We Are Not the Help, Part I

This is the first of two essays about those of us who work across the social impact sector and the strange, often invisible place we occupy within it. As the sector searches for its footing and tries to chart a path forward, some of the people it has long relied upon to carry knowledge, guide change, and move between institutions are struggling in ways the field has not learned to see. That should concern all of us, not only because of what these practitioners are experiencing, but because their struggle may be telling us something important about what the field values, what it overlooks, and what it is at risk of losing at precisely the moment it most needs the knowledge they carry.

Bear with me.

I’m attempting to articulate something that is in no way the final analysis but that the reporter in me can’t talk myself out of putting into the world. Truth be told, what I have worried most about is sounding bitter, petty, or self-interested. I have also wondered whether I was taking a set of personal experiences and making them stand in for an ecosystem too large and varied for any one person to describe.

Still, every time I think I have successfully persuaded myself to leave the subject alone, something pulls it back into view. A consultant colleague asks if I have time for coffee or a walk. A relative stranger wonders whether I might be open to a conversation. There is never an agenda. We just log on or show up and begin to talk. And as we do, it starts to surface in a pause or a smile that looks like effort.

They say things have been slow in a way that is anxiously seeking confirmation: Have you felt it too? Or they are trying to make sense of why relationships that once produced steady work have gone quiet. Or a long-standing engagement ended abruptly. Or yet another proposal was rejected with a form response: We received more proposals than ever. Followed by: Regrettably, we are unable to provide feedback.

The sheer number of proposals flooding every opportunity suggests that there are more of us chasing fewer engagements. The strain of what appears to be a severe contraction is indiscriminate, and it is wearing people down. Colleagues leading small practices describe shrinking pipelines and growing fears that they will not be able to make payroll. It does not help that all of this is unfolding amid a much broader atmosphere of precarity, increasingly shaped by a speculative, winner-take-all economy, massive corporate layoffs, the growing reach of AI, and the chaotic way our country is being run.

In the past year, I have watched brilliant consultants lose work, lose their jobs, or come to the painful realization that they simply cannot make independent practice work anymore. After years of building a business, after years of thriving, they are wondering whether it may be time to look for something more stable. Others, I am certain, are teetering in silence.

It took a lazy beach day, a week into our annual summer trip, for me to fully feel the weight of these conversations and the effect this peculiar moment was having on my own sense of purpose and belonging. My family was nearby, and the Aegean stretched out before us. The picturesque beauty, coupled with blistering heat, had finally interrupted my compulsion to keep producing. And in the solitude that only the natural world’s grandeur and wonder can produce, I found myself wondering whether I still wanted to be in this work.

What made the question difficult to grasp was that, relatively speaking, I was doing okay. I had large projects and smaller ones, with other possibilities still developing. I had been coaching more and finding something in the intimacy and honesty of those conversations that felt especially necessary right now, when genuine vulnerability can be so difficult to access in larger rooms. After three years of working on an investigative project largely through my own conviction, I had finally found a production team as excited by its possibilities as I was. I was building something distinct with this Substack. There was goodness all around me, work I believed in, and reasons to feel hopeful. But there I was, on a magical trip abroad, wondering whether I should keep doing this.

I knew that I was not tired of the work itself. I still feel that spark when a group begins making new connections. Still relish the moment a leader changes how they understand their responsibility. And still feel deeply humbled when an organization accepts the difficult work of learning and change.

What I was tired of was the recurring need to audition, prove, chase, package, and begin again; the ease with which years of accumulated knowledge could become invisible when leadership changed; the feeling that a vocation I had deliberately chosen could be reduced to a vendor relationship.

Maybe the distance helped me understand what I had been unable to name from inside the pace of my everyday life. When I finally let my body relax on that beach, I could see that the ache I heard in others was not separate from my own. Their dwindling pipelines, abrupt endings, lost livelihoods, and sheer loneliness had been accumulating inside me too.

Looking back, I think the calls, coffees, and walks have been a way of reaching for one another because we needed someone to confirm that what we were seeing and feeling was real. We were trying, perhaps without yet having language for it, not to let one another disappear into silence or self-blame.

It would be easy to chalk this up as the collateral consequence of a broader retrenchment within the sector. Organizations are indeed closing and merging. Funding priorities are absolutely changing. Political pressure has successfully produced a chilling effect across the field. Some of what we are experiencing is undoubtedly downstream of those conditions. Some of it may also reflect a genuine need for new tools, new strategies, and different forms of support than those many of us have historically provided. Both things can be true.

But that story does not quite hold up, not yet at least. Not when some organizations are having their strongest fundraising years. Not when I also know practices that are growing, consultants turning away work, and organizations continuing to make serious investments in outside support. From where many of us sit, it is simply not clear what is happening. The messages are mixed and muddied.

Part of my work over this past year has involved helping organizations think more seriously about risk, particularly the kinds that fall outside the categories institutions are accustomed to measuring. We readily recognize financial risk, reputational risk, legal risk, and operational risk. We are less practiced at registering the cost of losing memory, interpretation, relationships, and perspective until they are already gone.

That is the risk I am trying to draw attention to here. It extends beyond consultants being ghosted, losing contracts, or deciding to take full-time roles. The ecosystem is at risk of shedding knowledge and awareness without understanding what it is losing, and we do not seem to have any way of capturing the net effect because the departure of the people who do this work has not risen to the level of a sectoral concern. There is no convening to ask what is happening or what knowledge may be leaving with them. The disappearances simply accumulate, one person at a time, until one day we look around and realize that knowledge the system depended upon, but never regarded as consequential enough to protect or develop, is slipping away.

Consulting teaches us to project confidence as though it were our perpetual state of being.

Take the other day. I got an email letting me know that a proposal I believed was strong, for a project I genuinely wanted and thought we had a real chance of winning, would not be moving forward. It was a blow. Five minutes later, I had to get on a coaching call. The first thing my coachee said was that I brought such equanimity to our conversations, that I always seemed so even.

I remember thinking, Wow, I must be really good at this, because I am all up in my feelings.

But consulting trains us to pivot from rejection to reassurance, from uncertainty about our own future to helping someone else navigate theirs, without enough time to process the dissonance we feel internally.

The forced projection of certainty is also tied to the substance of the work. We are asked to help people navigate conflict, clarify strategy, repair relationships, interpret culture, make decisions, and undertake changes whose outcomes no one can fully predict and over which we have little authority, let alone control.

Part of what the transaction obscures is where transformation actually happens. We can help an organization see more clearly, make a decision, design a practice, or build a useful tool. But we cannot supply the internal muscle and discipline required to use what we produce. The deliverable can be purchased; the transformation cannot. When the necessary follow-through does not happen, the disappointment is often attached to us, as though hiring a consultant was itself supposed to produce the change.

We accustom ourselves to entering environments that are not always equipped or motivated to accomplish what they have asked us to help accomplish. We learn to speak in the language of possibility, momentum, direction, and next steps, even while managing impossible constraints of time and contending with the competing incentives of people whose actual jobs continue outside the process we are guiding. And still, we smile. And still, we prepare. And still, we enter the room and bring steadiness.

But when the work dries up, the confidence we have learned to project can become our worst enemy. Many of us have conditioned ourselves to explain our success through our own initiative, judgment, relationships, and singular gifts. We built the practice. We earned the trust. We found the clients. We made something where nothing existed before. We guided the room. We wrote the report. All of that is true, and we have the receipts to prove it.

It follows, almost inevitably, that when the calls stop coming and the proposals get rejected, we search for the failure in the same place. Perhaps we did not work hard enough, distinguish ourselves clearly enough, adapt quickly enough, or remain useful enough. Maybe we looked too eager. Or not eager enough. Maybe we followed up too soon, waited too long, charged too much, asked for too little, made ourselves too broad to understand or too specific to seem adaptable.

Once we assume the answer must lie within us, there is almost no end to the evidence we can assemble against ourselves or the labor we will undertake to correct whatever deficiency we imagine we have found. We revise the offering. We update the language. We produce more content. We adjust the price. We broaden the practice areas. Whatever alteration might make us newly legible or desirable, we attempt to make it. We turn ourselves into the problem to be solved.

The irony is that many of us have spent our careers helping other people understand how systems shape what becomes possible in their lives and institutions. We know that outcomes are never produced by effort alone. We can see the influence of power, policy, capital, relationships, timing, and structural advantage almost everywhere except, sometimes, in our own professional lives.

Having made a life outside the organizational systems that employ most people, we can begin to confuse independence with exemption, as though working for ourselves has somehow placed us beyond the forces reorganizing the sector around us. It has not. We may operate outside particular institutions, but we remain deeply beholden to the forces shaping the ecosystem.

We did not become consultants because we could not do anything else.

Many of us have led organizations, raised money, built teams, answered to boards, managed budgets, and carried the weight of institutional authority. We know what it means to sit inside an organization and be responsible for its future. Working across organizations was not where we landed after failing to find a place within one. It was a choice, rooted in the belief that our contribution could translate to different contexts; that knowledge gained in one institution might make a meaningful difference in another; that some of us needed to maneuver between organizations, notice what repeated, and help the sector learn across the boundaries it had built around itself.

And yet, from where I sit, an assumed hierarchy persists across much of the field. Staff belong to the institution; consultants visit. Employees are part of the organizational story; consultants are an expense attached to a particular need.

The institution may depend on our judgment, trust us with its most sensitive dilemmas, ask us to hold the fears and frustrations leaders cannot safely express elsewhere, and rely on us to help shape decisions with consequences extending years into the future. But once the engagement ends, the relationship can disappear as though none of that intimacy or accumulated understanding carries any continuing value.

It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that some of the relationships I have formed through this work have become deep friendships and ongoing exchanges that long ago ceased to have anything to do with a particular engagement or deliverable. But more often than not, when the work ends, the relationship does too.

The hierarchy becomes most palpable when resources become scarce. Staff salaries and benefits are treated, understandably, as livelihoods that carry a moral claim on the institution. In a society that does not guarantee healthcare, housing, childcare, or even the basic conditions of security, organizations are asked to shoulder an outsize share of responsibility for the people they employ. So when money gets tight, or the fear of future scarcity begins to take hold, that responsibility feels immediate and human. Consulting, meanwhile, becomes one of the first lines to disappear.

Beneath that material hierarchy sits a moral story about choice. Employees are understood to be people the institution has agreed to protect. Consultants are understood to have chosen independence and, with it, whatever insecurity follows. We chose not to have a salary. We chose not to have benefits. Once the story is told that way, our precarity no longer appears to warrant collective concern. It becomes the bill coming due for a personal decision we made.

It resembles the moral argument around student debt: You signed the papers. You knew what you were doing. Now pay what you owe. The larger system that structured the available choices disappears from view, leaving us to judge one another as though those choices were made freely and on equal ground.

The same moral logic shows up here. Those working inside organizations are presumed to be committed to the mission by virtue of their employment status, while those who leave to work across institutions can be regarded as having chosen independence, money, or personal advancement over belonging.

An elder once described leaving an organization and immediately sensing that their former colleagues no longer considered them part of the community. They had crossed an invisible line. Whatever they continued contributing to the movement, they were now outside.

What I think that distinction allows is for organizations to depend upon us without regarding our continuity as their concern. And right now, it makes our disappearance easier to interpret as a private career decision than as a loss to the field.

It also shapes how we are treated in the small moments, which are not actually so small. A requested proposal can represent hours of thought, research, conversation, design, and hope. Behind it lives a person trying to hold together a practice, pay bills, care for the people who depend on them, and decide whether they can remain in this work.

Let me be really clear: no one is owed a contract. Not every proposal requires a lengthy debrief, just as not every engagement needs to become a permanent relationship. But a proposal deserves more than a corporate boilerplate response. A years-long relationship deserves more than sudden silence. If we are truly in this together, then we deserve some honest account of why another direction was chosen.

The ancestors we like to name as our inspiration, and to whom we claim to owe a debt, would say that we owe one another more than that, especially in these times. Labor requested creates an obligation in return. It is just that simple, even when honoring that obligation is difficult or time-consuming. How we spend our time is always a choice, and our choices reveal what we value.

Earlier this year, I was introduced to the community agreement: We do not give up on each other. It immediately struck me as a necessary antidote to so much of what ails us. And perhaps that is where we must begin. We must reach for one another. We must tell the truth about what this moment is doing to us. We must refuse to interpret every struggle as an individual failure, allow people to disappear without asking why they could no longer remain, or believe for an instant that closing ranks and preserving what is in our pockets will protect us from the larger forces making all of us more precarious.

We cannot give up on each other.

If we can do that, then perhaps we can allow ourselves to look more closely at how we arrived at a set of arrangements that made our organizations durable while leaving so many of the people moving among them provisional, responsible for sustaining ourselves through one transaction after another. Those arrangements took shape over time. And if they were built, then perhaps something different can be built in their place.

Next week, in Part II, I will trace that history and begin to consider what something different might require.