Every few years, the ground seems to shift under our feet.

I started consulting for social good in 2009, during the throes of the Great Recession, when funding seemed to evaporate nearly overnight and organizations across Charlotte were forced to rethink their business models on the fly. We did it again in 2020, only that time the challenge was more operational than philanthropic: How do you serve people during a pandemic? How do you maintain community when people are working from home, schools are closed and social distancing is suddenly a public health imperative?

And now, here we are again.

Federal policy changes are creating new financial pressures for nonprofits and the people they serve, with consequences that may ultimately prove even more significant than either of those earlier periods. The rhetoric around the work has shifted too. A focus on racial equity that was relatively quiet for years became ubiquitous after 2020 and now, in many circles, feels practically persona non grata. Ideas, language and assumptions that seemed settled only a few years ago are being reconsidered in real time.

Seventeen years into this work, 12 of them through Next Stage, I have seen a lot of change. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering less about what all of it means for organizations and more about what it means for the people leading them.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with and get to know so many remarkable people across the Charlotte region. These are people who inspire me with their vision, creativity, and capacity for hard work. Many of them founded organizations because they saw something in the community that needed to change. Others stepped into leadership roles and stayed long enough to see the city itself transform around them.

And I started wondering: How are these times treating them? Are they still energized by the work? Are they taking care of themselves? Will they still be here for the next big disruption, whatever that turns out to be?

Those questions have become more personal for me, too.

Next Stage is arriving at an exciting crossroads. We are becoming more fully what I have long wanted us to be: a social innovation company, pioneering new approaches to collaboration, peer learning and the way people and organizations solve complex problems together. That evolution has me thinking differently about my own role, too. What is the work I am uniquely suited to carry forward? Where can Next Stage contribute something genuinely new? And how do we build on everything we have learned over the past dozen years to shape what comes next?

I also realized I missed people.

As Next Stage grew and our work expanded beyond Charlotte, my own role changed. I spent less time doing the stakeholder interviews, coffees and long conversations that had once been central to how I experienced the work. I became more buried in running a company and delivering projects. Somewhere along the way, I lost some of the proximity to people that had drawn me to consulting in the first place.

So this summer, I started calling people.

Each month, I’m sitting down with a handful of leaders I admire for conversations about what I’ve come to think of simply as “the work.” We talk about how their work has evolved, what feels like a job well done, and what remains unfinished. We also reflect on how they understand their life’s purpose and what they believe lies ahead.

There isn’t one answer to what purpose looks like over the arc of a career. There probably shouldn’t be.

What I’m interested in is the evolution.

The thing you set out to do at 35 may not be the thing you feel called to do at 45, 55 or 75. Or, for others, the thing you chose to do earlier in your career has taken on even more importance the deeper into it you've traveled.

The road to here is rife with change. Organizations mature. Communities change. The world throws new challenges at us. We learn things. We get tired. We get re-energized. We let go of old assumptions and sometimes, if we're lucky, rediscover the ideas that mattered most in the first place.

These are weighty conversations, and the fact that people are willing to have them with me feels like a gift. I’ll publish one essay each week on the Next Stage blog, then reflect on the collection at the end of each month. I'm planning this as a series for a full year, through September 2026. I'm calling it The Work in Progress because the work is unfinished.

And, thankfully, so are we.