This is the last in a 3-part series exploring organizational wellness as fundamental to organizations, especially during challenging times. The post describes the Foundation’s Adaptive and Resilient Leadership Cohort, facilitated by Oscar C. Gomez and designed for invited grantees wanting to strengthen their organizations’ ability to navigate disruption, uncertainty, operational strain, and ongoing change.
As Archstone Foundation’s organizational wellness engagement has evolved, it has raised a broader question: How might this commitment to organizational wellness help support grantees navigating uncertainty, operational strain, leadership pressure, and growing complexity across the aging-services sector?
This phase of the Foundation’s engagement focused on translating organizational wellness into practical leadership tools and adaptive organizational strategies that could help grantees during periods of uncertainty and change.
Start with Risks, Then Contingency Planning
As part of the process, we developed the Adaptive and Resilient Leadership Cohort, designed for invited grantees wanting to strengthen their organizations’ ability to navigate disruption, uncertainty, operational strain, and ongoing change. Each participating organization included two members of senior leadership, allowing organizations to engage the work collaboratively rather than placing responsibility solely on one executive leader.
One of the central components of the cohort involved a collective risk analysis process. Through facilitated workshops and discussions, participants worked together to identify and assess major risks, and organizational vulnerabilities affecting both their organizations and the larger field. Importantly, the collective structure of the cohort created a broader and more informed perspective than organizations might have developed independently on their own. Participants were able to identify shared pressures, overlapping concerns, and recurring operational themes affecting multiple organizations across the sector.
The cohort also introduced practical approaches to contingency planning. Rather than treating contingency planning as a purely technical or reactive exercise, the process focused on helping leaders think strategically about preparedness, adaptability, capacity, and decision-making during periods of uncertainty and disruption.
Look Inward, Then Outward
As the cohort evolved, another important insight emerged: while risk analysis and contingency planning were important entry points, many organizations first needed support addressing more immediate challenges before they could fully engage broader contingency planning efforts. Addressing those became one of the most important dimensions of the individualized coaching component of the cohort.
The coaching process created space to help organizations apply the broader organizational wellness framework in ways that reflected their specific situations. Rather than applying a single model to every organization, the engagement focused on helping each organization identify what was most necessary to strengthen clarity, energy, and rhythm within its own context. In some cases, organizations needed support strengthening operational systems, planning structures, decision-making processes, and internal alignment. For one organization navigating the transition from an early-stage startup mindset into a period of organizational growth, the most immediate need was not contingency planning itself, but building stronger planning and operational structures that could help leadership and staff move forward together more effectively.
Reframe Organizational Problems
In another case, the engagement focused more heavily on organizational diagnosis and troubleshooting. Rather than immediately developing new systems or frameworks, the process centered on identifying where clarity, alignment, communication, pace, and rhythm were becoming disrupted across different parts of the organization, including the board, executive leadership, and staff. The coaching process helped surface where disconnects were occurring and where organizational energy was being depleted or fragmented.
One specific shift in how I'm moving forward working with our leadership team is to take a moment to reframe. One strategy that continues to resonate with me is remembering that it's not a matter of being good or bad at something but more about what you're paying attention to.
— Adaptive and Resilient Leadership Cohort member
In other cases, organizations were already actively engaged in contingency planning and organizational transition efforts. There, the coaching process helped identify the importance of a stronger change management framework to support the organization’s ability to remain steady and navigate ongoing uncertainty while ensuring communication, alignment, and sustainability over time. Participants valued this opportunity to take the time to discuss challenges and think through a framework for addressing them with other senior leaders on their team and share challenges with others in the cohort.
Organizational Wellness Strengthens Organizational Health
What became increasingly clear throughout the cohort was that organizational wellness was not separate from leadership or sustainability. Wellness became embedded within how organizations approached decision-making, communication, leadership alignment, planning, capacity, change management, and organizational adaptability during periods of disruption and uncertainty.
This work also reinforced that organizational wellness does not look the same across organizations. Different organizations require different entry points, leadership strategies, and supports depending on their stage of development, internal dynamics, operational pressures, leadership structure, and existing capacity.
Beyond its own organizational wellness journey, Archstone Foundation has made an investment in adaptive and resilient leadership among its grantees. Through facilitated learning, risk analysis, contingency planning, coaching, and applied organizational support, organizations are strengthening not only internal culture, but also their capacity to lead, adapt, and sustain mission during periods of ongoing uncertainty and change—critical to their ability to improve health and social care for older adults in California.
From the Foundation
Through this 3-blog series we have explored what it means to build organizations where people can truly thrive through clarity that grounds us, energy that fuels us, and rhythm that sustains us. This series was never meant to be the finish line. It’s an invitation and a commitment. Archstone Foundation remains committed to investing in the wellness of our staff, organization, and our partners. This is not a one-time initiative, but an ongoing part of who we are. We’re grateful that you have learned about our journey and hope our conversations continue.
Read the first two posts in the series:
Wellness Is Not a Perk. It’s a Prerequisite for Staff, Leadership and Effective Organizations.
