The Future We Co-Create, Imperfectly
Imagining the future is bold. Building the future is a beautiful, messy labor of love.
Join us for a community conversation on this post and the year ahead for Zebras Unite on Wednesday, March 29th at 5pm UTC (9am Pacific Time).
At Zebras Unite, we believe that everyone has an equal right to imagine and create the future. First as a movement and now as a hybrid social enterprise comprised of a member-owned, for profit co-op, and a nonprofit organization, we have wrestled with how to do so effectively and equitably.
As a community of founders, funders, and allies, imagination has been our strength in building the Zebra movement, and we are proud of what we have accomplished together. One of our essential learnings is that what matters most is not simply that we build this movement, but how we build it.
As this enterprise has grown, we have been candid about our history of trying to do too much with too few resources. This isn’t a challenge unique to us — it is an experience shared by many organizations seeking to make meaningful change in the world. By the start of 2022, we found ourselves exhausted. Like many other movement builders and changemakers, we had unwittingly internalized dominant cultural norms of prioritizing overwork and productivity above all else. We were sustained by the importance of the work and the buoyancy of our community, but the reality was that our reach far exceeded our grasp.
We took a step back and embraced the radical idea that we could do more by doing less. Rather than continuing full speed ahead, we eased back to reset, restore, and rebuild. We prioritized trust and transparency. We asked hard questions–
What does it look like to genuinely practice our values at scale? To create an organization that continuously enacts mutualism, truthfulness, fierceness and emergence?
We embraced our imperfections, so that we might begin to break the stronghold of conforming to unrealistic standards of production. We defined our values in practice, developed a strengthened hybrid strategy, iterated on our governance processes, and co-wrote new operational agreements.
In October 2022, our core operational team of staff and co-op members (affectionately known as the Dazzle District), gathered for the first time. It was a profound experience to connect in person after so many emails, Slack messages, and virtual meetings. We laughed, cried, danced, shared stories and reflected together on a year of immense transition, with more yet to come. We nurtured the opportunity to look back in order to look forward. We realigned on our core values, our shared purpose, and the culture we wanted to co-create.
We worked together to put our hybrid organization on the path to co-creation by developing new cultural norms more closely aligned with the change we want to see in our ecosystem. We committed to work more intentionally and be patient with ourselves as we actively re-design the conditions for co-creation.
Our focus for 2023 is to co-create the future alongside our community. We invite you to join us.
1 Strategy, 2 Companies, 3 Circles.
In 2023, we are moving into a new era of strategic growth — cultivating focus, refining our methodologies, and scaling our funding and revenue prospects through aligned and focused offerings that create mutualistic benefits for the zebra community and the greater ecosystem.
This next chapter of our development means leaning into the power of our hybrid organizational architecture. Unified under one strategy, the Zebras Unite nonprofit will serve as the movement builder and R&D engine to grow the zebra movement, and the Zebras Unite Co-Op will lead the delivery and execution of this work. Collectively, we are embracing the core pillars of Zebras Unite’s hybrid mission to catalyze culture, capital, and community for people building businesses that are better for the world.
We’ve codified these core pillars into a refined, sociocracy-informed governance structure that enables each circle to maintain autonomy and agency over its areas of focus; enables more co-op member participation; and overall creates more pathways for co-creation.
In 2023, our collective work is guided by a set of intentions co-developed at the end of the year. This language may feel unfamiliar, and that is by design. As we considered what it meant to be more equitable we pivoted away from conventional success metrics in search of both language and a guiding purpose that felt more aligned with the type of organization we intend to be.
Experiment in Public
From the very beginning, Zebras Unite has been a series of experiments in creating a new way of doing business. Not every experiment is successful, but the value of these experiments is in what we can learn, and how we can better canonize The Zebra Way to create tangible value in a human-centered, empathetic way. Experiment in Public is our framework of practice designed to embrace the hybrid organization as both a lab and an experiment in and of itself, and seeks to foster a public dialogue around process and capacity-building within our community. In 2023, we will run a series of public experiments that will be incubated by members and staff and then publicly presented through thought leadership and participatory educational programming.
We are investing deeply in culture work, creating the conditions for all spheres of our community to thrive by identifying, connecting, engaging, and accessing resources. We do this through collaborative educational, design, and research activities that advance our mission and purpose.
Engage, activate, and nurture our communities
As a movement-building organization, the needs of our community are at the core of all we do. As we emerge from the darkness of the pandemic, we have heard that experiences that foster deeper connection are more essential than ever. In 2023, we’ll be focused on activating our ecosystem of founders, funders, and allies through programming co-designed with our members and partners, and facilitating intentional, place-based gatherings.
We will also be creating clearer pathways for you to find and engage with one another both online and in person, and access the right resources for the stage of your journey. We’re delighted to share our recent move to a new open-source community coordination platform that is more aligned with our values and our needs — Hylo. Stewarded by co-op member Terran Collective, we chose Hylo because it is designed to build better trust, transparency, and relationship between members, with robust asks and offers functionality and the ability to easily find members and information by both interest and location.
Join the Zebras Unite Hylo Community Here
Resource the zebra ecosystem towards prosperity
Prosperity is a key driver for Zebra organizations — prosperity for owners, customers, and the broader communities they serve. One of the most tangible ways in which we can support you is by accumulating and deploying capital into more dazzling businesses everywhere. In 2023, we remained focused on creating access to more nimble, courageous, and equitable financial products and mechanisms that serve both co-op members and the broader ecosystem, leveraging the creation of intermediaries that serve distinct stakeholder communities, such as the Inclusive Capital Collective and P6 Capital.
This is what we mean by catalyzing capital. We intend to create a spark that produces immediate and tangible impact, and ignites a phase shift not just for our members and community, but for the global ecosystem of organizations seeking to create meaningful change in the world.
Cultivate our collective capacity
As we prioritize clarity and cohesion across the hybrid, we’ve still got work to do in refining our existing operational systems and processes to ensure that we can cooperate effectively and thrive. This includes creating space to fully activate the collective brilliance of our co-op members towards co-building this organization. Over the next year, you’ll see more opportunities to engage in the labor of building the co-op, to give and receive value in the ways that matter most to you.
The capital intermediary design work is focused on putting you in a position of power when it comes to gaining access to values-aligned capital. We are reversing the ‘funders first’ bias and putting founders first, in order that the risks you take are appropriately rewarded, and economic justice is restored to those who have been marginalized by mainstream capital practices.
Further, as owners and operators of zebra organizations ourselves, we know that the goods and services Zebras Unite offers must be designed in partnership with you. Not only do you know what you need, but you are a 8,000 strong group of smart, compassionate business builders, with your own skills and experience to share. This is why the next phase of our successfully prototyped Zebra Advisory Services will be taken to the next level with our co-owners.
Movements are born from passion, but are sustained by process and intentional practice. If we seek to nurture the conditions for co-creation, we must also design and define the pathways for doing so. Co-creation requires equal parts collaboration, cooperation, and coordination. It’s an arduous process. Yet when done with intention, patience, and humility, it grows meaningfully and abundantly, like a garden well-tended by many hands.
While we know that much of the path ahead is still being written, as an organization we know that it is possible to achieve these intentions together through values-centered action and transparent experimentation. We hope you will join us on this journey.
