Katya Fels Smyth is the founder and CEO of Full Frame Initiative. She speaks, publishes, and advocates nationally for addressing poverty, violence, trauma, and oppression by removing barriers to well-being. Katya is a former Research Affiliate with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab, Research Fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Echoing Green Fellow, and Claneil Foundation Emerging Leaders Fellow. She holds a deep belief in the power of people to do good by and for each other.

In November 2024, FFI announced its intention to cease operations and transition its mission—and the movement to give everyone a fair shot at well-being—into the hands of a national network of champions and allies. That announcement kicked off an eight-month transition process. Throughout this period, Katya is writing and speaking more about endings, such as with the Rx Foundation and on Medium, as well as on her LinkedIn.

Since the episode’s recording, FFI has undertaken a two-part strategy: 1) equip its network of champions with connections, content, and confidence to take the work forward; and 2) invest in the preservation and organization of its 15 years of knowledge and insights to support the movement for well-being more broadly. The organization’s website will continue to house case studies, tools, and learning that is open source and accessible to the public. The full future site will launch in May 2025. See the organization’s existing extensive catalogue of resources at fullframeinitiative.org.

BACK TO EPISODES

Transcript

Katya Fels Smyth:

Inequitable access to well-being, well-being injustice, as the taproot of health disparities, wealth disparities, social disparities, and environmental disparities. And so, the reason I care about well-being is I think that people should be able to feel whole.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Welcome to The Measure. I am your host, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. At Equal Measure, we help foundations, nonprofits, and public entities advance social justice through learning, measurement, evaluation, strategy, and communications. On The Measure, you’ll hear conversations with leaders and practitioners about their social change and how to support more equitable communities through centering racial equity and transforming systems. I’m honored today to talk with Katya Fels Smyth. Katya is the founder and CEO of Full Frame Initiative, which is a social change nonprofit organization working toward a country where everyone has a fair shot at well-being. In November, the organization announced that it was closing after more than 15 years in operation, so I’m looking forward to having a chance to just have a conversation today with Katya. So, welcome. How are you? How are you doing?

Katya Fels Smyth:

Thanks, Leon. I’m good in part because I’m talking to you today. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. It’s a complicated time to be leading a transition of an organization at a time when the country and the world is in constant transition, but it also feels like both the right time for the decision to wind down FFI and the right time to unleash the work we’ve been doing to the world as a whole. So,  looking forward to that.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Well, I welcome our audience getting a chance to hear more about the work and what that unleashing looks like. So, I’d love for you to give a little bit more background, if you’re willing, and talk about your own kind of beginnings and the work that’s important to you, but in the context of how you think about place and your history and your context of how Katya has shown up into the world.

Katya Fels Smyth:

I am a white woman in my 50s who has the benefit of an extraordinarily strong education. I’m the daughter of two physicists at Princeton University. I have founded and led two nonprofits that I’m tremendously proud of. I have a husband and two almost adult kids. There’s a lot there that informs who I am and how I’ve been experienced by the world and certainly by the country. I am also a white woman in my 50s who has endured and moved through childhood violence, adolescent violence, adult violence, non-familial, but violence nonetheless, and who never really fit in as a kid and who was bullied and who grew up in a house where there was substance use and addiction and also recovery. And what I am really aware of throughout that is that my parents were active in the civil rights movement, and we never talked about white as normative.

And, so, I was raised with woman being the identity that was the one that was going to be the differentiator in part because my mom was a pioneer in her field. What, of course, is also true is that my whiteness protected me from a whole lot of things and has opened a lot of doors. But I sit with those two truths and two realities. Fast forward to college when I started volunteering at a shelter, and that, actually, was the first place that I felt like both my identities mattered and all my identities mattered in a way that I could be a whole person. I was also in a really bad accident that nearly killed me in college, and I couldn’t think anymore. I had to spend three years learning to think again.

And the shelter was one of the few places where I wasn’t thrown aside I felt because my brain wasn’t working right for a while. And those are relationships with the folks who were on the streets―some of them are housed now, many, many aren’t alive anymore―that were really salient for me in figuring out what I was going to do next. And I worked with a number of the women from the shelter to create an organization based on what they wanted and needed.

It’s not that these women are particularly screwed up. I think that these women are particularly screwed over. And if you think that people are where they are because they’re screwed up, you’re going to work with people and communities in a certain way. And if you start from the assumption folks are screwed over, you’re going to work with them in a different way. And I realized that my continuing to lead in community-based work, I really wanted to switch to the system side. And Full Frame Initiative grew out of that sense that we needed to fix the systems that are creating harms on one side that we are then trying to ameliorate with these insufficient programs on the other hand.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Wow. Thank you. Thank you so much for all that you named as you talked about your journey, as you talk about place, context, history. As I think about the pivot to the work of Full Frame, you define well-being at Full Frame as the set of needs and experiences universally required in combination and balance to weather challenges and have health and hope. That’s a quote taken from your work. But I’d love for our audience to hear how you break that down, the definition, for them to better understand that.

Katya Fels Smyth:

Sure. I actually want to go just ground us though in a feeling. Well-being is the collective and individual feeling of being whole. And that’s a really important place to start. We have all been hardwired by millions of years of evolution to seek out a set of needs and experiences that add up to that feeling. And they are things you’d recognize. So, there are five that we’ve identified.

Connections, which includes belonging, it includes having folks that take care of you and being needed by other folks.

We all need to experience safety. Our bodies don’t differentiate between psychological and physical safety. Collective safety is different from individual safety. But we all know what it’s like to feel safer and less safe.

We all need some level of predictability and stability in our lives. Some things we can count on, whether that is rhythms of the day, whether that is being familiar with just … being able to sort of walk around your neighborhood without giving it a whole lot of thought, right? We need things that are the same over time in our relationships. That’s stability, the third.

The fourth is called mastery, but we can think of it as mattering. We need to have a sense that we matter, which is a combination of influence. Does what I do matter, is who I am matter? Can I have some impact on relationships or the future or my environment? It also is where curiosity sits. It’s where purpose sits. It’s that drive that gives you a dopamine surge. If you’re an athlete or something else, you like to stretch yourself. It’s the stretch. That’s sort of the balance of the stability.

And the fifth is what we normally call basic needs. Food, shelter, water, air, sleep, things like that.

Now, the combination and balance part of the definition? You’re not going to be able to learn something new or try something new or stretch yourself if you’re trying to stay totally safe and totally stable.

We give up food all the time for other things. It’s this balancing that we do. Now, why does this matter? Why are we hardwired for this? Because when we have these things in combination and balance, we are healthier, we have more hope, and we are more resilient. One more piece that I think is really, really important to this. The United States is a country that’s been exquisitely designed for the well-being of a small number of people. We don’t all have a fair shot at well-being.

And because our well-being is essential for health, hope, and resilience, it is harder to be healthy. It is harder to be resilient. It is harder to gain hope if you are not of the white, male, landed, wealthy gentry or whatever the 200-plus year evolution of gentry is in this country. I see inequitable access to well-being, well-being injustice, as the taproot of health disparities, wealth disparities, social disparities, and environmental disparities. And so, the reason I care about well-being is I think that people should be able to feel whole. And I think that we can fix it in this country. That is within our reach. Maybe it’ll take a few generations, but we can get there because we have chosen how we design this country, and so we can fix it.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

So, I really appreciate those reflections and the intentionality of understanding the different components to well-being as we think about what it means to be whole. If we’re in a system that was intentionally created to benefit that small group of people, how do we get to a place where it can reach everyone? What needs to change? What’s the goal to getting to the place where it benefits everyone?

Katya Fels Smyth:

So, this question is actually really tied to what my hopes for the work of Full Frame Initiative is and continues to be, even after the organization is gone. Because I’ve always believed that this is not about any one organization. My experience that has been so rewarding and really extraordinary over the last 15 years is the way people of all stripes, of all backgrounds, just can pause and think about themselves and what matters to them and what matters to their communities when you start talking about access to well-being. And it becomes a way for people to share stories with each other about what makes them more safe and less safe and where they feel they belong and what that is. But in a way that also holds some joy and some humor and some laughter, which I think is desperately missing from so much of the dialogue about how are we going to fix this country, right? It all sounds terribly, terribly serious. And it’s a serious situation, but nobody’s going to stick with it if it’s all serious, all hard work.

So, I think there is, at first, I sit with the reality that this truly is about all of us. I’m not naive. I’m not like, let’s all just go out and hug each other and well-being each other. That’s madness, right? But I do think that just being resolute that this is about all of us, it’s not a justification for hateful behavior. It is not a justification for many of the really harmful things that we are seeing, but it is a way of beginning to understand and create bridges. And then there’s a whole technical, wonky, I think super exciting world of policy analysis, where you could look at policies―where are these undercutting well-being and shift those? There is metricization, there’s all the normal things that we think of when we think of systems change. But there’s also just the changing the systems that work in our neighborhoods and our communities in ways that are going to create more enabling environments for durable well-being and well-being justice.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah, I appreciate all those reflections, Katya. I do wonder, as I was listening to you, how do you think about where we are in this political climate?

Katya Fels Smyth:

I think that where we are now as a country is evidence of how much this work is needed. Early on, maybe 12 years ago, the first public system, the first state system that said, yes, we want to use this framework to make fundamental shifts in how we do our work―change policies, change culture, change narratives, all that other stuff that we now have jargon for, but at the time it was just how do we change the system―was Missouri’s juvenile justice system. So, I think about that early work with DYS and conversations we’d had with funders and conversations we’d had with others who just want to throw away some kids. And the way we had to bring those folks along as work I have to do myself right now to not end up otherizing half the country. Because I think that’s where we are, right?

Half the country otherizes the other half, back and forth and back and forth. And it’s convenient, and it’s neat, and I think a lot of it is rooted in people making up stories about each other. There’s social media, there’s a whole bunch of other things that feeds this, but about what belonging and safety and purpose mean. There’s one more piece I’d like to add, which is we’re capitalist country. We’ve all been raised with money, whether you have a lot of it or a little of it. And we tend to think in terms of fixed amounts of things. So, people think, well, if there is a fixed number of dollars, then there must be a fixed amount of belonging. Meaning if I have more, you have less. If you are safer here, I am less safe. Everything has become a zero-sum game. And so, a key part of really getting folks to embrace this idea of well-being equity and justice is that it is an area where we can grow the pie.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah, I appreciate it. I really appreciate that. I love that. So, as you are winding down Full Frame Initiative, you put out a powerful statement in a letter about the organization’s winding down. You wrote that “sustained predictable funding that is essential for the work of systems change has become even more rare than it used to be. ” Still with your quote, it said, “This trend is expected to continue. It’s one that the field and philanthropy need to reckon with if impact actually matters.” So, as you talk about the importance of this work needed even more now, talk to me about this trend that you’re seeing as we need this work even moreso now.

Katya Fels Smyth:

In 2020, lots of folks when COVID hit, started to be aware of systems in a way that they hadn’t before. People who always could get to their doctor couldn’t get a doctor. You couldn’t get a bed for your kid who’s dealing with anxiety and depression. There was systemic failure that was felt throughout the country. And I used healthcare as one example. And then George Floyd was murdered, and we started talking about policing systems as needing reform, right? And that brought up this idea of, oh, it’s not just technical, it’s cultural, it’s narrative, it’s all these different pieces. And philanthropy leaned in, and we started to see and hear more foundations saying they at least were interested in and wanted to support systems change. In the last three years, funding’s just gotten harder to get, full stop. Funders are using the same tools and lenses trying to fund systems change, not willing to give up any of the power, when power shifting is inherent to systems change.

But here are a couple of ways that it’s just not working. One is grants are short-term, they’re one year, maybe two years, and then they want to see what happens and then maybe they’ll come back. And time doesn’t work that way in systems change. Really, really long time arcs and really short windows of opportunity. So, we need, as a field, need long-term consistent partnership from our funders so that we can engage in long-term commitments to community and to other partners. I mentioned power. You cannot do systems change if you’re not explicitly trying to shift power. And so, if the funding doesn’t come with that as an expectation and as part of it, or if funders aren’t willing to engage truly in what that means and look at themselves in it and how foundations reflect the power structure of this country, that’s really problematic. It’s almost impossible to do with integrity.

And the reason that FFI is closing is not because we’re out of money. The reason that we are closing is that we don’t feel that we can continue to operate and do solid systems change with integrity. We make promises and commitments to communities, many of which have been hurt and harmed and so many people over so long have made so many promises. And I want to know that when I say, yeah, we’re going to be here with you for this project, for this period, even as it sort of has a meandering way through and we are going to get to impact in a few years. If every few months we’re having to run out and scrape up other funding and tell these short-term stories about impact, the harms are going to get pushed down completely onto communities that have been hurt again and again before. And our organization decided we didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah, very thoughtful. So, I do wonder, as I hear that, Katya, how do you see organizations that are looking to move forward, given the context that you just shared there? How do you see these organizations moving forward with a commitment to racial equity and systems change?

Katya Fels Smyth:

I’m not sure. I will add my voice to the many voices that say it is time for philanthropy and for power to actually claw back risk and to stop asking nonprofits to ensure them against bad results, against not finishing, against whatever. And instead for nonprofits to ensure that the communities that we are partnering with, that we are in, that we are of, are harmed the least, hold the least risk in this work. Now, that’s very simplistic, right, but I think that that absolutely has to happen.

I think our sector’s got some reckoning to do, and I’ve talked a lot about funders and all the stuff that funders have to do, but I think we as nonprofits or social change organizations or whatever we call ourselves, have got reckon with some stuff because a lot of us are going to close. We never close. We never close when we should. And so when we do, it’s usually pretty violent and traumatic and we don’t hold each other accountable for that. But it hurts the people that we’re supposed to be helping when we do that. And what if we started thinking in terms of, work has seasons and sometimes it’s not your season. How you leave is what people are going to remember.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Well, I appreciate naming that there’s still a lot of unknown over the next four years with a new administration, with the contentious political climate. I also hear in what you’re saying some nuggets of hope. So, I’d love for our audience to hear how you hold what brings you health and what gives you hope.

Katya Fels Smyth:

I would be remiss if I didn’t say my family is super, super important in that and in both my sort of my nuclear family and also my chosen family. And that’s really important for my health, hope, and my resilience. In terms of the work I do, I think I actually have a tremendous amount of hope. My hope lies in one, we’re all hardwired for well-being. And I’ve often said, 100 years of social service policy is no match for evolution. As awful as some of what we’re living with and going to be living through is, that drive for well-being is going to be there, and it is something that is going to be consistent for us to tap into.

The other thing is that this has and continues to activate extraordinary leaders across the country―not just in health and human services, but we work in climate, we work in the built environment. We’re doing some work in well-being economy. There’s lots of stuff our partners have done that has nothing to do with FFI. But to the extent that there’s this network of people and institutions that we’ve worked with that are deeply, deeply committed to this work, I have a deep hope that when we get an organization out of the way, maybe that will really unleash more of a movement around this.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Thank you for joining us today, Katya. It was a pleasure talking with you. And thank you to our listening audience.

I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation with Katya. It comes from the late W. E. B. Du Bois. He says, “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” You can learn more about Equal Measure and its work by visiting equalmeasure.org. And be sure to subscribe to The Measure Podcast. Until next time.