As of late, a lot of my writing has happened within the context of writing to my kid (more on this practice + rationale here), and this blogpost will follow the same format.

Dear [Kid’s Name],

I’m coming to the end of yet another contract with the Department of Imaginary Affairs (DIA) – one of many over the last eight years – and I figure you might one day ask me why and how I spent so much time here. Why did I keep returning? My “boss” at the DIA, Jenn, has asked me the same question over the years, as have many friends. 

Before I share the why, let me share some context.

For starters, I’m not the easiest person to work with. In reflecting on one of our more recent projects together, Jenn summarized it as “the privilege and pain of working with Mathura.” Here’s why:

Contracts & Contradictions

All of my contracts with DIA have been no more than four months long, and not for lack of DIA trying to make them longer. In fact, the Board and Jenn have been trying to entice me to become an employee for years. My first role with the DIA was as the Program Manager of The Stories of Us (SoU) program, which was funded by a three-year grant spanning 2018-2021. I was the Program Manager for that entire duration, and only signed three-month contracts for that entire duration. That’s 12 contracts over three years.

You see, I see stories and the work of storytelling as sacred. The Stories of Us was funded by an Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) grant and somehow I didn’t think they’d see stories in the same way. In fact, SoU was the “edgy,” feel-good project within their innovation portfolio – an outlier and a means to a narrative end. And as much as the DIA sounded cool as a concept, I hadn’t yet seen them walk their talk. If I was going to be building and stewarding this program under the constraints of a federal grant, at an organization I barely knew, I needed to know that I could leave if it ever got to a point where I was doing more harm than good, if the pressure to produce outputs (200+ stories over three years) meant putting relationships at risk, and/or if what I held as sacred became mechanical or extractive. DIA had been scarred by a previous program manager who had ghosted them, so my first contract began with a three-month probation period. Little did they know, I was about to put them on probation for much longer (spoiler alert: it still hasn’t ended!).

At the start of the project, I had shared the fears above with Jenn. She, who had just given birth to her second child, assured me that she had no idea the project would be funded when they had put in the grant application, that the program timelines / deliverables / metrics they had suggested in the application were somewhat arbitrary, that the only way to find out what works is to experiment, that the rules are meant to be bent/broken, that I should follow my gut, and that we could figure out how to change whatever wasn’t working. What sounds to me now like trust and freedom, landed in my then 25-year-old body as, “WTF. What do you mean it’s all made up? We said we’re gonna do one thing and somehow they’re gonna be okay with us doing something else with their money?? Are you for real or is this post-partum talking??”

In the three years that followed, a pattern emerged. Approximately every three months, I’d have what I then called an existential crisis, but what I now know is an integrity crisis (which, tbh, can become existential real quick). Anyone who has worked with me will know that I put a lot of weight on wrestling with and metabolizing the contradictions in our work, so that we are ultimately spending less time and energy fighting within and amongst ourselves and more of it fighting against the system. Within the context of The Stories of Us, the primary tension was between being responsive to what I was actually hearing from our storytellers and community of SoU practitioners re: what they needed, vs. meeting the metrics that had been set long before many of these relationships had been built. 

As these contradictions sharpened, I would come to these check-ins with Jenn with a rationale for why I couldn’t keep doing this work while remaining in integrity. In turn, she would (internally freaking out but externally composed) ask me what needed to change in order for the work to feel aligned with and responsive to community. In response to Jenn’s question, I would put together a counter-proposal of options and she would re-jig the budget, take it back to our funder, and advocate for those changes. I could focus on being responsive to emerging program needs and the community around it, because she was willing to fight for the material conditions to resource that ever-evolving work. In doing so, we were able to shift resources across budget lines as needed, host gatherings that were key to building relationships, share our learnings and storybooks in ways that people actually wanted to engage with, and build out a seven-session storytelling curriculum that was trauma-informed vs. the originally proposed standalone two-hour workshop that would’ve opened people up without being able to close them. (More on these acts of generative refusal here). 

As intuitive as this process may seem, this is not the norm within non-profit vs. funder relationships, where the fear of losing funding means delivering on what we said we would in the grant application often becomes more important than delivering what is truly needed in the moment. As much as we still joke about it, Jenn understood that my “commitment-phobia” with my contracts was never about shirking the work, but about being able and equipped to do it well and in integrity. Neither she nor I were about to let a funder who could barely remember the name of our organization (“Department of Imaginary Friends”) get in the way of that. In fact, as we learned that funders could indeed be moved, we became increasingly comfortable with raising points of tension and pushing for them to approve the material and bureaucratic shifts that would resolve them. 

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“What do you want?”

Now, let’s return to the question of why I stayed with DIA through those three years, and why I’ve kept coming back in the five years that have followed the end of that particular project. One recurring reason is that when I raise concerns about why I can no longer stay, DIA not only hears me out, but asks, from a genuine place, what it would take for me to stay. It is not delusional about what is possible, and it does not bend to my will, but it asks “What do you want?”

And that, I think, is the vulnerability that lies at the core of imagination as a practice. It invites us to shift – however temporarily – from a place of obligation (shoulds), possibility (coulds), and conditions (woulds), to a place of desire (wants). DIA may not always be able to deliver on what I want, and vice versa, but that conversation has been a necessary pre-requisite for us to truly understand what satiation looks like in a particular context (i.e. What would be enough?).

From what I’ve witnessed over these last eight years, employees / contractors who have been the most in tune with and forthcoming about what they want and open to figuring out what mutual satiation might look like between their wants and DIA’s mission, have had the most fulfilling experiences working here. Conversely, those who have been less content with their time at the organization tended to not know what they wanted, didn’t have the capacity to act on and operationalize what they wanted, and/or could not envision and see through a mutually beneficial exchange with DIA.

Here are some of my own answers to “What do you want?” over my eight years of working with DIA – desires and visions that I’ve then been able to shape, steward, and protect at DIA.

1. An organization that explicitly names white supremacy

George Floyd was murdered by police on May 25, 2020 and June 2020 marked a global and personal reckoning that inevitably bled into my work at DIA at the time. For better or for worse, I cannot compartmentalize the macro from the micro – what’s happening in the world from what we’re doing in our day-to-day – and I wrote a post for the DIA blog that began with the statement “I work within a system that teaches and preaches a colonizer’s language.” It unpacked the ways in which white supremacy shows up in our work despite our best intentions for equity. That post and its sequel prompted a series of reflections within the team, which ultimately resulted in DIA leading more visibly and vocally with our commitments to equity and justice rather than assuming they were known. 

2. An organization that functions more like a movement than a non-profit

In the summer of 2025, returning to DIA for a contract focused on re-imagining our strategy and direction as a storytelling organization, I was resisting yet another compartmentalization. I had spent the previous two years deeply embedded in, and regularly learning from, Palestine solidarity organizing as well as many other movements for liberation whose contexts, goals, and strategies intersect with the Palestinian cause. It felt impossible for me to sit here and imagine doing any sort of work that didn’t actively help us build the capacity to sustain these movements, and the ideological clarity needed to resist the counterinsurgent nonprofit industrial complex. So, the strategy I proposed was one that centered around the question,“What if we approached our work less as program/service delivery and more as building a movement?” Then, in asking “What are the skills we need to be practicing ourselves and teaching those we work with in order to make and sustain this shift?” we identified four core skills to guide our work moving forward: telling the truth, weaving the micro & macro, holding and metabolizing contradictions, and practicing curiosity. This video shares the thinking behind this strategy, these skills, and the first project (Migration as Practice) where we operationalized this shift. Today, DIA identifies itself as “a movement-rooted consultancy & learning lab.”

3. Deeper, more embodied engagement with the issues we’re working on or gathering around

In early 2023, returning for another stint with the DIA, I was inspired by the work I had been able to do on a different project in Fall 2022 – facilitating the Mortal Method retreat. The Mortal Method team had been open to me designing and facilitating a personalized 30-Day Practice for them to complete in the lead-up to our 10-day research & writing retreat in British Columbia. As a facilitator who is a firm believer in preparation, this practice allowed me to prime the retreat participants in a scaffolded and intentional way. This work we did in advance meant that the richness of the insights that emerged, and the collective creative flow we were able to access at the retreat, were unmatched. Everyone came in already vaccinated to the topics we’d be discussing over the 10 days, and already somewhat aware of their relationships to these topics. The practice had essentially expanded our runway, helped us pick up speed first slowly and then quickly, and allowed us to dive deep when we gathered. I wanted more of this – regular and deepening engagement with the issues we’re working on and gathering around – and brought this proposal to my work with DIA. 

Long story short, several of the DIA strategy and relational retreats that followed, as well as the most recent Migration as Practice gathering, have all been preceded (and in some cases also succeeded) by a series of practice emails (including meditations, reflection questions, artistic accompaniments, etc.) that were shared with participants. 

4. Pay that allows me to move with generosity in the work

While my pay as the Program Manager for The Stories of Us program was relatively fixed by the grant that was funding it, I’ve been able to negotiate my fees as a contractor for future work with DIA. In trying to explain to DIA program participants why they can’t have personalized practice all the time, Jenn has said, more than once, “Mathura is not cheap.” While I’ve created line-by-line budgets to justify why I cost what I cost, the foundation that underpins how I charge is this: I want to be resourced in a way that allows me to move with generosity in this work. In other words, I want to have a really honest conversation about scope and fees at the beginning of the project and then ideally never have to think or talk about money again. Moving with generosity means that I’m not counting my hours or foregoing a creative idea because I feel like I’m not being paid enough to see it through. The practices for Migration as Practice, for example, featured four custom meditations that I wrote, recorded, edited, and produced for participants. I’d never done that for a gathering before, but not only did it increase the accessibility of the practice, it was also able to support participants in dropping into their own experiences in an immersive way. It was a heavier lift than originally anticipated, but I felt resourced enough to do it with generosity.

My fees can also be activating for others. A few years ago, Jenn received her renewed CEO contract from the Board not long after I had signed another contract with DIA. She mentioned that she wasn’t satisfied with the salary they had offered her. In probing why, she said, “Well, for one, it means you’d be making more than me, if we’re looking at it on an hourly basis.” I asked, “Is the problem that I’m being valued too high or that you need to be valued higher?” She thought about it, and said it was the latter. “Then ask the board to do that,” I said. She did. And she got the raise. 

My being resourced to move with generosity in the work is only threatening when it holds up a mirror to one’s own ability / inability to move with generosity in the work. I was essentially asking Jenn the same question that DIA had asked me many times before, “What do you want?” Specifically, did she want higher pay for herself or lower pay for me? Answering that question honestly helped her respond to the salary issue from a place of integrity vs. insecurity.

5. A prioritization of our relationship over potential opportunities

Me being expensive means that it doesn’t always make sense for DIA to bring me on for a potential project or write me into a proposal. Personally, as a rule of thumb, if a collaboration asks us to divide a small pie (i.e. budget) into pieces that would leave neither of us (Jenn nor I) truly satisfied or resourced to do the work, that collaboration is not worth putting our friendship and working relationship at risk. Within capitalism, being able to move generously and without resentment is in part contingent on being resourced enough to do our jobs well. As an alternative to trying to eke out our respective fees from a potential client’s under-resourced budget, we have instead offered multiple packages where they can choose to pay us more to have both of us coach/consult on a project. 

Are you willing to be changed?

If it isn’t clear from all of the above wants-that-became-norms, DIA is an organization that is willing to be shaped by the hands, hearts, and heads that touch it. 

In turn, it asks us to be open to being shaped by it. After all, “All that we touch, we Change. All that we Change, Changes us.” (Octavia E. Butler)

For example, I have wanted nothing to do with funders since I began my time at DIA. Meanwhile, DIA puts a lot of weight on being an organism within its ecosystem that is able to convene and bridge relationships between stakeholders who might not otherwise be in reciprocal relationship (e.g. frontline workers, service providers, community members, and funders). 

With SoU, I was grateful that Jenn and Blair were open to managing the funder relationships and advocating for the program’s needs on my behalf. When it came to completing the one-size-fits-all reporting templates for IRCC, I was grateful to be supported in sharing program updates whose length and format defied the boundaries of their tiny Excel columns, and in sharing critical feedback about the limitations of the template itself.

In a later contract with DIA, I was more than happy to compile and synthesize an exposé of the harmful norms and barriers faced by BIPOC youth navigating the world of youth-focused grants, and offer proposals for care within philanthropy. DIA honoured and harnessed my need for thorough, transparent documentation, while also staying in relationship with our funders, who, to my surprise, actually read my 75-page report and responded back with a demonstrated desire to shift the harmful norms within their sector.

Fast forward to 2025, the funding landscape looks a lot different. The federal government that once granted us $250,000 over three years under a Service Delivery improvement grant, has made significant cuts to service delivery spending, much less service delivery improvement. The foundation that granted us 800K in operational funding across three years – funding that allowed us to host, gather, and resource our people in ways would’ve otherwise been unfundable – sunsetted. Remaining sustainably resourced in this environment requires a drastically different approach to funding – one DIA has been cultivating slowly but surely, one conversation, invitation, and persistent follow-up email at a time. 

Earlier this year, after a three-month hiatus from DIA, I found myself offering to Jenn that I would be open to coming onboard again if it meant I could help steer DIA’s F(un)dable Futures program towards what I now recognize as philanthroabolition. I still had no interest in interacting directly with funders, but I could see the urgency with which they needed to be moved towards mass redistribution, and my offering to Jenn was this: “I’ll push your thinking and you can push theirs.” As promised, over these last two months of facilitating practice at DIA, my work has been rooted in pushing DIA’s engagement with the philanthropic sector from a status quo of generosity-at-best to redistribution-as-imperative, from maintaining funds in perpetuity to spending down endowments, and from shifting dollars alone to shifting power alongside with those dollars. This has included exposing DIA to the work of organizations like the Guerrilla Foundation that are already leading, modelling, and sharing language around this push.

However, without the relationships that DIA has cultivated with funders over the years (the relationships I had wanted nothing to do with, mind you) there would be nothing and no one to push. This work has been fruitful because it was scoped and completed at the intersection of what I want (i.e. philanthroabolition), what DIA sees as important work (i.e. convening and forging relationships between unlikely bedfellows), and a partnership that allows both parties to remain in integrity with the worlds we want to practice towards.

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“Do you still want this?”

Every time I wrap up a stint at the DIA, I’m ready. I’ve given it my all, pushed as much as I can push (myself, and the work) given the conditions, I’ve documented the work, and am splitting at the seams for something different. This time is no different. 

You see, it’s not just enough to ask, “What do I/you/we want?” We must also be brave enough to ask ourselves and each other “Do I/you/we still want this?”, and answer honestly. The world is changing so quickly, as are our lives, our relationships, and our capacities. It’s becoming more and more unsustainable – on our bodies, psyches, spirits, relationships, and organizations – to do work we don’t actually want to be doing. 

Earlier this month, I followed through on something that I had been sensing for some time. Five weeks into what was initially scoped to be an eight-week practice, I asked Jenn if she actually wanted to continue receiving practice emails. When I asked her something similar a few weeks prior, she had “jokingly” said, “I want it all. I want all the punishment of practice.” This time around she hesitated. She compared me sending her practice emails to having a personal trainer. “You don’t want to go but you go because you don’t want to disappoint them or yourself.” It’s true that it requires willpower to show up to the gym, but it also requires a body that feels resourced for the exertion it’s about to do. 

^shit Jenn has said about me sending her practice over the years

I found myself repeating back to Jenn some version of what she told me in 2018 – that the rules are meant to be bent / broken (even if we’re the ones who made them up), that she should go with her gut, and that we could figure out how to change what wasn’t working. Her gut said that she wanted to stop practice for the rest of my contract, so we did. The one thing I dislike more than under-resourced work is make-work (i.e. work that is generated for the sake of doing something vs. work that is actually serving a meaningful purpose). Instead, we negotiated a different, more impactful way for me to channel the remaining resources, and this blogpost was one of those ways. 

___

Keeping Faith

So kid, as I wrap up this contract, I truly don’t know if/when I’ll be back at DIA. But if/when I am, it’ll likely be because my answer to “What do I want?” has led me back here. After all, that’s why I’ve returned each time before, and it’s why I stayed for as long as I have. Three months at a time, many times over.

Letting go when you don’t know what you want is inertia. 

Letting go when you’ve done the work of figuring out what you want is faith.  

Leaving you with a lil poem about faith. It reads as a love poem, and it is. For a reality where work – whatever form it takes – continues to feel like a labour of love. 

Believe in a love
that is being stored up for you
like an inheritance,
and have faith
that in this love
there is a strength
and a blessing so large
that you can travel
as far as you wish
without having to 
step outside of it.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Love,
Mama

p.s. I got my first gig with the DIA by sending them an 11-minute voicenote, and that is the MOST on-brand for your mama 😉