Succession: Zebra Style
Big changes are afoot within Zebras Unite! Exciting changes. Anticipated changes. Unanticipated changes. Growth-inducing changes. Signs-of-maturity changes.
The four of us, Mara Zepeda, Jennifer Brandel, Aniyia Williams, and Astrid Scholz, are the founders (or we call ourselves, the Dazzle Doulas) of the multi-organizational experiment known as Zebras Unite. And we’re excited to share the variety of ways in which we’ve been working to make ourselves obsolete, or at least less essential to the success of the movement we helped (alongside SO MANY OTHERS) to catalyze.
We chose the moniker “Doula” to describe our group to both nod to the founding role we played and to invoke the quality and energy of the work required to imagine a new business and movement into existence. As any parent remembers, the moment of birth is just the beginning of a steep learning curve and a new reality that comes at you hard and fast with unforeseen challenges and a multitude of tasks that need to be mastered and things that need to be done, urgently and now, if the new life is to thrive. The best doulas move in for a time, creating the conditions for the newly-minted family to succeed until the family finds its mojo. And then they leave.
Doulas have an expiration date by design. And we set ourselves that expiration date from the moment of inception of Zebras Unite:
- We planned for Mara and Astrid to step into operational roles for about a year–setting a clock on finding, nurturing, and supporting an operational team comprised of founding members and worker-owners of Zebras Unite that would and could take up the mantle of those day-to-day responsibilities;
- We wrote into our bylaws that the co-op board would be representative of all our shareholder classes, and that the nonprofit board would expand to be geographically representative of the movement–setting a clock on finding, cultivating, and recruiting others into the governance and oversight roles and thus broadening and strengthening the very foundation of the movement; and
- We designed a shareholder class that gives us preferential participation in any distributions from the co-op to sunset after 5 or so years.
With this post we are celebrating having achieved the first two milestones of our planned obsolescence as Doulas of Zebras Unite over this past year.
- Effective January 1, Mara Zepeda is moving on from the role of Managing Director of Zebras Unite LCA to focus on efforts in her own backyard of Columbia, South Carolina.
- Founding Member and longtime worker-owner Madelynn Martiniere has taken the helm as the new Managing Director by unanimous consensus of the team and board. You’ll be hearing more from her, in her own words, in the weeks ahead.
- Astrid Scholz is stepping down as Chief Financial Officer to focus on the Capital Circle Lead role. She is still representing the Doulas on the Zebras Unite nonprofit board.
- Jennifer Brandel is now representing the doulas on the co-op board.
- Aniyia Williams, in her role at Omidyar Network, continues to apply zebra principles at the ecosystem level through building The Tech We Want.
- We have our first-ever General Manager of the Zebras Unite nonprofit: Alex Darby.
- We have expanded our nonprofit board to include: Nakeema Stefflbauer and Keith Porcaro.
- We have expanded our co-op board to include Priya Parrish and Yoshi Tabuchi to represent the Institutional and General membership classes, respectively–completing our move to a democratically elected, fully representative governance structure as contemplated in the co-op bylaws.
While we are stepping back from the center of this beautiful movement, we’ll still be here, deepening the work through our new roles, and most importantly, as members of the cooperative. In the coming year, you’ll hear more from each of us, and more from the ever growing community about what we’ve learned along the way.
Dazzle On!
The Doulas — Mara, Astrid, Aniyia, and Jenn
