2025 was a year of shifts and seismic shocks, meaningful celebrations and bone-deep gratitude, pivots, adaptation, and a maturation of our work and commitment to Just Transition. Like many in our community, we endured the whiplash of federal chaos and local stress, and we faced personal crises and health breakdowns. Amidst all that, we deepened our relationships and forged new pathways in order to move forward together, with momentum, while nurturing joy.
What is our role in a time of instability and change? The transitions we are navigating are intense and require us to step up. There is a quote we have used over and over in our workshops, as well as in internal conversations, to help guide us:
So that is what we tried to do. We responded by pivoting programs and creating new ones, offering opportunities for our community members to learn, refuel, and connect, as a way to “achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.” We bolstered our internal resilience and security measures, as an organization that many rely upon for their Good Work, to allow us all to continue to build the systems of care and equity we need. We renewed our commitment to offering containers for the hard conversations that needed to be had and the grief that needed to be expressed. We created spaces of joy, celebration and well-being, prioritizing connection and clarity of purpose. We also marked our 10-year anniversary with a party that had our ears ringing and our hearts full!
We feel tremendous gratitude for everyone with whom we have walked, laughed, learned, wept, talked, imagined, and traveled during the journey of 2025. While snapshots are inherently only very partial views, we would like to share a few highlights from our programs and activities:
- Empowering Good Work through Fiscal Sponsorship
- Fostering Deep Democracy
- Partnering with Orgs and Initiatives Advancing a Just Transition
- Nurturing Community Space: The Greenhouse
- Incubating a Community-Designed Fund
- Shining A Light on Good Work in Action
All of our offerings come from a belief that we can create hands-on, innovative change in our lives, organizations, and communities, if we center justice, deep democracy, collaboration, and care.
We hope you share this mission with us, and that you will choose to support the Good Work coming in 2026 with a contribution.
Empowering Good Work Through Fiscal Sponsorship
Through our fiscal sponsorship program we accept and regrant funds for charitable projects. As institutions and systems collapse and are deliberately attacked and dismantled, fiscal sponsorship enables new ideas to take root quickly. Last year, we added projects related to immigrant protection, farms-led food access, equitable access to housing and property, and programming for incarcerated youth. Our new educational projects focus on building ecological understanding and connection to land and extending access to the arts. Since the start of our program in 2018, we have helped over 45 fiscally-sponsored projects access more than $12 million in charitable funds. We recently published two blogs posts to give more insight into this growing program area:
Fostering Deep Democracy
We entered 2025 with a programming plan that quickly changed in response to the impacts that were apparent on the ground: we saw stress, fatigue, and overwhelm in our community due to national political turmoil and economic uncertainty. Nonprofits were losing funding, people felt rage and impotence, and we felt our role needed to be to create spaces to refuel, be in solidarity, and foster action in the face of paralysis. So, with 40+ events, workshops and gatherings in 2025, we reached hundreds of people in our region and beyond.
We offered our core programs: Navigating Conflict, Navigating Feedback, Just Transition Primer, Climate Grief, and two facilitated communities of practice to support ongoing connection and learning. Our new offerings included:
- Rooted & Resourced: A 1-Day Retreat for Change-Agents: A full-day in-person retreat that combined training, facilitated discussion, and nourishing communal time to build relationships and provide a day of refreshment and rest.
- Art of Facilitation: Participatory Facilitator Training + Happy Hour: An afternoon workshop highlighting some of our techniques and practices in facilitating a space where good work can happen. Over-subscribed when we launched it, we offered this workshop three times.
- Solidarity Civics: Initially created as a way to respond to the executive orders, this monthly in-person gathering allowed people to share how they are handling the current moment and what we can do locally. With special guest speakers in the fall.
- Democratizing Work Primer: We created this 1-hour whirlwind offering as a quick introduction to the Policies, Practices and Culture needed to democratize the workplace.
Internally, we doubled-down on our intention to launch a fellowship program; in 2025 we completed the planning and recruitment. This new cohort program, Solidarity Leaders Lab: Facilitating the Future, starts in April 2026. We also initiated a hiring process for a new position in the Deep Democracy Circle to support our growing work across public workshops and tailored offerings for organizations, and can’t wait to introduce our new colleague!
Partnering with Orgs and Initiatives Advancing a Just Transition
We send gratitude to all the organizations we have worked with this year, through tailored programs, coaching, and onsite workshops. Here is a partial list of those that have taken steps this year towards committing to Just Transition and starting to implement what we call “deep democracy” in how they operate:
- Next City, Billion Oyster Project, CCE Orange, BARD College, Guardians of Flushing Bay, Found & Fixed, Hudson River Watershed, Hudson Valley Watershed Alliance, Mission Driven Finance, Vassar College, Village of Villages, Kingston Executive Director Circle
Nurturing Community Space
The Greenhouse, our community hub at 65 St. James Street in Kingston, is a container for Good Work. With over 190 free community events, workshops, meetings, and celebrations, we welcomed over 2,900 people to the building this past year, an increase from 2024. We work to provide a warm, welcoming, bright space on a sliding scale or free for free public events. Upstairs spaces house resident organizations, providing them an affordable place to convene and work, and Kingston Common Futures had their own office downstairs too. We continue to partner with community members and organizations to offer sound healing, art exhibitions, and Climate Grief meetings, while community members lead meditation, book clubs, and other learning and healing experiences. In 2025, we were so happy to host an art exhibit, Resisting Erasure: Artistic Creativity in Times of Political Turmoil. We love how many people are coming together to incubate ideas and gathering to create change here, allowing us to host a diverse and proactive cross-section of the community.
Incubating a Community-Designed Fund
2025 was the year that this project came to full flowering! From its beginnings as a 9-month learning journey and collaborative process with 18 members of the Kingston community designing a community-centered grant fund to the first pilot year of grant-giving through Kingston Common Futures! GWI continues to act as a hands-on advisor and incubation partner, and also offers the more complex form of fiscal sponsorship (Model A) that allows KCF to focus on their mission of community engagement and democratic allocation of grant funds to community projects.
In its pilot year, with only 3 staff members (some were part-time) KCF engaged over 200 people in the community, reaching many more: 7 street team members to get the word out into diverse communities; 8 advisory team members; 23 volunteer mentors to support 55 of the applicants who requested help; 34 volunteer readers to evaluate applications; 8 Decision Circle volunteer members who came to final funding decisions after deliberations; with a total LOI applicant pool of 140 projects, of which 107 moved on to the full application. The Decision Circle process was facilitated by GWI, with two days of finalist interviews and 2 days of deliberation.
By the fall, $150K of funding was allocated to 11 projects, ranging in grant sizes from $5,000 to $32,000, and covering a wide variety of community projects. You can read all about the grantees here. It was a moving and beautiful process from start to finish, and a huge achievement! This project represents to us what it means to pull power back into the community, by providing a concrete way for the people of Kingston to name their priorities and dreams, design projects to bring those dreams to fruition, apply to a grant program where decision-making is held by community members in facilitated spaces, with the larger goals of creating networks of collaboration and engagement to build the commons in Kingston. Stay tuned in 2026 for a documentary view of this unique experiment brought to life.
Shining A Light on Good Work in Action
In 2025, we continued to shine a light on examples, stories, people, and artists who are embodying and manifesting Just Transition through their Good Work. Our weekly radio show, the Good Work Hour, on air on Tuesday evenings for six years now, was hosted almost exclusively by Micah. As in past years, we had over 30 different guests on the show covering so much different terrain; all episodes are archived and available for streaming. With a bittersweet farewell, we hosted our very last show on air on February 24, 2026: Radio Kingston is moving into a new approach to community-led radio, and that means we now get to finally cook up a new project… Could it be time for a podcast?
Internal Resilience
Last, but certainly not least, we continue to nurture our own sustainability and capacity to persevere through the whatever may lie ahead. With that in mind, in 2025 we worked on practicing ever closer collaboration with our board and our larger network of supporters to diversify how we fund our work. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to our 10-year anniversary campaign! If you believe in our work, please consider making a gift to support all that we have done and will do in the near future.
We thank you for your support and partnership!
