, communities respond to a set of signals that shape how they interpret the moment.

Governance confidence

Communities watch closely to see how boards support a new leader. When trustees demonstrate unity and alignment around the institution’s direction, that confidence travels quickly through the broader community.

When governance signals are less clear, communities often take more time to understand the path ahead.

Leadership credibility

New leaders are naturally the focus of close attention during a transition. Communities look for signs of trust, steadiness, presence, and direction.

They observe how the leader engages with faculty and families and how the institution’s history is honored while the future begins taking shape. These early impressions influence how quickly supporters feel ready to move forward.

Community invitation

The most successful transitions invite communities into what comes next. Donors, volunteers, faculty, and families want to feel that they have a role in shaping the next chapter.

When supporters feel appropriately included in the work ahead, participation grows and philanthropy follows. When communities are still finding their place in the new chapter, momentum may build more gradually.

Early hesitation does not necessarily determine the outcome of a transition. Communities continue forming impressions long after the initial announcement. As leaders engage openly with faculty, students, families, and supporters, confidence may grow over time.

At the same time, transitions can reveal areas where institutions may need to strengthen alignment between leadership, governance, and community expectations. Addressing those dynamics thoughtfully can help institutions move forward with renewed momentum.

Leadership transitions are not only administrative moments, but community moments that reveal how deeply people believe in the institution’s future. When governance confidence, leadership credibility, and community invitation are aligned, transitions can become profound seasons of momentum.

For boards and leadership teams navigating transitions today, the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, as change will always introduce it to some degree. The opportunity is to lead the moment with presence and direction while inviting the community into the work of the future.

When that happens, leadership transitions become more than a change in leadership, but the true beginning of a new era.

In the strongest transitions, several practical choices reinforce this momentum.

Boards communicate early and consistently about their support for the new leader. Visible alignment from governance sets the tone for the broader community.

New leaders spend significant time listening across the institution before advancing major changes. That engagement builds trust and signals respect for the community’s history.

Advancement leaders serve as an important bridge during these moments. They help translate the leadership transition into a forward-looking narrative about the institution’s future and ensure that supporters understand where the institution is headed.

When that story is clear and shared widely, communities are far more likely to invest in what comes next.

Healthy governance and strong schools depend on a paradox. Authority must remain clear while institutional understanding must be shared.

I’ve been thinking about this balance through what I call the Institutional Trust Triangle, a framework for understanding how leadership, trust, and institutional knowledge move through healthy schools. The model helps explain why some boards and leadership teams work together with ease while others struggle despite strong intentions.

In schools, we tend to talk about leadership as though it resides primarily in the head of school’s office. But institutions are rarely shaped by one leader alone. This is especially important to remember as we consider the burnout that can follow years of operating as though the head of school must carry the full weight of leadership alone, a model that is increasingly unsustainable as modern leadership evolves.

Anyone who has worked closely with schools understands how much institutional leadership depends on strong relationships among trustees, the head of school, and the senior leadership team. When those relationships are healthy, the institution functions smoothly and leaders are able to focus their energy where it matters most.

The strength and stability of a school depend as much on its governance structure as on the leadership of any individual. The relationships among trustees, the head of school, and the senior leadership team create the architecture that allows a school to move forward effectively, with experts leading in their areas of expertise rather than being slowed by politics or unnecessary process.

When governance works well, it becomes a steady and trusted foundation for institutional life. Trustees provide strategic stewardship while leadership focuses its energy on the mission and the daily work of the school.

Trustees focus on mission stewardship and long-term direction. The head of school leads the institution with vision and authority. Senior administrators bring operational experience and institutional insight that help both trustees and the head understand the work of the school more fully.

Each group plays a distinct and essential role. When those roles are well understood and the relationships among them are strong, leadership becomes more effective and institutions become more resilient.

One way to understand this alignment is through the Institutional Trust Triangle.

The triangle represents three essential elements of institutional leadership.

Board of Trustees

Trustees safeguard mission, steward resources, and guide the long-term direction of the institution. This responsibility includes thoughtful succession planning and governance frameworks that support institutional continuity.

Head of School

The head of school leads the institution, shaping culture, direction, and the daily work of the school.

Senior Leadership Team

Senior administrators provide the expertise and operational understanding that allow the institution to function effectively and evolve over time.

The triangle does not imply equal authority among these groups. In healthy governance, the board governs through the head of school, and the senior leadership team operates under the head’s leadership.

But authority alone does not create strong governance. Healthy schools operate with a productive tension, and authority remains clear while institutional understanding is shared.

In some schools, information flows only upward through formal reports. Trustees make decisions with limited context. Senior administrators rarely interact with the board. Over time, the head of school becomes the sole interpreter of the institution for trustees.

In stronger systems, the structure remains the same but the relationships look different. Trustees gain insight into the institution through thoughtful engagement with senior leaders. Senior administrators understand the board’s strategic priorities. The head of school remains the central leader while ensuring that understanding flows in multiple directions.

Authority remains clear, and understanding becomes shared. When this balance is present, governance becomes more stable and leadership becomes more sustainable.

At the center of the triangle sits something equally important: continuity.

Leadership transitions are among the most consequential moments in the life of any school. Institutions that remain strong over time are intentional about leadership development, succession awareness, and governance structures that support stability across generations of leadership.

Leadership roles in schools are forms of stewardship, held for a time and then passed to the next generation. Trustees, board chairs, heads of school, and senior administrators all serve the institution before passing responsibility to those who follow.

None of this requires more meetings or heavier oversight. What it requires is well-defined roles, strong relationships among leadership, and a shared commitment to the mission of the school.

Healthy institutions rarely rely on a single leadership relationship alone. Instead, they cultivate trust among trustees, the head of school, and the senior leadership team.

When those relationships are aligned, the triangle holds. And when it does, schools are able to focus their energy where it belongs: on students, on mission, and on the future they are building.

Leadership, culture, and philanthropy are not separate disciplines. They are reflections of the same institutional health.

The Institutional Trust Triangle offers one way to understand this alignment. I look forward to exploring its implications for leadership and governance in future writing.

This week I had the pure joy of watching my daughter dance at her first competition of the season.

She’s eight and already seems like a preteen much earlier than I anticipated. I’m in awe of her ability to wrangle her nerves and fear and go in.

When she first started dance, there were many moments when nerves got the better of her, like first day at the studio as a tiny six-year-old, first recital, first competition, first class with the big girls. None of these firsts came easily, and there have been times she clung to me before walking into the room. But every time, she made the choice to go in.

We’ve talked since about what might have happened if she had given in to her nerves and opted out. We talk about the joy she would have missed; the wins, the friendships, the jumps in her technique, the bonds she’s built with these incredible dancers in her studio. She would have missed all of the good stuff if she never went in.

And each time I watch her take a breath and go, I think about the parallel to leadership.

In leadership and philanthropy (and entrepreneurship), we’re always considering how we move the bar higher and achieve bigger goals.

And there is only one way to start.

There comes a moment when we must decide to go, commit to the movement, trust the step, step fully into the choreography instead of hovering at the edge of it. This has everything to do with leadership.

There’s always a moment when leaders face the same choice. We can stay near the perimeter. Keep things safe, measured, carefully calibrated, and operate in the no-fail zone where it’s comfortable.

We can lead with one foot slightly outside the moment, or we can go in. Going in means committing and trusting the mission enough to step fully into the work.

It means trusting the team. For my daughter, it’s trusting the dancers beside her. For leaders, it’s trusting the board, the leadership team, and the strategy so the institution can move forward together.

When that happens, people feel it. Your team feels it. Your audience feels it. Your donors and community feel it too.

Momentum builds when people recognize conviction when they see it. And the extraordinary, whether on a stage or in philanthropy, begins in that moment.

Leadership lessons show up in the most unexpected places.

Amid the frenzy of headlines and footage came reports that a girls’ school in Iran had been struck amid escalating conflict, with civilian casualties mounting. When violence reaches a classroom, it is hard to regard it as distant, whether near or far.

This morning, I sat with the awareness of how quickly the atmosphere around our work can shift.

There are seasons in advancement when the work feels clear and forward-leaning, and when outreach carries a natural rhythm and momentum. And then there are times when the world alters that rhythm, and what once felt timely suddenly feels misaligned. On such days, even a carefully crafted, scheduled email can land in a way that feels untimely or insensitive.

The question that arises is not political but human: how do we continue moving mission work forward when grief and fear feel tangible around us? How do we honor the weight of the moment while still honoring the responsibilities entrusted to us?

Experience has taught me that crisis does not eliminate mission, though it does reshape its context. Leadership in these moments becomes less about speed and momentum and more about discernment and steadiness.

Over time, I have learned that urgency and importance are rarely the same. When the world feels unsettled, it can simultaneously seem insensitive to proceed and irresponsible to pause, yet most outreach can withstand a brief period of reflection. A short pause seldom harms long-term momentum, while communication sent from a place of anxiety often carries that strain with it.

It has also become clear that the internal posture of the leader matters. Messages shaped by fear of falling behind or pressure to maintain appearances tend to transmit that tension. When steadiness is prioritized before action, tone and timing align more naturally.

Advancement work can feel small in comparison to visible suffering. Yet institutions that educate, heal, convene, and serve are woven into the fabric of community life. Continuing that work with care is stewardship, particularly when communities most need stability and belonging.

In periods of disruption, begin internally. Advancement professionals are human beings before they are fundraisers, and an acknowledgment that the moment feels heavy can create a permission to be human, and a steadiness that extends outward. From there, intuition and decisions about communication tend to emerge with more clarity.

Discernment, in the end, is part of the work itself. Not every crisis calls for a public statement, nor does every headline require silence. Leadership resides in the space between reaction and retreat, where choices are guided by values rather than playbooks.

The deeper question is not whether we proceed, but how. If our work cannot endure in the presence of suffering or affirm the dignity of human life when that dignity feels most vulnerable, then it has lost its grounding. At the same time, if we withdraw entirely when the world is unsettled, we risk forgetting that our institutions exist precisely to strengthen communities in uncertain times.

Perhaps we can’t resolve global conflict, or control the headlines that shape our days. What we can determine is the posture we bring to our responsibilities.

In fractured moments, steadiness becomes a form of leadership. Humanity does not require allegiance to a position, but it does require attention to the people entrusted to our care.

If you find yourself pausing over a drafted message in the coming days and weighing whether to send it, you are not alone. Discernment is not hesitation, but a hallmark of responsibility. Often the most responsible course is neither silence nor speed, but thoughtful continuation.

There is a place in every advancement operation where relationships deepen in a way that cannot be manufactured by a campaign timeline or an ask strategy. That place is stewardship.

In the donor lifecycle, cultivation and stewardship are described as separate phases, but in practice I think of them as a continuum. The gift does not conclude cultivation, but changes its texture. When stewardship is intentional and relational, the work of deepening trust continues seamlessly rather than resetting after each transaction.

Donor stewardship is the quiet discipline of making impact visible in ways that feel personal and specific. Early in my career, a mentor I immensely admire, and now call a friend, placed Donor-Centered Fundraising by Penelope Burk in my hands. (Thank you, Laura!) What has endured in my own practice is a philosophy: donors give because they care, and caring deserves attentiveness that is relational and sustained over time.

Annual reports and formal impact communications are essential and should remain rigorous, as they establish credibility and transparency. Yet stewardship as a superpower extends beyond formal reporting. It includes remembering the anniversary of a transformative gift and sending a note that simply acknowledges what that gift set in motion. Or recognizing the anniversary of board service, a reunion year, or a birthday in a way that feels natural rather than procedural. It might take the form of a brief message sharing a photograph from a classroom or a rehearsal space with a line that says, “This happened because of you,” allowing the donor to see themselves inside the outcome.

This is where an institution has the opportunity to become pristine and unforgettable. It is time well spent, not because it immediately generates a next gift, but because it reinforces the relationship that makes future generosity possible.

Stewardship should never be deferred to a single individual as though it were a narrow function within advancement. It is a team endeavor that benefits from varied voices and vantage points across the institution. A philanthropist should experience their impact through faculty, through students, through senior leadership, through trustees, each interaction reinforcing that their investment is known and felt in more than one office. When stewardship is shared in this way, it signals coherence and care rather than compartmentalization.

One of the most effective tools for bringing this discipline into practice is the Individual Stewardship Plan, or ISP.

An ISP is a relational blueprint reserved for those philanthropic partners whose investment shapes the trajectory of the institution in meaningful ways. Select twelve to fifteen of your most significant donors and determine who truly necessitates this level of intentionality. The ISP is not meant to be universal; its power lies in its selectivity.

For each individual or family, create a calendar of meaningful touchpoints that reflect who they are and what they value. This might include an invitation to a university choral concert because music has always been part of their story, or an opportunity to offer brief remarks at an independent school assembly because their journey embodies the mission in action. It could involve front row tickets to a college football game alongside the president, allowing conversation to unfold in a shared experience, or a planned visit in Palm Beach in the spring when you know they are in residence and receptive to connection.

Choose four touchpoints that are intentionally anchored in the calendar and protected from competing priorities, then allow additional moments to arise organically as authentic opportunities present themselves throughout the year. The calendar provides structure so that stewardship is not left to chance, yet the execution must always be human and genuine. The aim is to be thoughtful rather than formulaic, attentive without being orchestrated.

The purpose of the ISP is not to manufacture access or engineer sentiment. It is to ensure that gratitude is expressed with intention and consistency. When this approach is embedded across a team, something shifts. Faculty understand that their presence carries relational significance. Senior leaders recognize that a brief appearance can communicate care. Students see that their words matter. The philanthropist experiences the institution not as a single point of contact but as a community that recognizes their role within it.

Institutions often focus their energy on the art of the ask. And stewardship invites equal attention to the art of staying present. When practiced with discipline and authenticity, it strengthens relationships tenfold.

A week before the Olympic downhill, Lindsey Vonn tore her ACL in a training run and was airlifted off the mountain. Most stories would end there, but this one didn’t.

Lindsey is famous for the full send. It’s in her DNA to ski so close to the limit that when she said she would leave nothing on the course, commentators admitted it made them nervous, because with her, giving everything has always meant accepting the risk that comes with it.

Quoting her longtime coach and mentor, Erich Sailer, she returned to the line that has become synonymous with her approach to risk: “It’s only 90 seconds. What’s 90 seconds in a lifetime?” That is her leadership calculus.

Culturally, we tend to talk about failure as a verdict, or as evidence that something went wrong. But at the highest altitudes, failure works differently. There, falls are merely evidence of velocity and motion.

Lindsey didn’t crash because she lacked discipline or preparation. She crashed because her risk was so calculated that she chose to operate at the limit of what was possible, not because of how she might come undone, but because of what awaited her at the podium had she not had that single wobble. She trained doggedly, with deep respect for the cost of injury, because she knows it intimately. And when the moment arrived, she sent it.

She’s known for having an unusually high number of wins because she has an unusually high number of injuries. That’s how she operates.

Leadership works similarly. When we aim for adequacy, we can optimize for safety. But when we aim for greatness, when we try to build what does not yet exist, change systems that resist change, and lead in ways that require imagination as much as endurance, impact becomes inevitable.

We do not achieve firsts without falls. We do not move systems without resistance. We do not reach the highest altitude without unforgiving terrain. And as we climb higher, fewer people accompany us.

Failure, then, is not a detour on the path to excellence. It’s the cost of entry.

Leadership at altitude requires two distinct disciplines: knowing when to go full send, and knowing how to fail up.

Transformational leadership does not come from doing what has always been done. It comes from performing in moments that have not existed before. Chasing excellence feels unstable precisely because the past cannot fully instruct you. Precedent runs out. You are making the path as you move upward.

When ambition outpaces precedent, failure becomes data, so that when we pick ourselves up, we can get it right. This is what it means to fail up.

And let me be clear. Failing up does not mean lowering standards. If anything, it means refusing to lower the mountain. It means accepting that when you move faster and higher than what previously existed, the ground meets you differently. Only those who are moving upward can fail up. Failing up is not permission to abandon accountability; it is a deeper commitment to it.

This distinction matters profoundly at the executive and governance level. When leaders and boards understand that a path can fail without the mission failing, they create room for honest assessment, course correction, and sustained momentum. The alternative, treating any deviation as disqualifying, does not produce excellence. It produces caution, which eventually leads to smaller ambition.

Failing up requires discernment. Restraint is not the same as hesitation. Lindsey did not go all in everywhere. She held back in training to protect her body, preserving energy and reducing risk, knowing she would lay it all out on the Olympic course.

Leadership works the same way. Wisdom is pacing and discipline. Courage is knowing when not to hedge, when the moment matters, when ninety seconds carry the weight of a lifetime.

Failing up is evidence of proximity to the limit and the pursuit of greatness. Properly understood, it is not cultural leniency, but protection against institutional drift and quiet underperformance.

The leaders I trust most are not those who have never fallen. They’re the ones who did not lower their aim after they did, and hold pride in their scars.

It has also meant normalizing gentleness alongside brazenness in pursuit of a real diagnostic. Praise matters for morale and momentum, but it does not, on its own, make us more excellent. Excellence requires the discipline to debrief honestly, to ask not just what worked, but what we would do differently next time, and to resist the comfort of repetition simply because something once succeeded. When we find ourselves doing the same thing again and again without interrogation, that is where risk lies.

The full send also requires clarity about resources and focus. Just because a leader can do everything does not mean an institution should depend on that elasticity indefinitely. In my work, I have seen how preserving and conserving strategic energy, while deliberately expanding capacity where it matters, creates the conditions for bold decisions to succeed. That kind of readiness is how we ensure that when the moment comes to go all in, the infrastructure and trust are already in place to support it.

Fail, because we all will. But fail up, because greatness doesn’t happen by repeating the past. It happens by fully inhabiting the present, risk of falling and all, choosing ambition over comfort, and understanding that doing something new, doing it differently, doing it at scale will carry impact in its wake.

That is the price of excellence at altitude, and it is worth paying.

With gratitude to Lindsey Vonn, whose career continues to define grit and the full send.

The early months of building have lent themselves to what feels like an extraordinary luxury: leaning fully into curiosity. I’m recognizing patterns in conversations and digging into theses through reading, meetings, and questions explored with thought leaders I’ve long admired.

In that process, I’ve spent recent months examining the expectations placed on women in leadership through my own experience and through conversations with women leading across sectors. Again and again, I encounter the same underlying tension: women are leading at the highest levels with extraordinary skill and commitment, while still operating inside cultural norms that have not caught up to the roles we occupy.

The Tide Report exists to examine moments like this, when leadership practice evolves faster than the institutional cultures meant to sustain it. This essay is offered as both a reflection shaped by those conversations and an invitation to look more closely at how our institutions support, or constrain, the very leaders they depend on.

We are living in what I think of as the after-the-firsts era of women’s leadership. The question of whether women can lead has been decisively answered. Women lead today across sectors with depth, judgment, intuition, and range. Authority is exercised differently, and decisions are made differently. And yet, many institutions have not learned how to fully receive that leadership.

The questions this moment begs are: what is quietly expected of women once they reach the senior ranks of leadership? Which expectations persist, even as leadership itself has changed? How do those norms continue to shape women’s experience of authority?

Women lead at meaningful scale across education, philanthropy, healthcare, finance, civic life, and beyond. My daughter does not need to imagine what it looks like to see women in authority. She sees it everywhere. That progress is transformational, and it matters.

But while women are taking seats at the highest rungs of the professional hierarchy in increasing numbers, the norms that govern authority have not been fully recalibrated. Culture is lagging behind credentials.

In many institutions, particularly those shaped by long-standing power structures, women occupy senior leadership roles while operating inside professional cultures designed for a different era. Even institutions that aim to uplift women are not exempt from perpetuating these norms, particularly when women who learned to navigate them come to sustain them, often without realizing it. Many institutions are actively trying to evolve in good faith, even as they inherit cultures shaped by a different time.

What we are experiencing is not resistance, but lag. Power has moved faster than the norms that govern it, and leadership cultures have not evolved at the same pace as the leaders they now depend on.

Across sectors, women are increasingly leading with lives that are visibly integrated rather than carefully partitioned. They name elder care, invisible labor, burnout, or flexed hours for school drop-off as part of ordinary life. These moments run counter to leadership models that quietly police which priorities are considered legitimate once authority is conferred. They represent progress. And still, they can carry a cost.

Women parent while leading. We carry conviction and responsibility into our work. We reject the fiction that authority requires emotional absence. Like men, we lead with judgment, commitment, and moral responsibility. Yet we remain subject to outsized scrutiny for how those qualities are expressed. We are conditioned to calibrate confidence so it does not read as arrogance, to soften conviction so it does not register as intensity, and to regulate our energy across professional, family, and community expectations. These pressures shape daily decisions about how much of oneself is permitted in the room.

Most women learn these rules not explicitly, but through observation. We watch which women advance and which are labeled difficult, fragile, or too much behind closed doors.

Like many women, I learned to soften my tone, choose my seat strategically, and float ideas tentatively so I could read the emotional weather before sharing more fully. I monitored my presence and, in doing so, withheld parts of myself.

For a long time, I believed this was professionalism. Only later did I recognize it as fragmentation, the quiet contortion of self required to meet outdated expectations. In diminishing myself, I reinforced standards that no longer serve us. Worse, I modeled them for the younger women who were watching. See how easily these norms are passed along?

I observed how, in women, silence was rewarded as composure and conviction treated as risk. Under these definitions, what passed for strength was often a narrowing of self.

That leadership model implicitly rewards steady output and reliable competence while significant parts of lived experience are kept out of view. Over time, the cost accumulates. It shows up as exhaustion that cannot be explained by workload alone, as second-guessing instincts that should be trusted, and as a narrowing of presence that masquerades as professionalism.

Burnout, in this sense, is not a function of volume. It is the long-term cost of sustained self-editing in cultures that require it.

And the erosion is not only personal. Institutions lose judgment and continuity when women leaders are required to regulate their humanity rather than exercise their full authority. Many women lead while invisibly carrying caregiving, community responsibility, moral conviction, and the unacknowledged labor of stabilizing people and systems around them. These are not distractions from leadership. They are sources of it.

I eventually wrote about my own experience with grief in an essay published to a national audience, hoping, if I’m honest, that no one I knew would read it. I am grateful now that they did. What surprised me was how many people connected through that sharing. The response revealed how many women were carrying similar complexity quietly, waiting for permission they had not been given.

For the first time, I stepped into a leadership identity that did not separate the professional from the personal. What followed was not diminishment, but connection across roles, sectors, and circumstances. Again and again, women shared their own moments of reckoning. The details differed, but the weight was familiar. Far from eroding trust, those exchanges deepened it.

And yet, despite this lived evidence, we continue to enter professional spaces with our frayed edges carefully edited out. We present only the most polished version of ourselves. Institutions lose something essential when that happens.

Which raises a quieter question: if leadership becomes stronger when women are known more fully, why does concealment still read as professionalism?

It is important to name that stepping outside these norms can carry risk. But that cost is negligible compared to what institutions lose when women are asked to fragment themselves in order to remain legible in power. It is also negligible compared to what becomes possible when we refuse to do so alone.

When women leave leadership, their departure is often framed as a personal choice rather than a cultural signal. More often, it is a rational response to cultures that have failed to evolve alongside modern power.

The after-the-firsts moment we are living in demands more than celebrating women’s presence in leadership. In many fields, women are still only beginning to reach meaningful representation at the most senior levels. Equitable pay remains a battle still being waged. The work is unfinished. And this moment requires recalibration.

Institutions that want to retain experienced women leaders and cultivate the next generation must examine not only who holds power, but what that power requires in return. They must ask whether those demands are sustainable and whether they allow women to lead as their full selves. Recalibration, however, is not only institutional. It is interpersonal.

This moment also asks something of us as leaders. It asks whether we are willing to show up whole, even when doing so feels risky. Whether we are willing to resist the quiet narrowing long rewarded as professionalism. And whether we are willing to stand beside one another, offering protection rather than silence, when the cost of wholeness appears.

Leadership does not become stronger through concealment. It becomes stronger through presence. And cultures change when women no longer have to fragment themselves, or carry the cost of integration alone.

We stepped into this work because we believe, perhaps quietly, perhaps fiercely, that institutions can be forces for good. That education, philanthropy, and nonprofit work are ways of advancing missions that matter to us, and of shaping the world we share. We believe that justice matters. That people matter.

Those reasons have not changed. What has changed is the ground beneath our feet.

We are living in a time of uncertainty, in a country that, in many ways, feels unfamiliar. Norms that once felt stable now feel contested. Assumptions we relied on feel less certain. For many leaders, there is a sense of disorientation, of trying to lead responsibly while the larger context shifts around us.

In moments like this, it can be tempting to retreat, narrow our focus, tell ourselves that our role is simply to manage what is in front of us, and not to engage with what feels overwhelming or beyond our reach.

But retreat has never been why we chose this work.

If you are a head of school, a university president, a nonprofit executive, a chief advancement officer, a foundation leader, or a trustee, you hold more power than you may realize. Not power in the loud or coercive sense, but the kind that shapes culture: the ability to name values, to set tone, and to influence what is normalized and what is not.

Culture moves before policy. It always has.

Long before laws change, people decide what they will tolerate, what they will defend, and what they will refuse to accept as inevitable. Institutions, especially those rooted in mission, learning, and service, play an outsized role in that process.

Leadership in uncertain times is not about having all the answers. It’s about remembering who we are, why we’re here, and what we are responsible for holding steady.

This moment is not an exception to that calling. It is an expression of it.

So what does leadership look like now?

Not grandstanding, or perfection, or even unanimity. It must exist through presence, unwavering hope, clarity of values, and above all, the courageous choice not to look away.

Here are a few ways leaders can act, starting where we are:

Reaffirm the values that brought you here.

Justice, dignity, belonging, and care are a few of mine. Naming these values publicly and privately reminds people, and ourselves, what our work is in service of.

Use your voice in the spaces you lead.

Boardrooms, classrooms, donor conversations, internal communications, and community gatherings all shape culture. Speaking with calm moral clarity steadies others.

Ask questions that keep institutions honest.

What are we normalizing without meaning to? Whose experiences are being centered or ignored? What kind of world are our choices helping to build?

Align resources with purpose.

Budgets, partnerships, hiring, and funding decisions are expressions of values. Small, consistent alignment matters more than sweeping declarations.

Lead in community, not isolation.

No one is meant to navigate this alone. Conversation, collaboration, and shared courage make leadership sustainable.

None of this requires abandoning nuance or complexity. All of it requires remembering that leadership is relational and moral.

If the world feels uncertain right now, that does not mean our purpose is unclear. We are here because we believe institutions can make life more just, more humane, and more hopeful. And that belief is not naive. It’s foundational.

This moment asks us not to retreat, and not to despair, but to stand right where we are, use the influence we hold, and move forward together.

Culture moves before policy. And together, through our work, we can, and we will, shape the world we share.

Consider reaching out to someone who reminds you why this work matters. We do this best together.

Every so often, something surfaces that feels worth naming off schedule. This is one of those moments.

Over the past several months, I’ve been returning to a core truth that sits at the center of Tidemark’s work.

Leadership, culture, and philanthropy can no longer be treated as separate domains. They are deeply interdependent; each shaping, reinforcing, and influencing the others in real time. When one shifts, the others respond.

Across conversations with leaders, teams, boards, and donors, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern: moments of strength or strain in any one of these areas are rarely about strategy alone. They are almost always rooted in a shared underlying condition.

Trust.

Trust is the single element that moves fluidly across leadership, culture, and philanthropy; shaping how people experience decisions, how communities respond to change, and how willingly donors invest belief alongside capital.

Trust isn’t built in one big moment. It’s built in hundreds of small moments that accumulate toward distance or toward belonging.

Tidemark’s core thesis is simple but increasingly unavoidable: leadership, culture, and philanthropy are integral to one another. Institutions can no longer strengthen one without attending to the others. And trust sits at the center of all three.

Trust sits at the center of institutional life

Trust is not confined to internal culture, nor does it live only in donor relationships. It is experienced simultaneously across an institution:

• Among colleagues who rely on one another

• Between staff and leadership during moments of uncertainty

• With donors who invest not just capital, but belief

• Within communities who watch closely for alignment between values and behavior

When trust is strong, institutions feel coherent and resilient. Leadership holds, culture breathes freely, and philanthropy flows.

When trust erodes, everything becomes harder. Fundraising grows cautious or transactional, culture turns performative, and leadership spends more time managing optics than truly stewarding people.

Trust functions like a climate

Trust is best understood not as a moment, but as a climate.

It is shaped over time by patterns:

• How transitions are handled

• Whether contributions are acknowledged or quietly absorbed

• How truth is received when it’s uncomfortable

• How consistently values are lived, not just stated

Climate isn’t determined by a single storm. It’s defined by what people experience day after day.

When the climate of trust is healthy, people feel safe enough to be honest, stable enough to take risks, and confident enough to invest emotionally and financially.

When it cools, people don’t always leave right away. They withdraw, they hedge, and they wait. Philanthropy slows. Distance grows.

How trust is built, and how it erodes

Trust is built through small, often unremarkable choices:

• Presence over process

• Acknowledgment over silence

• Consistency over convenience

• Care in moments when nothing is required

Trust is eroded just as quietly:

• Silence where recognition is warranted

• Process replacing presence

• Decisions made without context or care

• Misalignment between stated values and lived behavior

Over time, people don’t disengage because they lack commitment. They disengage because caring begins to feel unsafe or unseen.

The Monthly Trust Scan

A practical leadership discipline for tending the climate of trust.

Trust isn’t assessed annually. And it isn’t repaired in crisis. It’s shaped in accumulation.

The Monthly Trust Scan is a simple practice leaders can return to, especially in moments of pressure, transition, or uncertainty.

Each month, pause and ask:

1. What uncertainty remains unnamed?

Silence rarely preserves trust.

→ Where can I offer clarity, context, or a timeline, even if the answer is incomplete?

2. Who has contributed quietly?

Trust deepens when people feel seen without self-promotion.

→ Who deserves acknowledgment this month, especially behind-the-scenes contributors?

3. Which feedback loops are still open?

Unclosed loops cool trust faster than disagreement.

→ Where do I need to follow up, even if the answer is “still under consideration”?

4. Where has distance crept in?

Trust erodes less from conflict than from disappearance.

→ Have I been present, responsive, and accessible in the ways that matter most?

5. Who is getting quieter — and why?

Withdrawal is often the earliest signal of trust strain.

→ What patterns am I noticing, and what curiosity is required before correction?

6. Where are values stated but not fully lived?

Small misalignments compound quickly.

→ What is one decision, behavior, or signal I can bring into closer alignment this month?

A final thought

The climate of trust doesn’t shift through intention alone. It shifts through conditions consistently reinforced.

Trust is always accumulating, toward distance or toward belonging.

If this reflection resonates, I’d welcome the conversation.