I left my job at the Farm Alliance of Baltimore a little over a week ago. Next week I will begin a new one at Impact Hub Baltimore, where I’ll dive in to leadership with two comrade co-directors managing another membership-based nonprofit and all of the humanness and messiness that accompanies such a structure. I am excited to work with an all-woman leadership team, and the diverse array of young front-line staffers who crew the ship. But something is different.
In this between-place, the limbo between the jobs that I arranged for myself in order to have “down” time, I’ve experienced a shift. Let me try to explain.
In 2017, I began the job at Farm Alliance with a sense of possibility, intensity, and overwhelm: I was hired to bring that organization back from the brink of extinction, and I expended every calorie of mental energy in my neurons in order to do so. People weren’t used to my communication style or my lack of farming chops; I thrashed and made some mistakes, at first. But once I made it clear I had the smarts and the tenacity to make it work, it worked. I overfunctioned and overtaxed myself, working into the wee hours, meeting with funders, attending every committee and board meeting, never letting go of the imperative to make it rain so that the urban farmers could continue to call the Farm Alliance their home. And in the process, my writing, which at that time consisted of an amorphous combination of reported columns for the New Labor Forum, plus my own journals and, honestly, posting on Twitter, suffered. It occupied a lesser status in my work. Because it couldn’t pay the bills, I felt I had to give my absolute all to the thing that would pay the bills.
But this time around, I need it to be different. I’ve fallen in love, you see.
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