Regenerative Leadership & Collaborative Governance
Mid-Autumn Festival - Handmade flower-shaped lanterns are being decorated along Eu Tong Sen Street for the coming Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations in Chinatown. The official light-up will be from 24 August 2014. Free to share and use image retrieved from flickr.com
Alt Title: Leadership, Governance, Rest and Regeneration in the Social Purpose Sector
This series featuring conversations between Louise Adongo and Benny Welter-Nolan is adapted from conversations originally published by Inspiring Communities. A a three-part dialogue conversations between Louise Adongo and Benny Welter-Nolan explored leadership, burnout, governance, succession, and systems change within the social purpose sector. These discussions emerged during a period of profound transition across nonprofit and community ecosystems in Canada.
This period included increasing leadership turnover, intensified equity discourse, and growing critiques of extractive funding and governance structures.These shifts were further shaped by the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial reckoning of 2020, and successive, compounding climate crises. This adaptation revisits and reframes those conversations within a broader dialogue on collaborative governance, regenerative leadership, and the evolving conditions shaping social sector work today. Rather than presenting these reflections as isolated acts of authorship, this series situates them within an ongoing ecosystem of nonprofit governance discourse that has been emerging across Canada and internationally over the past several years.
Over the last three years, governance discourse in the social purpose sector has increasingly shifted away from narrow compliance-based approaches toward relational, collaborative, and regenerative models. Earlier conversations often centered board effectiveness, fiduciary oversight, and strategic planning within relatively fixed institutional structures. More recent discourse has questioned whether inherited governance systems themselves contribute to burnout, inequity, organizational fragility, and disconnection from communities. Practitioners, organizers, researchers, and sector leaders —including Sean Geobey, Tamarack collaborators, trust-based philanthropy advocates, participatory governance practitioners, and systems transformation researchers — have increasingly emphasized distributed leadership, community accountability, collaborative stewardship, and regenerative structures.
This three-part blog series series contributes to that evolving dialogue, inviting readers into a candid conversation about what it takes to sustain leadership in the social purpose sector. Through dialogue between Louise Adongo and Benny Welter-Nolan, the series explores burnout, governance, succession, shared leadership, and the structural conditions that shape whether equity-focused leadership can thrive.
The series begins with the lived realities of burnout and moves toward possibility: healthier transitions, co-leadership, collaborative governance, and more regenerative ways of holding responsibility together.
Read the series
Series Introduction: From Governance as Oversight to Governance as Relationship
Part 1: Burnout and Systemic Barriers to Rest & Resilience
Part 2: Collaborative Leadership as a Model for Healthy Transitions & Succession Planning
Part 3: Collaborative Governance, Regenerative Leadership & Reimagining the Structures That Hold Us
Why this series now
Leadership in the social purpose sector is changing. Organizations are asking harder questions about who holds power, how decisions are made, how leaders are supported, and what kinds of governance models can sustain collective impact. The old model - one leader carrying the vision, the risk, and the pressure - is no longer enough.
This series offers language, stories, and frameworks for organizations ready to examine the systems they have inherited and build containers that are more equitable, distributed, and alive.