Spring 2025

Elizabeth: And then suddenly it was the middle of May. Here, where I live in Durham, North Carolina, the bright blush of early spring has deepened to a darker green and the mulberry tree in my backyard is heavy with ripe purple fruit. The cicadas have resumed their evening serenade and two nights ago I saw my first firefly. We have been blessed with another cool, damp spring. Weeks on end of 70 something weather makes the punishing heat that we know awaits us this summer feel worth it. I wrote in an email to someone overseas, “the weather forecast seems to be about the only good news coming out of the United States nowadays.”

Last month when Ellie, Will, Charlie and I traveled to Portland, ME for the Farm to Institution New England conference it felt like time traveling. There, hardly a bud or leaf to speak of, and on one of the days it snowed hard. Packing for the trip, I grumbled about having to pull out the winter coat and sweaters I had recently put to bed in a box in the basement. But when I ducked out of the conference to see the fresh falling snow, I felt only unabashed delight.

We went to Maine to host a two-hour session along with Eastern Food Hub Collaborative members exploring anti-competitive food hub networks. (Keep reading below for more on that by Will.)

We took advantage of being together to stick around Portland to have one of our quarterly in-person meetings together – where we balance out long sessions of “working on our business” with a hearty amount of wine, local food, and, per my insistence, shopping – mostly for hand-thrown ceramics.

Each season when we facilitate ourselves through these in-person get togethers, one of the first things on our agenda is always to review the cultural agreements that we laid out together back during our very first meeting as Seed Change Strategies. Together we answered:

·   What do we need to work with joy, ease, and connectedness?

·   What do we need to work efficiently (and how important is efficiency to us)?

·   What do we need to do the kind of work together that we want to be doing? That we feel proud of?

·   What do we need to make decisions effectively and collaboratively?

·   What do we need to handle conflict?

Some of them are admittedly a little bit silly. (My favorite might be “We recognize that it is essential for all of us to go camping sometimes, together and separately.”) But re-reading them now, they resonate deeply. Here are a few that stood out:   

·   We recognize that working with ease will not be easy. Ease requires discipline, competence, autonomy, relatedness and wellbeing.

·   We can’t succumb to jadedness, ennui, or any of the other symptoms of burnout. When we’re struggling to work with joy, we will call it out; and we will work together to support each other through those times.

·   We will strive for fearlessness in how we work together. To get there, we acknowledge and accept that we’ll all make mistakes, miss cues, ask silly questions, miss appointments, and eat someone’s leftovers by accident. When we do, we’ll take ownership, but we won’t hold it against each other.

As we’ve grown, we’ve had to create new ways of actualizing these values. After our retreat last summer, we decided we needed to more consistently seek and receive feedback. Now, once a week, every week, we give one another applause (recognition for good work) and offers (feedback for how you might improve). Giving and receiving feedback frequently felt a little uncomfortable at first. But by practicing this consistently, we’ve built our muscle for feedback and have grown to really love and rely on this process. 

If Seed Change Strategies has a canonical text, it’s Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. There’s a paragraph in Emergent Strategy where brown talks about her own experience building organizational culture that I keep coming back to:

“Being a part of this team has been incredible. We have experienced what it’s like to release any assumptions that one person has to have all the skills needed to lead and support the work. That release – a huge relief to me personally – allowed us to really begin to weave together our strengths, rather than facing the limitations of relying on one leader to hold the vision, coordination, fundraising, and programmatic work of the group. It has allowed us to face our own personal limitations with transparency and curiosity, noting where we want to grow and not being afraid to ask for feedback. On the average day, it feels like a highly functional organization working for change. On the best days, it feels like the world we are trying to create, and it is marvelous.”

At a time when it feels like so much is out of our control, it’s important to remember that each of us has immense capacity to influence our relationships, communities, and organizations just by how we show up for ourselves, for each other, and for this work. As we plan for the rest of 2025 we know that we’ll have bad days, we’ll have good days, we’ll have great days – but every day, no matter what, we have each other and we have the culture and the systems we have built that ground our work in our values, our friendship, and our highest hopes for the future. 

You can read our cultural agreements here and if they spark any curiosity or inspiration in you, then please reach out. We would love to hear from you and are happy to share anything that helps.