E&W Year-End Reflections

There’s a particular texture to the world right now, one of isolation, fragmentation, distrust.

This painful tension between hyper-connectivity and loneliness, a chronic feature of contemporary life, somehow felt even more acute in 2025. All year, we’ve heard from clients and partners who feel stretched thin—materially, socially, politically, spiritually.

Yet amid this overwhelm, something else kept showing up. We saw countless examples of people rejecting dominant narratives of division and in incredible acts of rebellion, commit to reorienting themselves towards connection. 

At Evenings & Weekends Consulting, we’ve always believed that listening and acting with bravery and humility can create better futures. We see systems and institutions as a series of interconnected relationships, that when tended to with care, can be radically transformed. And in 2025, we saw that truth reflected back to us again and again.

In a year marked by significant grief, we continually asked ourselves: “What kinds of communities and connections are necessary in these times of rupture and realignment? How might we build meaningful relationships in ways that heal and transform?”

Our answers came in the form of three lessons, which we’re holding close as we look to 2026.

Dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human.—Paulo Freire

Lesson 1: Think (and act) in ecosystems

This year reminded us that silos are one of the greatest obstacles to progress: the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors are filled with passionate people working on similar issues, often in parallel, but often with a scarcity mindset that keeps resources and knowledge locked away. However, when people remember that they are part of something larger—pooling what they have, choosing collaboration over competition—the work expands dramatically. The outcomes are stronger, more imaginative, and more durable.

There is a meaningful difference between thinking in terms of my program, my budget line, my strategic plan and thinking in terms of our ecosystem. This year, we witnessed more organizations shifting into ecosystem thinking, and it was one of the most energizing transformations of 2025.

Within our workshop “Cultivating Coalitions for Advocacy and Change,” community organizer Khaldah Salih created a space for coalitions to navigate differences, honor multiple truths, and align around shared values. So much becomes possible when groups treat themselves as interconnected parts of a living system rather than competing entities.

This approach shapes how we work at E&W. We strive to build relationships that are relational, not transactional, and to create connections that endure beyond any single engagement. We position ourselves as collaborators, not just contractors, because strong ecosystems depend on mutual care, reciprocity, and trust. It allows us to approach each project with curiosity, always asking: What knowledge is already here? What perspectives are missing? And how might weaving these together strengthen the whole ecosystem of the work?

This is the heart of ecosystem thinking: recognizing that no individual holds the full picture, and that together, we can build something far more resilient and transformative.

The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. —Robin Wall Kimmerer

A few ecosystems that were significant to E&W team members in 2025: Salt Spring Island, British Columbia | Oslo, Norway | Evora, Portugal | Marbella, Spain | Toronto, Ontario | Toronto, Ontario | Grand Bend, Ontario | White Rock, British Columbia | Toronto, Ontario |

Lesson 2: Create slow spaces for iteration

This year reminded us that meaningful change rarely happens at speed. Iterative learning requires room to breathe, just like how a garden needs steady attention but cannot be rushed. In 2025, we reminded ourselves and our clients to slow down, create more spaces for feedback, and adjust our approaches when needed. 

Naming when urgency was getting in the way of thoughtful work continued to be a critical part of our practice. As our Co-Founder Paul Taylor likes to say,“We’re not in the business of writing reports that sit in a folder somewhere gathering dust. We’re interested in creating tools for people who want to shift their own ways of working and being.” 

We were thrilled to partner with organizations like the Milton Community Resource Centre (MCRC), who embraced an iterative mindset when partnering with us on a new evaluation framework for their programs. With generous time provided for curiosity, we sourced ideas from the MCRC staff and community, tested new approaches, and together, we designed a framework where program participants would co-create the metrics for evaluation and share their feedback within methods that were accessible to them (like conversation circles, hands-on art activities, and more). 

Obeying urgency culture wouldn’t have allowed for the kind of iterative creativity we supported at MCRC. When we’re rushed, we tend to bypass collaboration, and we fall back on our usual ways of doing things. By slowing down and making space for reflection, however, we can break that cycle and create sustainable systems that are responsive to the communities we serve. 

In 2026, let’s give ourselves permission to build that slow space and see what can flourish.

Borderline (An Oder to Self Care) by Solange

I'll Call U Back by Erykah Badu

Lesson 3: Stay rooted in values of accountability

This year reminded us that working across differences (whether in our identities, experiences, worldviews, or sectors) requires courage. It calls us to lean into our own discomfort, to trust that others hold knowledge we do not, to become deeply comfortable with being wrong, and to adjust our approaches when new information emerges. It also calls us to seek repair after rupture, and to understand how anti-Black racism, anti-Indigeneity, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression are rooted within so many of our systems and our own ways of moving through the world. 

We saw the power of this courage when partnering with a national advocacy organization defining their Palestine solidarity work. We facilitated spaces for their team members to share their views and experiences, to navigate tensions, and to continue to deepen the trust necessary to move forward together in this important work within a profoundly hostile political climate.

We also were grateful for the trust placed in us by a community health centre, who brought in E&W to enable their management team to speak candidly about past tensions, identify pathways to move through them, and together, to embrace conflict as a tool for generative change. We sought to give their management team the tools to have hard conversations, while encouraging them to reflect on the difference between feeling discomfort when challenged and being “unsafe” — a distinction that can be lost on people with more privilege. 

Across all of these experiences, our partners reminded us that lasting change relies on relational accountability. Collaboration only succeeds when it is grounded in trust, and a shared commitment to addressing the systemic inequities that prevent us from truly seeing and working with one another. We seek to do this work with care, and are grateful for the trust placed in us. 

Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.—Audre Lorde

What We’re Carrying Into the New Year

As we look toward 2026, we’re carrying forward a set of practices that have grounded us all year:

• Prioritizing rest

• Anti-scarcity thinking

• Interdependence over independence

• Communication that is clear, honest, and kind

• Generous sharing of our resources and knowledge

We’ve reflected these practices in our Partnership Principles, an agreement that we share with our clients when we embark on projects together.

Here’s what we imagine for the year ahead: more organizations choosing collaboration over scarcity. More shared stewardship and spaces for dreaming. More imagination. More courage. And always, a deeper commitment to equity and justice as a living, relational practice.

An immense thank you to our partners, collaborators, and extended team members for joining us in this work, and to our 2025 clients for their trust and vision:

ABC Life Literacy | Afrika Outbound | Atkinson Foundation | b current | BC Housing | The Bentway | Birth Mark | Black Healing Centre | Black Women in Motion | Canadian Association of Midwives | The Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion | Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work | Canadian Journalism Collective | Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts | Canadian Drug Policy Coalition | Cavalluzzo LLP | Centre for Community Organizations | Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-RAC) | Columbia Valley Pride | Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood and Community Health Centre | The Daniels Corporation | The Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning | The City of Toronto | Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario | Ernestine's Women's Shelter | FairShare CSA Coalition | Family Councils Ontario | Federation of Community Social Services BC | Flemingdon CHC | Fora Network for Change | Gardiner Museum | Green Thumbs Growing Kids | Hamilton Community Foundation | Hamilton Health Sciences | Imagine Canada | Indigenous OT Collective | Indigenous Youth Roots | Innocence Canada | Jane Goodall Institute of Canada | Laidlaw Foundation | Leadnow | Level Justice | Lumenus Community Services | Martin Luther University College | Milton Community Resource Centre | The National Collaboration for Doula Access | Newmarket African Caribbean Canadian Association (NACCA) Not 9 to 5 | North Point Douglas Women's Centre | North York Community House (NYCH) | Northwestern Toronto OHT | Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto | Ottawa Outdoor Gear Library | OCASI | Ontario Nonprofit Network | Out On Screen | Parkdale Community Food Bank | Peel Elementary Teachers’ Local | Peterborough AIDS Resource Network | Proctor and Gamble | Rooted Birthwork Collective | SCISA - Steel City Inclusive Softball Association | Seniors Care Network | Singing Out | Summerworks Festival | Toronto Fringe Festival | Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape | The Vanier Institute of the Family | The 519 | Unison CHC | the United Church of Canada | William Osler Health System | Women’s Shelters Canada

From all of us at E&W, we hope you and you communities have a beautiful, restorative end to your year.

In care and solidarity, Team E&W