Ever/Was is intentionally built as a Canadian Collective.
We pay as much attention to our internal relationships and processes as we do to those we walk alongside in the Hotline, advocacy work, and accompaniment teams. We have a breadth of experience with endings and closure. Our members have served as executive directors and board members. Most of us have navigated the closure of at least one organisation, sometimes more. We bring that lived experience into every situation.
We’ve shared our bios so you can get to see who is behind the work of Ever/Was. As we are an open collective, the group will regularly shift with members stepping in and out of this work. If our work calls to you and you’re considering being part of our collective, please get in touch.
Adam is the Founder of Solvable where he works with clients and communities to make the behavioural and structural changes that solve for the actual complexity of the world and their roles within it. Through the Department of Dismantling, Solvable has hosted multiple projects centred around hospicing and composting what does not serve people and their organizations. As an entrepreneur, Adam has personally closed two organizations. Prior to Solvable, he spent over a decade in the fields of industrial and graphic design as a strategist, and five years in philanthropic fundraising.
Adam lerner
Collective member & Hotline Navigator
Bonnie Veness
Collective member & Hotline Navigator
Bonnie is a leader with over 20 years of experience in Indigenous and community engagement, community investment, and philanthropy. Her work is grounded in trust, reciprocity, curiosity and a genuine commitment to systems-level change. She believes the natural world holds important lessons for humanity including the honouring of release and renewal as a way to move through organizational endings, transitions and new beginnings. When not supporting courageous leaders seeking good endings, Bonnie loves to spend time outdoors hiking and camping with her husband and children.
Carlye Watson
Collective member & Hotline Navigator
Carlye is an executive coach and facilitator with over 15 years of experience supporting leaders and teams in the non-profit, healthcare, and UN sectors across multiple countries. A PCC-accredited coach with the International Coaching Federation, she brings a human-centred and systems-aware approach to leadership, transition, and change.
CaSSIE ROBINSON
Collective member & Hotline Navigator
Endings have been at the centre of Cassie’s work for a long time. She was the initiator of Stewarding Loss and the Farewell Fund which catalysed a wider field of endings work in the UK. She’s walked alongside others through grief in its many forms: the loss of loved ones, the loss of roles and identities, and the tender, demanding work of helping organisations to close well. All of this sits within a deep and long-standing practice in transitions. Across eight years working in and around the flows of philanthropic resources, she came to see how often they are the quiet determinants of what lives and what dies. She’s also a director of the Wealth Design Studio, working to shift the private wealth ecosystem towards redesign. She brings her background in psychology, and practices in systems innovation, futures and foresight, and transition design, to her work with individual Wealth Holders, Family Offices, and those inside the Wealth Management world.
CHARLES HOLMES
Collective member
Charles is a cultural anthropologist by education and a convenor, community builder, facilitator, executive coach and educator by vocation. For the past 30 years he has honed a passion for helping organizations and leaders to build and strengthen high performing cultures. Charles co-founded the Learning Strategies Group at Simon Fraser University as well as the Academy for Systems Change. He has co-created and taught leadership, strategy, facilitation and negotiation workshops for many organizations and university executive programs. He has facilitated dialogues with the Dalai Lama, and with many multi-national corporations, non-profits and government agencies around the world.
HIMA BATAVIA
Collective member & HOTLINE NAVIGATOR
Hima believes that endings are a liminal space full of possibility when held with intention and grace. As an Ever/Was Navigator, she brings that belief to the Hotline and to the organizations she supports through transition. A non-profit leader across arts, culture, and social justice, Hima has worked as a strategist, facilitator, and program designer specializing in strategic planning, experience design, organizational culture, artistic production and launching new programs and services. She is also a political organizer, performance artist, and advisor to CAPSULES Artist Resources. Hima is the co-founder and former co-director of Reset, and has collaborated with organizations including Vitala Global, Artscape, North York Arts, TED Courses, Simon Sinek, Woodgreen Community Services, The Legal Centre for Palestine, Centre for Social Innovation, On Canada Project, Luminato, Parkdale People's Project, and others.
LORI Hewson
Collective member
Lori is a practical visionary and compassionate leader who encourages connection and understanding built on diverse perspectives and who sees possibility for initiatives that help transform us personally and collectively. She thrives on the sometimes ‘wild’ edges between people, organizations and systems believing in the power of relationships to help navigate meaningful change.
LouISE ADONGO
Collective member
Louise brings her passion for work at the intersections of strategy, equity, and cultural transformation to the role she sees herself playing in Ever/was as a narrative complexity navigator; supporting communications that re-balance perspectives on closures. Her familiarity with endings, some of which were natural and some less planned and more abrupt derives from her many years of work spanning academia, civil service and community engagement. She has expertise borne out of holding multiple roles on the edges of ecosystems as a weaver, and most recently as a co-steward with the Transition Bridges Project, a collective inquiry into the practice of systems mediation.
SYMA HABIB
Collective member & HOTLINE NAVIGATOR
Syma has over a decade of experience across the social sector, from frontline roles to leading programs and projects that respond innovatively to complex social challenges. She has served on numerous nonprofit boards through periods of significant transition, and convenes organizations to strengthen capacity and collaboration across the sector. Trained in permaculture design and as a death doula, Syma supports individuals in navigating grief and transition. She is especially curious about how insights from regenerative design and grief work can inform how the social sector navigates endings and transitions.
Vanessa Reid
Collective member & HOTLINE NAVIGATOR
Vanessa works with the cycles of living and dying and where systems and soul meet. A process architect, Senior Fellow at the IKS Lab, and Faculty at Wolf Willow Institute, she co-developed the practice of conscious closure when bringing an organization through its full lifecycle to a close. She has since brought her systems artistry to complexity, crisis, and transition around the world, accompanying leaders, organizations, and families through the thresholds of change, transformation and dying. She co-founded the Living Wholeness Institute and writes on Conscious Closure and The Wild Life of Dying — a body of work she first opened in her TEDx Talk.