Reading for Leading Change–January 2025

We recommend these recent articles as you seek out new inspiration and innovative approaches to nonprofit leadership and social impact.

There is No Leadership Without Risk
Particularly in our current divisive and polarized times, we need courageous leaders, and leaders need our support. We appreciated this timely call to action by Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, in this New York Times opinion column. “Courageous, moral leadership demands more. Because it challenges us to recognize that bringing light is often worth enduring the heat, especially in moments of profound challenge for our democracy, our communities, and our world. … We penalize bold leadership when we should be rewarding it. Inequality has created the conditions in which the American people are both desperate for leadership and programmed for corrosive cynicism about seemingly anyone who offers it. … Effective leadership requires managing nuance and complexity, seeing all sides of an issue from the perspective of every stakeholder, and then setting a course and communicating with clarity, consistent with common values.”

Year Compass
The Year Compass is a free downloadable tool that provides structured personal reflection questions to look back on the past year and think ahead to the next. We appreciate the Compass as a personal guide to help mindfully close out the year and set intentions for the coming one.  

10 Ways to be Prepared and Grounded Now That Trump Has Won
This analysis published by Waging Nonviolence says that “the key to taking effective action in a Trump world is to avoid perpetuating the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion, and disorientation.” Ways to prepare and be grounded as our new federal administration comes into power include trust yourself, find others who you trust, grieve, release that which you cannot change, find your path, do not obey in advance or self-sensor, reorient your political map, get real about power, handle fear and make violence rebound, and envision a positive future. There are many pathways for taking effective action — find the one that suits you:

What have you read lately that helped you lead your organization? We’d love to hear about it.