Reimagining What Is Possible in Times of Trouble

Last week, the CHHSM Board of Directors gathered for our June meeting and spent meaningful time focused on a central question: What does CHHSM need to become to meet this moment?

Grounded in the realities our members are navigating—workforce challenges, financial pressures, and evolving community needs—we leaned into the work of reimagining: not as a theoretical exercise, but as a necessary response to a changing landscape. Together, we began discerning how CHHSM can evolve to strengthen our impact and deliver clear, meaningful value to our members.

This work will continue throughout the rest of the year. And while it is focused on CHHSM’s future, it reflects something much broader already underway across our network, as many CHHSM organizations are rethinking models of care, adapting to new realities, and forming partnerships that would have felt unlikely just a few years ago. These are not incremental adjustments. They are signs that the systems we have long relied on are shifting, and that faithful leadership now requires not only resilience, but imagination.

In April, I wrote about the courage it takes to step forward when the path is not fully clear. In May, I  reflected on the strength found in bringing our voices and gifts together across this network. This month, the invitation takes another step forward: not simply to recognize our shared gifts—but to reimagine what becomes possible when we actively align and deploy them in new ways.

Because this moment is asking more of us than collaboration alone. It is asking for transformation.

In times like this, it is easy to focus on constraints. But reimagining invites a different discipline: to look again—more deeply—at what is present, and to ask how it might be engaged differently.

For CHHSM, this insight is shaping our own reimagining work. It is leading us to think differently about how we convene, how we support innovation, and how we amplify the collective voice and impact of this network.

And this same invitation extends to each of us.

To look at the gifts within our organizations and ask:

• How might those gifts be shared more openly?
• How might they intersect with the work of others?
• What becomes possible if we align them toward a common challenge or opportunity?

This is not easy work. It requires trust, openness, and at times a willingness to release familiar ways of operating. But it is also where new possibilities begin to take shape—possibilities that are not defined by the limits of any one organization, but by the collective strength of many, guided by one Spirit.

This is where this year’s Gathering theme, Many Gifts, One Spirit, continues to unfold in new ways.

Reimagining what is possible requires that we move beyond simply naming our strengths and begin to organize around them differently. It asks us to consider how our individual capacities—our expertise, relationships, innovations, and lived experience—can be more intentionally woven together to respond to the realities before us. Not as separate efforts running in parallel, but as connected strategies shaped by shared purpose.

Because gifts, on their own, do not transform systems. However, when aligned, shared, and activated—they do.