It’s that time of year, where nonprofits, community-based organizations, and other entities spend down their budgets, finalize funding reports, reflect on their successes and create goals for the new fiscal year.

It’s a pretty hectic time for me as well. While most of my client contracts start on the calendar year, I’m rushing alongside them to get things done by the end of the fiscal year.

One of my goals for Year Four of my business is to go back to basics. Specifically in these three ways:

  1. Blogging about reproductive justice and intersectional analysis was the initial reason people started following my work. While I’ve embedded RJ into the content I’ve created in the past, what I want now is to make more explicit RJ-related content by way of my blogs, future webinars, and trainings. There’s a major difference between learning about RJ and actually incorporating it in our personal and professional lives, and I want to help people bridge that gap.
  2. After processing everything I’ve worked on in the past year with my clients, I’m noticing that there’s a greater need for me to strengthen how I teach and coach my clients, hone in on their learning styles and information retainment, and figure out how to best break down concepts into digestible and easy to understand formats.
  3. When I say “raise your voice for women and girls of color”, how am I working with my clients to actualize this? What does this look like for them? How are they currently doing this, and how does my working with them as a thought partner help them reach this level of engagement with the communities they serve?

I have to look at the foundation of my work, take everything I’m currently doing, and examine it piece by piece. What are the essentials, the basic facts, the fundamentals? How can I break down what I’m doing in its most basic parts, and how have I placed the building blocks to build the foundation I’ve been operating from? I hope by doing this over the next year, it will lead to some aha moments for both myself and my clients.

I also hope this approach is something that nonprofits, community-based organizations and the like can take in the upcoming fiscal year. Sometimes taking a program or service, breaking it down into its many parts, and examining how each piece plays a role in the overall functioning can give a greater sense of how communities are responding to your work.

Raise Your Voice: What’s one way that you can go back to basics in your work in order to help the communities you serve?