Alternate Power and Decision Making Models (EP.52)
Recorded
April 27, 2021
Last Updated
December 27, 2021
This conversation was recorded as part of Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit that took place on April 27, 2021.
There are a multitude of ways to share power, decision making, and leadership in organizations. In this episode, Aja Couchois Duncan, Hop Hopkins, Lauren Ruffin, and Jason Wiener explore several, as well as discuss what companies should keep in mind as they consider different ways of participatory leadership.
Resources mentioned during session:
“Racism Is Killing the Planet” by Hop Hopkins
Solidarity Not Charity - Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy
Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Nonprofit Democracy Network
Guests: Aja Couchois Duncan, Hop Hopkins, Jason Wiener
Host: Lauren Ruffin
Guests
AJA COUCHOIS DUNCAN is a leadership coach, team engagement and strategic planning graphic facilitator and organizational development consultant of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. A Senior Consultant with Change Elemental, Aja has worked for almost 20 years in the areas of education, leadership and equity. Working with a broad range of clients from public and private universities, nonprofit organizations, national policy advocates, statewide arts organizations, to small businesses—she provides organizational capacity building expertise through needs assessments, program and/or strategy design and delivery, group facilitation, strategic communications and ROI/impact analysis. Aja has a strong background in diversity and social justice work, having provided diversity education, disparate impact analysis, diversity program evaluation and macro-level recommendations to improve equity and thus workplace climate and organizational performance. For nearly a decade, Aja was an active member of the Native American Health Alliance, an organization composed of University of California, San Francisco students, staff and faculty of Native descent working together to promote cultural understanding and an awareness of the health disparities affecting Native American/Alaskan Native peoples. With a small group of Native University of California staff, she created a development program designed to increase skills and promotional opportunities for employees of Native descent across the university system. She has led workshops for Native adults and youth to promote cultural values and identity through artistic expression. Previous professional roles have included leading creative writing workshops for under-served youth, working in the electrical and construction trades, serving as a meeting/conference planner, and leading nature programs in a state park. Aja is a certified co-active coach (CPCC) and holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a Master of Arts (MA) in policy, organization and leadership studies from Stanford University, where she is a member of the Stanford Native American Alumni Association. A writer and sometimes visual artist, Aja is interested in connecting the often disparate realities of spirit and mater, flora and fauna. When not at Change Elemental, you can find Aja writing or drawing. She also enjoys running in the hills with her dog, yoga and a daily meditation practice which begins with an expression of gratitude to her ancestors and ends with an enthusiastic shout out to the extraordinary miracle of her toes.
HOP HOPKINS is Director of Organizational Transformation at the Sierra Club, where he works to ensure that Sierra Club campaigns and programs protect those most affected by climate change and environmental degradation and promote economic justice. Hop was also a certified Arborist, a Master Gardener and has earned a Permaculture Design Certificate. He has been a Grassroots Environmental Justice Community Organizer in Seattle, WA, Portland, OR and Los Angeles, CA. Born in Dallas, Texas, he received his BA from New College of California as a graduate in the Culture Ecology & Sustainable Communities program with a focus in natural building. He has served on the boards of the Community Coalition for Environmental Justice, Western States Center and People’s College of Law. Presently, Hop sits on the Los Angeles Food Policy Council’s Leadership Board, is earning his Master’s in Urban Sustainability and is the Climate Justice Fellow at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He also participated in the Marshall Ganz Organizing Program at the Harvard University Kennedy School. Alongside his wife of eighteen years, co-founded Panther Ridge Farm located just outside of Los Angeles. Collectively they homeschool their daughters and steward a quarter of an acre of land inhabited by their pet Australian shepherds, chickens, honey bees, fruit trees and multiple compost piles.
JASON WIENER enjoys the challenge of creatively designing legal and business solutions to persistent social and environmental challenges. Jason comes to this work with a wide range of experience as an entrepreneur, litigator, activist, organizer and worker-owner. With more than a dozen years of experience as an attorney – including several years in BigLaw litigation, and as a labor lawyer – Jason’s range of expertise and experience brings an innovative approach to solving client issues. Jason has walked in the shoes of his clients, as a social entrepreneur in his own right, on the board of non-profits, cooperatives and corporations. Jason has served on executive strategy, human resources, finance and other management level teams. Jason has been a thought, do and practice leader in the cooperative, employee ownership, impact finance and capital, and teal lawyering movements. Jason’s client work and public speaking have charted a new and grander course for the potential of democratized economic structures to re-calibrate the hazardous course set by “business as usual.” Jason has published more than six scholarly law review articles on international, human rights and renewable energy topics and speaks regularly about worker-owned and cooperative business model, non-extractive finance, the future of work, the contemporary and teal practice of law, distributed solar policy and sharing economy legal issues. Jason is an adjunct professor in Colorado State University’s Global Sustainability and Social Enterprise program, where he teaches an MBA course on business law and ethics. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Colorado Law School’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic. His hobbies include mountain biking, yoga, hiking, running, walking his two dogs, coffee, cooking and traveling, and raising his two young children with his amazing wife, Meghan.
Host
LAUREN RUFFIN (she/her) is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. She's into exploring how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. As part of this work, she frequently participates in conversations on circular economies, social impact financing, solidarity movements, and innovative, non-extractive financing mechanisms. Lauren is a co-founder of CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Lauren is currently the interim Chief Marketing Officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), where she focuses on amplifying the stories and activism of the YBCA community. Prior to joining YBCA, Lauren was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States. In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, a new educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office to date. She has served on the governing board of Black Girls Code and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative, and on the advisory boards of ArtUp and Black Girl Ventures. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law.
Transcript
Hop Hopkins:
This society doesn't teach us how to be participatory. Even in our own families. All the institutions that we've come through by the time you get to be 20, 21, and you're going to get your first job, you are ill prepared to do anything that's participatory for the most of us. Some of us have been benefited from having been homeschooled or alternative different exposures to different spiritual practices.
But the majority of people are not even... I mean, if you think about an athlete, it's not even our muscles have atrophied, to atrophy, you actually have to have the muscle present first. Most of us don't even have not one calorie towards what we're trying to do right now. So I would say before you would think about going to resource, get clear on what your organization's trying to do and why you're trying to do it.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I’m Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that.
Earlier this year, podcasting's favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin and I produced Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit. The event took place online on Tuesday, April 27, and featured eight sessions, 25 amazing speakers, and covered a whole host of topics related to the ethical re-opening of workplaces amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
We raced to produce the Summit from start to finish in just three weeks as we felt the urgency and stress mounting as workplaces were in the midst of re-opening decisions. Several months on, we still feel the content is as necessary as ever, so we decided to release each of the sessions in podcast form.
In each of the eight sessions, you'll hear the conversations just as the Summit attendees did. As a reminder, in late April 2021, COVID vaccine distribution was just gaining speed and we had yet to begin hearing about the Delta variant. From that vantage point in time, it very much looked like by Fall 2021 things might be settling back into somewhat of a quote unquote normal routine. As I record this preamble in Fall 2021, that's not the case. We're now talking about break-through infections, booster shots, schools opening and closing again, hospital ICUs are packed in states across the U.S., and still how to safety gathering in indoors as the temperature again begins to drop with the change in seasons.
In this session: Alternate Power & Decision Making Models, the panel discusses ways to share power, decision making, and ownership in organization. Panelists include Aja Couchois Duncan, Hop Hopkins, and Jason Wiener. And podcasting's favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin kicks off things off and moderates the discussion. So, over to you Lauren...
Oh! A quick note about the audio quality in a few sections of this episode. You’ll notice in a place or two that the audio quality and clarity is, let's just say, less than ideal.
The source file that came from the summit platform included these glitches. So, while we did our best to clean them up in post-production, we couldn't fix them all. That said, this is a terrific conversation -- audio glitches and all. Apologies for the added adventures in audio quality and we hope you enjoy the episode.
Lauren Ruffin:
Okay. Well, let's get started. Hey folks, I'm Lauren Ruffin. I use the she series of pronouns. I'm a brown skin black woman with short hair and wearing a green hat and a black shirt. And I'm in a room with a white door in a white dresser and behind me, and on top of the dresser is, oh, a laptop, which shouldn't be there. A bunch of books, the plant and my pandemic village. It's coming together slowly. I'm really excited to be here to kick off this conversation on alternate power and decision making models. As many of you know, Fractured Atlas had share non-hierarchical leadership team for about three years now. We've learned a lot about how we're seeing power throughout the organization.
We tend to get a lot of questions around how we make decisions. Initially we were a four person leadership team. Now we're a two person leadership team, and it's good to be in community with folks who I know are living and thinking about this stuff deeply all the time, similar to the way that we've been doing at Fractured Atlas. And so with that, I'll hand it over to my fellow conversationalists here. We've got Jason Wiener who is an attorney based in Boulder, Colorado, doing a lot of work in the cooperative space around governance, around setting up cooperatives nationally.
Hop Hopkins these with the Sierra Club as their director of organizational transformation, and Aja Duncan, who we just learned as in rural Orange County, California and works with Change Elemental as a coach and strategist. Welcome. And I'll turn it over to y'all for some intros. I gave brief bullet points, but of course want to know what you're thinking about. And anything you want to share in the space as we kick this conversation off. Jason, I'll pick on you because I know you best.
Jason Wiener:
Thanks Lauren. Jason Wiener, he, him, his pronouns. I'm coming to you from Boulder, Colorado on unseeded Arapaho territory. I'm in my living room. You might hear the clickety clack of my dog in the background. It's a fairly bright room behind me. Not much to set apart the white walls, tan skin, a white man short haircut, and some scruff coming in on the face with a gray colored polo shirt. It's wonderful to be with you all. I'm excited to have a conversation about how we show up to work and organizations and acknowledge power structures that don't serve us, how we live into a more humane and people-centric and anti-oppressive arrangements that are healthier and can help us to get past the trauma of prior teams and organizations and families in a way that is sustainable. Thanks. And I'll pass it to Aja.
Aja Couchois Duncan:
Okay. Hi, my name is Aja Couchois Duncan. I'm mixed race [inaudible 00:03:15]. My people come from [inaudible 00:03:17], which is a great lakes area, Upper Peninsula, Michigan, Canada, waterways and Scotland and France. And I'm cisgender, quire, woman, person human. And I live on the stolen ancestral lands of the coastal Milwaukee people in rural west Marin and work with Change Elemental and really excited for this conversation and appreciate the opportunity. And my dog may bark wildly because he's outside and there's squirrels out there. And I'll turn it over to the Hop.
Hop Hopkins:
Yo, yo, yo, what's up everybody. My name's hop Hopkins. I'm the director of Organizational Transformation, as Lauren said. My pronouns are he, him, his. I'm calling in from occupied and unseated Tonga too much territory in Southern California, just at the base of what is now known as the San Gabriel foothills. Been at the Sierra Club for six years in a number of different roles. I am a middle-aged black man wearing a brown cowboy hat and what's that? Earth tone plaid shirt. I'm in a corner of my garage with some climbing gear and my printer to my left and to my right.
And I'm thinking about how do you take 128 year old organization that has an immense amount of power within the U.S social movement infrastructure and turn it into something that it has not been before, which is a more democratic participatory place where transparency is the rule of the day. Decisions are shared across not just in hierarchical relationships, but across expertise and do this all at the time when the organization is making a shift to try to become a more justice effort organization, [inaudible 00:05:19] racist founding and move to an anti analysis in a way it does and addresses it's environmental climate check. Some one said I was muted. Is that true?
Lauren Ruffin:
No.
Hop Hopkins:
Did [inaudible 00:05:36] here me?
Lauren Ruffin:
You're fine on our end.
Hop Hopkins:
Okay.
Lauren Ruffin:
But if you're having a hard time with audio, feel free to refresh [inaudible 00:05:43]. Hop, that's a great way to kick us off because you just asked the central question, which is what we're all thinking about. Aja, I do want to give you a chance to give an audio description just for folks who might be listening on podcast or just might need some help with that.
Aja Couchois Duncan:
Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm not used to that, so I missed it right away. I am a middle aged woman with brown hair, today in [inaudible 00:06:11] ranges from yellow to pink, depending on the day, and then my role and my body's pretty brown. And I'm wearing my politician worthy the red shirt in front of some art. Some of it is mine, some of it isn't. And yeah, thank you.
Lauren Ruffin:
Amazing. So Hop, you really cut right to the meat of what we're all trying to figure out. And I'm curious, you said, how do you turn around the ship that's been around for 128 years? How do you transform the way power happens? How would you answer your own question? What are your... because everyone in this group is at sort of different stages, which is one of the things I love about this organizational transformation work. What are you thinking right now? Because Sierra Club's been really thinking about this and engaging with it for, what we say about a year ish?
Hop Hopkins:
Well, we've been about, I think, we've really been about the talk is about the last 17 years and we really started implementing instructional change over the last three to five years. And just recently within the last year, it's been about within the last year, we dissolved our previous executive team and went to a transitional interim executive steering committee, which I'm on, which is majority BiPAP, majority women. And it's not necessarily based on hierarchical position in the organization. So yeah, we've been thinking about it for a minute.
I mean, some would say we've been on this journey for about 30 years slowly. And to your question, how does it happen? Well, it happens too fast, too slow, not real enough. If anyone's familiar with the bridges model, there are different people in different places in terms of the wheel of change and accepting. Some people are in the old space, some people in the neutral zone, some people are in the new beginnings and it's really hard. I mean, it's sort of be real. We're 128 year old organization. We have one chapter in every state at least, and California, for example, was our very last state. So it has that big 10 to 12 chapters nationally.
[inaudible 00:08:24] Puerto Rico we have chapter. So when I try to explain this to folks, we have a universe at about nine to 10,000 people on a day-to-day basis that we're involved in communication with. And our base right now is just under four million people. And when you think about a base of four million people and an active body of people you're engaging with on a day-to-day or weekly basis, that for me and people represents a body of people that's larger than 22 of our states in the union. So it's a pretty significant infrastructure that you're trying to navigate with a number of different forms of organization.
We have groups in the groups have... So we have chapters in the chapters, we have groups that are geographically based within the state. If placement is a large state with disperse populations. And then we have networks that are national, that are composed of members from some of those groups, it didn't work on things. And so it's a very multilayered organizational infrastructure and they're different people at different places inside the organization. Most people would say, we definitely want to change. That's not the problem. It's the level of change and the type of change that begins to rub people raw, that starts to chaffs people's hides. And for me, in this last year, I do think more, and we've gotten much more clear on exactly what type of change we're doing.
I think the question of why [inaudible 00:09:48] a question for some people, why are we trying to become an anti-racist organization? Why is that essential to the way in which we solve climate change? And there's an article that I wrote called Racism Is Killing the Planet, which I was asked to write by our deputy executive director, who is my boss and in the hopes of articulating why it's necessary for the organization to take on an anti-racist intersectional analysis, because that was the disconnect that some of our folks were making. So if you asked me to make change across the board to get them aligned senior leadership, our senior leaders or directors, it's a very complex multi-layered structure. And depending on who you're asking that it would take being or not being.
Lauren Ruffin:
Just drop the link [inaudible 00:10:37] chat. I read that right after you first met up a couple of months back up, and it's a really great article that makes that connection to people often have [inaudible 00:10:45] which is how oppression floods through all of our work. And how [inaudible 00:10:51] really try to do inside of our organization is recognizing these people that we work with are also being impacted by oppression. And beginning to tease out the levers that we can pull as leaders to make the way that we work a little bit more humane. I'm going to go to you now Aja, because I know Change Elemental.
I won't say it was just like birth, but has a long history of working in a non-traditional way as an organization with shared leadership, and being non-hierarchical. So I would love to get a sense of where y'all feel like you are on your journey, because this is a way that you've worked for quite some time.
Aja Couchois Duncan:
Yeah. Thank you [inaudible 00:11:28]. We also rebranded. So it's a true statement to say it Changed Elemental has been working this way. But we were previously known as the Management Assistance Group, and I've been around for 45 years. And I wouldn't say that necessarily that's the way we've always been working. The we changing over time, of course not the actors change. Yeah, we started with a co-director model, which a little over five years, which now I know is like almost common place, but at the time there was a lot of push, both from our governance team. And then a bunch of people were like, "Well, how do you do that?" After we did it.
And it certainly enabled us to share power in different ways and draw on different people's strikes, but it wasn't any way of fully grappling with white supremacy and hierarchy and power and race in the organization. And it also didn't ease the endless burden of ed burnout, even if there was... it was to eds burden out basically. What was great about it is they hit a wall and that really pushed us to re-imagine what we could do in ways that enabled us to really live more deeply into [inaudible 00:12:38]. Yeah, we can a space for [inaudible 00:12:45] how our own, like the qualities of our own internal capacities manifest and how we show up and all of that kind of stuff.
So we started a journey about, give us a year and a half ago to re-imagine what it might look like. And we really wanted to draw on the strengths and powers of the... not power in that way, but the strengths and abilities and capacities of folks in the team. So we went from a co-director model to a five person what we called a chrysalis stage and just started having people hold more responsibility and influence in decision making in different aspects of mission sustainability, human sustainability, and fiscal sustainability. And then we moved into the next iteration, which we called the hub, and that became a... I'm trying to remember. I was just in a meeting. I think it's a six person team with the co-directors trying to increasingly step out and see what we could sort of grapple with.
And now we're on what will be the third iteration of thinking about what's.... it's so interesting Hop, to come after you. Because we're such a teeny organization that our constraints are much more around the governance team, which is wildly supportive. And we have an amazing governance team. But just so you know, the nonprofit, industrial complex constraints and expectations, which you do hit against, every time you push you're going to hit another one. Yeah, we're really small. So we don't have the amount of stakeholder potential constraints and feedback and influence that I'm sure you're all grappling with, of course my computer's reminding me to eat.
But now we're moving into another iteration and we're just starting to imagine what it will look like. I'll say some of our learnings we range between 10 to 13 people, is if you've got almost half of your organization in a shared leadership model, and then we created structures for actually everyone in the organization to be in what we call different paths of around functional aspects. Because we're almost too small to have certain functions actually at all. It's real big draw on the energy and attention to the organization. And so while we're learning tons of things and sharing them with our partners in the field, we also are in the dance of, what's too much so that we can't actually do the work that we're... her vision and mission are actually about.
So I think that that's probably always attention. And I know other small organizations that have been doing a lot of experimentation around shared leadership are hitting up against those things as well.
Lauren Ruffin:
Jason, you're up.
Jason Wiener:
Well, it's interesting we've gone down this progression of scale. And Aja, I will say we're probably even smaller. We're a core team of eight individuals, seven are attorneys, seven women and one man, which is an interesting dynamic in a law firm. It's highly unusual. I personally wrestle with notions of power and leadership as a white [inaudible 00:15:57] male in an organization that purports to practice in an unconventional way with unconventional types of clients. And to dismantle systems of white supremacy in as many places as they show up in our work. And so what that looks like we have, I think, a fairly robust stakeholder approach.
We have on any given year, over 150 individual clients. We've been around for seven years. And we were one of the first public benefit corporation, B Corp certified entities. We went through both the certification and the public benefit Corp thing at a time when brand stamping was really in Vogue. And I always knew that was really just the starting line for what it meant to actually practice with authenticity and a dedication to anti-racism anti-oppression. And we've cultivated a clientele that in many ways carries out those values into the world at a scale that's much larger than we ourselves can impact. And so, I think in some ways we're part of this value chain and yet we've pushed ourselves to invest more deeply in the work and the way that we do it.
And so we have a... despite this being... I'm the only quote unquote owner of the firm, but we've operated with 99% open book management. I come from an organization that had 100% transparency, down to individual salaries comp and everything else. And I decided that there was a degree of discomfort in that that caused me to ratchet that back just one degree. So we're 99% transparent. I do dashboard reports every week to our team. We produce annual public benefit reports with metrics that go far beyond what is required or even contemplated by the B Impact Assessment. We just put out our last 2020 impact assessment or B impact report.
We've done about five of them now, and it's interesting to watch the trends. But we're self-managed entirely. So I've made it very clear that I am neither comfortable nor desirous of the decision-making power within the organization. So even for fairly young attorneys, and when I introduced myself, I talked about trauma. A lot of folks come to even our small workplace with a lot of trauma, and it shows up and we tackle it transparently and hopefully in an environment of security and safety. It shows up in the way we talk about comp. It shows up in the way that we talk about budgeting. It shows up in the way that people talk about their conditions and needs for work as well their desire and need for autonomy and professional development and evaluations.
And we try to make it as multilateral and as inclusive as possible, recognizing that we all show up with work trauma. And it's been interesting and challenging because the unacknowledged trauma is one of the most pernicious and serious forms of oppression that we bring around in the world. And so it's such a relief when team members show up and either after or during a conversation acknowledge the trauma that they just brought to the interaction. And it gives me the safety to know that I haven't necessarily... that we can have a now more enlightened and hopefully liberated discussion about what we want versus what needs to occur.
And there's a lot of monikers for what we do teal lawyering or whatever, whatever. But really to me, I created the firm to be an enlivened liberated place for me to just be who I am and practice the way I want. And I discovered over the last couple of years that it's turned out to be a fairly inviting and safe place for others to show up to work too, and do work that far exceeds any possible expectation I had for excellence and dedication. And now we grapple with how do we... so I don't worry about how do we keep people motivated. I worry, how do we keep people from burning themselves out, running themselves into the ground? So we're one of those organizations. We're small, I don't like to police anything so unlimited PTO.
Now the irony is people don't use it. I have to encourage and remind people about self care, which is both ironic and I think a bit paternalistic. The white man reminding people to take care of themselves, but I make it a point to invite. When is your next vacation day scheduled? You're getting through something big now, just know not to jump into the next big thing. I have to actively ratchet back people's bandwidth reports to make sure that they're not overextending. So all this is to say that this is part of the journey that we've embraced and we take on and we try to showcase that and practice it with our clients as well.
Lauren Ruffin:
To that Jason. I can see some folks on my team who we had conversations during the interview process about work trauma. They're telling on me in the chat. But I think that work trauma comes up when we have organizations where leaders will power in a way that's really unhealthy. And it is interesting in particular when I'm managing and working with younger folks, they're entry-level employees, their first experience with our workforce is typically pretty horrific. And so we tend to get folks at Fractured Atlas and across who are maybe in their second job or second or third job, relatively young.
And helping them have transparent conversations about power and encouraging them to step into their power. I think is probably one of the most freeing aspects of about thinking about how power is distributed throughout your organization. Jason, I know that you're doing a lot of work with co-operatives. I'd love for you to really quickly dispel some myths about democratic governance and decision-making in particular. We continue at Fracture Atlas to get a lot of questions about how we make decisions. I also thought the question to chat about decision making. So maybe we could spend some time there as a group collectively. But Jason, you can get started. Because I know you have lots of thoughts on co-operatives and decision making.
Jason Wiener:
Sure. There's one followup I wanted to make, which is unfortunately when it comes to work trauma, I think particularly in the U.S. and probably throughout Western world, I think the only kind of example we have of folks who show up with a bit of an open-minded or liberated notion of work are entrepreneurs. And the entrepreneurs in some ways, we've developed this cultish iconic lionized version of what the Western entrepreneurs like. They show up, they overwork, they read, and they're these over accomplished often white men who come from privilege and means to fulfill a vision and a dream. And I think in so many ways, when we look to recruit people who are relatively self-aware and show up having thought of their work trauma, that's the only kind of example we have.
We don't have folks who are conditioned out of traditional employment based work trauma. That may be my segue to cooperatives. Cooperatives are no different. The cooperative is perhaps a more democratic and potentially more humane way to organize people, but it's not intrinsically more humane and it's certainly not intrinsically more functional. In many ways it's so well-practiced to be dysfunctional. And the examples we have are replete throughout the food grocery co-op sector, and even in the worker co-op sector. We're still... to some degree we haven't fully deprogrammed. And we haven't actually fully lived out the liberated notion of broad-based shared ownership.
I sometimes maybe jokingly or coily refer to the cooperative as the apple of business models. It should be intuitive and it should be practiced from an intuitive place versus a programmed way of organizing. So a lot of cooperatives will still organize themselves in a fairly traditional format. The board of directors views its central role to be somewhat adversarial with management and hold them accountable, or be captured by management and buffer them against the members. We don't have a really strong example or many strong examples of dynamic governance that involves proactively engaging broad-based members as owners and also as stakeholders, in a way that engages them and leans into the stickiness of the relationship that we've cultivated.
I think Crux and a few other examples are leading the breakout of what the mold ought to be. But we have to begin to pair some of the new thinking around self-management or non-hierarchical team orientation with the business model of shared ownership. So that we can fully express what ownership really is. Because ownership in America really is about power. It's about wealth and it's about liquidity. So it's about that big golden rainbow payday. It's really not about sustainability and durability and intergenerational planning. And that's what the cooperative models built about and not give one final anecdote.
We had a mini training moment on our team. We've got a client that's been a co-op for 75 years and they originally in the thirties and forties were issuing paper membership certificates. And one of the heirs to one of the members came forward the co-op and said, "This $50 share sure has got to be worth a lot of money today. I'm here ready to cash it in. What do you owe me? Five, 10, 25, $30,000?"
And the board said, "No, it's still worth $50." And they hired a lawyer. They thought this can't be right. And over the course of now, probably three or four generations, that person had lost track of what their family membership in the co-op was really all about. But it hearkens through several generations of technology. And with blockchain and smart technology, we can do so much better to tell the story about what participatory management is, what co-ownership is in a cooperative and what that means in terms of the access I have to policy setting and engagement.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. That's really profound, Jason. Hop, you're in a relatively new shared leadership situation, have y'all had any disagreements yet. And how did you ultimately come to a decision?
Hop Hopkins:
You got jokes.
Lauren Ruffin:
[inaudible 00:26:59].
Hop Hopkins:
That's why I like kicking it with you. You got jokes. Oh, I was telling you, I just came out of a budget, just came out of the ISC meeting the...
Lauren Ruffin:
[inaudible 00:27:13].
Hop Hopkins:
The [inaudible 00:27:14] committee. So it was like the whole space is contiguous without even having to put anything on the agenda. I mean, it's like, I always think about that James Baldwin quote precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscious, you find yourself at war with society, right? And it's that way. I mean, many of the things we're talking, about and Aja, I really want to appreciate you for naming it before I did. We're the nonprofit industrial complex, it's a system within a system within a system of oppression. That's not meant for liberation. And so there's already some bookends to what's possible given the system that we're trying to operate in. And that is the first challenge in going into an organizational transformation process.
Aja Couchois Duncan:
Yep.
Hop Hopkins:
[inaudible 00:28:07] way possible, given the context that you're in possible for this [inaudible 00:28:18]...
Lauren Ruffin:
Hop, we're losing you a little bit. [crosstalk 00:28:30].
Hop Hopkins:
... what just happened. So [inaudible 00:28:33] all right?
Aja Couchois Duncan:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yup.
Hop Hopkins:
I'm I back now? So that's the first thing is just really trying to get everybody on the bookends remedy. And that's really difficult, challenging when when you're in a liberal mainstream, most likely Neo liberal. I mean, most of us who work in nonprofit really are Neo liberal spaces, right? We need to understand that the role that nonprofits plays and really protecting the money and wealth of the 1% who happened to be a little bit progressive or want to put their money in a system where they could shelter. I mean, that's just the reality. And so I'm not saying that changes is... the level of change we're going to be able to do.
We should just ground ourselves [inaudible 00:29:12] the foundations of what [inaudible 00:29:14] what the ecosystem we're operating in. So that's one thing. So a 12 or 13 person executive team that was majority white, executive team that [inaudible 00:29:32] power, they would meet [inaudible 00:29:35] those people were barely knew what they did and they no voting power, right? They could say, don't agree. And then the executive director just do decision they want to do and feel like they've been transparent enough to say, "Well, I've let people know [inaudible 00:29:50] you have to be back. And then I made [inaudible 00:29:52]."
Then to a nine person body [inaudible 00:29:55] BiPAP folks, two of which are white. The two white folks are the executive director. And [inaudible 00:30:02] then you have some of us who are senior directors and our own executive team just positionally right? At that executive level. Some of us are not. So you get those and you'd have a conflict all ready, right? There's not even the word that needs to be said. And so the idea is a transformational process. The first thing you want to do is [inaudible 00:30:32] the problem you're trying to solve for, right? Because you have other people thinking that we're going to be in some hyper democratic process that's going to be horizontal and flat. Now we're going to sociocracy and so there's different visions and ideas about what you mean were in there. And you just got to lay it out for people.
And the first body like us from that, from that team to this, I have to tell people like, we're not the magic sauce. We're the cleanup crew. Let's just be real. We're going to [inaudible 00:31:08], pardon my bionics. We're going to clean up all the stuff that this previous body wasn't able to do. It's like being an organizer. When you are organized, you go knock on your first door in the neighborhood. They ain't trying to hear what you got to say. They going to tell you all the things that was promising [inaudible 00:31:27], that you didn't have nothing to do with probably, but you're going to get all the shit for. So on your fourth or fifth visit to that, you should just be prepared on your fourth or fifth visit to the houses is the time you've going to be able to talk about what you want to talk about.
Up until then, you're going to get an ear full, probably get both ears not off by all the stuff that went wrong and all the other people showed up. And so I'm telling people, "Look, let's just be real. We're the cleanup crew. We're going to try to set stuff right in this period. There's a limited amount of time, we're here because we have probably an overabundance of political capital that we're going to expand in order to move from this very highly visibly dysfunctional place to something that's the hope and promise of something different." And so if you're doing this, you should be thinking about it as an iterative process. And you need to be thinking about it as a multi-tiered, you're going to need to go into many different... you should be ready to experiment and fail, which non-profits and white supremacy culture are neither set up for to tolerate or want to do.
Which is change and experiment and fail. And then we do a pretty poor job of doing it from the experiments that we are allowed to do. So I've just tried to tell people, we're not that magic sauce with a cleanup crew. We're going to do some things, but that we're not going to be the body that's going to bring and deliver the organization transformation at the big level. We're going to level set, try to get people prepared for a larger level of transformation and then set the stage for the next group that comes through behind us.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And Aja, what are y'all learning and [inaudible 00:33:01] around as you're to make decisions at Change Elemental?
Aja Couchois Duncan:
Yeah. Well, and I just want to riff on what you named because one of the experiments that when Alyssa Perry and Susan Mason started were co-directors was to do the work that they thought was most important with the organizations and leaders and networks that were the most important in terms of prefiguring a different future, one of liberation and love. They were like, "If it turns out it's not financially viable, as a fee for service with foundational support organizations, then what's the point? We're just part of the system. We're just perpetuating it. So we are often in that question, in the parameters of that question shifts, depending on where we are financially, external circumstances, all of that.
What we're always in that question, like if we can't be doing the work that we think matters, then we shouldn't be here. I think that... and I also didn't name in the same way I fail to describe myself. There's a theme here that the organization was originally, not originally, but we had our co-director model, two quire women of color, one black, one Southeast Asian, and now is two thirds BiPAP, a third quire. So number of identities have been really critical and were also predominantly cisgender female. And one of the things that we focus the most on, and I think that this is embedded in and everything that's been named as relationships. So building trust, getting really clear about what our values look like in practice.
Because you can say equity is our value, but what does that actually mean? These people hold very different mental models or pictures of what that is. And then what's the per share practices that are going to support us? And all of that being named and us all nodding our heads, I just came out of a meeting that was very tense, where we were like, "I'm still in some kind of way about what you're saying. And you're telling me this is the decision-making criteria. And yeah, I thought we were in a shared leadership situation?" So we get into it. And what enabled us to get into it? Because I think a lot of us as facilitators and coaches tend to be more on the lake support side, was actually just being in deep relationship and spending a heck of a lot of time with each other, and talking about what does shared leadership mean, and what does equity mean, and what does it mean to draw on ancestral wisdom?
And what does it mean? So be really clear about all the S-H-I-T, I have about money because of my intergenerational stuff, my own childhood. So we're often trying to unpack that stuff. So at least we can know, this is mine and this is the organizations, which is an aggregate of all of ours. Just to have some space to talk about and grapple with that stuff. Now I don't even know if I answered your question. [crosstalk 00:36:02].
Lauren Ruffin:
[inaudible 00:36:02] needed to be. So don't worry about it at all. I want to hop to a question we have in the chat here from [inaudible 00:36:12]. How can a traditional nonprofit organization adopt ultimate power and decision making models? Is this possible? I know that the sustainable economies law center has done a lot around democratic governance. Are there other resources that we could point the folks who are in the chat? I think pretty much everyone in this room is here because they're thinking about this, we [inaudible 00:36:33] some nuts and bolts resources of things that have been helpful as you all are creating, these organizations are beginning to lean into this.
Hop Hopkins:
That's one, the sustainable loss center. That's a good one. That's here in Southern California. So that's a great resource. I mean, I think... I'm just going to say this. I'm going to want to do resources, but I feel like I come up against this all the time doing equity, justice and inclusion worker intersectional work, in spaces where that's not been the norm. And I'm not saying this is where the question's coming from, but it does remind me of this, is that there is no silver bullet. That people looking for that one or two or three things that we can get. And it's not that easy. And I can give you a list of resources, but if the organization does not have the intestinal fortitude, or it's not oriented to be in this space, it doesn't matter what I give you.
If you're not ready for it, you're not ready for it. And I would say most organizations aren't ready to go to a third party. I don't want to bust up any consultants, but we spent way too much money on outside work because we're not ready there. And I think the first thing I was saying is, you've got to define the problem you're trying to solve for. And first you try to define the problem you're trying to solve for, you're going to find out that you're not all trying to solve the same question to the same problem. And that's the big thing. And I want to suggest that organizations get trying to clear on, what are we trying to pivot from to what is it about our culture that we've actually examined that is not healthy for us, that's preventing us from moving to this new direction.
So there's a bunch of pre-work that actually has to happen before I think you even get to trying to get to a consultant or resources. You just need to be clear because many of the concepts and things are going to be introduced to, most folks have had... I mean, look, this society doesn't teach us how to be participatory. Even in our own families. All the institutions that we've come through by the time you get to be 2021, and you're going to get your first job, you are ill prepared to do anything that's participatory for the most of us. Some of us have been benefited from having been homeschooled or alternative different exposures to different spiritual practices.
But the majority of people are not even... I mean, if you think about an athlete, it's not even our muscles have atrophied, to atrophie, you actually have to have the muscle present first. Most of us don't even have not one calorie towards what we're trying to do right now. So I would say before you would think about going to resource, get clear on what your organization's trying to do and why you're trying to do it. Right? And it's actually got to be honest... I'm just going to tell you this, if it's not situated in actually dismantling, systemic, oppression from the start, I mean, even if we could just get there, we could still have hierarchies and still be doing better work.
I mean, God damn. I mean, that's the problem. Is this just not recognizing the world out in the world and we're trying to just band-aid and tweak around the edges of justice. And so I would say there's a bunch of pre-work that has to happen to do that. And just some of these questions that I'm identifying would be helpful. And then one is like having a conversation like this, what are the leadership and cultural practices and pivots we want to shift from to? Get the idea of what's the difference between learning to some basic stuff. What's the difference between governance and management, right? Getting a clear idea about power and how it operates within our organization, within a society and how we actually want to relate to power in our new structure, right?
And also this thing, what Jason brought up was trauma. How is this place not psychologically safety for those who don't identify with the mainstream? And how is it that our decision-making processes and models now enforce and increase that level of lack of psychological safety? So there's some already things I think that we ought to do as an organization that take a back seat to resources. First is just getting from building a vocabulary to understanding about actually how our organizations are actually structured and function now, both consciously and unconsciously to perpetuate systemic oppression within these nonprofit structures.
And then once you've done that, I'll let Jason and Aja give you some [inaudible 00:40:40], and I've spent so much time. Because you bring in a consultant and I'm like, "Holy hell, what kind of mess that I get into?" And they're just trying to level up people to square one. [inaudible 00:40:48]. [crosstalk 00:40:48].
Lauren Ruffin:
To the crown level.
Hop Hopkins:
And they're happy to get paid, but they're living in their best way to help you move forward. And so I would say there's some shit that you just got to figure out ahead of time before you call a consultant. And if a consultant doesn't ask some of these questions, they're not worth a dime.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's so true. We've got four minutes left. There's one more question in the chat that I see, right. It came in earlier. I've been having many discussions recently with others from my team who feel as though decisions made by management, especially as it relates to performance assessment and promotions are opaque. I'm interested in especially how an artwork can better approach decision-making in general, so that it feels transparent and fair to those affected. Jason, I know you talked about open book management and some transparency in your organization. How are y'all handling performance assessment promotions? Because I know you're doing more than just billable hours as a firm.
Jason Wiener:
Yeah. This just came up actually. I mean we've only had full-time associates on our team for about three years, three out of seven. And in many ways as is usually the case, whenever you plan for a major change in your organization, the things that you don't plan for are the things that come up. And so that really speaks hop to your point about don't bring in the consultant to plan for a big change. You have to be prepared for the adaptation that's involved. So one, we try to bring a sense of mindfulness to all of these conversations and a sense of humility. We know. The one thing I know for sure, the one thing I'm really confident about is that neither I nor any individual on the team will have all the answers for the questions that come up.
So I go in thinking, "Okay, I'm going to tell you that I'm giving this my best shot. And I remain open and available and adaptive to the feedback that we need to adapt this tool." So first thing is we co-developed an assessment and evaluation matrix. And one thing that's kind of in my core is to know that whatever you measure, is a reflection of what matters. It's the same thing with nonprofits, whatever you budget for, that's what matters. If it's not in your budget, if it's not in your evaluation, it can't matter that much. And it's also not fair to informally measure the thing that's not there. So our matrix has a little bit on technical skill. It has a lot more on experience and skill development, what things...
So we actually developed this matrix and we have the person go through a self evaluation, and then we do an evaluation with at least one senior person. There's no supervisors or managers. It's a senior attorney only to provide some kind of a different perspective on training and experience. But we rank each component based on how important is it to the organization? How interested is the person being evaluated in that skill or piece of development? And then what is their expected level of proficiency? And then how do they rate against that? It's silly to just rate performance without knowing what the baseline is. We say for a fairly junior attorney, maybe they're only expected to be one out of five in terms of their expected proficiency. And I can tell them, well, you're over-performing, you're at a three already.
So with actually for 25 components of evaluation. And by the way, values, alignment and adherence to our norms are in that matrix, how you live out these values, how you support leadership within the team, how you exercise leadership outwardly. And again, these are all components. And so we measure that and we just did this with one of our associates. And on top of going through that exercise, our associates selected who would review her performance. So I asked her, I said, "I'll do it, you'll do it. Who else would you like to review you?" And we brought in somebody who she selected to provide that feedback.
And it was a conversation started. And what we looked for was misalignment in the tool. So where did you... and it turns out that again, this reflected trauma, she vastly under assessed her performance in areas where I thought she was just crushing it based not only unexpected levels of proficiency, but objective loves the proficiency. So we were able to talk about that. We were able to talk about what that meant in terms of professional development, where to devote resources. And then on top of that, we have a very open dialogue around compensation. So while individual comp is not public, I try to maintain a sense of uniformity in terms of the rationale and the approach.
We've got folks all over the country and so that makes it a little bit challenging. But everyone has access to all the numbers of the firm, every week. Everyone knows what we're working with in terms of resources. And so I've been fortunate more than I think I've been, well, intentional unfortunate. I have preempted every associate for a salary adjustment before they've asked. I've said, "You've been here a year, you haven't asked yet. I want to invite you to make a recommendation and a proposal." And I just prompted this associate for a review because I was like, and it was provisional. We agreed, but I was like, "I think we got it wrong. I think we're too far under, so let's do an evaluation and then let's readjust it." And that's just conscientiousness more than I think it's really anything else. But I'll stop there.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Well, that's a good hopeful note to end on. As clear that this is really meaty and we could have spent another hour on this, but I want to be respectful of everyone's time. Hop, Jason, Aja. Thank you so much for showing up for us today. And I hope we can continue the conversation. We'll be back, I think on the main stage at the hour mark, wherever you are. Hopefully I'll see the three of y'all in the chat. Thank you.
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