healing the stories that shape how we serve
leadership coaching + consulting for sustainable service
STORY-HEALING | MORAL IMAGINATION | SPIRITUAL ECOLOGY
We're living in an era of polycrisis — multiple overlapping crises exposing the fragility of our institutions and pushing mission-driven leaders to their breaking point.
but this moment isn't just testing our capacity to respond to external challenges. It's revealing the deeper wounds within our organizations and within ourselves.
In a moment marked by multiple genocides, the rollback of women's rights and LGBTQ+ protections, the villainizing of immigrants, and a breakdown in connection as friends, families, and communities split over social and political values, there is a meanness that has crept into public discourse making it challenging to engage in meaningful dialogue to address root issues or harm. In the midst of all of this we're still processing the trauma of COVID and navigating widespread social disconnection as we witness violence, trauma, and suffering that has been hypernormalized through social media.
On top of carrying this collective pain, those of us working in service of others are also being pushed to our limits in unprecedented ways. Being asked to do more with less. Navigating impossible ethical dilemmas. Maintaining our commitment to help others while our own needs and well-being are pushed to the side.
beyond well-being, we're also experiencing a reckoning with the reality that the values reflected in the mission statements we have spent our lives serving don’t match the actions of our organizations.
This moment in time has left many of us facing:
moral injury as we experience ethical conflicts that violate our deeply held beliefs
institutional betrayal by organizations that prioritize power, profit, and productivity over people
systemic grief from realizing the systems we've dedicated our lives to aren't broken—they're working exactly as they were designed to.
exhaustion from fighting for change within structures designed to resist it, while also carrying the weight of everything happening around us
The old approaches — the ones that demanded we sacrifice our humanity for the mission, compartmentalize our values to maintain professionalism, and bear individual responsibility for systemic failures — are not just insufficient for this moment. They're part of what's breaking us. But despite the popular refrain, meeting this moment doesn’t require more resilience.
it requires moral imagination — the capacity to hold pain and possibility together, to grieve what has been lost while still being able to envision something better and worth building as we move forward.
and healing the stories that shape how we serve is the first step.
this is the work of Roots in the Clouds.
two pathways
i’m here for my organization
for government, humanitarian, and nonprofit organizations ready to address root causes of harm and support their staff.
i’m here as an individual
for mission-driven professionals navigating oral injury, institutional betrayal, systemic grief, or other exhaustion in an era of polycrisis.
Tell Me My Story
"What if the service path we've chosen is actually an invitation—to see and heal and love and embrace our own humanity through the stories of the people we're serving? And what if that healing could happen at both the individual and organizational levels?"
— Dimple Dhabalia - Tell Me My Story
Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self
Written for mission-driven professionals who have dedicated their lives to serving in systems that were never designed to honor their full humanity — and who are ready to reclaim the story of what it means to serve without sacrifice.
practicing moral imagination is how we move toward hopeful action —
Not as individuals pulling ourselves up, but as a collective slowly rewriting what service rooted in care and integrity can look like. Every organization that chooses to center the humanity of its staff alongside its mission creates ripples that extend far beyond its walls. That's the work. That's what's possible.
This is how cultures change—not through policy alone, but through the courageous choice of individuals and communities to stay rooted in what matters most. To grieve what has been lost. To refuse the ceiling of what currently exists. To tell new stories.
the question isn't whether this moment is hard. It is.
The question is what we choose to practice inside it.