By Jill Oldham, CEO
If 2025 taught us anything, it's that strength isn't just about momentum. Sometimes it's about knowing when to pause, reflect, and listen. This year brought its share of headwinds – shifting funding landscapes, steady demand for services, and the ongoing challenge of doing more with less. Greenleaf could have simply weathered the storm, but we made a deliberate choice to use this moment for something deeper.
In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 was the Year of the Wooden Snake – a time associated with wisdom, introspection, and quiet transformation. While we don't claim to be astrologers, there's something resonant about that symbolism. In 2025, we embarked on a comprehensive strategic planning process, asking hard questions about our impact, our sustainability, and how we can best serve our community in the years ahead. We leaned into reflection not as a retreat, but as preparation.
We discovered that even in a year of recalibration, our work didn't stop. Our programs continued to reach and support those who need us most. Our team, board, community partners, and supporters showed up with resilience and creativity that reminded us why this work matters.
As I share the highlights of 2025, it is with transparency about the challenges we faced and pride in what we accomplished. As we look to 2026, we are committed to bold action, renewed energy, and the courage to turn our strategic vision into reality.
Navigating Challenges with Purpose
Like many organizations in our sector, Greenleaf experienced real financial pressure in 2025. Funders, from the federal government to local foundations, had to cut or decrease allocations. Despite these constraints, we made a commitment to maintain all services. The families and individuals who depend on Greenleaf shouldn't bear the cost of funding decisions beyond our control.
Strategic planning is never simple and requires a different kind of commitment. As we moved through the process, we grappled with looking inward and toward the future when everything outside feels uncertain and resources are tightening.
What we discovered energized us. Through stakeholder conversations and honest internal dialogue, we gained clarity about what Greenleaf does exceptionally well and where we need to lean in. We came out of the process knowing precisely who we are and what we do. Greenleaf serves our community through three foundational areas—behavioral health treatment and prevention, family support and education, and community services of D/deaf and Hard of Hearing. This unique combination of services is what distinguishes Greenleaf—no other organization does all three.
That clarity matters because it guides every decision we make—and in 2025, we had to make some difficult ones. But we didn't simply react to funding pressures; we drew on our foundation while staying true to our mission and the people we serve.
Even amid uncertainty, we grew stronger and more focused. We know who we are. We know who we serve. And we know that the need for our work has never been more urgent.
Strategic Planning: Building Our Foundation
The strategic planning process gave us more than direction—it gave us precision. We refined our mission: Greenleaf empowers individuals and families to build healthier relationships and greater well-being through counseling, education, and support services.
We also refreshed our organizational values, articulating what has always guided our work: Integrity, Respect, Family, Compassion, Connection, and Growth. These aren't aspirational statements on a wall—they're the principles that shape every interaction with clients, colleagues, and community partners.
The plan includes both immediate priorities and a ten-year vision. By 2035, we see Greenleaf distinguished by a unified philosophy of practice that guides all our work, a transformed funding model with diversified revenue streams, and a reimagined environment that features trauma-informed design principles.
The next five years will lay the groundwork for these transformational goals through five strategic focus areas: Programming, Flexible Funding, People & Culture, Operations, and Marketing & Communications. Each strengthens Greenleaf’s ability to evolve to meet the needs of the community, while shaping lasting systems change – something we’ve been doing for more than a century.
This is the wisdom offered during the Year of the Wooden Snake: know who you are, clarify where you're going, and build the foundation with intention. We’ve now entered the Year of the Fire Horse, and we're ready to activate this vision with energy and purpose.
Program Highlights: Putting Strategy into Action
The systems-based approach at the heart of our strategic plan is already taking shape in our most impactful work. In 2025, two programs demonstrated moving from individual intervention to community-wide change.
PEERS: From Individual Support to Systems Change
Our PEERS parent advocate program has been a lifeline for families navigating the complex and often overwhelming landscape of mental health services for their children. When a parent receives a diagnosis they don't fully understand, faces a school system that seems indifferent to their child's needs, or simply doesn't know where to turn for help, PEERS trained advocates truly get it—because they've walked the same path.
For years, this peer-to-peer model has helped families access resources, understand their rights, and feel less alone in their journey. One family at a time, we've made a difference. But last spring, the Akron Community Foundation saw the potential for PEERS to create change on an entirely different scale. They awarded us a multi-year Proactive Grant to begin evolving this successful program into a systems change initiative.
This is transformational work that embodies our commitment to a systems-based approach – moving from helping individual families navigate complicated systems to empowering those same families to advocate at the community level. The grant allows us to build the infrastructure and capacity to train parent advocates and create pathways for families to participate in policy conversations, serve on advisory boards, and shape the very systems they once struggled to access.
All families with children facing mental health challenges should be able to thrive, and no family should feel alone or powerless in seeking help.
Prevention: Building Empathy, Rejecting Isolation
Our suicide prevention work reaches nearly every young person in Summit County in grades 6-12 each year. Proud of our work and this level of engagement, it demonstrates the schools’ trust in Greenleaf to deliver such important and urgent education to their students.
We are currently on track to deliver suicide prevention programming to 18,750 youth in Summit County by the end of the 2025-26 school year. This past school year, sixth graders saw a 28% increase in knowledge from pre- to post-testing, with 83% of all grades now know more about resources that can help someone who is depressed or suicidal.
However, as effective and far-reaching as this work can be, preventing suicide requires more than education. It requires talking honestly about the social conditions that lead young people to crisis in the first place, such as bullying, social isolation, or instability at home.
To that, we're expanding our prevention efforts to go deeper, empowering students to not just to recognize warning signs but to actively create cultures of belonging. When young people embrace empathy and reject behaviors that make their peers feel invisible or excluded, we can transform entire school communities.
And we're not stopping at school doors. This spring, we're taking our prevention work into the broader community by engaging adults with QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) training. When parents, coaches, employers, and community members know how to recognize signs of crisis and connect people to help, we create a true safety net that extends beyond the classroom. Now more than ever, this comprehensive approach is critical. Our young people are telling us they're struggling, and we're responding with programming that meets the moment—in schools and throughout the community.
Looking Ahead
The Year of the Wooden Snake was about about looking inward, and we answered that call with courage and honesty. We questioned, we listened, we refined, and we prepared.
We’ve entered 2026 with the energy and momentum that this moment demands. This month, Greenleaf marks 114 years of service to our community. That longevity isn't about standing still – it's about continuously evolving to meet the needs of the moment. The fire horse is known for its passion, independence, and willingness to charge forward with purpose – exactly where Greenleaf stands today. We’re ready to activate the strategies we've built, scale the programs that are working, and lead the kind of change our community needs.
We're grateful to every person who made 2025 possible – our dedicated staff who maintained excellence despite uncertainty, our board members who provided steady guidance through challenging decisions, our community partners who collaborated with creativity and trust, and our donors and supporters who believed in our mission.
The wooden snake taught us wisdom. The fire horse will carry us forward with boldness. And the community we serve will continue to be at the center of everything we do.
Thank you for being part of this journey. We can't wait to show you what the rest of 2026 holds.