What We Talked About When We Opened the Doors

In June we tried something we had never done before. We invited a small group of our closest supporters into a video call and, for an hour, showed them the inside of the organization. Not a pitch. Not an ask. Just the questions we are actually working on, the research underneath them, and a few of the people doing the work.

Two of those people, Sue Moldaw and Eric Toda, serve on Reimagine's volunteer Board of Directors, the group that governs the nonprofit and helps steer where it goes. The third, Selma Quist-Moeller, leads our research on post-traumatic growth.

It went well enough that we want to do it again, and well enough that the conversation deserves a wider audience than the room it happened in. The full recording of the evening is included in this post.

The chaplain

Sue Moldaw joined our board after a long career in chaplaincy, and she came to that career the way many people come to this work.

"What brought me to the work was a personal experience," she said. "Eighteen years ago I lost my father." She spent a year supporting him through his illness. After he died, processing her own grief, she made what she described as a fairly spontaneous decision to go back to graduate school, to support other families through aging and loss. She enrolled in a gerontology program.

"But what I discovered when I was in the program was that all I really wanted to learn about was death and dying."

That led her to chaplaincy, a field she had not previously heard of, and to California Pacific Medical Center, and to the single lesson she says mattered most.

"How important it is to just simply be there and to create space for families and for people. To listen. To just listen, and not to try to fix."

Asked what people find hardest about being present with someone in pain, she was direct about it.

"We want to help. We want to fix, and it's a natural instinct. You see something someone's going through and the instinct is to make it better. And there's so many things that really can't be fixed."

The psychologist

Selma Quist-Moeller is our lead psychologist on post-traumatic growth, educated at Berkeley, UCLA and Copenhagen, and one of the field's more visible researchers.

She started with the finding that got her attention in the first place. For decades, trauma research focused on the damage: PTSD, depression, anxiety, all well established. Then something else began showing up in the literature. Somewhere between 30% and 80% of people who go through serious hardship report learning something from it. Not from the event, she was careful to say, but from the struggle around it. Something that moved them closer to how they wanted to live.

That is an enormous range, and it is the range that set her research question. Why do some people arrive there and others do not, and if you can name the factors, can you support the people who would not have got there alone?

One factor keeps recurring: community.

"If we lean into community, if we reach out to people, if we feel supported, if we feel like we aren't alone in our suffering, that has been a key finding."

She put some weight behind why isolation is not a soft problem. Loneliness has been found to carry a physical toll comparable to smoking seven cigarettes a day, and it shortens lifespan. A UCLA study by Dr. Naomi Eisenberger found that social exclusion activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain. Which, as she pointed out, makes evolutionary sense. If you were pushed out of the group, you were likely to die of it.

Then she explained the design decision that a lot of people ask us about.

Most social platforms, she said, are built around instant reward, and they engage the same neural pathways as addiction. We wanted the opposite. So the platform is built around a button called Holding Space, and it does nothing quickly.

"One of the most beautiful things you can give to another person is presence. Not fixing necessarily, not advising, but actually just being present with someone."

The button is an attempt to make that a repeatable, learnable action rather than a talent some people happen to have. And it is deliberately asymmetric. On the platform, you cannot see how much space has been held for you. You only see how much people hold for each other.

She also offered a metaphor for why growth is not purely inward work.

"I compare it to breathing. We need to both inhale and sometimes turn our attention inward. But we can't live by only inhaling. We also need to exhale."

Being of service to someone else, she said, is one of the stronger findings in the field for improving your own meaning and wellbeing. Give and get, give and get, in a loop.

Then she stopped talking about it and led everyone through it. A minute of turning attention inward. Then looking at the face of whoever happened to be next to you on the grid, a stranger in most cases, and holding the thought that this person has also lost something. Then sending them, silently, a few plain sentences. You are not alone. I wish you well. Then noticing that someone had done the same for you.

The room went quiet. It is a different thing to feel than to read about, which was rather the point.

The board member

Eric Toda has been on our board for around a decade. He is a marketing executive who has built brands for Meta, Nike, Airbnb, Snapchat and Gap, and an advocate for AAPI representation. Brad asked him what stands out about Reimagine's approach.

He answered by explaining why he joined.

"I joined because I lost a child. And in that time, and in that moment, I felt a lot of shame, not being able to talk about it. A stigma. Not being able to share that I lost a child. And I kept it inside."

He found Reimagine when it was, in his words, very analog. A scattering of emails and conversations, but a place where he could say the thing out loud and find other people who had been through it.

"I don't just want to enter into people's lives. I want to impact them."

"I want to make sure that there is space for them to hold their feelings, to understand that there are people to empathize with them. Empathy is something that is severely lacking in this world right now."

On what the platform is for, he was plain: "Hopefully no parent, nobody, has to feel alone in their journey."

Where this is going

Brad closed by naming what has changed. For most of our first decade, Reimagine made events, and we have now hosted thousands of them. What is new is that the events, the ten-week group programs and the self-paced individual pathways now sit on one platform, so that someone who comes to us at two in the morning has somewhere to go, and someone who comes to a single vigil is not dropped afterward.

He also named where it goes next, which is into partnership. We are in conversation with large hospices in Ohio, Florida and Michigan. All of them run bereavement programs. Most of those programs are short-term, end well before grief does, and are not built around community.

And he gave the honest version of the challenge, which we thought was worth keeping in.

"How do we hold true to these kinds of values and scale? That's very challenging, to think about every feature, every interaction, and redesign it in a way that people can engage but also have it be something where you're healing others and yourself."

We do not have all of that solved. We said so in the room, which was the point of opening the doors in the first place.

We will do this again. If this made you want to be part of what happens next, support our work or reach out to get involved.

Reimagine is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, governed by a volunteer Board of Directors. Our programs are free because people give. Learn how to support this work