Village Ethos
The PassingOn Collective has a holistic response to these moments of transition – we call it the Village Ethos. It honors the role of peers in healthy transitions and restores what fragmentation has taken from most of us: the ability to meet these transitions with collective strength.
Life is a series of passages across thresholds. The threshold asks something paradoxical of us: to sit with the moment while passing through to a new place. The village ethos embraces both of those invitations.
Work With Us
Fostering the Village Ethos means supporting each other to be authentic, collaborative, attuned, and creative together. That’s how the fabric of our village gets stronger, better able to endure transitions and loss.
Whether you’re anticipating a relationship milestone or leading your organization through change, we’ll help build sustaining practices to get your family, community, or workplace over the threshold it faces — and the ones to come..
Signature Programs
To bring a program to your community, build a unique program for your group, or sponsor a program for others, click here for our inquiry form!
Listening Circles
The Listening Circle is a structured, compassionate way for communities to gather in the wake of significant loss or transition. Your group learns the practice of deep listening, creating a safe environment where everyone can speak from the heart and be heard without interruption, judgment, or pressure to solve anything. It’s not therapy (we promise!), but it is transformational. To learn more about it:
Click here to see our poster from the 2026 Association for Death Education and Counseling Annual Conference, and
Click here to view the Case Brief.
Memoir Retreat
The Memoir Retreat is a one-day guided experience that helps people turn a lifetime of memories, experiences, lessons, and relationships into the beginning of a memoir. Through reflection, conversation, and storytelling, participants discover the deeper themes that have shaped their lives and create a practical outline for a book or other memoir project. No writing experience is required! Whether attending on your own or with a spouse, partner, sibling, friend, or adult child, you’ll be invited to pause and take stock of the journey so far, not simply to record what happened, but to understand what it has meant.
Care Village
The Care Village is a customized peer formation program that strengthens the capacity of your community or organization to meet its moments of change. Small groups of peers learn both the information and the skills necessary to support one another through transition, sharpen their emotional intelligence, and strengthen the ties between them. This program builds and embeds the Village infrastructure so that it can be fully owned by the community or organization.
Thresholds Exhibit and Retreat
Thresholds Exhibit invites visitors to reflect on the places where grief and hope meet — what the exhibit describes as “the holy space between what was and what is becoming”.
Thresholds Retreat brings the experience of the exhibit to your community in a day of reflection, connection, and creation. Guided by Thresholds facilitators, participants of all ages and abilities become the artists and your space is the gallery. Sponsorship opportunities available.
Our Team
Argerie Vasilakes, MEd MPOD
Co-founder
Argerie is a community and organizational design leader, weaving strategy with care to help groups flourish. Trained in Positive Organization Development (Case Western Reserve University) and Adult Education (Cleveland State University), she has guided culture change and grief work by strengthening the village of support in both for-profit and mission-oriented communities. In March 2026, her co-authored book chapter, Early Innovators for Environmental Sustainability, was published — it describes her role centering well-being in a company’s sustainability efforts. As a community radio producer early in her career, Argerie learned how to get to the essence of people’s personal stories — a skill she brings to her listening and writing.
Priscilla J. Callos, MDiv BCC (ret.) CT
Co-founder
Priscilla is a thanatologist and chaplain, with degrees in English from The Ohio State University and Divinity from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, and an executive certificate in Social Innovation Design from the University of Pennsylvania. Her experience in grief and transition work spans the country: she brought her flavor of empathy, creativity, and offbeat ritual to hospitals and hospices in Burlington (Vt.), Boston, Cleveland, Columbus, and San Francisco. Since 2025, she has been working with an initiative to make religious spaces more accessible to disabled and neurodivergent kids. A lifetime ago, Priscilla was an avid party thrower; now, she hosts small-scale dance parties for her spouse, their two boys, and a long-suffering cat.
Linda M. Krasienko, M.A. COTA/L LPM
ambassador
Linda is a lifelong community advocate, developer, and relationship-builder, working in direct care with people in crisis. Among her innumerable service-oriented accomplishments, she is the founder of A Place for Us Development and the nonprofit It’s About Us, both based in Cleveland, Ohio, focusing on the needs of the senior LGBTQ+ community. Linda is who Fred Rogers’ mother was referring to when she told him, “Look for the helpers.”
Testimonials
We don’t really talk about legacy in our family. So I wasn’t sure if my grown children would understand what has been important to me in my lifetime. But the Legacy Letter produced by The PassingOn Collective gets to the core of it and will speak for me.
Lana Cowell,
Activist and Matriarch
The Listening Circle experience will be so very meaningful for chaplains and spiritual directors, pastors, etc. The facilitators are confident and knowledgeable and express themselves with such feeling and compassion. I really hope a great number of folks will take part in these gatherings. They will not be sorry!
Pastor Carolyn Horvath,
Hope House of Prayer
We can take the PassingOn practices into our organizations to replace busyness with spaciousness. We can be reminded that in doing so, we are actually more productive, our relationships improve, and we can connect to each other and to purpose at work.
Jules Myers, MSOD
Ohio OD Network
Let’s connect!
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