I2I’s Heart-2-Heart on 2024 Wrapped, Words of the Year, and Rest!

Season’s greetings, friends! ❄️☕️

Welcome to Intention 2 Impact’s Heart-2-Heart — our monthly newsletter where we share what’s on our mind, in our hearts, and up our sleeves.

In our final newsletter of 2024, we reflect on all we achieved together in the past 365 days, reveal our words of the year, and sign off as we bid farewell to 2024!

On Our Minds

I2I 2024 Wrapped

Who needs three French hens and two turtle doves when you’ve got…

🚀 37 projects (a whopping 48% increase from last year!)
🌟 31 game-changing organizations served
✈️ 14 trips to 11 different cities

🎤 10 conferences and convenings
📋 5,489 Asana tasks checked off
💬 38,474 Slack messages sent
… and a partridge in a pear tree!

2024 has been nothing short of extraordinary at Intention 2 Impact. We’re wrapping up the year feeling grateful, proud, and let’s be real — a bit tired (okay, very tired, very demure). But every moment has been worth it, and it’s all thanks to incredible supporters and co-conspirators like you.

This year, we grew our team to 6 full-time members, 11 contractors, and 2 advisors.

Together, we:
✨ Designed and implemented 11 MERL frameworks
📊 Completed 11 portfolio, strategy, and program evaluations
🤝 Led 12 technical assistance projects

Our work supported visionary clients advancing critical causes like:

Racial equity
Affordable housing
Environmental justice
Youth mental health
Social entrepreneurship
Responsible technology
Worker and economic justice
Early childhood education
School nurses
Infertility and reproductive care
LGBTQIA+ rights
…to name a few

Along the way, we learned and experienced some things. Here are some of the most defining lessons, moments, and musings of 2024:

3 lessons learned:

To measure the impact of apples and oranges (aka: outcomes across a diverse portfolio of grantees), develop “impact archetypes” by clustering different types of changes within a system. This challenge/solution came up 4 times this year!
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) and Impact Measurement & Management (IMM) frameworks are better together — especially when it comes to measuring impact investment portfolios within foundations.
Always learn out loud. Our favorite part of our job is facilitating learning for our clients — and to practice what we preach, we find ways to “learn out loud” through monthly mindmelds, LinkedIn Live, participating in communities of practice, and of course, this newsletter! In case you missed any, catch up here.

3 favorite moments:

Meeting Ava DuVernay at the Mission Investors Exchange annual conference
Hosting our first March Madness: Celebrity Philanthropy Edition. Congrats again, Dolly!
I2I team exploring Portland via walking food tour (highly recommend this tour if you find yourself in PDX)!

3 most popular newsletters:

MacKenzie Scott's Giving, Racial Healing, & Interactive Reporting (Jan 2024)
Philanthropy Influencing Culture, Love Languages, & Provocative Theories of Change (Feb 2024)
Investments vs. Grants, New Team Member Alert, & An Invite to I2I’s Annual Fundraiser (Sept 2024)

From the bottom of our hearts (and our inboxes), thank you for being part of our year!

In Our Hearts

Last week, Dictionary.com and Oxford announced their 2024 “words of the year.”

Dictionary.com kept things light with “demure” (see what we did up there? ⬆️), paying homage to the summer’s viral TikTok video. Meanwhile, Oxford’s pick “brain rot" calls us out for what happens to our brains when we watch too many Reels & TikToks about being demure. 😳

To combat brain rot, and lean into our most refined selves, I2I core team members reflected on our own 2024 words of the year. To take things to another level, we also selected words as intentions for 2025.