Hello Reader,

In season 4 of my podcast, Ecosystems for Change, Margo Fliss shared a story about how an ecosystem convening that had completely imploded.

As she walked me through how the event unfolded, I felt for her every step of the way, because most of us know this situation

You planned carefully. You can see the North Star for the ecosystem on the horizon, and you have mapped out how you will all get there together. Agenda in place. Sticky notes and pens laid out. Parking passes emailed the week before. As you line up the water bottles with the labels facing front (no? Just me?), people start trickling in.

Thirty minutes later, the tension in the room is palpable. A few people raise their voices, others retreat into their phones, and the rest watch the arguments fly back and forth like it's the U.S. Open.

As the ecosystem builder who organized this convening (and spent real social capital getting people into the room) you watch for a while, try to course-correct, and ultimately concede that this did not go the way you hoped.

Salvaging that kind of chaos requires strong facilitation skills and hard-won experience. Skills that some of us have, and many of us are still building.

What Margo's story reminded me is that knowing how to build an ecosystem ,and surviving the daily reality of doing this relational work, are two very different things.

Working with people is messy, complex, and impossible to fully predict, and yet we show up anyway.

That tension between what the frameworks tell us and what the work actually demands is what I have spent the last ten years documenting.

Be part of my Valley!

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After seven seasons of the podcast and ten years of fieldwork, I wrote It Takes a Valley.

It is a book about the people doing the slow, relational, often invisible work of building entrepreneurial ecosystems in communities that have been overlooked, underfunded, or asked to prove themselves over and over again. The concepts and strategies are grounded in real stories from more than fifty practitioners across the United States and beyond.

On May 20, I'm launching a pre-sale campaign to help cover the production cost of the book: design, editing, printing, fulfillment (and an audiobook if we hit the first stretch goal!). This pre-sale is designed to cover the baseline cost of bringing this book into the world. Everything above it goes back into making this a richer, more useful resource for the field (I'll tell you about the stretch goals next time!).

And because you're a loyal reader and supporter of this work, I want you to get an exclusive preview of the campaign:

Help me choose the subtitle

I'm finalizing the subtitle of the book and I can't decide between two directions. I've been obsessing over this for weeks. Help me settle this so that my delightful graphic designer can finalize the cover!

Which one would you pick up off a shelf? If you have a strong reason, I want to hear it! If none of these land, let me know why or what's missing by simply replying to this email.

Your instincts here genuinely matter to me, and I'll share what you tell me when I announce the final title!

Pre-sale perks for early birds!

I put a lot of thought into what I could offer beyond the book. I'm committed to bring you practical tools, templates and planning guides that actually help you become a more effective ecosystem builder.

Here are a few of the tiers I want you to know about now, because some have caps and the early-bird pricing only holds for the first 75 backers:

A community-supported first edition

The First Edition tier opens at $50 for the first 75 backers and reverts to $60 after that. You get a first edition paperback version, an invitation to the virtual book launch, and your name in the Founding Readers acknowledgment. This is the anchor of the campaign and the easiest way to be part of it.

To make sure you are among the first 75 backers on day 1 of the campaign, click here and I'll send you a special note as soon as the campaign launches:

The Field Practitioner

The $299 Field Practitioner is for those of you who want to take the book further into your own practice. It includes everything in the lower tiers plus a live 90-minute storytelling masterclass with me, capped at 25 participants. I expect this tier to fill quickly because it is the only place I'm bringing the storytelling work I've built over the last decade together in a single session.

What still baffles and annoys me, even after ten years in this field, is that the practitioners doing the most important work are usually the least visible. This book is one attempt to change that, at least for fifty of them.

If you've been one of those conveners, connectors and champions in your community, you already know what the invisibility yet deeply gratifying nature of this work feels like. If the book lands the way I hope it does, more people will too.

To see what other rewards I have created for you, check out the pre-sale campaign here:

Bookish

My reading has been very feminist-leaning:

• ​Und alle so still, Mareike Fallwickl (sorry, German only): One day, all the women in a German town lay down without a sound and refuse to go on: No more care work, no more family scheduling and planning, no more putting everyone else first. Utopian and deeply gripping.
• ​Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke: This book is the complete opposite perspective. Tradwife influencer Natalia Heller Mills wakes up in the time that she has been promoting: 1855, only to find out that it's far from the romantically rustic lifestyle she's been trying to imitate on her Instagram.

Read more books, friends!

Shen-Anika-ns: Indie Bookshop Crawl - it's a wrap!

Yesterday, we drew the winner of the grand prize of our inaugural indie bookshop crawl!

A whopping 61 participants handed in their passports. 42 of them visited seven or more independent bookshops in the Shenandoah Valley during the two weeks of the crawl! Eight people visited all of them! I'm in awe.

One participant gave us a complete run-down of her crawl experience, including visiting the small town of Buena Vista that they'd never been to before:

I'll be honest with you all: When we first started this endeavor in February 2026, I didn't know where I would find the time and capacity to make this happen. But then I remembered that it wasn't my job to do it all, only to convene local indie bookshop owners and facilitate their collaboration.

I'll write again on May 19, the day before all of this goes live. Until then, I'd love to hear your subtitle pick, and if there's someone in your community who has been doing this work without much fanfare for a long time, send them this issue. That is how a book like this finds the people it was written for.

I'll be back in two weeks!

In camaraderie,

Anika

P.S. Missed my last newsletter? Check out the previous issues of Impact Curator.