During the “Leading with Love” plenary at the GEO 2026 National Conference, Angelique Power shared the following original poem with the GEO community. As philanthropy continues to navigate uncertainty and change, her words invite us to reflect on what it means to lead with love in our work and relationships. Below are new reflections she added post-conference about the piece she wrote, followed by the poem itself.
Talking about love at a work conference? Who does that?
Apparently, many of us inside of GEO do.
When Marcus Walton, GEO’s president and CEO, asked me to join him and the deeply thoughtful and soul-stirring Rodney McKenzie, Jr., vice president of strategic partnerships at the Freedom Together Foundation, for a plenary about Leading with Love, the first thing I thought of was how this topic is bold, the antidote to cruel policy and polarized communities. I wanted to show up with some love in hand for every person in the GEO community. When GEO asked if I’d read a love poem or write one, I knew I had to write one for us, for this electric time and moment, and share it for the first time in a space that would bring it to life.
Poetry writing isn’t something that has just come to me. I’ve been writing poems since I could hold a pencil. I still have a poem framed by my parents from first grade. My first book written at age seven came shortly thereafter. Later, I’d receive a Master’s in Fine Arts in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (and an honorary degree from there years later). Am I special? No. Not at all. We all are born with so many gifts. We deploy them in all kinds of ways. I have written poetry for myself, for others, to understand the world, and more recently, I’ve taken to writing love poems periodically for my staff at The Skillman Foundation.
Over the course of my writing life, I’ve been in deep critique sessions, in writer workshops, in slam poetry competitions and in quiet poem exchanges. You take in a lot of thoughts on poetry and your own writing in doing so. So, when I set out to write our GEO love poem, those criticisms about poetry and love were my first visitors. After all, I once had a professor implore me that no matter what I do, I should never, EVER, write a poem with the word love in it. Too cliché. Too expected.
Boom. The GEO love poem was born. Rather than a workshop on nuts and bolts of grantmaking, plenaries are meant to bring our focus higher. To speak to our souls instead of just our strategies. And here we are, living at a time when we must shuck convention and buck what we’ve been told works. We must show up with everything we have, which includes vulnerability, grief, forgiveness, longing for something new and remembrance of something ancient. In short, love.
And so, I give to us again, Never Write a Poem with the Word Love in It. And I want to say thank you. Thanks for asking me to speak this into existence with and for us. It was an immense honor. After all, the love I have for each of you, our beloved GEO community, is real.
Never Write a Poem with the Word Love in It
Looking around the world, it seems we’ve all agreed.
Let’s erase the word love from our lips, our minds, our policies and practices, our institutions and constitutions.
In its wake, what remains is the wide openness of consuming ache, of expansive hurt, of hollowing need.
And yet – clever earth, mischievous planet – it patiently waits out our very human ineptitude.
Instead, this world showers us with enough rain, we must stop talking to open our mouths wide enough to taste it, as it tracks down our cheeks, arms, legs, back toward the growing grass.
Instead, this world sends us a plump and outrageous moon, bowing in extravagance above our furrowed brows.
It offers the scent of jasmine and lilac, blooming in droves to beckon our senses and scramble our sensemaking.
Bougainvillea flirts, waving luxuriously all around until we pause and notice the potency, the power of its beauty.
Until we roll our windows down, turn the music up, we take the corners with our whole bodies leaning in as we turn the wheel, we are 16 again, and 36, and 86, all in the roll of the tires, the sound of our singing to that song, they are playing our song.
This world whispers, did you know there are one trillion trees here? Twelve times as many as the stars in the sky? Roots are all around us, an information superhighway, figure eights of umbilical generosity – sharing chisme and warnings, nutrients and reassurances.
It offers us everything if we only can see it.
The hope of a bowl of wild raspberries. The snap of tomatoes fresh off the vine. The warm kiss of the sun today. Your smile like moonlight.
Breathe from your belly. Breathe infinite possibilities with each gulp of air.
In with the majesty of it all, out with the ministry of what we simply call love.
Angelique Power is the president and CEO of The Skillman Foundation, a private, independent foundation that works with grassroots and grasstops advocates to transform the education system.
Never Write a Poem with the Word Love in It is published with permission. Copyright © 2026 Angelique Power. The author retains all rights.
Watch the full “Leading with Love” plenary conversation from the GEO 2026 National Conference. The recording is available to GEO members and conference registrants.