Last year, we talked about weathering the storm. Together, we braced ourselves personally, professionally, and as a community. We asked whether we’d be the tree still standing when the winds died down.

And here we are. But here’s what we’ve learned about storms: surviving them isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning.

Deep in the Sierra Nevada, the giant sequoia holds its cones closed for years and sometimes decades. The seeds inside are viable, ready, and waiting. However, they won’t germinate without fire. It takes the heat, the pressure, the very thing that seems most destructive, to crack the cone open and release what was there all along. In the ash-cleared ground left behind, with more light than ever before, those seeds grow into the largest trees on earth.

That’s where we are right now. The storms we’ve faced in our communities, our work, and our lives didn’t break us. But they changed us. They sharpened our focus, deepened our connections, and revealed something worth paying attention to: what’s inside us is stronger than we knew.

This year’s program, “Strength Under Pressure: How Weathering the Storm Brings Growth,” is about that next chapter. Not just survival, but what blooms because of the fire. We’ll explore how adversity builds capacity, how pressure forges leaders, and how communities like ours grow deeper roots precisely because of what they’ve endured.

The storm revealed what we’re made of. Now let’s grow.

The ITA Team