Annual Report

Remember 2025? What a wild ride.

Round-ups of the year (which I love) from newsletter writers are expected to arrive in our inboxes at the end of said year. But this is an Annual Report. And Annual Reports need time to collect the full year's worth of data. So, with that reframe, here it is. Right on time.

1. Mission

I met only 1 out of 3 of my core goals for 2025. But it was the most important one: take mum on a wonderful trip to Uluru that she loves.

The other goals were about my art practice and my social justice consultancy. They were ambitious, perhaps even visionary goals. But I didn’t connect them with the enormous daily actions they would have required to achieve. I got part of the way there. Which isn’t bad.

After this helicopter ride, Mum sat in the passenger seat beaming. "I feel like I'm a cat purring."

2. Work

I did work I truly, truly loved in 2025. Here are some highlights.

Expanding Our Frame

For Pratt Design School

A human-centered design workshop for the DEI Coalition at Pratt’s Design School. You can read more here.

The Me Manual Workshop

For The United Way

An An anti-burnout workshop that direct service teams actually love. Each person leaves with a personalized user guide to thrive. AKA a Me Manual. You can read more about this here.

Peer to Peer Workshops

For ATLAS

What if everything we need exists inside community? Peer-to-Peer workshops created structured spaces to learn from each other’s lived expertise—because the people doing the work understand the problems most deeply and often have the best solutions.

The Wisdom Gift Exchange

For The United Way

A celebratory (and literally sparkly) year-end practice where people share the wisdom they earned the hard way—the lessons that cost them something to learn. When we hold the heavy things lightly, we can gift that wisdom forward.

You can read more about it here.

Communications Strategy

For PS Wrx

This start-up organization is doing extraordinary work, and I had the privilege of partnering with the CEO to develop some of their communications in 2025. I’ll share more about this another time, but boy am I grateful to be working with this leader and this team on this heart-centered structural shifting work.

Program Strategy

For Various Clients

From an architect launching a new initiative to a social justice organization refining their approach—helping people design programs that work for their specific context and community.

Program Facilitation

For Tythe Design

I was one of a community of facilitators that Tythe Design organized for the public Fair Housing Workshops being held across the city. I had a blast. Tythe Design is one of the most robust and credible orgs in the social impact space and, if nothing else, I highly recommend downloading their Community Engagement Almanac.

3. Objects of Civility (OoC)

OoC is a long term passion project originally funded by an Independent Projects Grant from the The Architectural League of New York and The New York State Council on the Arts.

OoC is an experiment - can physical props and tools assist in fostering civility across adversarial groups?

Here are a few of the OoCs I designed and developed in 2025:

Making The Invisible Visible

A powerful tool for bringing the lived experiences of a community to the surface.

For example, look at these amazing results from the powerful ATLAS community. Many have had a depth of human experience beyond most others (times when they’ve not had enough food, shelter, or safety), and now in their current role as family therapists, most are intensely proud of the person they’re becoming.

The anonymous dot-sticker format creates a visualization: ome people walk lightly through the world, while others carry significant weight, even within the same community. Read more here.

An early version of this idea at a court-room exhibition.

Me Manual

Over 200 justice workers now have a Me Manual. Isn’t that kind of amazing.

What is a Me Manual? It's a personalized guide to thrive, of course!

Justice and frontline workers face a distinct and complicated series of factors that contribute to burnout and vicarious trauma. This OoC is designed to tend to that - so they can release stress and return to building a just world. (AND even have fun!)

Participants building their personalized Me Manual.

Mapping

Mapping is a practice I’ve developed to help us hold a spacious sense of curiosity around our experiences.

Inside justice organizations, Mapping has been particularly helpful for surfacing the personal impacts of stressful events or the accumulated weight of sustained vicarious trauma. By literally seeing these events on the page, we create distance between what happened and what we make it mean.

Maps take various forms depending on the issue they’re addressing.

Read more about Mapping here.

1:1 Map Sessions

I’m offering 1:1 Map Sessions through February 13. In these sessions, I listen deeply as you share, and draw a map in real time.

The map acts like a sieve: mental chatter falls away, and your deeper wisdom is captured on the page. What remains is a distillation of your inner knowing, mapping a way forward.

Sessions are one hour over Zoom and offered on a sliding scale of $120–$240.

4. Financials

In recent years, it felt as though I was bleeding money. I’d look up from a financial leak and peer through time to catch the eye of my 80-year-old self. Sorry, I’d shrug guiltily. But this year, a combination of (1) making better choices, (2) being more consistent with said choices, (3) loads of good luck (aka finding people I love working with and no literal pipes bursting) meant I stopped the bleeding.

Hurrah!

When I told my friend Irina—after all, “stop the bleeding” was a money mantra she’d given me after reviewing all my finances with me in LA back in summer 2024—she sent me an embroidered robe and a “good work” note. I now wear her robe on Fiscal Fridays like a champion boxer as I punch the air, then sit down and diligently pay attention to my finances.

Other highlights: I filed my taxes on time! (With an extension, of course. But on time for that extension!)

This year my goal is to build back a steady financial ground. Things like clearing debt, building a personal emergency fund and, ahem, health insurance.

Beautiful (and powerful) Irina with the thank you card I sent her.

5. The World

What is there to say?

It feels as though we’ve spent decades painstakingly separating the mold from the yeast. And as we were finally getting ready to bake bread, a bunch of drunkards crashed into the kitchen and began kneading the mold back into our dough. Stomping, and cackling, and slapping each other on the backs. Undoing our decades-long work within minutes. Gleefully.

Just this past week they stepped back to admire their handiwork and decided to piss in the yeast bowls for good measure. The weirdest thing? They eat the same bread as us!

In 2025 I couldn’t cope with all that without becoming immobilized. So I turned my attention to the civic scale of my local neighborhood—and poured my generosity there.

As a consequence, this year my heart’s capacity is stronger and more expansive. I’ll be contributing at the civic scale of The City. This is exciting. (And who knows, at this rate by 2027 I could be taking on the world.)

Here's a reminder of the Scale of Civility I developed last year. Each scale is important. I recommend pouring out your civic generosity at the scale that doesn't break you—that might even have you feel good.

6. Community

Oh I’ve run out of space! Just joking! There’s ALWAYS space for community.

But I will write another newsletter dedicated just to community. How returning to community (over and over again) in 2025 grounded me and made me stronger.

In the meantime. Here are two photos of me resting during that weird in between week just before New Years.

Wishing you all a courageous hearted 2026!