Folding The Full Frame Initiative with Katya Fels Smith

​For over nearly-20 years, Katya Fels Smyth founded, led and closed the Full Frame Initiative, a national social change organization that brought together system and community leaders to move the US towards a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing. In October 2024, FFI began a strategic winddown, transitioning its mission over 9 months to a national network of public sector, community and nonprofit leaders who are carrying the work forward. 

​FFI was able to wind down with a focus on doing right by its partners, its people and its mission— and Katya knows that this is highly unusual. Join us for a session to hear about what happens when a systems change organization turns its tools on itself, and to explore what makes mission-focused closure possible, why it may be essential for social change, why we need to focus on systems change in addition to practice change, and what some of the key levers may be. 

​About Katya

​Katya Fels Smyth has dedicated her career to transforming systems that perpetuate inequity and harm. In 1995, she partnered with women who were unhoused in Cambridge and Boston to found On The Rise, a community for women pushed to the margins. Recognizing that righting inequities requires structural change, not services, in 2009, she founded the Full Frame Initiative (FFI),  a national social change organization that, drove structural transformation to move the US towards a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing. 

Through FFI’s partnerships with communities, government and organizations, she was the lead architect of FFI's Five Domains of Wellbeing framework and analysis of how structural barriers drive economic, health, and social inequities, and launched many of FFI's signature partnerships, including with Missouri's juvenile justice system and St. Louis County Family Court; a Massachusetts multi-system effort reframing government's approach to homelessness, sexual assault, and domestic violence; a California statewide project that shifted narratives and over $500M in national funding by centering how survivors define success; the Wellbeing Blueprint, an agenda for structural change in the wake of COVID and this country’s racial reckoning; and equitable access to wellbeing as a design principle for urban planning and infrastructure investments. In 2024, she initiated a strategic wind-down of FFI, transitioning the mission to a national network of leaders committed to moving the work forward.

A former Affiliate with MIT’s CoLab, Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Echoing Green Fellow, Katya lives in western Massachusetts with her spouse, teenagers, and an unwieldy menagerie of rescued farm animals.