I sat down with Malka — educator, community herbalist, organizer, and co-founder of the DC Mutual Aid Apothecary — to talk about honoring endings, beginnings, in-between moments, mergers, sunsets. All the transitions that, when witnessed well, can turn into wisdom instead of just abrupt, unmarked closings.

Malka spent over a year researching the closure of Movement Ground Farm, a decade-long land-based nonprofit that attempted to shift into a worker-led model and eventually decided to sunset. She wove the story of that organization into a virtual interactive timeline, drawing on 20-plus interviews (some of them four hours long with former staff). Her research has become a case study for anyone moving toward collective land-based work, especially the people asking what we can learn from projects that have shut their doors.

We talk about why so many of us leave organizations carrying rage, distrust, and shame. Why the nonprofit form so often turns into a machine for sustaining itself. What happens when a founder can't let go of power, and what shifted for the Movement Ground Farm ED once he had a year of reflection and an outside witness to help him make sense of what happened. Malka also shares where she is right now with the DC Mutual Aid Apothecary, six years in, exploring what a soft ending can look like when a project has grown so entangled with its community that ending it isn't even fully in her hands anymore.

If you've ever left a project feeling like it went up in flames, or watched one dissolve without acknowledgment, this one's for you.

In this episode:

• Why unmarked endings get carried into the next role as rage, cynicism, or a quiet loss of faith
• What happens when the nonprofit's real job becomes sustaining the nonprofit
• Movement Ground Farm as a case study, and Malka's process of interviewing people from every side of a decade-long story
• The founder's paralysis, and what shifted when he could finally make sense of what happened
• Two very different kinds of endings: organizations imposed on a community versus ones that grew out of it
• Why some things can't fully be ended, because they no longer belong to their founders
• What a "soft ending" can look like (Plant Fest, and giving away thousands of seedlings, is a good example)
• The elements Malka names for holding a closure well: an outside witness, space for community to honor the work, not hoarding what you've built, and telling the story with nuance
• The offering an ending organization can make to the rest of us as a case study, mistakes on display, humbly

Resources mentioned:

• Movement Ground Farm — harvestingforseed.com
• The DC Mutual Aid Apothecary

Connect with Malka:

• LinkedIn: Malka Roth
• Instagram: @malkaeve
• Email: malkae.roth@gmail.com

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Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health

Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com

What Organizational Doula Work Is

• Deep witnessing and accompaniment through transitions, not framework application
• Starts with assessment: what the organization already has, its history, cultural identity, strengths
• Builds emergent frameworks tailored to the specific team, broad enough to flex but tethered to history
• Psychological safety as a core pillar: enables trial-and-error culture and generative mistake-making
• Doula as “lantern holder”: outside perspective that makes sense of what teams can’t see from within
• Individual and collective work combined: leadership and team members addressed separately and together
• Tools are maps, not plans: flexible, multi-route, oriented toward a shared North star

Who It’s For and Key Use Cases

• Teams merging, experiencing leadership ruptures, or moving toward something new
• Organizations sunsetting or closing, including unexpected closures
• Coalitions forming across very different organizations (example: North Dakota anti-trafficking coalition bringing together law enforcement, nonprofits, faith groups, government)
• Teams in conflict: conflict held as generative, not something to squash
  • Ignored conflict snowballs, teams lose talent and the ability to dream together
  • Must be witnessed from outside by someone not in the conflict
• Conferences and gatherings: drop-in support, workshops, helping excited collaborators ground new ideas into actionable maps before they leave

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🔗 Stay Connected

Take the Quiz → Discover where your organization most needs storytelling

Let's connect on LinkedIn

Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health

Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com

Alice Ely is one of my favorite people to talk with, and I’ve been wanting to have her on the podcast for a long time. She’s the executive director of the Public Health Council of the Upper Valley, celebrating twenty-five years of the organization she leads. She’s also the person who funded my BIPOC and queer healthcare storytelling work through the Vermont Community Health Equity Partnership a few years back, so this conversation was a real coming-full-circle moment for me.

We talk about what it took for the Public Health Council to hold the VTCHEP grant in a way that served the communities it was meant for. We talk about: word-of-mouth outreach through networks the state would never have thought to use; fiscal sponsorship for organizations without institutional infrastructure; money upfront when grantees needed it; and more.

We talk about qualitative data being treated as unreliable inside healthcare settings. We talk about what it means when N is too small to report. And we talk about the medicalization of public health, and what happens when community health workers never leave the institutional walls of the systems that employ them.

If you’re a funder, a public health leader, a community-led practitioner, or someone trying to change how your traditionally white-led organization shows up in this work, this one is for you.

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🔗 Stay Connected

Take the Quiz → Discover where your organization most needs storytelling

Let's connect on LinkedIn

Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health

Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com