Beth is passionate about making missions happen. Throughout her consulting career, Beth has helped nonprofit leaders connect people and programs to mission and goals. Her MapMoveMeasure™ framework is a guide for elevating stewardship and increasing supporter engagement.

Beth's customers say working with her introduces fresh perspective and new ways of thinking about their work. And they always gain clarity, strategic direction, and alignment. Beth's consulting practice reflects her life experience. Studying abroad, earning her MBA, taking a mid-career detour to volunteer and travel, leaving her corporate job to serve in AmeriCorps VISTA and ultimately leading her own consulting practice have contributed to Beth's commitment for connecting passion with purpose.

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Quotes:

"Planning strategically is how I reframe strategic planning. I often see strategic plans that have a high level strategy or big goals at the top and dive very quickly into the execution of it. So it's a little thin on strategy and quite robust on operations. That is actually leapfrogging right over the opportunity for a leadership team to really sit in that strategic thinking space."

"Planning strategically from my perspective starts with a very clear, well articulated vision statement that is supported with outcomes the organization can actually achieve."

"Every strategic plan has vision in it. And the way to make your strategic plan more strategic is to really build out that vision within your accountability and within your capacity to think about a roadmap of outcomes."

"Be clear not only on your vision, but your roadmap of getting there. Not the work to do, but the change you're making along the way."

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

Laura Gouin is a director, writer, and actress who got tired of starving and essentially created the company she wishes would have been around when she was starting out. She loves leveraging her experience in theater and film casting to custom match clients with their most ideal support, drawn from the creative arts. These Artful Admins are taken through her systematic training program, founded on principles of teaching learned from her MA in education. In addition to her creative background, she has worked professionally in team augmentation, sales, business development and operational management. Her unique approach to hiring, training, and team building has served organizations for over two decades by placing hires that stick long-term, and fostering teams that thrive.

Satiated Artists

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Surgeon's Short

Quotes:

"The cycle of rebirth, renewal, it's pretty standard for artists, that creation cycle. Sometimes things have to end for something new to begin, to create that space for that. When artists come into satiated artists for employment, that doesn't have to end. That creative cycle continues because our clients are patrons of the arts. They know that who they're hiring are artists. They are energized by getting that creative mind on staff."

"We don't connect with anybody if we don't know how to tell a good story. And I think that's where artists really excel. We understand that there's a narrative. We're all meaning making machines. Together collectively, let's make the best meaning we can."

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

Austen Smith (they/them) is a spirit-led creative with decades of community advocacy and organizing, program evaluation, intersectional qualitative analysis, and community participatory research. Their work addresses national housing disparities, racial inequity, disability justice, gender inclusivity, and the metaphysical impacts of racialized oppression. Currently, Austen is stewarding ImaginationDoulas, a spirit-led creative education program designed for racially and culturally marginalized artists. Learn more at www.imaginationdoulas.com.

Austen's Website

Austen's Instagram

Check out the ImaginationDoulas Foundational Views Micro-Course, a free, six-week micro course designed for those who are ready to explore creativity as a spiritual discipline.

Julie McFarland was a housing and service provider within homelessness response systems before beginning technical assistance on a national level. Julie's work has focused on designing more person centered and streamlined systems, more effective service delivery, elevating and uplifting the voices of people closest to the solutions, and creating more equitable systems for people experiencing homelessness. Julie values partnership with people who challenge the status quo and existing power structures to shift to more equitable and inclusive approaches.

Quotes:

"Stakeholder: The phrase is rooted in the act of driving stakes into a land which forcibly marks territory as one's own. And so using that casually in our work could unintentionally evoke the trauma of having someone's stake, possession, or even assuming some power we have that is not necessarily ours." - Naomi Hattaway

"The word carries such a violent connotation because words cast spells. They all of the history of that term. We're connecting to this foundational ideology that requires and necessitates colonialism. Bringing that energy into the field of consulting or the field of philanthropy inherently ties the money that is meant to incite liberatory realities for folks to this idea of stolen land and stolen property. It keeps us in a cycle when we continue to use specific words." - Austen Smith

"It feels like a responsibility, in particular as a white woman, that once I become aware of something like this that has such a violent history and violent roots, it is critical to make the pivot and not continue to perpetuate that harm through the use of language in itself." - Julie McFarland

"I would appreciate a resource of language, words, phrases, or terms that are aging out. That we could start the conversation of normalizing language being a living thing because this is so normal." - Austen Smith

"Everything comes back to relationship all the time. And if we are in deep, authentic relationship with people, this act of educating and offering an opportunity to shift, it typically goes so much better when that trust is already established." - Julie McFarland

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

An award-winning expert on organizational storytelling, Thaler Pekar works with visionary leaders to build and sustain cultures of excellent communication – cultures in which people can effectively speak and listen to each other, and to their audiences. For 20 years, she and her team at Thaler Pekar & Partners have advised leaders on strengthening trust, alignment, and influence through speaking, listening, narrative, and story. Working across sectors, Thaler delivers her four trademarked communication processes; produces multiplatform media; and develops oral histories and story collections.

Recognized by both the BBC and the Smithsonian Institution as one of the world's leading experts in applied narrative, Thaler has delivered keynote speeches on five continents to thousands of people. Her influential work on the ethics of working with story, participatory narrative, story elicitation, and persuasive communication is featured in seven books.

DOCUMENTARY: Lifting Up What Works®️: An Oral History of the First 22 Years of PolicyLink documentary

BOOK: Lifting Up What Works®️: An Oral history of the First 22 Years of PolicyLink

The Atlantic Philanthropies communications compilation of oral histories

Thaler Pekar & Partners' Narrative Garden®

"What Will Replace the Hero's Journey?" - SSIR essay

Quotes:

"Things are constantly shifting our perspective, our wisdom's growing, and ideally the stories are polyphonic."

"A great leader, a great communicator, can tell a story that connects the past, the present and the future, and creates spaciousness for what comes next. It's sensical. Great storytelling is placemaking, meaning making, sensemaking, and it invites people to see themselves in the future that's being created."

"I don't think of legacy as what's left behind. I think of it as what is carried forward."

"One thing about legacy is the danger of a hero narrative and just shining the light on one person, when there are other people in the shadows. And in fact, you're creating those shadows if you're shining the light just on one person."

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have choreography for the kick line—but not for the goodbye. In this episode, Naomi unpacks the Netflix docuseries and explores what it reveals about leadership transitions, legacy traps, and the danger of having no plan for "what's next." Whether you're leading a nonprofit or sitting on a board, you need to hear this breakdown.

Learn about:

• Why "churn" is not the same as "transition"

• How legacy leaders without a succession plan risk collapse

• What it means to evaluate performance without care

• And how Leaving Well can help your organization do it differently

Because glitter doesn't cover grief, and turnover without care is just change in sequins. If you're a nonprofit leader or board member, this is your call to rethink succession before it becomes a crisis.

Quotes:

"The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders don't reckon with the human cost of shaping the team through extraction. Culture is constantly shifting and shaping the team dynamics every time someone leaves, even if it was the right decision."

"The Leaving Well framework, the work that I do with nonprofits, asks, 'What does it look like if we offboard with grace, transparency, and care?' That question doesn't exist in the cheerleading and sports model, but it could."

"Legacy without a succession plan is honestly nothing at all. It's not a true legacy."

"My sweet spot is helping organizations name the unnameable and the scary stuff about departures before it explodes into narrative chaos."

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

Katya Fels Smyth is an advocate / activist for shifting power and perspective so we all have a fair shot at wellbeing. She is the founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative, now in its final stages of winddown after more than 15 years of national social change work; and is the founder and former Executive Director of On The Rise, a 30 year-old community of and by women who are unhoused and who have not found community or support in traditional social services. She's a mom, spouse, and a person to almost 20 animals who share a 25 acre farm, where the people grow and sell artisanal garlic and the animals live the good life.

Read Katya's essay

Find Katya:

Full Frame Initiative

LinkedIn

Medium

Steward the Forest, Not Save Every Tree

If We Care About Justice, We Must Care About Endings

Quotes:

"We never have control over things. But what we can do is pay a lot of attention to relationships and energy more than control what others are going to do moving forward."

"Whether you are an individual leaving a relationship, or a board deciding to close an organization, or a funder deciding to end a funding relationship, the decision to leave is an expression of power."

"We remember endings. We remember the high and the low of our experience, whether it's a surgery, hospitalization experience, or a work experience. And we remember how it felt when it ended."

"Your legacy is as much about how you left people feeling and doing and equipped, and did you respect them enough to not walk out on them if you had the opportunity to stay with them and hand things over to them."

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

Nani Jansen Reventlow is an international human rights lawyer. She is the founder of Systemic Justice, an organisation that advocates for marginalised communities across Europe through strategic litigation. Previously, she founded the Digital Freedom Fund. Nani is the author of the book Radical Justice, a collection of nine essays on how to build a better world, published in Dutch in 2024 with an English edition coming in March 2026.

Read Nani's essay

Find Nani:

Website

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LinkedIn

Radical Justice - book

Quotes:

"If you trust someone to build an organization, why wouldn't you trust them to also make sure that that work can continue without them?"

"I want to set up the organization for further success because I invested in building it. I want it to thrive as I leave. That means not only looking after my 'legacy', but also making sure that the incoming executive director is set up for success and that there's sufficient space for them."

"There's not going to be a successful leadership transition if we lose the team along the way. So making sure that there's someone who's looking out for everyone and for the people who are not making themselves heard. Change is uncomfortable for us humans. There needs to be someone who's mindful of the different feelings and dynamics that come up."

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.

It took 40 years but Kate finally figured out how to embrace change instead of run from it. After all, it's the only constant and there's some comfort in that. She loves all things salty - the ocean, margaritas, and even your saltiest board member. Kate can really get behind a lazy afternoon, a home improvement project, and teaching her dog useless tricks.

Quotes:

"When we use scary words like merger or dissolution, or the way that we soften dissolution by talking about sunsetting and winding down, it sounds great, but the reframe is that all that is structural change."

"Your mission is important. Your vision is important. That's your destination. That's where you're going. Structure is the vehicle you're taking to get you there."

"Mergers are an excellent tool for getting an organization to inventory every single thing that they are about. You cannot leave any stone unturned. You don't get to do that in a structural change. And that's why I love it as a tool. Because even if at the end of the day we decide that these two organizations shouldn't merge, each organization is stronger for having gone through the process of exploring that potential collaboration. They understand their unique value better. They understand each other better and where they can collaborate."

"Mission resilience is how you actually make sure that even if the structure changes, even if the name changes, the whole reason we are here to do any of this is because of the people at the center that we care about. And we're not gonna leave anybody behind."

"My whole reason for doing this work is that structural change is a tool. It's a tool for social change. It's underutilized in the nonprofit sector. So I want to normalize this conversation."

Find Kate:

Website

Merger Mondays case studies

LinkedIn - Kate Harris

LinkedIn - KHG Nonprofit Strategy

Sustained Collab

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.

This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.