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With this article, we launch our series—Narratives to Build Collective Economic Power—which NPQ is publishing in partnership with the national racial and economic justice nonprofit, Common Future. In this series, the authors write about their economic justice work and how, in their work, they challenge conventional narratives and offer new ways of thinking about who can be owners in the economy and what community economic development means. 

We know that our economy is inequitable and unjust. We see this in everything from unemployment numbers to the number of business closures to the nation’s enormous racial wealth gap. What makes this inequity difficult to tackle is not just its pervasiveness; it’s also the stories underpinning our economy—the beliefs around what is right or just, and who is deserving or at fault.

For those of us working to build a more equitable economy, our policy and philanthropic efforts—even our day-to-day practices—have to champion new models of and stories about what our economy can be, models and stories that challenge dominant ideas about what is just. Specifically, we must tell stories that shift our view of individuals as sole actors and challenge the “winners and losers” mentality.

Earlier this year, writing in Shelterforce, Anne Price, President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, shared the story of the life of one of her ancestors, James Albert Parsons, Jr. Born in 1900 in Dayton, OH, Parsons was able to build a life unimaginable for Black people at the time. With a gift for math and desire to pursue engineering, he graduated from college, became the director of Duriron Research Laboratory—where he supervised the nation’s only all-Black lab—secured eight patents, and upon retirement, became a college professor and dean.

Yet, as Price notes, none of these strides and successes led to wealth accumulation for James or his family. “He was exceptional, but no exception,” Price observes—blocked from generating wealth to pass down to his children and grandchildren. His individual success was no match for the structural barriers around him: redlining, pay gaps, and chronically underfunded educational institutions.

Many of us can share similar stories of people in our lives and communities who “beat the odds,” as the saying goes. These people are celebrated and presented as examples of what’s possible. Their stories’ pervasiveness illuminates how we think about economic inequity and wealth. In short: wealth is a matter of individual grit and accomplishment. If you don’t get there, you simply didn’t try hard enough.

This belief affects how we define problems and pursue solutions. For example, if we believe the wealth gap is the result of poor choices, we will focus on individual interventions like financial workshops and not put pressure on banks to overhaul their lending practices. This is not to say individual interventions aren’t necessary or helpful. They certainly are. However, we know that large-scale, long-term social change requires structural change. In our focus on the individual, structural barriers become hidden; they are “common sense” or “just the way things are,” allowing long standing, inequitable practices to flourish and to continue extracting from the very communities who need to build wealth the most.

Thus, structural change requires, not just interrogating existing stories and the behaviors they support, but also offering new, more compelling stories that reflect our shared vision and values while showcasing efforts to create an economy where people like James and his community enjoy success and wealth. The stories with which people make sense of the world must lead them to build a future with all communities in mind.

Can New Narratives Build Collective Economic Power?

We have titled this series, “Narratives to Build Collective Economic Power,” but can narratives actually do that? At Common Future, we believe they can—and must. In this series, we feature five community wealth builders from our network who share their stories and the beliefs underpinning their models—stories that emphasize collective power, community trust, and reparative investment. In addition to learning about their work, readers will learn about the challenges and opportunities in identifying and uplifting new stories that create new narratives about what’s possible.

The stories told share common themes yet vary tremendously. Two authors are from the US South—one recounts the story of organizing to protect Black-owned land in South Carolina; the other looks at what is required to develop Black-owned businesses in Mississippi. We also include a story about how to preserve Latinx businesses in Los Angeles. And we have two stories from Native America—one that focuses on Indigenous economics and another that poses comunalidad (communalism) as an alternative economic and narrative frame of reference.  

How does narrative change happen? There are many answers to this question. One answer is that narrative change often occurs when there is a disconnect between what is said and what is happening—when people ask questions and are hungry for answers. We’ve seen such moments arise in the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic is one prominent example, as it laid bare so many failings of US society. Part of the reason, too, why up to 26 million people across the US mobilized after the murder of George Floyd is because the video images of Floyd’s killing made it impossible, at least for a short time, for millions of white Americans to deny the pervasiveness of structural racism.

These are dramatic moments when narrative shift occurs. But often narrative change occurs more slowly, hidden from view. It is this subtler change that this series highlights. For example, Tómas Durán of Concerned Capital, a Southern Californian firm that helps employees become owners, writes about what he calls “workplace entrepreneurs.” Long-term employees who have been told all their lives that they cannot be business owners, workplace entrepreneurs are people who in fact “have the potential to run and own their own businesses, but only if they are mentored and supported and that potential is tapped.” It is important to tell a story that highlights their capacity.

In Mississippi, Tim Lampkin of Higher Purpose Co. notes that the “profits of Black culture largely line the pockets of people who are white.” One of the central strategies of the nonprofit he leads is to share stories of success—again, telling people who believe they cannot build wealth that they can—and, of course, providing them with the technical assistance and support to do so.

It might not seem that having community conversations regarding estate planning would be an important narrative change strategy. But as Dr. Jennie Stephens of the Center for Heirs Property Preservation in South Carolina details, it is essential. “Poor folks just do not sit around the kitchen table and talk about estate planning,” Stephens explains. “It is unfortunate, but nonetheless true. Inheritance and land use can be a difficult conversation to have. Often, these people have been taken advantage of.” Part of building community wealth, in short, involves creating spaces where conversations regarding how to preserve existing wealth, such as land ownership, can occur.

A lot can be done. Vanessa Roanhorse, who is Navajo and leads a Native consultancy firm, observes that in the long historical scheme of things, “The market is mutable and young, which means it can change. We can change it.” ChristinaMaria Patiño Xochitlzihuatl TouTou Soutil Houle of the arts collective, Las Imaginistas, similarly challenges us to think expansively: “The world is at a moment of changing consciousness,” she writes. “How we approach the problems ahead of us will be determined by our ability to soften attachment to old definitions of ourselves and welcome in new ways of being.”

In short, countless efforts are underway to change actions and beliefs so that we may all have better lives. We can solve the economic challenges we face. And the people closest to these challenges most often have the best solutions.

One thing is clear: the economic narratives that have dominated our society have not served us well. Fortunately, in every crisis—and we are living through plenty of these—there are also opportunities to shift power to low-income and BIPOC communities and create new narratives around what a good economy looks like. It is, after all, in the combination of action and story that our boldest efforts can take hold.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

The nonprofit sector claims to prioritize care and altruism, yet too often nonprofits don’t enact these values within their own organizations. Market logic and the professionalization of the sector have normalized business thinking and practices in the name of efficiency, leading nonprofit workers to be viewed as cost centers to be kept in check—the lower the wage bill, the better—rather than intrinsically worthy human beings. Reporting volunteer impacts in terms of dollar equivalents rather than contributions to mission fulfillment is likewise a product of such market logic.

A business mindset often rationalizes inhumane labor practices like paying sub-living wages, not providing healthcare insurance or paid time off, and limiting employee autonomy through command-and-control leadership. People of color and women are disproportionately affected by these practices. For example, 20 percent of workers report feeling disrespected at work; the rate increases to 33 percent for Black workers. Supervisors, managers, and senior leaders often perpetuate racial inequity in the workplace. Dehumanization also shows up when organizations tolerate bullying, toxic leadership, and power abuses.

Besides hurting workers, dehumanizing labor practices negatively affect operations by increasing staff turnover. A 2021 survey by the National Council of Nonprofits of over 1,000 nonprofit organizations found that 42.3 percent of responding organizations had job openings for at least one in five positions, while 16.1 percent of respondents reported that more than 30 percent of positions were vacant. A separate 2021 survey found that the top three reasons for voluntary employee turnover in nonprofit organizations were: dissatisfaction with organizational leadership and culture; lack of opportunity for career growth; and obtaining better compensation and benefits elsewhere.

In addition to decreasing organizational capacity, staff turnover is expensive—recruiting, selecting, and onboarding new people costs on average about 18 percent of an employees’ annual salary. Lost institutional knowledge is another substantial, intangible cost.

How Did We Get Here?

Recent scholarship traces the origins of scientific labor management back to 17^th and 18^th century slavery management practices in the West Indies and the US South. Those practices included keeping detailed production records to calculate expected and actual worker outputs, varying labor allocations by type of crop, efficiently coordinating meals and lodging, and interchanging reward incentives with harsh punishments.

Such practices informed the scientific labor management field that developed in the 20^th century. American mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor serving as a leading figure in this field, which sought to improve efficiency through standardization and control. Along with other researchers, he engaged in time-and-motion studies, observing laborers at work and collecting and analyzing data to determine how long a work task should optimally take. From these studies, tenets of scientific management gained traction, such as setting productivity expectations for all employees based on top performers’ output rates, specifying and routinizing tasks, and dividing responsibilities between workers and supervisors, with managers responsible for planning and supervision and workers for task performance (Taylor, 1911).

Increasingly, business operations were siloed into categories such as technical (e.g., production and manufacturing); commercial (e.g., market transactions and exchange); financial (optimizing capital investments); security (protecting resource investments); accounting (tracking revenue and costs to assess profitability); and managerial (e.g., planning, organizing, commanding, and coordinating) (Fayol, 1917). Outcomes of this thinking include organizational charts, a hierarchical chain of command, top-down decision making, expectations of obedience, and loss of worker autonomy.

A growing body of research points to the ill effects of such authoritarian and autocratic management practices, including higher job stress, increased fear and anger in employees (Harms et al., 2018), lower levels of worker satisfaction (Gastil 1994), and the creation of a toxic workplace culture through a cascade effect; when executives manage in an authoritarian style, lower-level managers mimic these behaviors (Li & Sun, 2015). Authoritarianism also impedes innovation, since authoritarian managers are less open to listening to, valuing, and adopting creative ideas from subordinates, further driving employee disengagement and turnover.

Is There a Better Way? The Promise of Humanistic Management

Humanistic management, which is rooted in principles of dignity, care, mutual respect, and partnership rather than control and domination (Pirson, 2017), addresses these issues. A humanistic approach begins with the belief that people are inherently worthy, rather than assessing worth based on instrumental performance valuations. Such an approach puts people first and treats profit as a means, not an end, and always in service to individual and collective well-being and environmental stewardship. A humanistic standpoint’s 10 commitments include empathy, altruism, critical thinking, ethical development, peace, social justice, service, and responsibility.

While humanistic values are not new, humanistic management in the context of business emerged in the late 19^th century as a counterpoint to scientific management. Mary Parker Follett was among the first to formulate managerial principles that, contrary to the model advanced by Taylor, put people first. She espoused that groups succeed when they facilitate collaboration, enable people to define their own roles, and give people substantial autonomy over their work.

Follett also recognized the constitutive and reciprocal nature of organizing. Her approach conceives of power as “with” instead of “over,” emphasizing compromise as a more effective means to conflict resolution than domination. She also advocated for community-based “win-win” solutions, recognizing the creative potential of diversity and inclusive processes in achieving peace, prosperity, and progress (Follett, 1918). Such principles align with cooperative, prosocial governance models, community-based organizing, and nonprofit business models rooted in reciprocity rather than extraction.

Another early exemplar of humanistic management was Madam C.J. Walker, whose mutualistic entrepreneurship helped 20,000 Black women develop the skills—including budgeting, business development, and networking—to raise individual and collective capacity and create better lives for themselves. She also advocated for just and equitable systems, recognizing business’ role in catalyzing social change. Her activism and humanistic approach to management challenged the belief that the financial prosperity of some must come at the expense of other people’s well-being.

Humanistic Management in Practice

How can organizations shift to business models and practices grounded in partnership, like those that Follett and Walker pioneered, rather than domination? Today, humanistic management is gaining traction as a sustainable alternative to the economistic management paradigm of profit maximization, short-term decision making, efficiency maximization, and growth that dominates today’s business thinking and cultural discourse. Organizations such as benefit corporations, social enterprises, and nonprofits often espouse humanistic management principles, even if they don’t frame their work as such. The following examples dive a bit deeper into what humanistic management looks like in practice:

Wage equity: While the gap between executive compensation and front-line worker wages is a common and accepted practice in many organizations, a few firms recognize that their commitment to equity and social justice must begin internally if they are to have moral authority in their external social justice advocacy. Two examples are Dr. Bronner’s in San Diego and Gravity Payments in Seattle. Dr. Bronner’s caps the pay of its highest-paid executives at five times that of the lowest paid, fully vested employee. Compare this to the average 351:1 gap between CEOs and typical workers in 2020. Similarly, Gravity Payments starts all full-time employees at a minimum annual salary of $70,000, which has reduced voluntary turnover by 50 percent (Price, 2020). Such greater wage equity has cascade effects in communities as better paid employees become homeowners and achieve the financial security needed to support their families.

Another approach to wage equity is to move away from reliance on part-time staff to avoid benefits expenses. For example, prior to 2020, the visitors services department of the Museum of Us in San Diego relied on 20-30 seasonal part-time staff and a few year-round full-time employees. Now, it has shifted to a small team of full-time employees who reflect the region’s diversity. These employees earn $20 an hour plus benefits, including retirement plan matching. 

Pay Transparency: In 2019, Seattle’s Molly Moon began sharing salary information with employees to increase gender equity. Whole Foods was an even earlier adopter of this practice. These businesses remain exceptional—only 17 percent of for-profit companies make salary information publicly available. Importantly, conducting pay equity audits and adopting salary transparency policies exposes and consequently decreases racial and gendered salary disparities. According to a 2021 survey by the Society of Human Resource Management, 83 percent of firms that conduct pay equity reviews subsequently adjusted employees’ pay. 

Autonomy and Self-Managed Teams: Having control over one’s work is fundamental to motivation, job performance, and satisfaction. Yet too often, authoritarian management prescribes not only what a worker should do, but how. In part, this is due to dominant mental models of management rooted in 20^th century scientific management principles. Today, however, many organizations are having success with practices like self-managed work teams.

For example, Morning Star Farms’ work teams manage themselves, a practice facilitated by two workplace principles. First, physical or psychological coercion, such as command-and-control leadership, are not allowed, reducing power differentials that limit compensation and career opportunities. Second, Morning Start Farms prioritizes honoring the commitments employees make to each other, themselves, and external stakeholders. These accountability agreements reduce the need for supervision and monitoring. They also lower operational costs by reducing bureaucracy (e.g., less need for supervisors and middle managers).

Self-management aligns with the Jemez principles for democratic organizing. These principles resemble Walker’s management practices and Follett’s tenets of inclusion, bottom-up organizing, solidarity, mutuality, and a respectful, relational orientation. The Sierra Club adopted these principles in 2014 in order to become a more just and equitable organization.

Promoting Family Well-Being: Adopting family-friendly policies—such as parental leave, flexible work arrangements, breastfeeding support, childcare, and child benefits —is essential for achieving sex equity and creating humane working conditions. Such practices also mitigate compliance risks, improve worker retention and well-being, enhance performance, job satisfaction, and loyalty, reduce employee absenteeism, promote a positive organizational culture, enhance public image and reputation, and boost profitability. Best practices with case examples are provided on Family Friendly Workplaces’ website.

Reclaiming Care: An Action Agenda for the Nonprofit Sector

In addition to adopting practices like those above, three additional steps are needed—and these reforms extend beyond the workplace to society. The first, as Riane Eisler argues, is to move from norms of domination to partnership. This requires fostering democratic and economically equitable family social structures outside the workplace and equally valuing female and male workers in the workplace; cultivating high regard for values such as nonviolence; promoting mutualism, reciprocity, and trust; and developing narratives grounded in empathy and care.

A second step, as Eisler also emphasizes, is to understand and make visible the elements and resource flows of the caring economy. Beyond measures such as gross domestic product, it’s essential to recognize and account for intangible assets like relationships and knowledge, as well as life-sustaining sectors such as the natural economy, household economy, and civil society/community economy.

A third step is to promote the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Drafted by representatives from around the world and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris in 1948, the declaration includes amongst its list of human rights freedom from discrimination, slavery, and torture; access to justice and equality before the law; and the right to work, civic engagement, privacy, and freedom of expression. In many areas, the US falls short of protecting the human rights outlined in the UDHR. Opportunities for improvement, notes the American Civil Liberties Union, include ensuring socioeconomic rights (e.g., freedom from want, access to basic healthcare, and greater income equality), eliminating corporal punishment in schools, reducing incarceration rates (especially for youth), protecting women’s rights, and protecting the voting rights of minority communities.

By engaging in these systemic, macro interventions in tandem with humanistic management practices in our organizations, the nonprofit sector can reclaim a leadership role in promoting human dignity and well-being. Just as nonprofits prioritize care for the people they serve, they must reorient their management practices to integrate caring into their own organizations.

References

Fayol, H. (1917). General and Industrial Management. Dunod et E. Pinat.

Follett, M. P. (1918). The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government. New York: Longman, Green & Co.

Gastil, J. (1994). “A Meta-Analytic Review of the Productivity and Satisfaction of Democratic and Autocratic Leadership,” Small Group Research, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 384–410.

Harms, P.D, Wood, D., Landay, Karen, Lester, Paul B, & Vogelgesang Lester, Gretchen. (2018). “Autocratic Leaders and Authoritarian Followers Revisited: A Review and Agenda for the Future,” The Leadership Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 105–122.

Li, Y & Sun, J. (2015). “Traditional Chinese Leadership and Employee Voice Behavior: A Cross-Level Examination, “The Leadership Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, 172-189.

Pirson, M. (2017). Humanistic Management: Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, D. (2020). Worth it: How a Million-Dollar Pay Cut and a $70,000 Minimum Wage Revealed a Better Way of Doing Business. Seattle: Gravity Payments Inc.

Taylor, F. (1911/1967). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: W W Norton, 1967.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

When I founded Pangea Legal Services in late 2012, I set out to model it after the Buenos Aires factory cooperatives I had witnessed while studying abroad in Argentina. In these coops, self-management, mutuality, respect, and dignity were the norm. In 2017, I finally proposed removing my executive director (ED) title. A transformative power shift followed. But my vision of shared power and ownership was not easily won. It ran counter to the conventional wisdom that only strict organizational hierarchies confer visibility, trust, and legitimacy. As a leader of color, I also had to unlearn a tendency to equate professional titles with respect and a sense of self-worth.

When I proposed my title change, I felt both nervous and excited. My colleagues voiced their opinions and questions. Should we rotate the person in the ED role regularly? Should we get rid of the title altogether? I thought that having no ED would further our collective governance goals and showcase to the world the transformative work we were doing internally. Of eight staff, two colleagues and I voiced our desire to remove the ED title.

One of our board members said, “I’m holding on to the table because I’m about to fall out of my chair.” Most of our co-workers believed it was important to keep the title because we were a new organization and needed to build credibility with funders and partners; funders tend to build relationships and trust with EDs, and they had just started to do so with me. My colleagues thought my title would safeguard these critical functions. In the end, we decided to keep the title for the time being—and to my surprise, even though I had made the proposal, part of me felt relief. I wouldn’t have to explain to my Iranian family why I wasn’t the big-shot ray-ees (boss) anymore.

That is when I realized that I had not reconciled my ego with my values and the values I wanted Pangea to uphold. I was raised by a working-class, immigrant, single mother who modeled how to work hard and climb the hierarchical ladder of success. This hierarchical conditioning is especially prevalent among immigrants and BIPOC leaders like me, in part due to the pressures imposed on us by colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. We often feel the need to overcompensate for the negative views people have of us, working extra hard to integrate into society in a positive light. This kind of labor is not required of people with race and class privilege. I had been conditioned all my life to chase the positive feedback loop of visibility and status. Attaching some of my professional self-worth to my title was second nature.

But this is not who I wanted to be.

I thought back to the workers at a garment cooperative I visited in Buenos Aires in 2004. One worker, Alberto, gave me a factory tour and invited me to meetings. I remember a group of workers in jeans and comfortable clothes sitting in a circle in the middle of a huge hall next to factory machines. Their conversation and treatment of each other were humane and dignified. Over delicious alfajores at a cafe, Alberto described how his coworkers made decisions by consensus and rotated leadership roles. They placed no importance on titles, personal gain, and status. Rather, they focused on people’s needs and their collective wellbeing. Those are my values.

This form of leadership, known as democratic or participatory governance, is proven to work, be more resilient to economic downturns, and be more efficient than top-down corporate structures. I wanted to emulate such leadership at Pangea. I did not want to emulate corporate structures, where too often inequity, secrecy, and worker exclusion from important decisions are the norm.

Although we chose to keep the ED title, we explored other ways of implementing a shared leadership structure. We extended the title to a colleague, Bianca, who was already doing a lot of ED work. We researched other democratically governed nonprofits and political organizations. Although we didn’t find any that had no executive director, we learned about various ways that organizations distributed authority. Our key role models were AORTA, Sustainable Economies Law Center, and Fortify Community Health. Our work was also informed by Frederic Laloux’s book, Reinventing Organizations, which deconstructs the myth that collectively managed organizations have no structure, organization, or leadership.

A year later, in 2018, we instituted a “hub” model of organizational management, where staff self-organized to co-lead internal administration and development committees, including finances, communications, human resources, governance, and operations hubs. Our hub model helped the organization become more high-functioning, well structured, and leaderful. The financial and operational outcomes of this transition strengthened our commitment to building a high-performing, values-based workplace.

Two years later, we voted to remove the executive titles altogether. Leading up to the vote, we had multiple conversations that underscored our readiness to rightsize our ED titles with our actual authorities and processes. When I returned from parental leave in 2019, our governance hub, comprised of two white male colleagues and myself, welcomed me with an invitation to remove my ED title. My first reaction was, “WTF?!” Hello, feminist-POC-mother pride coupled with insecurities of losing organizational worth and value after being on 4.5 months of leave! Despite my push for this very transition, I felt the sting of being devalued.

I had poured all my heart and energy into building up the organization. For years, I researched, read, strategized, and talked about our organization with everyone I knew. I gained valuable skills and tools in a short amount of time. I had built power and authority. But I reminded myself that I had started this conversation and was driven by values of shared or rotational leadership. By this point, Bianca and I no longer had any executive power or final say over matters unless such say was delegated to us by the hubs. Our ED titles had become symbolic. My role and work would continue as before.

It took me working with a trusted therapist to understand my feelings and not feel ashamed of them. With help, I confronted my relationships with success, achievement, performance, authority, motherhood, and self-worth within the context of US culture and the counterculture I was cultivating in my organization. As I moved through my ego, what remained was a strong feeling of pride and accomplishment in my organization, my co-workers, and myself for pushing ourselves to the next level of democratic governance.

Even at this next level, however, we needed someone to keep a bird’s eye view of the organization. A significant amount of unnamed labor that Bianca and I did was not delegated to any of our hubs. This included proactively addressing staff needs, identifying gaps, acting on them, researching and presenting proposals to better the organization, fundraising (advocating in white spaces), and a great deal of other relational work. Ours was a clear example of the invisibilized yet crucial labor that is disproportionately carried out by women and gender non-conforming people of color to help organizations run well. Bianca and I continued to do some of this labor outside of the hubs before a full-time employee was hired to take on this work in May 2022. That invisible labor was essential in helping Pangea transition to a decentralized structure, and it will be key to maintaining it.

Pangea formally became a nonprofit with no ED in March 2020, and all staff (14 of us) took on the title of co-director. Although our roles, duties, and distributed leadership structure remained the same, staff ownership and accountability to the organization was elevated. For example, one employee who had never been involved in fundraising was empowered to secure a sizable grant for Pangea, at the time equivalent of one year’s salary. Distributing authority and living by our values has gone hand in hand with reaping economic benefits. Pangea’s financial standing and reserves are well over the industry standard for nonprofits.

Organizations don’t have to get rid of their ED titles to be inclusive and leaderful. But we should question and push back against traditional power structures and valuations of human time, labor, professional experience, and education if we are to live in a freer, more inclusive, mutually respectful, and equitable world. As adrienne maree brown says, “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” At the small scale, nonprofits can invest in creating a culture of respect, equity, and inclusion, modeling the kind of world we want to see in our larger communities and governments.

In the next 10 years, I envision inclusive and participatory governance practices becoming the norm in the nonprofit industry, and hopefully beyond.

Here are 11 tips for any ED or leadership team curious about pursuing a similar journey:

1. Honor your personal feelings and internal conflicts. Follow kiran nigam’s advice to “examine your personal relationships to structures of authority.” My feelings stemmed from my ego. Taking time to process this helped.
2. Try transferring a few major organizational responsibilities to other staff. Give them final decision-making authority (over your own vote) and let the rest of the staff know about it. Also, give them structures and resources to support their leadership.
3. Research some of the different ways shared leadership and horizontal governance can work in practice. Talk with staff at organizations like Pangea Legal Services, Community Resource Initiative, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance: AORTA, RVC Seattle, and Fortify Community Health.
4. Read this NPQ article and consider talking with the leaders referenced in it about how they share their leadership and titles.
5. Facilitate a conversation about power in your organization. Involve everyone who is directly impacted by your governance structure, including staff (at all levels) and the board. If your organization is larger than 12 people, consider conversations in smaller breakout groups.
6. Write collective governance and shared leadership in as goals for your organization’s strategic plan.
7. Don’t try to do it all overnight. Give everyone involved time to process and talk amongst each other and with others outside of the organization.
8. Try a step-by-step approach. For example, try removing the word “chief” if you have C-suite titles. Try out the executive director title instead. Or try out a shift from one executive director to a team of two or more ED’s.
9. Consider a six-month pilot project rather than a permanent change.
10. Recruit two or more people with democratic governance experience to your board.
11. Hire an experienced coach or facilitator to guide your journey. There are many excellent coaches within the Nonprofit Democracy Network.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Every day it seems, local and state officials hold a press conference to announce that a company is bringing a project to their community. Those ceremonies tout the alleged benefits of the company’s arrival: the number of jobs that will be created and the amount of money a company will invest. But what is too often missing from those announcements are the costs: how much money will the public have to pay the company in return?

Without that vital piece of information, the rest of the discussion is just noise, for there is no way of knowing whether the per-job cost is a good investment for the community—or a lousy one.

States and localities across the country give companies corporate tax breaks, or “incentives” as corporations and some elected officials like to call them. These tax breaks allow companies to pay little to nothing in state income, property, or sales taxes. States also woo companies using non-tax subsidies, like cash grants, workforce training, or free land, roads, and sewer lines.

In short, corporations are exempted from paying for all the things that communities value: clean water, paved roads, well-maintained parks, public safety, help for people in medical distress.

Such subsidies are significant. It is estimated that annually, state and local governments spend more than $95 billion on such deals. Amazon, with profits soaring by 220 percent in the first year of the pandemic, has received at least $4.2 billion in public money from states and localities across the country. The company received $700 million in subsidies in 2021 alone.

Recently, my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that monitors corporate subsidy payments, released a study, Financial Exposure: Rating the States on Economic Development Transparency, evaluating the state of the field’s disclosure. The report represents our sixth publication on this topic, but our first since 2014.

Have things gotten better or worse? It depends where you live. Eight years ago, we found that 55 percent of examined subsidy programs provided at least company names; now, this number stands at 62 percent—a modest improvement. But that still means that in one third of state programs, public monies are being given away with no public disclosure at all, not even the name of the company receiving the payments. Lack of transparency is a problem as these tax subsidies often come directly out of city, state, and even school district budgets.

The ubiquity of corporate tax subsidies puts a lie to the notion that a “free market” exists in the United States. In fact, it pays to be connected. It also pays to keep those connections secret—the less the public knows, the easier it is for politicians and government officials to funnel resources to favored corporations, and for corporations to extract cash from communities.

If there is a silver lining to this, it is that communities are increasingly fighting such subsidies, resulting in policies that require online disclosure of payments made to individual companies. Sometimes elected officials seek more information as they too can be left out of knowing which corporations are receiving public money. In Nevada, a combination of those factors pushed the state from having one of the nation’s worst disclosure ratings in 2014 to the best just eight years later.

Tesla Lights Up Nevada

Most people are familiar with Tesla, the company owned by centibillionaire Elon Musk. Fewer are aware how aggressive Tesla has been in seeking out public subsidies. According to Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker database, Tesla ranks number 17 nationally in corporate subsidy recipients, having received an estimated $2.5 billion in tax breaks and other subsidies. Again, this is probably an incomplete figure.

Tesla’s largest known deal, for $1.3 billion, came from the State of Nevada in 2014.

At the time, Nevada had few disclosure rules. A 1999 law required Nevada’s economic development office to submit biannual reports to legislators on subsidized companies, but those reports were not publicly available.

The good news is that now anyone can see Tesla’s and other companies’ job creation records and subsidy payments online.

Here’s what happened. In 2014, while shopping for subsidies to build a massive electric vehicle battery plant—a so-called “giga-factory”—Telsa quietly contacted several Western states. Later, the company publicly announced that it would limit its site search to four states: Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. It reportedly inspired Amazon’s far more notorious auction for “HQ 2” three years later.

Negotiations between Tesla and officials of the four states were done in secret. Residents had no insights into what the negotiations entailed or how much public money was being offered. A coalition of organizations from the competing states voiced their concerns and opposition to the process, calling for cooperation rather than competition. Eventually Nevada “won” the contest, offering $1.3 billion in subsidies. An editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal remarked that the deal “had all the transparency of a brick wall.” Nevada groups on the Right and Left publicly opposed the deal, calling for greater openness.

In response to public outrage over the price tag, some concessions were made, leading to modest accountability and transparency provisions. New legislation in Nevada insisted that half of the 6,500 jobs Telsa promised go to Nevada residents. The state’s economic development office was charged with auditing job creation outcomes quarterly and publicly reporting the findings. The bill also had “claw back” provisions, requiring Tesla to reimburse the state if it fell short on its promise.

Similar transparency provisions are now standard in many Nevada subsidy programs. In 2015, a change to legislation required the state development agency to produce annual reports on grants and transferable tax credits. Those reports, now easily found on the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) website, show which companies benefit from subsidies, by how much, how many jobs they create, and how much those jobs pay. Reports on tax abatements (a different kind of subsidy), previously buried on an obscure legislative webpage, are also now easily accessible on the GOED website.

Nevada residents finally have access to information on which companies benefit from public subsidies and what the public is getting in return.

Transparency Loopholes

Too many states, however, still hide or delay information or disclose it incompletely. Even Nevada’s system remains less than ideal. As the Nevada Current recently reported, data on corporate deals in the state “can still be murky.” Reporter April Corbin Girnus noted that state laws allow companies to request that some data, such as job creation benchmarks, be designated “proprietary information” and thus removed from transparency documents.

There was also a catch in Tesla’s transparency requirements. Almost $200 million of the credits the company received were transferable, meaning Tesla could sell those credits to another company for straight-up cash. The deal did not include any requirements to disclose which companies were buying credits, but journalists revealed that casinos such as MGM Grand were the buyers and users of the tax breaks. In practice, a deal that was supposed to create well-paying manufacturing jobs become a way for casinos to avoid paying state gambling taxes.

Other states have transparency loopholes too. For example, in summer 2021, Disney announced that it would relocate office jobs from California to the Orlando area, for which Florida awarded the company $570 million in tax credits. (This, of course, was before Governor Ron DeSantis (R) decided to retaliate against Disney’s criticism of his bill limiting LGBTQ+ rights earlier this year.) The subsidy deal was approved back in February 2020, but thanks to a Florida law that allows companies to request confidentiality on such awards for at least 180 days after a subsidy deal is finalized,

Florida residents first learned of Disney’s subsidies more than a year later.

Other examples include: Illinois makes film production tax credit data available only through freedom of information act (FOIA) requests; Georgia posts limited information on companies approved for two grant programs, but after 30 days, those announcements are removed from public view.

Disclosure Bright Spots

While loopholes abound, there is some good news. For example, the State of Kansas historically has been one of the worst offenders. That changed in 2019 (the same year Kansas and Missouri agreed to end interstate poaching of each other’s companies through bidding wars) when Kansas legislators passed a new subsidy transparency law, which requires the Kansas Department of Commerce to disclose which companies receive state subsidies, the size of the subsidies, the companies’ location, and how many jobs the companies create.

On signing the bill, Governor Laura Kelly (D) said that “Kansans deserve to know what’s happening in our state agencies and how their tax dollars are being spent.” The state’s commerce department proudly highlights a transparency database on its website. The state’s public portal is still new and does not cover deals that were signed before the bill was passed, but going forward, Kansas residents can now see which corporations are getting how much subsidy and where their tax dollars are going.

Transparency As a Step Toward Accountability

Often, promises of jobs are not realized. In Tesla’s case, the promised jobs were created, but the amount of subsidy exceeded $200,000 per job created! Did Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, need public money to build his Storey County factory east of Reno?

This raises another key point—transparency is only the first step to accountability. It does not equal accountability by itself. Substance matters too. This means structuring subsidy deals to ensure community benefits outweigh costs.

What would an accountable deal look like?

Fundamentally, if the public is going to subsidize corporations, then the jobs these expenditures subsidize should raise community living standards. This means ensuring that residents end up with a significant share of the jobs generated. State and local officials must have enforceable means to recoup money if companies do not perform as promised. Better yet, the money should only be distributed after a company hits its benchmarks, not before.

Also, core services, especially schools, should be protected. This is one place where Nevada failed: Between 2017 and 2021, the local Nevada school district lost $90 million to Tesla’s tax abatements (the county government lost an additional $77 million). Ironically, Tesla gets props in the press for donating $37.5 million, but of course the $37.5 million donated is less than the $90 million budgetary hole the subsidy created.

We can only know if accountability measures are working when subsidy deals are fully disclosed—when they provide names of recipient companies and their corporate owners, how many jobs are being promised and at what wage level, and how much the company is promising to invest in local communities. If a company fails to meet the stated benchmarks, then the state (or locality) must have recourse to reclaim the subsidy dollars.

Rules for the Corporate Subsidy Road

The Tesla deal, like countless other deals, was done behind closed doors, with no public input. The new transparency law in Kansas did not prevent state lawmakers from recently passing a bill that approves turning over $1 billion of public money to an unnamed company. Corporate subsidies are still given out like cotton candy at a county fair—that needs to change.

How? Here are a few key steps:

• Deals should only be approved during public meetings and interested residents should be notified about those meetings via email or text message.
• All subsidy applications and supporting documents such as cost-benefit and economic impact analysis (which calculate at what price point a deal makes sense, or how many years it will take for a state or locality to recover invested public money), should be available for public inspection at least 60 days before a deal is voted on.
• States should prohibit the use of non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, which prevent public officials from disclosing information during the subsidy approval period.

A few states practice limited pre-approval transparency: Nevada posts online company subsidy applications for some tax-break programs ahead of approval. Texas does the same for its controversial property tax abatement program, Chapter 313. Those are exceptions, however, rather than the rule, and even they don’t go nearly far enough.

There is no perfect state subsidy disclosure regime yet, but some states are getting much better. Nevada shows that a state can move from disclosing nothing on company subsidies to providing residents with better, even if imperfect, information on which companies are benefiting from public money. Still, a lot of work remains.

One thing is clear: policy change is possible, but only when the public organizes and demands it.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

We all want power. The power to attract what we want, such as love. The power to avoid what we don’t want, like harm. The power to create what we want to see in the world, for example beauty. But what is power and how do we get it?

Power is enacted—it is brought to life by our actions. Power is not about the rule of law, institutions, society, or the state. These are simply the dead forms, or artifacts, of past power-laden interactions. And power is never absolute; where there is power, there is resistance.

In the research I did for my book, The Power Manual,¹ I met Max.

Max was one of the first Black students admitted into elite private schools on the east coast of the United States. While his parents sent him to these schools to receive a quality education, to make it through Max also learned to navigate difficult, social dynamics. He recalls that when he was in eighth grade, there was a white student who was always making fun of him. As one of the few Black students, Max had been picked on a lot. “A Black kid is someone who is clearly different on the outside,” Max told me. Eventually, Max decided he wasn’t going to give this student any more attention. This annoyed the student, who tried different ways to regain the upper hand. He eventually began to be nice to Max, in hopes of getting his attention again, to no avail. Their peers noticed this shift in attention—in power—and the white student lost their esteem. Max was learning how to perceive and shift power dynamics.

There are two types of power—supremacist power and liberatory power.²

Supremacist power is the ability to dominate, or control, people and things. It is a crude form of power, related to scarcity consciousness, or the belief that the world holds limited supplies of the things we want—such as love, power, and recognition.

Liberatory power is the ability to create what we want. It is real power, related to abundance consciousness, the creative force of life. Liberatory power is about expanding our set of choices and fine-tuning our consciousness so that we can recognize decision points and choose intentionally.

A mother shared this personal story with me.

As a parent, I have plenty of opportunity to explore the differences between supremacist power and liberatory power. For example, I have a teenage son, and a few years ago he became interested in making music and asked for things, like a special microphone, for Christmas and such. And in short time he had a nascent home studio. I didn’t pay much attention to the music he was making. After all, we sit down to dinner every day and have in-depth conversations about our experiences in the world, with lots of power analysis and reflection. We’re a thoughtful, connected family, everything should be ok.

One day, my daughter—who was home from college at the time and whose room is next to my son’s—says to me, with a concerned look, “Mom, have you heard the songs he’s been making?” I admitted I hadn’t. (He was also apparently turning them off every time he heard me coming up the stairs to the floor his room is on.) My daughter responds,‘“I think you should.”

A few days later, I was cleaning up there and, as I worked around his desk and computer, I decided to listen. I was horrified. It was a replica of the worst misogynistic rap. I flipped. I took his equipment. I yelled at him. And I punished him. All things I don’t believe in and try not to do. But I was shocked that my son would write songs like this. After I calmed down—a few weeks later—I talked to him. I learned what it’s like for him to grow up in a feminist household, and how sometimes the women appear to be the ones in power because, while there is language around patriarchy as a problematic, there isn’t comparable language for matriarchy. The message then is—men are bad, women are good. All of which leaves him feeling disadvantaged and wondering how to construct a powerful identity as a boy. He didn’t think it was fair.

Take a minute and think about a moment in which you enacted supremacist power.

Now think of a moment in which you enacted liberatory power.

Was it easier to think of one or another? It can be easier to think of examples of supremacist power. Many of us do not even know that there is such a thing as liberatory power because supremacist power has become synonymous with power—to the extent that many people, especially social change practitioners, have a conflicted relationship with power.

There are at least three levels at which we enact power—the personal, the social, and the systemic.

At the personal level, power is developmental. Our personal story about power is learned in childhood, through our interactions with our caretakers, during which we learn that we either get what we want, or not. There are two goals we seek in these interactions, which have to be balanced and are often in conflict: control over our reality and affectionate connection with others. We leave childhood with a power identity developed from the abilities we have formed through our experiences balancing control and connection.

Erik Erikson, Stages of Development³

At the personal level, power shows up as identity. There are two essential power identities—powerless and powerful. We are powerless when we internalize the idea of power as dominance and engage in practices of domination—seeking to control and subordinate others. We are powerful when we refuse domination—to dominate or be dominated—and focus our attention on creating what we want.

There are at least two aspects about my upbringing that shaped my power identity. One is that I come from a family of artists, the Ayalas, who are keepers of Black Puerto Rican culture on the island—and they spoke about being Black as a wonderful thing. My maternal grandfather created the vejigante mask, which is one of the two national masks of Puerto Rico, and thus was considered a national artist. Famous salsa singers came to visit my mother’s cousin Samuel Lind, a sculptor and painter and an archivist of Black Puerto Rican history and lore. It wasn’t until I was in high school—when my friends started sharing stories of their parents not wanting them to date people of color, even when they themselves were people of color—that I realized how unusual it probably was to grow up amidst the guarding and celebration of Blackness. As a result, I didn’t internalize anti-Blackness. I was proud of who I was. It never crossed my mind to feel otherwise.

Another aspect that shaped my power identity is that I did well in school and scored high on IQ tests, which I didn’t know I was taking. I found out when my fourth grade teacher called my mother in and explained this to her, urging her to make sure I got a good education because I could “be anything I wanted to be.” This impacted how my family treated me. They expected me to be “successful.” I grew up with a strong sense that I can get what I want in the world, in spite of any challenges.

What is your power identity?

How did you develop it?

At the interpersonal level, power shows up in interactions. Power is relational.⁴ The liberatory goal is effective interactions. These are interactions that disrupt dominating behavior, or the taking of more than one’s share, and generate mutuality, changing as a result of our interactions with others. We can build our capacity for effective interactions, which we practice in everyday interactions, either contributing to unequal power dynamics or interrupting them.

There are patterns of domination that help us understand how supremacist power shows up.⁵ They are behaviors to avoid when our goal is effective interaction. Everyone has work to do when it comes to shifting from relationships of inequality to effective interactions. In an interaction, the work of the dominant—those who have an inordinate capacity to shape the choices of others—is to make room for the other and not invite them to play a powerless identity. The main liberatory task is to disrupt these patterns, whether they arise in ourselves or the other.

For the subordinate, the work is to resist any powerless identity on offer, look for where they do have power, and construct their identity as powerful by choosing a direction that expands choice. As there are patterns of domination, there are also patterns of resistance.⁶

What is the work for you in enacting effective interactions?

At the systemic level, power shows up as positionality, how we are placed vis-vis others. We also tend to have a preference, or a habit, for how we position ourselves in our interactions with others. There are at least four positionality patterns: privilege, subordination, marginality, and engagement.

Privilege is, simply put, the possession of special rights. It is an advantageous position in relation to valued resources. It reflects an imbalance of rights and responsibilities. This position is valued in Western societies.

Subordination is being the object of obligations. It is being constrained at every turn.

It is having one’s boundaries and meaning making defined by others. This position is not valued in Western societies.

Marginality is separation from others. Marginalized people do not impose their will on and avoid the will of others, relatively speaking. When marginality is forced, as with minoritarian groups, the position is not valued. When it is chosen, as with the rebel, it is valued.

Finally, engagement is being fully engaged in interactions. It is the balancing of rights and responsibilities, of self and others. To be engaged is to participate in challenges that we find worthy. This position is the most effective for human relationships. It promotes joy, defined as expanding the self through meeting others.

How are you positioned in society?
What position(s) do you enact in society?
What positions do you offer others?

In any situation, we have at least three levels from which to engage power. They all require expanding our set of choices. At the personal level, we identify where our power lies and how to expand it—to use it for the good of all. At the interpersonal level, we expand our repertoire of effective interactions. At the systemic level, we choose how we want to position ourselves in a system and explore ways of doing so; and we are careful about how we position others.

Notes

1. Suarez, Cyndi. The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics. Canada: New Society Publishers, 2018.

2. hooks, bell. “Changing Perspectives on Power,” Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End Press Classics, 2000 (1984).

3. Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1950.

4. Foucault, Michel. “Method,” History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York, NY: Random House, 1978. Page numbers?

5. Based on the work Roland Barthes, as presented in Chela Sandoval’s “The Rhetoric of Supremacism as Revealed by the Ethical Technology: Democratics,” in Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2000. Page numbers?

6. Based on the work of Frantz Fanon, as presented in Sandoval, Ibid.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.