Community
Our infrastructure of resistance and hope.
Community,
We’ve got you on our minds right now. So much in the world around us feels out of our control. It can be hard to know what action to take or how to really make a difference. In the face of the extraordinary chaos and harm happening everywhere, when we’re desperate for a dose of hope and optimism, we turn toward our greatest source of inspiration, aspiration, and renewal: our community. And that is you!
Right now, we’re also thinking a lot about how to be more active community members and stewards, and how we more intentionally nurture, broaden, deepen, and serve our community. It feels more important than ever to double down on our values, and act upon our commitment to the work we do and the expanded community we do it with.
As we consider how to engage our people, all of you, in new ways that help us weather these challenging days together, we reflect on the different dimensions of our community that show up in our work and lives. How they are like three concentric circles - a ‘small c’ community inclusive of those most proximate to and intimate with us; a ‘middle c’ community representing friends of friends and peers of peers, who are just a degree or two removed; and a ‘big c’ community of those who may be least proximate to us individually but part of the larger ecosystem we navigate and hope to impact.
We think of our “small c” as each other - the women of this practice who hold and sustain us, who celebrate our wins and catch us when we stumble, who remind us why we do this work when it feels hard. We show up for each other with love, grace, and a hell of a lot of laughter.
Our “middle c” is humbling in its reach and impact, and we are grateful every day to be in such excellent company. It’s the candidates we engage, coach, and champion, including leaders navigating impossible loads and responsibilities, wrestling with decisions about whether to take that leap, whether they’re “ready,” whether they belong in rooms they’ve been told weren’t meant for them. It’s the hours spent on the phone helping someone see their own brilliance, or walking them through a difficult negotiation, or simply bearing witness to their journey. It’s also our inspiring peers and collaborators across the social impact space: the extraordinary constellation of search firms, consultants, coaches, and practitioners who share resources, swap insights, and hold each other accountable to doing this work with integrity, and support the work of making positive social impact every day, year after year. It’s the clients who become friends, the candidates who become colleagues, the coffee chats that turn into ongoing partnerships. This middle circle is where so much of the relationship-building, truth-telling, truly seeing, mutual resourcing, and sometimes healing happens. It’s where we learn from each other, challenge each other, and lift each other up to keep going.
And our “big c” community? For us, in our day to day work, that’s the organizations, agencies, and individuals doing the hard, necessary work of pushing back and fighting for justice and liberation. We’re fortunate to work with clients like the New York Immigration Coalition who are on the frontlines right now, defending immigrant communities when they’re under direct attack from our own government. Or Amnesty International USA taking on human rights injustices, domestically and around the world. When we place transformative leaders in organizations that are actively resisting harm and building toward liberation, we’re not just filling roles—we’re strengthening the infrastructure of resistance and hope.
This is why our work matters. This is why your work matters. The candidates we meet become the leaders who shape these organizations. The organizations we support become the movements that protect our communities. And the community we build with each other, across all three circles, becomes the foundation that keeps us going when everything else feels like it’s crumbling.
So for 2026, with our focus on community, we’ll be hosting a series of intimate conversations (join us for our first one on Feb 27) to make public the ongoing discussions that are top of mind and most close to heart. The kind of discussions that have kept us going all year, that center how we’re supporting each other, how we’re charting new paths, how we’re surviving, changing, resisting, healing, leading, preserving hope, and on our brightest days, how we’re thriving.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
All of us at Axis
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Any of your favorite civilian action & mutual aid campaigns
Topics Suggestions for our Conversation Series
P.S. Highlighting some of our favorite resources for civilian action & mutual aid below.