Leading With Love and Finding Joy in 2025

Once upon a time, if you were in a relationship, receiving a mixtape filled with songs that remind you of your evolving journey together was a significant milestone. As a grants management professional back in 2010, I was surprised when a package arrived at my office from PEAK. While it didn’t contain a cassette, it did include a letter inviting me to be part of this growing network. I could practically feel the love jumping off of the page. Ever since, the PEAK community has surrounded me with a mix of knowledge, inspiration, and love. Even in rough times, I’ve been blessed to feel a sense of well-being and belonging in our community that reminds me that joy at work is possible. No matter the headwinds that came my way, this community’s constant beat of love and support has helped me to navigate those challenges with resilience.

We need a new vision to introduce more joy and love into how we engage in a sector where the love of humankind is our modus operandi. Under the guise of “professionalism,” certain ways of connecting as humans become inappropriate. In All About Love: New Vision by the immortal sage bell hooks, she says, “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”

Meaningful connections are essential to nurturing the movement building necessary to address our most challenging issues, including how we show up for one another at our organizations and in coalition. Our call to act also includes how funders engage with and show up for nonprofits. For years, PEAK has called for funders to move from transactional giving to forming deep, long-term partnerships with grantees and the communities they support. Making that shift is not easy for some, but our feeling of connectedness with others can make a world of difference in an unpredictable climate.

Many of us are anxious about the future and the world our children will inherit. Whether their inheritance includes equal access to opportunity and joy depends on us, adding weight to a nonprofit sector that reports feeling undervalued and burned out. Sadly, the work of direct service organizations will only get harder as they work to fill gaps that are being systematically widened. Furthermore, we’ll need to go about the work of protecting and strengthening the social sector differently.

In a sector where we often dwell too long on the problem instead of moving expeditiously to invest, per bell hooks, every “available dollar in the solutions, bringing love into the center of our practice can seem naive.” Let me be naïve and proclaim that love is a central reason I come to work at PEAK every day.

The many ways in which we can show up for each other—a mixtape of actions, if you will—both charts where we are in our relationship right now (the grieving process) and affords us the support we need to create a stronger us on the other side. While there have been some dark days in the past year, this network knows how to tackle hard things. I have deep appreciation for the philanthropic sector and how it can direct its resources toward unsupported people and areas of need. Right now, I have to believe in philanthropy’s promise, and I’m relying on the visionaries in our sector more now than ever. That vision and promise comes not from the CEO, it comes from everyone, working together and contributing your ideas and insights. This includes every PEAK member who can be a leader—regardless of their title or position—in driving change.

When I reflect on 2024, a huge source of my joy was the PEAK staff. Their brilliance and resilience is remarkable. Every day, they show up focused on supporting you—our members—and being a solid partner to other philanthropy-supporting organizations in our sector who, like PEAK, are experiencing wins and bumps in the road in equal measure of late. The best part of my job is trying to be the best colleague I can, modeling what it is to thrive and fall short, to boldly share my learnings and failures, and to steward a community of care amongst us that I hope ripples out to our members.

And I think we’re doing something right. We closed our year having grown to 600 member organizations and more than 9,000 individuals, with 15,000 followers on social media. While funding to support our work has waned, each week, PEAK has the fortune of hearing from you, and we’re pleased beyond words when you credit our work as a factor that helped you be an agent for change and good in our sector. Our collection of peer groups, our thought leadership, and our annual convening have been PEAK’s mixtape to this community; evolving along with the times and your needs. It fills us with love to see our members keep jamming to the tracks we’re laying. Your belief in the PEAK community is evident in how you show up, openly share, learn from one another, and help to make the PEAK community the tightly knit and supportive place that it is.

I’m coming into my fifth year in this role and setting a course for what I hope is an impactful year of growth and learning for me, the amazing PEAK team, and each of you.

It’s not always easy, but together we can lead courageously and demonstrate a commitment to promoting a sense of well-being, joy—love, even—through our grantmaking practices. At a time when the very important work of our sector is under great scrutiny, we can let love be a verb for our community, helping us stay centered as we drive toward change and transformation.

We will remix this sector, and we will one day soon dance to more joyous music.