As the year comes to a close, I want to pause and reflect on what we have built together at For A Loving Future—and how we are orienting toward what comes next.

Our work reflects the values of this community, and it has been built collectively. It is important to us to name this clearly, because Loving Future has been shaped not by a single role or pathway, but by many different forms of contribution—each of which has mattered.

While For A Loving Future is formally four years old, it is structurally young and relationally long-formed. The relationships that ground this organization reflect a thirty-five-year journey. The trust, practice, and shared language that hold this work did not begin with incorporation; they were cultivated across decades of organizing, leadership, and community life.

People have contributed to this organization in many ways: through board service; sustained community participation and active feedback; accompanying leaders and their organizations during periods of high stress and uncertainty; supporting key leaders as they navigated rupture, volatility, hostility, natural catastrophes, and political targeting; trust-based problem solving; shared learning experiences; and the deepening of relationships over time. Contributions have also included supporting our internal systems-strengthening processes, creating bilingual learning spaces, hosting us internationally, funding the Solidarity Fund, and—at times—contesting our ways of working by naming conflict and rupture when alignment was strained.

We are naming this breadth intentionally. Part of our responsibility is to help our community understand the full scope of what this organization holds—not only what is visible or comfortable, but what has required care, endurance, and ethical clarity.

This work has unfolded in a context of institutional misreading that, over time, has taken the form of coherence rejection. In many cases, the deepest points of tension have emerged inside institutions we care about most. We have often pushed hardest with and for those institutions—naming risks, contesting harmful dynamics, and advocating for ethical coherence precisely because of our commitment to their stated missions. Within conventional institutional frames, this level of engagement has sometimes been misread as the pursuit of personal agendas or internal positioning, rather than as principled effort to strengthen institutions from within.

The material impact of this coherence rejection has been real: constrained access to funding, political exclusion, retaliatory withdrawal of support, and moments of internal sabotage. These responses have not come from a single source. They have emerged across multiple locations of power—within organizations, through philanthropy, across adjacent institutions, donor networks, and through individual actors—often reinforcing one another. Because of our positioning and the relational traditions we come from, we were not initially aware of the cultural and institutional contexts that would interpret our approach in this way, and there were moments of genuine confusion as dismissal replaced engagement.

This organization has also had to withstand moments of intentional harm, alongside the more familiar pressures of scarcity, misinterpretation, and institutional rupture. For A Loving Future has endured multiple stress tests over the past several years, and it is stronger for having moved through them with integrity intact.

A core part of this integrity has been our relationship to extraction. We privilege ethical alignment and relational accountability over personal affinity, political positioning, or issue-based agreement, and we refuse extractive engagements—of knowledge, labor, resources, legitimacy, or proximity—from us or from the communities we accompany. This stance has not always been convenient, but it has been essential to maintaining trust, coherence, and long-term responsibility.

This past year has not been defined by expansion or visibility for its own sake. It has been defined by continuity—and that continuity is itself a feat. In moments of uncertainty and uneven capacity, relationships held. Conversations continued. Learning deepened. People stayed in motion with one another, even when clarity was incomplete. From these relational patterns, we have been slowly and deliberately formalizing structure—developing governance, systems, and practices that reflect how the work actually happens, rather than forcing relationship to conform to pre-set institutional forms. Structure has followed relationship, not the other way around.

Two key practices have emerged clearly from this year’s work: coherence leadership and coherence creation. Coherence leadership names the responsibility of holding relational integrity when conditions are volatile—staying oriented to values, ethics, and long-term responsibility rather than short-term control. Coherence creation names the collective work of rebuilding shared meaning where it has thinned—through language, practice, and relationship—so that people and institutions can move together without distortion.

Loving Future remains a women-of-color–led organization, and the women who steward this work are deeply ethically aligned. We prioritize shared commitments to how power is exercised, how conflict is handled, how accountability is practiced, and how people are treated—especially under strain—because those commitments determine whether work can endure.

Within this collective effort, my role has been to anchor these shared values and model their practice: to hold coherence when it is strained, to remain accountable to relational process, and to help ensure that how we work stays aligned with what we say we value.

Looking ahead, Loving Future is orienting toward a period of consolidation and accessibility. Our focus is on ensuring that what has been created is usable, transmissible, and grounded in real relationships.

We are not moving toward scale for its own sake. We are moving toward durability.

As a small gesture of gratitude and care as the year closes, I also wanted to share a Christmas playlist I created for this season. It follows the same spirit that has guided our work this year—quiet, grounded, hemispheric, and meant to be lived with rather than performed. You can listen here.

Thank you for the many ways you have contributed to this work—formally and informally, visibly and quietly. I look forward to continuing what we have built together in the year ahead, with clarity about our role and care for what we are collectively carrying.