A Year of Tending

Last month, BloomWorks Solutions marked its first year. Today also marks a different kind of anniversary: one year since USAID’s closure changed the lives of friends and colleagues, and, indeed, the trajectory of BloomWorks, as well.

And while I’ve had Rent’s “Seasons of Love”—and its 525,600 minutes—running through my head, I’ve also been thinking about gardens.

This time last year, my small community garden plot was joyfully putting forth cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and a cooler full of vegetables to share over the holiday weekend. This year, my little plot has been slower and more weed-filled. It is producing, but it is requiring more patience, more attention, and more work.

Which feels about right.

Because if this first year of BloomWorks has taught me anything, it is that growth is not just about blooming. It is also about tending.

This year, I have had the privilege of working alongside organizations that are asking hard questions about how to shape themselves in the face of change. Some are revisiting strategy. Some are rethinking structure. Some are listening more deeply to stakeholders. Some are trying to understand what still holds, what needs to shift, and what needs to be let go.

I have seen leaders wrestle with how their organizations stay rooted in what they do and who they are, while also bending toward the realities of the moment.

Not bending so far that they lose themselves. Not holding so rigidly that they snap.

I thought about that recently as a DC thunderstorm rolled in and the wind picked up around my garden. My tomato plants, still a little spindly this year, leaned hard with the gusts. For a moment, I was sure they wouldn’t hold. But they did. Not because they were immovable, but because they had just enough flexibility, just enough support, and just enough rooting to withstand the storm.

That, too, feels about right.

Over the past year, tending has looked different in every engagement.

Sometimes it has meant creating structure where things felt uncertain. Sometimes it has meant helping leaders and teams step back from the metaphorical weeds and see the work more clearly. Sometimes it has meant making space for honest conversation, careful listening, and shared decisions about what comes next.

Often, it has meant asking simple but important questions: What are we trying to grow? What is getting in the way? What needs more support? What no longer serves us in this season?

These are strategy questions. They are also leadership questions. 

And they feel especially urgent at the end of a year when so many organizations were forced to respond to vast changes they did not choose, on timelines they could not control. In those first moments, speed was necessary. Leaders had to make hard decisions quickly: to protect people, preserve mission, manage risk, and find a way through.

What I am seeing now—and what makes me hopeful for BloomWorks’ future—is something different. Many leaders have moved through the first wave of urgent decisions and are now creating space to regroup, reconnect, and move forward with more intention. They have moved through responding to disruption, and they are asking what comes next.

That is its own kind of tending.

It means pausing long enough to understand the conditions around them now—not the conditions they expected, or the ones they wish they had, but the ones they are actually working within. It means bringing teams back together after hard decisions have been made. It means listening for what people need to move forward and clarifying what the organization is uniquely positioned to do in this changed landscape.

It means asking what still holds, what needs to shift, and what can be released.

Gardens do not thrive because we demand that they do. They thrive when we pay attention to soil, light, water, weather, timing, and care. Organizations are not so different. They grow in context. They are shaped by history, relationships, resources, constraints, leadership, trust, and the wider conditions around them.

Some years, everything seems to bloom at once.

Other years, the weeds come in fast. The stems are thinner than expected. The harvest is slower. The work requires more patience.

But slower growth is still growth.

This first year of BloomWorks has not been the year I expected. It has not been the year many of us expected or wanted. It has been a year marked by grief, transition, uncertainty, reinvention, and a great deal of wondering what comes next.

It has also been a year marked by generosity: people making introductions, sharing ideas, trusting me with their organizations’ questions, and inviting BloomWorks into meaningful work. Colleagues and friends have found new ways forward after enormous disruption. Leaders have continued to tend their teams and missions even though the ground beneath them shifted.

As BloomWorks enters its second year, I carry this thought with me: growth is not only measured in what blooms visibly above the surface. It is also measured in the roots that deepen, the structures that strengthen, the clarity that emerges, and the capacity to bend without breaking.

A year in, I appreciate every organization, colleague, and friend who has been part of this first season.

And I am still tending.