Out of Season / In Season / Unseasonal
Out of season typically refers to a food that is unavailable or has to be procured from far away because nearby conditions are insufficient for it to grow and thrive. I think there’s a lot in this agricultural and commercial phenomenon that speaks to the growing sense of unease or “out of synch”-ness permeating our work in the sector, in the broader world, and (for some of us) within.
It has to do with the ways in which we may be finding it harder to flourish under hostile conditions, how we think about limits and make choices about tradeoffs we’re willing to make, and how we calibrate what we really want and need.
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I’m still haunted by an observation made in April by Naaima Khan that some of the fatigue she’s seen permeating the sector is not strictly burnout so much as it is a dissonance between the work people are doing and what they believe in. She writes:
“People are being asked to carry strategies they don’t fully believe in and still make them work.”
She is naming that there’s a gap, or tradeoff, when our organizations pursue strategies in conditions that do not allow them to take root, or when they set measures that ignore the complexity of how change truly happens. And that this comes from conforming to what systems holding the power and resources (yes, the very same systems culpable for root inequities) will tolerate.
Like NPQ’s Alison Stine suggested in her April newsletter note “Nobody Said Anything About the Air,” which reflects on how to circumvent the restrictions of a homeowner’s association to grow a home vegetable garden, Khan advises us to consider how we might grow into the gap. She prompts:
“What does it take to build strategy that can actually hold under pressure without requiring you to abandon your analysis, your values, or your relationships to do it?”
It’s about how to find and hold our own integrity, given the limits we’re bound by, while also recognizing where we remain free.
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One of the most important ways of exercising and cultivating more freedom is through our gift of radical imagination. Over the past months, I’ve seen many here on LinkedIn creating spaces for collective imagining and visioning. One is futurist Tracee Worley, whose “Seneca Falls 2048” workshop series engages participants in “creating artifacts from a matriarchal future.” This is a powerful act of imagining and prefiguring, by literally making, the future we want.
In a recent Women Changing the World podcast with Lis Best, Worley describes this process of futuring and why “matriarchy” doesn’t mean what some might assume. She also invites us to see the ways that matriarchy is already here with us, so that practical visioning can be about “how to strengthen it and infuse it into all the places it needs to be.”
This is hopeful work, but rooted—not naïve. In a 2025 Mother Jones article, Worley acknowledges that futurism isn’t always good at “mak[ing] room for darkness or pessimism.” Rather, she would have us “expect that things will change, surprise, and collapse” and to “know that you can survive it, but you need to be more communal in the way that you approach it.”
The call for collective imagining is a radical one. Our online-all-the-time culture isolates us from one another while so-called “generative” AI steals, mimics, and tries to sell back to us our human capacity for imagination. It is critical for us to find ways to push back, if we think as Worley does: that “our imagination is our most underutilized resource to get ourselves the fuck out of this nightmare.”
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Another meaning of being in or out of season refers to hunting, and what is “fair game.” This is a dark aspect, considering who is being hunted and who fancies themselves hunters in an age of ICE terrorism at home and genocidal brutality abroad. As ever, the language of othering dehumanizes those perceived, persecuted, and prosecuted as “animals.”
The devaluation of life by those who relish in killing as a form of control is being echoed in wildlife management policy. Among the Trump administration’s rollbacks of common-sense regulatory guiderails is the reintroduction of M-44 cyanide bombs, banned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management since 2023. Used to lure and poison inconvenient wildlife like foxes and coyotes, M-44s are indiscriminate in their lethality, accidentally killing pets and injuring children.
Action: Sign to urge the BLM to bring back the ban on M-44s
(Center for Biological Diversity)
The government has also declared “open season” on not only our organizations and institutions but on free thought and knowledge itself. From the attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center to the OMB ruling that would make public funding subject to ideological litmus tests, nonprofits seem to be on the menu—targeted like an undesirable species to be controlled, culled, or eradicated.
Action: Push back on the proposed OMB changes
(National Council of Nonprofits)
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Amid all this, I’ve been heartened to see friends and colleagues (including those I’ve not met yet, but who seem kindred spirits) making compassionate space for grief and healing.
In an article for Community Centric Fundraising, Esther Saehyun Lee gifts us with a gently incisive (Is that a thing? It is now.) naming of the many faces of grief we’re living with as humans in the nonprofit and philanthropic (i.e., love of humanity) sector. Lee echoes the same sense of a gap noted earlier between the work we want to do and the work we are constrained to do within hostile systems. Her article uniquely stares down this gap from the fundraising and resource development space, treading the tightrope between money and mission in a capitalist frame where wealth operates as a weapon.
Lee argues that this unaddressed grief keeps our visions for our organizations small, and she calls for us to work to process it not individually, but collectively.
Facilitator and coach Michael Kass makes a similar observation about the connection between our feeling and our doing. In this brief video, he talks about how our embodied feelings show up in our smallest actions, arguing that the same is true in how we approach organizational decisions and strategies and that operating from a reactive or negative feeling state has a different effect than if we are able to—like an improvisational actor—embody a different “desired” feeling. It may be difficult (it is for me) to accept what sounds a lot like “act as if,” but it too is a form of imaginative futuring—is it not?
As dominant culture conditions us to separate and alienate ourselves from our own feelings, reclaiming the connection between what we feel and how we move in the world is its own act of resistance.
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Christina Jones, principal of Humane in the Membrane, has also shared wisdom from her work with nonprofit leaders and the fundamental importance of being always in relationship as whole people. Her way of being pushes against the false separation between feeling and action, or our deepest selves and the roles we play in our changework. Two of her recent posts come to mind.
One shares an anecdote that speaks quietly of the power in setting aside “the work” to do the humane thing of taking a pause to connect to a leader in crisis. This enabled her to accompany the leader in tending to their own humanity, creating more ease for the individual and a small space for the changework to continue to move forward.
Another of her recent posts speaks to the all-too-familiar contradiction of leading a nonprofit that is committed to liberation but unwittingly replicates restrictive, control-based structures and relationships. In this reflection, Jones encourages leaders to take responsibility for freeing themselves so they can create more freedom for those working in their organizations. This links the individual to the collective, recognizing how we all have choices to make in how we show up for ourselves and each other.
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Jones and others are restoring my faith a little as I’ve grappled with being a consultant while nonprofits face existential threats, asking myself: When things have gotten too “VUAC” for strategic plans, what is the role of a consultant? Are we midwives for birthing needed change, or are we middlemen at best, mercenaries at worst? What is capacity building “in these times?” Is research needed, or is it a hedge against action? What is a moral livelihood?
I admit that I’ve been chronically underemployed as a consultant for a while now. This newsletter is what I have time for these days—in between networking calls, RPFs, and job applications, of course. And while my conversations with peers are hopeful on the surface, they’re not altogether untethered from a muted sense (shared in half-joking exchanges about our career contingency plans) that consulting itself could be outliving its usefulness in its known form and function. Has my own work gone “out of season?” Or is it time to vision a different future for consulting as well?