You know this story – some of you even lived through it: on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with a force that caused immediate and devastating destruction for hundreds of miles in every direction. Ecologists and geologists predicted it might take many decades, or even centuries, for life to fully return.
But do you know this story? That within days, small shoots of greenery were discovered. And far sooner than anyone predicted, patches of wildflowers, scuttling beetles, and grazing elk were repopulating the landscape, and within just a few decades life seemed to have returned in full. It is considered one of the great examples of natural ecological revitalization.
In my faith tradition of Christianity, we recently celebrated Easter, a holiday about resurrection, hope, and new life. During the season of Easter, these words of poetry from the prophet Isaiah always strike me anew: "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland" (Isaiah 43:19). These words, drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures and shared across both Jewish and Christian traditions, were written to a people in exile, promising a future hope that they couldn’t have conceived of in that moment. Whether Easter is something you celebrated, or your spring observances come from a different faith tradition or no tradition at all, I think these ideas of new life from barren places are on most minds in the Pacific Northwest in the spring, when flowers are budding from trees and new life is emerging where we forgot it ever existed.
I've been sitting with what these ideas of resurrection, renewal, and new life might mean for us as leaders right now.
The research on major disruptions — social, economic, institutional — is consistent: they are deeply uncomfortable to move through (and they affect different people and groups differently). The social sector is living through true, uncomfortable upheaval right now. Our instinct is often to find footing and return to what felt stable. That instinct isn't wrong, nor is it wrong to be genuinely concerned at the conditions that have prompted the change. I doubt an ecologist would say the Mount St. Helens eruption was something to celebrate. But what's also true is that disruption makes way for new life — and that sometimes, in our work, that requires a resurrection mentality to notice.
A resurrection mentality isn't about pretending nothing has been lost. It isn't about rushing past grief or refusing to name what is genuinely hard. It is, rather, a refusal to let loss have the final word. Something new emerges, not a ghost of what was, but a transformed reality.
And critically, it is not nothing. Resurrection isn't a disappearing act. It's the emergence of a new form that carries the best of what came before into something we're still learning to recognize. Sometimes that means asking honestly whether new life might emerge more fully in partnership with others, through a reimagined process, or by finding entirely new soil. It takes vulnerability, creativity, and the willingness to look beyond our own walls.
The road ahead may be different for the social sector, and that is not a failure. It is the nature of new life. My hope for you this season is not just that you survive the disruptions you may be facing, but that you begin to find within them the conditions for something you couldn't have grown any other way.
Romanita Hairston
Chief Executive Officer