Shared Decision-Making toward a Just Transition
Democratizing power through shared-governance
The decision had been made, the consultants recruited, selected and retained. From now on, our annual budgeting process would be determined solely by a metrics-driven framework developed by consultants who had been hired from a multinational corporation based upon finance-driven, bottom-line principles. Our nonprofit was to be trained on how to align all of our work within the metrics model for the upcoming budget submissions. Implementation was to begin in just a few weeks with significant implications: non-compliance with the new guidelines would most likely result in cuts to resources or to staff — people, co-workers, teammates. Understandably, when the pronouncement made its way through my nonprofit which was large and decentralized at the programmatic level, but controlled by a central budgeting apparatus, it brought with it a feeling of having been delivered by an impassive and opaque entity. The decision lacked transparency.
It fostered feelings of mistrust, misalignment with values, and in some cases, fear.
What I described above is a series of events that I have experienced many times in top-down institutions. Determinations had been made seemingly in a vacuum, driven by concerns about impact among those in the highest tiers of leadership, with those of us responsible for implementation having absolutely no say in the decision-making process. So when I joined Justice Funders last summer amidst the racial and social justice uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, and at a time of profound internal changes to the organization, I did not quite know what to expect.
I was surprised and pleased to encounter an entity whose staff and leaders were engaging in a thoughtful process aimed at democratizing the way that it was run through shared leadership and decision-making, and thus inspiring feelings of trust, alignment with mission, and in many cases, excitement and joy — not fear.
When I started at Justice Funders, it was six months into what has now been an 18-month organizational development journey. This process, guided by organizational consultant Kiran Nigam, has been marked by deep thinking, restructuring, and visioning about the ways in which we could catalyze an organizational structure that would align with the principles of a Just Transition including self-determination, shared responsibility and deep democracy. At the same time, we had been engaging community archivist Nadine Wilmot to interview 20 members of Justice Funders’ larger community as part of an internal evaluation project to mark our 10-year anniversary. These conversations with social justice movement leaders, network members, consulting clients and program participants illuminated our strengths, assessed our contributions and offered recommendations for shifts that could be made for us to have the greatest impact moving forward. “Increase sustainability and strengthen the infrastructure of Justice Funders’’ emerged as one of the leading recommendations. In particular, the desire to see the organization internally mirror the values and practices embodied in the Just Transition framework was a prominent sentiment shared among our allies and partners.
As an outcome of these complementary processes, Justice Funders is embarking on a series of foundational organizational shifts. One such realignment involves the way that day-to-day operations are run.
We are moving away from a top-down, hierarchical structure in which decisions are made without transparency and handed down for staff to carry out as tasks, to an ecosystem in which the entire staff takes ownership over decision-making and implementation while engaging in a process through which thoughtful and deep consideration informs outcomes, and actions are dependent upon agreements of the collective group.
This structure is something that is antithetical to my experience in the work world, which up to this point has been characterized by highly layered tiers of decision-makers and approvers, with an accompanying sense of disconnect about how decisions are made and the ways that those decisions affect staff members. This piece is an attempt to share how Justice Funders is demystifying — democratizing — the steps that go into leading a Just Transition-aligned organization.
What this looks like in practice is creating an organizational structure that allows for shared leadership, democratic decision-making and self-governance.
Justice Funders is now governed by five cross-functional Circles that collectively coordinate and manage the organization’s internal work: Governance; People Centered Systems; Regenerative Finance; Organizational Culture & Development; and Program Strategy & Cohesion. Circles offer proposals and bring them to the full Justice Funders staff for a vote. Each team member is expected to engage, participate, research and contribute to at least two Circles. Circles develop their own guidelines around how often to meet, agenda topics, note taking responsibilities, proposal creation and next steps.
My position title at Justice Funders is Development and Communications Director, and my skill set encompasses fundraising and communications, relationship-building with partners and allies, project management and finance. As the convener of the Regenerative Finance Circle, my role is to facilitate and guide my fellow Circle members on a journey towards increased knowledge about, and comfort with, the financial aspects of maintaining a sustainable and growing nonprofit organization. The intention is for Circle members to feel a sense of ownership around the fiscal health of Justice Funders and to be equipped with the information and skills needed to drive decision-making around bringing resources into the organization, and where and how those resources are used.
Circle members are charged with development of Justice Funders’ annual budget created with participatory budgeting principles and practices. Members set strategy related to engagement with resource partners. Members participate in finance and fundraising training. It is also the Regenerative Finance Circle members’ charge to implement any policies that are approved by proposals to the entire Justice Funders team for which there are financial implications.
Our first such proposal approved this spring was paying the Shuumi Land Tax, a voluntary annual contribution that non-Indigenous people living or working on traditional Lisjan Ohlone territory make to support the critical work of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Although Justice Funders is a national organization, our office and several of our staff members are located in Oakland, California, which is unceded Ohlone territory.
Paying the Shuumi Land Tax is one small way for us to honor and recognize the Indigenous communities on whose land we operate. It is also a way for us to support the work of land rematriation, or the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people, which we believe is necessary for a Just Transition to a regenerative economy based on reflective, responsive, reciprocal relationships of interdependence between human communities and the living world upon which we depend¹.
It has sparked conversations about how to identify opportunities to pay land taxes to the Indigenous communities on whose land other members of our staff reside. The Governance Circle proposed an annual payment in the amount of 1% of our organizational budget, and the proposal was approved by the entire staff using our newly adopted democratic decision-making process (see next paragraph). It is the responsibility of the Regenerative Finance Circle to ensure that Justice Funders maintains adequate resources going forward to include this line item in the annual budget.
The implementation of the Circle structure is only the most recent of several efforts made to democratize and distribute power within our organization. In late 2020, Justice Funders shifted to an organizational structure and org chart that resulted in more broadly distributed decision-making across roles. We moved to a “Gradients of Agreement” method for collective decision-making that takes place at our bi-weekly all-staff meetings. We also adopted an annual staff engagement plan aimed at nurturing intrinsic motivation in lieu of annual performance reviews that are based on compliance-based management approaches. And in January of this year, we transitioned our former Executive and Deputy Directors into Co-Directors, creating a model for shared leadership which they wrote about in Leadership Legacy.
And we have more changes on the horizon. Beginning July 1, Justice Funders will become a worker-directed non-profit, where the staff assumes the responsibility of the vision, direction, strategy, and policies of the organization. The role of our board will shift from a hierarchical structure that maintains power over its staff to an entity that is in deep relationship with our team and is part of our various ecosystems of work.
We are excited to formally adopt a structure that allows us to live into our values of self-governance, collective responsibility and mutual support, and look forward to sharing more about this final phase of our organizational transformation in the coming months.
Through these shifts in structure and practices, we are aiming to transform our organization by moving away from extractive and exploitative methods of working towards cultivating an environment where all of us can have a say and where we can all thrive. Together as a team, we are intentionally co-creating alternatives to the oppressive organizational practices rooted in capitalism and white supremacy. Our hope, intention and expectation is that as our staff are exposed to and practice various forms of democratic governance and have experience fostering social and ecological well-being, that this will also inform all of the work we do to transform philanthropy.
At Justice Funders, we understand that we are learning as we go along, or rather, learning by doing. We are embarking on this journey with tremendous optimism, but we know that we will make missteps along the way. We expect to incorporate a generous amount of patience and grace into this process. Our programmatic work is expanding its reach, our team is growing, and like many organizations, we are functioning in a remote environment that requires special accommodations to create the cooperative and collegial culture that is required for our Circle structure to be successful. That said, we begin this shift with tremendous advantages.
With racial and social justice as the foundation, our brilliant and talented team brings deep skills: highly effective and strategic communications, conflict transformation coaching, project management and fundraising, finance training, grantmaking experience, and long-term executive management skills.
We have wholly embraced the opportunity to transform old practices and embrace the new: a democratized approach to co-leading a worker-led collective nonprofit. This Circle work, which is new for me, can be shared with colleagues, movements, and allies. I hope that this work will present new ways of thinking and doing within the field of philanthropy.
[1] From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring: A Strategic Framework for a Just Transition. Movement Generation, 2016
Special thanks to Maria Nakae for her support on this post.
During summer 2020, I photographed murals that were created in downtown Oakland after the racial justice uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. A small sampling of the amazing artwork is included in this post.
