Good Endings

Katya’s Story

This is Katya’s story — co-written with Helia and told from her perspective!

I want to be clear: there wasn’t a dramatic “thing” that happened. No scandal. No sudden crisis. That’s important context for what I’m sharing.

The Full Frame Initiative was founded in 2009, though I’d been running it as a project for years before that. We’ve been remarkably successful at what truly matters—durably changing how governments and communities interact, and how people perceive and behave toward each other, to advance the idea that everyone deserves a fair shot at wellbeing.

My background is in evolutionary biology, which shapes how I think about change. I’ve always been suspicious of how we fetishize individual leaders or organizations, because I know how much context and serendipity and cumulative forces matter in making progress. Relationships matter. Real change happens through movements, not heroes or heroic organizations.

Over the years, we developed a deep theory on creating durable systems change, drawn from real success on the ground. We were largely foundation-funded, with some individual major donors and earned income balancing out the picture. When COVID hit, we were in the final stages of a major growth campaign. We, and our partners, were logging big wins. 

At the same time, something was shifting in the funding landscape. Everyone talked about systems change, but they were trying to programmatize it rather than addressing how systems themselves were broken.

By 2023, fundraising was increasingly difficult, particularly getting in front of prospective new foundation funders.

I’d been planning to take a sabbatical when COVID hit; I finally did in 2023, and when I returned, we learned a major funder was changing direction. We moved into 2024, which proved to be the worst fundraising year in terms of new donor acquisition I’d experienced in my nearly 30 years running nonprofits.

Post-sabbatical, I brought the executive team into more financial management as part of a commitment to increasing shared leadership. We weren’t out of money. We hadn’t laid anyone off, but it was increasingly tight in a way it hadn’t been for a decade. In retrospect, I should have better normalized the reality that nonprofits face tough times — especially for team members who had only experienced leadership at FFI and other organizations during periods of financial stability. That closure is a reality that needs to be okay to name, and to be able to do so without it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. All of our planning was about moving forward, and that was what I was committed to, but I suspect that even naming it as a possibility in the summer made it seem like something being actively considered by other members of the Executive Team. That may have been scary. 

When a key team member announced their departure in October, I spent the next 72 hours in conversations with our board and executive team. It became clear that rebuilding the executive team while simultaneously shifting our fundraising strategy would prioritize organizational perpetuity, potentially at the expense of the mission.

I kept thinking about organizations that shuttered suddenly, like Benefits Data Trust, which closed with just three weeks’ notice. All the attention went to lawsuits and employees—and almost none to the communities who depended on their work.

I kept coming back to the idea that how you leave matters. Leaving is what folks remember. We’d made promises to communities in Cleveland, in North Flint, in places where we worked. If we tried to keep going and the money really did run out, we too would shut down suddenly. After just trying to keep the organization alive, we would hurt communities that had already experienced too much trauma.

That wasn’t the organization I wanted to run. We’ve always been values-led and made hard decisions based on those values. Why throw them out now?

Over the course of about a week, we decided on an intentional wind-down with three clear goals: take care of our team, take care of our partners, and ensure our mission lives on.

In mid-October, we started talking to staff before we even had a complete plan, which goes against all conventional advice. We went back to our core donors and made a case for funding the wind down — for releasing restrictions on existing funding and for adding more dollars to the pot so we could do this well. Beyond that, we stopped fundraising immediately. We started working with our allies and partners to figure out what it would mean for the work to live on. By December, we had clarity: we could continue our work well through May, with a path forward for everyone.

That we had funders we could go to who were so responsive is really unusual. I know. And it made me realize that part of our ending well has to be making the road so others could follow. Because without funding, ending well is much, much harder. 

Something unexpected and really magical was happening.

We started to feel an amazing energy shift. People reached out saying, “You can’t unsee this work,” and “What do I need to do to keep this going?” We invited those who had meaningfully supported our work to create a community of champions to keep the work moving forward, across the country. Today, there are over 100. Nineteen of these champions were invited to be stewards who agreed to shepherd the work for 18 months after we closed.

We kicked off the “Champions Community” with events with powerful art and music, sharing in the community all the ways policy and culture are shifting to center wellbeing equity, and opportunities for people to connect. We’re ending well with our partners, and it’s been genuinely energizing to tap into people’s desire to be part of something that continues beyond any single organization. I invited about a dozen staff to work with me to end well between October and May, and every single one of them has done so, completely locked in on supporting each other and the mission, and doing some of the best work we’ve done. I’m incredibly proud of them.