Read the letter from FFI’s Founder & CEO Katya Fels Smyth about our journey winding down the organization over the past eight months and how the work will continue.
Dear Friends and Allies,
It is a strange thing, this experience that something I was told for decades indicated failure – nonprofit closure – instead is closer to a triumph. Not a raucous, celebratory triumph. But the quieter triumph born of bushwhacking an alternate path to something better, when common wisdom suggested there wasn’t a way forward beyond the rutted road we were on.
I was warned how lonely these last months would be, but they have been less lonely than the two years preceding. I was warned that people would say they’d help and then not show up, but allies have shown up before being asked.
I was warned how much it would hurt, and it has hurt. But there’s a difference between hurt that’s like shrapnel lodged under the skin, poking and burning day after day, and the hurt that indicates healing – the hurt of witnessing and honoring the evolution of work that has been m heart and my hope for 20 years. It’s an evolution to something beyond me, the founder, that’s different and resplendent and wobbly, all at once. In this way, it is warm and welcome. And still, it hurts.
It is an unsought blessing to be able to lead as authentically as I have these last eight months, without contorting to attract the attention of potential donors. It is an honor to be part of a team so unerringly committed to purpose. Every person invited to stay through this transition – 11 staff, four fellows – showed up with a contagious care that fed each other’s energy and built resolve among our partners across the country. We shared an electric intent not to waste what we’ve been afforded: the chance to accelerate the achievement of significant systemic change milestones over a few months, rather than petering out. Unexpectedly, we’ve enjoyed a clarity, stability and front-row seat to hope that is at odds with what so many reading this post have experienced in the last few months.
Our work ends May 30, so this is a month of gutpunch lasts. Last Senior Fellows meeting. Last staff meeting. On and on. I’ve been pushing myself to remember that while “last” can mean terminal, it also can mean durable, and that the transition of FFI’s mission from the organization to a network is how the mission will last. Sometimes an organization must end for a mission to live on.
Determining how the work lasts and grows beyond FFI has been up to a “we” so much bigger than FFI. Over 50 partners from the last 15 years helped set the course, and hundreds more have taken up oars to row. Over 100 Champions accepted FFI’s invitation to forge a community committed to carrying the work forward across geographies, fields, sectors, centers of power. Nineteen Stewards are shepherding this transition through 2026. Each Steward has made wellbeing real in their respective fields, agencies and communities in powerful, profound and durable ways. FFI is expanding our library, releasing over 150 resources “from the vaults,” almost all with Creative Commons licensing so that Champions and Stewards and you can not only use the work, but evolve it, making it better, stronger and more relevant in the months and years to come.
It’s not all tidy. I’m not the only one on our team not sleeping particularly well. We don’t all have jobs or know our next steps. The state of our nation is fragile, exhausted, defiant and dissonant. Team FFI and the community of Champions are not immune to this. The need for moving the US towards a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing is more salient than ever, although my early fury that we’re closing when we’re so effective, needed and in demand is tempered by the recognition the work is living on. Indeed, this lasting mission smacks of possibility and pugnacious optimism. It is a bright spot in a turbid national sea. The partners keeping the work moving forward are a web of lights, catching and sharing solutions.
Whatever your role in this, thank you. Our work, grounded in the radical belief that we all deserve a fair shot at wellbeing, was unlikely from the start. For more than 15 years, our successes showed what was possible when people see things differently. Our ability to make this final transition was unlikely, too. There aren’t playbooks for what we have done together. And this work, these successes and this ending hold lessons far bigger than FFI.
I am now certain of what I suspected last fall: the price we all pay for work that ends without intentionality is deeper than lost knowledge, momentum or political will. Trust among groups and across lines of power turns rancid when endings are traumatic. When there are alternatives to breaking promises, when power can be distributed rather than consolidated, we have an obligation to act accordingly.
The work of shifting power so that those closest to the healing or harm can guide this future is not for others to do. It’s for each of us to do. We must reject the hubris of nonprofit and foundation perpetuity, and fund and support what needs doing now. We all are needed to create the space necessary for evolution, for better endings for what cannot continue. Indeed, right now, wherever any of us is in this ecosystem of social change and justice, we are all needed. Full stop.
My request to each of you is simple. Carry the flame of wellbeing in your work, home and community. Use the resources on our website. Lean on the wisdom and resolve of the Champions and Stewards to work together to shift the frame and show what’s possible. Be indefatigable in your search for and protection of bright spots: community and national efforts whose tenacity and value you can feel in your bones. And because we cannot, and should not, save everything, do not let FFI’s accomplishment over these last eight months be a singular feat. Instead, use us and our example to challenge your own and others’ assumptions about nonprofit closure. Build on our demonstration that good endings reduce hurt and harm, and can even launch new beginnings.
To be able to do work that calls my soul so deeply and engages my mind so fully has been a humbling honor. I count so many exemplary leaders within FFI and across the country as delightful accomplices in the work of transformative change. There is no sweeping statement of gratitude for your partnership in the work, including a good ending, that can capture what needs communicating. I look forward to telling you each directly.
How people, communities and institutions leave each other matters, deeply. Now, it’s FFI’s time to leave. Now, it is up to all of us to keep moving the work of FFI forward, to keep finding the solutions in our midst. It is up to each of us to bushwhack to something better, and to chase the opportunities on the other side of endings.
Onward,
Katya Fels Smyth
Founder & CEO
