Inside the Wellbeing Cohort: Designing Workplaces Where Everyone Can Thrive

It started with a question: How might we transform the homeless response sector in Los Angeles by expanding the foundation of care and wellbeing to include frontline workers? What if our workplaces could be spaces of healing, creativity, and joy — not simply sites of service?

Over the years, we’ve seen the profound care and deep commitment expressed by outreach teams and leaders working in this sector. Frontline staff have increasingly long to-do lists — with their own wellbeing often falling to the wayside. It is a systemic challenge that leads to burnout for many across the sector.

In response to these questions and observations, SJPLA created the Wellbeing Cohort – a collective experiment in what becomes possible when organizations come together to reimagine how we work – centering wellness, liberation, and connection at every level.

A Collaborative Beginning

The seed for the Wellbeing Cohort was planted at a monthly internal team meeting and informed by reflections on nearly five years of sustained partnership with Cedars-Sinai, a consistent and deep supporter of SJPLA’s efforts to advance worker wellbeing in the homeless services sector.

Before the cohort, we had been offering two primary wellbeing initiatives: the monthly Wellbeing Series and the quarterly Community Care course, both designed for staff in the homelessness sector seeking to create more supportive, sustainable ways of working for themselves and their teams. At the same time, we were also working with sector leadership through our REI Fellowship and our Executive Director affinity space. 

Through these spaces, we realized we had perspectives from across the sector hierarchy: frontline, mid-level, and executive, and we began to see themes emerge across all levels.

That realization sparked a new question: What would it look like if all levels of leadership came together to first acknowledge the challenges in the current ways of working in the sector to then design workplaces that truly centered frontline worker wellbeing?

From “Being Well” to the Wellbeing Cohort

These conversations took place shortly after we hosted Being Well, a two-day immersive retreat exclusively for frontline and mid-level staff. The goal was simple yet profound: to create a space where workers could simply be well without the pressure to fix or solve anything.

That next step became the Wellbeing Cohort — a structured, multi-organization effort to help nonprofit teams design and test new practices, policies, and cultures that support sustainable wellbeing.

While Being Well focused on rest and restoration, the Wellbeing Cohort focuses on systemic change: how organizations could embed wellbeing into the fabric of their daily work.

Designing the Cohort: Collaboration with Equity Meets Design

To bring the vision to life, we partnered with Equity Meets Design, a consulting group working at the intersection of design thinking, equity, and wellbeing.

Together, we structured a program that brought together four organizations — a mix of large and small nonprofits in the homeless response sector— each committed to a deep, sustained exploration of how to center wellbeing in their workplace.

Each organization was invited to form a 10-person team representing a cross-section of roles: frontline staff, middle managers, HR and operations staff, and executive leaders. We encouraged strong frontline worker representation, to be certain that the frontline perspective was well represented in designing workplaces that center frontline worker wellbeing.

To make participation meaningful and accessible, each organization received an unrestricted grant made possible through our support from Cedars-Sinai, plus stipends for each participant. This structure reflected our philosophy that wellbeing work should not add additional financial stress to already overextended staff or budgets.

A Safe Space for Honest Conversations

From the outset, the Wellbeing Cohort’s design centered on one key principle: authenticity.

In most organizations, especially in hierarchical settings, staff can feel unsafe to speak candidly about the challenges they face. The cohort aims to shift that dynamic by creating a shared space where executives could hear, firsthand, what their teams are experiencing — and where everyone is equally invited to participate in design and problem-solving. 

Many components of the workshop are conducted anonymously so staff can express themselves openly and without fear of repercussion. In one particularly powerful moment, participants used a shared Google sheet to anonymously name “unspoken norms” within their organizations. 

Participants could see at a glance what was really happening in their organizational culture, a truth-telling that often doesn’t happen in front of people with decision-making power. 

Rooted in Mission: Wellbeing as Justice

For us, this work is not a side project; it’s central to SJPLA’s mission.

Wellbeing is at the heart of our racial and social justice work. Justice is, at its core, about community wellbeing. So we ask: how do we change systems and structures to create that wellbeing?

Over the past nine years, SJPLA has been committed to modeling a liberatory workplace — one that rejects oppressive norms rooted in white supremacy and cultivates equity, joy, and sustainability from within. 

Our intention is to create that liberation and wellbeing for our team, and to create a model that we can also share with the broader community as part of our mission.

The Wellbeing Cohort sits at the intersection of those commitments: personal wellbeing, organizational transformation, and systemic liberation.

Responding to the Challenges of Today

The approach crafted by Equity Meets Design is refreshingly pragmatic. Rather than starting with theory, participants are invited to identify a real, hard challenge in their workplace and then use design thinking to address it collaboratively.

The goal isn’t to hand organizations a polished new handbook or a set of templated policies. Instead, it’s to cultivate the practice of design so that every participant leaves knowing they have the power and skills to create the conditions for wellbeing in their own context.

The vision extends far beyond the four participating organizations. The hope is that their work will create a ripple effect throughout the sector. The long-term goal is a cultural shift: a nonprofit ecosystem that values wellbeing not as a perk, but as a foundation for effective, sustainable, justice-centered work.

The Power of Time and Reflection

One of the most radical aspects of the cohort may be its use of time. Participants commit to multiple full-day sessions — time that might otherwise feel impossible to step away from urgent work.

That intentional spaciousness allows for the deeper dialogue, experimentation, and trust that are often missing in the day-to-day rush of nonprofit life.

Toward a Healthier Sector

At its heart, the Wellbeing Cohort is both an experiment and an invitation, a chance to ask what might be possible if nonprofit workplaces become places of liberation and wellbeing, not depletion.

The goal of the program is to rethink wellbeing as so much more than rest. It’s about creating systems that honor humanity, organizations that listen deeply, and leadership that sees wellbeing not as a luxury, but as a fundamental right.