Assessment: Use these questions to identify where belonging is scaffolded, supported, or undermined within the organization. These questions are an invitation to share stories about how you powerfully cultivate each practice and where you may need more attention. 

Implementation: Based on your assessment and areas of interest, try out the following implementation suggestions. Which could help your organization grow a right-sized belonging?

Assessment Questions

• Can members of the organization state the purpose of the work in their own words? Are they able to articulate their role in moving that purpose forward? 
• Can people identify what isn’t in the realm of the organization’s purpose, as well as what’s in it? Do people understand what issues and people sit at the center of the organization?
• Are there opportunities to learn the lineage of the organizational purpose, discuss how it manifests in the work, and debate and refine it where appropriate? 

Implementation

• Clarify the organization’s purpose and trace the lineage that brought you to this moment. Encourage staff and members to situate themselves as part of this lineage.
• Map different avenues towards contributing to the purpose. Provide space for people to see how their protagonism moves the purpose forward. Evaluate how members see their own impact and provide opportunities to strengthen that impact.
• Build consistent social units that help new members connect as humans and go on the ‘journey’ of connecting to purpose together. These units, such as membership cohorts, neighborhood groups, or buddy systems, can support people to build relationships, reflect on the impact of their actions, and share stories.
• Practice managing the potential discomfort of prioritizing purpose, even when everyone’s individual wishes may not be met. 
• Without falling into liberal traps of disposability, develop strategies for meaningfully and compassionately parting ways with people if there are irreconcilable disagreements with the fundamental purpose.

• 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.

• Can people across the organization name what is expected of them in their role? Do they understand what they can expect from others, and from the organization as a whole? 
• Do people in the organization understand how decisions are made? Do they see their place in the decision making process?
• Is it clear that the organization is trying to be a social space, political home, cultural community, healing center, movement building project, or something else?

Implementation

• Clarify the boundaries of what the organization does on the day-to-day, as well as in moments of crisis. Work with members to identify potential needs or scenarios, and map which are met in the organization, and which are met elsewhere. 
• Design clear resources and trainings to illustrate how people in the organization are expected to relate to each other, work together, and make decisions. 
• When conditions shift, work with members to identify how this changes any organizational boundaries or expectations. 
• When members join the organization, create opportunities to learn about the context of organizational boundaries and how decisions get made.
• Practice holding people accountable to shared expectations in moments of conflict or when work is left incomplete. If a consistent challenge, shift expectations in line with group needs and organizational values.

• Can members and staff openly disagree in meetings and discussion spaces? If they disagree, will they still work together towards a common goal?
• Do staff and leaders feel equipped to create containers for feedback, disagreement, and principled struggle? 
• Over the course of their involvement, do members generally have more skillfulness and comfort with conflict?

Implementation 

• Reflect on organizational tendencies when it comes to conflict. What stories are at the root of those tendencies? Are organizational practices in line with your values? Identify how you may want to change your processes. 
• Identify what “safety” means for people across the organization. Create a felt sense of safety by fostering ways to move through processes of rupture and repair, reinforcing the normalcy of such processes. Ensure your understanding of safety is informed by an analysis of who wields power in the organization and how.
• Titrate conflict by creating progressively deeper ways for people to engage in debate and disagreement. Get people more comfortable with conflict over time by creating spaces for collective decision making and dissent. 
• Promote and define collective accountability across teams and working groups. Explore peoples’ past experiences with punitive accountability or avoidant tendencies to land on a grounded accountability. Generate processes that are rooted in your values, shared agreements, and fair consequences.
• Acknowledge and celebrate when conflict has been resolved. Uplift the ways people practiced skillfulness and vulnerability, and put words to lessons learned through the process. 
• Build critical conflict skills, such as:
• approaching conflict from your values – asking “how do we want to be” rather than “what do we want to do?”
• discernment – picking and choosing which battles to wage
• communication – directly and compassionately sharing analysis, needs, observations, thoughts, and feelings (as needed)
• embodiment – identifying emotions and returning to center when activated 
• principled struggle – debating different ideas or tactics, backed by studied analysis, with the goal of building our strongest possible collective action and unity
• regular feedback – giving and receiving critique and appreciation for the sake of growth 
• grounded accountability – being able to be responsible for one’s own actions or inactions, taking steps to repair, ask for help, and make amends where needed

• Can staff members and organizational leaders articulate how cycles of violence impact members?
• Do members understand that emotional skillfulness is an important aspect of doing the work in the organization?
• Does the organization have fluency in the emotional skills that best support your organizing? Are there deliberate trainings and practice opportunities to build these skills?

Implementation 

• Map the emotional landscape of your community. Identify key traumas, going to the source, and work to understand how those traumas manifest in actions and beliefs. Where necessary, consult and build with movement-aligned healers to bridge understanding. 
• Train staff to balance challenge and support with members. Staff should understand how to build trust through curiosity, push at peoples’ growing edge, create opportunities for debrief and feedback, and affirm where transformation is taking place. 
• Encourage regular self-reflection on personal patterns, reactions, needs, emotions, self-perceptions, limits, and capacity. Ensure that people are able to recognize their feelings, and, where appropriate, connect them to a broader moment or purpose. 
• Support people across the organization to create sustainability, healing, and crisis plans, and identify resources within and outside of the organization to nurture that healing.
• Evaluate emotional skillfulness throughout the organization, and plan to create ways to practice key skills where necessary. These skills can be incorporated into existing meetings, campaigns, committees, or gatherings. Skills may include: 
• self awareness – understanding one’s own thoughts, actions, feelings, and beliefs
• emotional discernment – ability to decide when to share feelings and thoughts, holding and letting go when needed
• adaptability – returning to center when methods, plans, or practices change 
• conflict mindfulness – choosing when to engage in conflict, and understanding why
• principled struggle – engaging in thoughtful disagreement or dialogue with others for the sake of political clarity 
• strategic visioning – guiding decisions for the future without pessimism or unanchored optimism 
• balancing individual needs and collective purpose 
• principled and direct communication

• Do you know of resources, organizations, and people that can help meet the needs of members when those needs are outside of the scope of your work? 
• Can members of the organization identify other meaningful places of their own belonging? 
• Are there opportunities to exchange, learn, and build relationships with people from other organizations? Are these opportunities available to people at different levels of involvement? 

Implementation

• Assess the common needs of the membership–such as housing, mental healthcare, trauma support, job preparedness–and proactively find resources to meet those needs. 
• Encourage people to reflect on how they get their belonging needs met at different levels, and celebrate their work towards nested belonging. How do they belong to themselves? What relationships or communities do they belong to? What movements, values, or ideas do they belong to? What histories do they belong to? 
• Build ongoing relationships with other organizations, groups, and healers that can assist the community during acute crises or with ongoing needs. Resource and sustain those relationships often. Make these relationships known throughout the organization. 
• Provide opportunities to situate the organization within a larger lineage and ecosystem. Ensure people across the organization can study how the work compliments, compares, and flanks other organizations in the past and present. 
• Create a position or group in the organization that can regularly research additional resources, and act as a connector to the membership.