Practice #2
Approach Problems with Collective Governance
Meet collective problems with collective practice. Identify places where people can create culture and practice governance together. Often, the degree to which people feel belonging is the degree to which people feel power.
Even in organizations with hierarchy, ensure there are ways to collectively hold different parts of the work so that everyone can build a just relationship to power. This can strengthen personal investment and overall alignment. Encourage people to be part of processes to build emotional skill, address conflict, and shape how the organization operates.
Sustainable and powerful movements across the world understand that when shared problems are addressed collectively, people belong to the process of building solutions. Individual housing needs are best addressed by organizing the whole building. Personal burnout is best addressed by group processes that make the work more feasible for all.
Strong relationships are necessary for collective work and governance, and organizations should focus on ways to build mutual understanding, trust, and resilience.
Risk
If our processes are not democratic and human-centered, our movements will not truly be liberatory. When people don’t have opportunities for governance or material decision making power5, they can revert to tendencies that displace their agency, even around their ability to belong, onto those who do have perceived power. They will passively receive and do the work, rather than shape and be shaped by it.
Without collective practices, our members can feel confused or disempowered about how the work has come to be. Although this work demands all of us, people may never feel truly responsible for, or accountable to, a project that is larger than themself.
Opportunity
When people see and feel the impacts of their work, their sense of investment grows. People are more likely to feel a sense of belonging to something they are invested in and responsible for.
Marx asserted that revolutionary practice is the simultaneous changing of circumstance and human activity. When we collectively govern, we become more human. In our organizations, this can look like emphasizing and enabling participation, encouraging ownership of the work, and democratizing expertise.
This very governance mirrors what we want to see in our future communities, giving us a valuable practice ground to learn how to wield, shape, and share power.
Challenge
Many people have internalized individualism from the dominant and activist ethos surrounding us. Amy Halsted, Ben Chin, and Jesse Graham detail the characteristics of activist culture and nonprofit culture in their piece, Nuts and Bolts for Building Resilient Organizations. These cultures, fueled by meritocracy, scarcity, and white supremacy do not foster the skills or mindset for collective work.
People may be coming to movement building experiencing either obsessively hierarchical organizations where they hold no decision making power, or understanding social change to be about strong, unwavering individual voices that never back down.
Reframing social change and organizing work as highly iterative teamwork will take time. We must be patient with people as we re-learn how to be in connection, struggle, trust, and practice.
Assessment Questions
Do people have meaningful ways to make decisions that impact the direction of campaigns, projects, or the organization at large? Do they see themselves as stewards of the work of the organization?
Are there avenues for members to surface needs and ask for help from peers or staff? Are there containers for members to hear organizational challenges and contribute to collective solutions?
Can people contribute to the organization at different levels, depending on their capacity or proximity to the organization?
Implementation
Evaluate your current structures of governance, formal and informal. Interrogate whose voice is often heard and who makes decisions that impact groups of people. Consider where trust can be extended and built with more people, to widen the practice of governance.
Identify where ‘culture’ is created in the organization. Culture may be in rituals, recurring practices, traditions, unspoken agreements, or standards. Set, evaluate, and maintain these practices collectively.
Bring shared problems to collective attention. Address recurring conflicts, sustainability, and moments of crisis in large groups as a way of building decision making skills and sharing power.
Create regular spaces for people to share stories, surface needs, and ask for help. By humanizing ourselves and each other, we create better opportunities for curious and compassionate connection. These relationships form the foundation of strong governance.
Encourage collective memory by supporting long-term members to tell stories about the history of the organization. Guide people to imagine their work as contributing to that lineage.
5 I’m naming ‘material’ decision making to acknowledge the tendency towards ‘artificial’ decision making: decisions that have no real impact on the work, but give the illusion of power and choice. Groups should interrogate if there are avenues for people to learn, debate, and give input on things that actually shift the course of the work, campaigns, or organization as a whole. Importantly, this is not to say that every decision gets to be made by everyone.
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