I love rituals and objects that carry meaning.
It was the summer of 2021. It had been well over a year since our team had been together in person. COVID was still rampant, and meeting someone outdoors still felt like a small act of courage. I’m sure many of you reading this remember those strange times too.
I invited the team to my backyard, a patch of wood decking behind our apartment building. The space was not fancy, but it was home, and after such a long stretch of separation, I wanted to create a safe enough space for us to reconnect in person.
We sat in a large circle on the ground, six feet of space between each body. Our food came wrapped in separate packaging, dropped off outside my front door, a new era of touchlessness. Nobody quite knew how to greet each other or if we should wear masks. For a team dedicated to advancing social connection, the irony was not lost on us. What I remember most is how it took us a minute to remember how to be together, and then, almost as quickly, how joyful it felt once we did.
I wanted our team to have something physical to hold onto after a year of work that was entirely virtual and on screens. So, I poured into the center of our circle a pile of smooth river rocks I had been collecting since the pandemic began, and in my backyard, we painted them.
On one set of stones, we captured the bright spots we had made possible while apart, such as the new grants we made and the deep partnerships we nurtured. Each rock sought to capture in a few words the ripples that we helped make possible in the world — work that could have felt so ephemeral when your whole job lived on Slack and Zoom. These became our milestones.
On another, each person painted a rock for every other member of the team, with a single word that came to mind when they thought of them, epitomizing the rockstars that made all of the milestones possible. We then went around the circle and celebrated each rockstar by populating each other’s personal rock gardens, memorializing what others see in us, even on our most difficult days.
When it was my turn, I was handed words like “bold,” “listener in chief,” and “illuminator,” reflections of the person I try to put into the world. My teacher, Parker Palmer, calls this way of living an “undivided life.” That day, our team saw me for all that I am, and all I am still working to become.
That day, our team saw me for all that I am, and all I am still working to become.
Parker writes about this in his book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life: “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream…”
That’s what wholeness means to me in practice: people feel a deep sense of belonging without having to leave parts of themselves at the door. We cheer each other on for the small, human things. A loaf of homemade sourdough given away nearly every week for a year (I did it!). Fifty-two books read cover-to-cover in 12 months (Ira nailed it!). A driver’s license earned to navigate the new reality of parenthood (Chi got it!). We help each other take on the heavier things, too, like teaming up on projects that seek to make our society less divided and showing up for one another when something doesn’t go according to plan, which is nearly always (that’s life!).
Each year, every person on the Einhorn Collaborative team keeps a living document of our professional and personal goals, without lines separating the ones for life and those for work. Writing these goals down together is our way of saying, “We see the whole of you, and we’re rooting for all of it.”
The connected and collaborative environment we have built is not by accident. Ira Hillman, who has been part of this team for 12 years, taught us what it looks like to hold excellence and care at the same time, without treating them as opposites. As our Strategy Lead for Bonding and our appointed “Team Captain of Culture,” Ira has shaped so much of what makes our team what it is.
Ira has spent over a decade helping this team hold both halves of insides matching outsides at once: the excellence our work demands, and the care we owe each other while we do it. And today, I’m excited to share a new milestone: Ira is stepping into a new role as Deputy Director at Einhorn Collaborative, while continuing to lead our Bonding strategy. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating Ira and this well-earned promotion!
As I think about our next chapter, where Ira will lead the team alongside me and where we will be joined by two new team members in the Strategy Lead, Building Social Trust and Communications & Content Specialist roles, I feel a deep commitment to be even more intentional about who we are, how we show up for each other, and how we extend support to our partners.
Because the problems we work on — polarization, loneliness, the fraying of trust between people — sit so close to the center of what it means to be human, that deep yearning inside every one of us, eager to feel seen and to belong. If we are asking Americans to bridge divides and repair trust, and we know from the science from our grantee partners that strong relationships are what hold a healthy, cohesive society together, then we owe it to ourselves to practice bonding and bridging inside our own walls. It’s at the core of why we invest so much in how we work together, knowing that our culture is not a nice-to-have but a proof point for what we are asking others to do.
The rockstars that make up the team at Einhorn Collaborative — and those who have been part of it in years past (hint: read our Through the Prism with our inaugural Fellow, Brian Kilkelly!) — have come to recognize that our roles here are so much more than just jobs. They’re vocations, touching upon pieces of ourselves that we can’t not do. This work is the work that helps each of our hearts sing. And the culture that surrounds it is one that encourages our whole, best selves to keep showing up as a person and for each other.
This work is the work that helps each of our hearts sing. And the culture that surrounds it is one that encourages our whole,
best selves to keep showing up as a person and for each other.
As Palmer writes in his book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
Our tenure here runs long, so openings like the ones we have right now are genuinely rare. If you’ve read this far and felt something resonate, if the idea of a team that tries, imperfectly but earnestly, to make our insides match our outsides sounds like a place you’d want to fill your days, I hope you’ll consider joining us.
Our front door is open, and we are saving you a seat. We have rocks to paint together.
