Resource Generation: A Case Study in Collaborative Governance

By Yahya Alazrak, Executive Director, Resource Generation

The story I want to tell is both personal and organizational. It’s the story of my journey from organizer to executive director at Resource Generation. And it’s the story of how Resource Generation moved from a traditional organizational structure into one of decentralized leadership and workplace democracy.

In the Beginning as National Organizer

It’s impossible to begin this story without sharing a little bit about who I am and the history of Resource Generation.

I’m nonbinary (raised to be a man), mixed race (white and Arabized North African), and mixed class. One side of my family is owning class. They live in Morocco, where I was born, and they own and operate plastics and electric vehicle factories there. I was predominantly raised by my other parent in the US in a home that fluctuated between poverty and lower middle class. My worldview and my personality have been shaped by my experience of growing up going back and forth between scarcity and over-indulgence. I enter movements from many places: as the child of a trans and Muslim activist and leader; the experience of racialization and anti-war movement work post-9/11; the cooperative and solidarity economy work I first participated in at Guilford College; Occupy Wall Street; and the 2014 uprisings for Black lives.

Resource Generation (RG) is a twenty-five year old national membership organization made up of a multi-racial base of young people with access to wealth and class privilege organizing towards the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. We have over 1,000 dues-paying members in nineteen chapters across the US.

For most of RG’s history, we had a small staff that was mostly white and wealthy. But over the last eight years, we’ve grown to twenty-three staff, and for the last many years, our staff has been predominantly from poor, working, and middle class backgrounds and predominantly BIPOC (i.e., Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color). (I state it this way intentionally because we have a number of white staff from poor, working, and middle class backgrounds and a number of BIPOC staff from wealthy backgrounds.)

In 2015, when I was twenty-four years old, I started working at RG as a national organizer and the coordinator of its people of color programs. I was excited to be at an organization where I could learn to better understand how to leverage my own class privilege and access to power alongside other young people with access to wealth, building a movement of class traitorship. It was my first professional-feeling job and my first time working at a well-resourced organization.

I came to RG believing in the potential of horizontal structures and collectives and deeply critical of hierarchy (how RG operated at the time). I had seen the potential of horizontal structures and collective work at my Quaker college and in the student-run coop I belonged to there, both of which operated on consensus. And I had witnessed the downfalls of hierarchy nearly everywhere else.

Grounded in Values-Aligned Practices

As I acclimated to RG, I got to know some of the ways in which the organization was practicing its values. These practices were internal manifestations of what RG was—and is—trying to do in the world:

RG’s mission is to end the current class system. We believe that this necessitates working in relationship across lines of difference (race, class, gender, ability). As an organization, we believe it’s important to be practicing that same relational and direct way of interacting with each other internally. This took intentional work over many years because it required RG to challenge the white, upper class, conflict avoidant way of being that was in the DNA of the organization and is part of the default DNA of most non-profits/professionalized social justice spaces. When there was conflict or trust was broken between management and staff, RG attempted repair through collective processes. RG was one of the first places I saw circle process and transformative justice principles being used in a way that truly addressed conflict.

Considering the nature of RG’s work with a largely white and wealthy membership and a staff that is fairly diverse across race and class, RG staff have long had a practice of caucusing along lines of identity. These identity caucuses provide outlets for staff to talk about their experiences, and have historically been spaces where proposals have been generated—and successfully moved forward—for structural changes within the organization to make it a more just, equitable, and sustainable workplace for everyone.

Despite believing that there was no such a thing as a “good boss,” over time, RG changed my opinion about what was possible for supervisors and bosses. I was lucky to have had amazing and supportive supervisors who were supported by RG to show up for their supervisees in an accountable and meaningful way. They challenged me, helped me grow as a person, held me accountable when I needed it, and acted as allies and advocates for me within the larger organizational structure.

As a young people’s organization (the last several EDs have been under 35) with an audacious mission, RG has been able to maintain an openness to doing things differently and an orientation towards “how can we be better.” There aren’t a lot of assumptions about the ways that things need to be done, and since we’ve been a predominantly member-funded organization for the past decade, our financial freedom has allowed us a flexibility and ability to experiment that we wouldn’t have had if we were funded by restricted grants.

And yet, despite these values-aligned practices and ways of being and the systems and structures RG had in place, time and time again, the organization’s default use of a hierarchical structure caused intractable challenges and damaged our ability to successfully do our work.

Challenges with Organizational Decision-Making

In my role as organizer, I had low structural power and a high degree of autonomy over my own work and work plan. But when it came to organizational decisions, I never knew what to expect. Decision-making processes were confusing and inconsistent: sometimes one person with power made a unilateral decision, sometimes a small group made a decision, sometimes the full staff made a decision, and sometimes the full staff was included in the discussion about a decision but didn’t participate in the decision-making itself. We often found ourselves in a cycle: a top-down decision would be made without consultation that had a significant impact on the day-to-day work of organizers, we would spend multiple meetings building buy-in after the decision was made, and the decision would ultimately be adjusted to make it work for those carrying it out or impacted by it. It was incredibly inefficient and negatively impacted the work.

This lack of clarity about who held the responsibility for particular decisions also made it difficult to know how to put proposals forward for doing things differently. It advantaged management and those of us who had strong relationships with management while making it feel riskier for non-managers who were poor, working, and middle class to make proposals. There were some staff, myself included, who took it upon ourselves to use our soft power, social capital, relationships, and class privilege to advocate for the things that others on staff were wanting (for example, moving from 80% to 100% employer health insurance coverage, clarifying our home office budget, advocating for a 32-hour work week).

Of course, because RG is an organization that has the muscles for addressing conflict, there were conversations about these issues and efforts to address them as they arose. Following one staff retreat, a group of staff formed a committee to research alternative decision-making models RG could use. Unfortunately, that committee was overwhelmed by the scope of the project and didn’t make much progress. Around this time, RG also tried adopting some practices that challenged the organization’s norms, such as using a participatory budgeting process to compile the organization’s annual budget, and we had some success democratizing that work. Meanwhile, as an organizer I was puzzling through how to create structures to scale RG’s chapters, especially the NY chapter, which was approaching 100 members at the time. I was drawing interconnected circles in my notebook, thinking about how mycelium and fungal networks communicate, and scheming about how to build resilient and nimble organizations that could adapt to changing circumstances. In retrospect, it’s clear that these internal struggles pointed to RG’s need to identify ways to practice sharing power.

The Shift to Shared Power: Sociocracy and Collab

Shared power, done well, invites leadership from every member of a team. To maximize the benefits of collaboration we need clear roles and clear containers, which means each person has areas of work they lead with empowered autonomy. Beyond that, we need clarity about when a group is needed to make a decision and which group at what time (e.g., small team, full team, executive team, board, etc.).

In the summer of 2019, I went on sabbatical (an amazing practice RG has to support sustainability and longevity of staff in what could otherwise be a high-turnover young people’s organization). I came back in September ready to start transitioning from my role as organizer to campaign director and was delighted to learn of two exciting developments on the shared power front. First, after beginning to experiment with a dynamic governance framework called sociocracy, the New York chapter had decided to implement it as its overall chapter structure. (If you’re curious about Town and Country’s take on how that went, check out this article.) Second, senior staff leadership were embarking on training in Collab.

Collab is an organizational communication and governance model developed by Round Sky Solutions that builds heavily on sociocracy by utilizing a sociocratic structure and decision-making process. Collab also provides frameworks, including business plan review, interpersonal tension clearing, and ongoing personal development. While I am primarily focusing on the decision-making aspects of Collab in this article, Collab additionally provides a robust framework to standardize and improve clarity about roles and accountabilities, reporting and communication, meeting structure, and transparency and accountability.

In December of that same year, leadership made the (top-down) decision that RG would experiment with Collab for six months starting in early 2020. We spent a good portion of our week-long February 2020 staff retreat learning Collab and setting up our new scopes and our individual roles and accountabilities within the new structure. In March 2020 we began our six-month-long training and experimentation process led by staff from Round Sky Solutions. During that period we spent one to two of our weekly staff meetings per month learning about a different part of Collab while behind the scenes Round Sky Solutions staff supported scope leads in establishing the new rhythms and processes for their teams.

Taking on a new organizational structure wasn’t the only massive change happening in March 2020. Everything around us was in an overwhelming state of flux. While I wouldn’t recommend undergoing a major organizational change at the beginning of a global pandemic, I think that coincidental timing provided a natural opening to completely reevaluate “business as usual.”

On top of all of this, our executive director had announced in January 2020 that they would be transitioning off staff in summer 2021. I began to consider whether I wanted to apply for the role and began talking to my closest coworkers and trusted folks in my life about the possibility.

Our six-month trial period ended with the conclusion that while there were still some issues to work out, the structure of Collab felt better than what we had been doing before. Collab was not just truer to RG’s values, it gave the organization a clear structure to work within and build on that centered shared power.

On Reflection as Executive Director

Cut to a year later: after an open search process, I was selected to be the next executive director of RG in small part due to my willingness and excitement to be an executive director within a shared power structure.

I was excited for a few reasons. First, as someone who will share my opinions with relative ease, I benefit greatly from being on teams where others also feel the psychological safety to share their ideas, challenge mine, and together align on what is most strategic for the whole. Second, I saw an opportunity to be part of demonstrating that it’s possible to be a high-impact organization while empowering and dignifying the people actually doing the work. And last, to be frank, the responsibilities of executive directors are nearly impossible to fulfill, and distributing leadership and decision-making relieves some (but definitely not all) of that burden.

Hierarchical Decision-Making

While we’ve implemented the Collab model for day-to-day operations, policy development, and strategy setting, we have maintained a hierarchy around performance management, firing decisions, and compensation. While the final assessment rests with the manager, there’s a lot of team-based input through 360 and peer evaluations. Hiring is done by committees selected by the teams of the roles that are being hired for.

My experience so far, two years into being executive director, has affirmed the organization’s choice to maintain hierarchy around performance management. While there are some staff at RG who would rather we make all decisions collectively, there are others who are glad to not share in the responsibilities of management and so be better able to focus on their roles.

Collaborative Decision-Making

One of the things I appreciate about structures like Collab is the nuance in decision-making processes. Since people are empowered to make decisions most relevant and closest to their scopes of work, there are many centers of power. This can include leadership decisions around the best course of action. A pre-Collab example of this is the top-down decision to try out Collab, which saved RG from continuing to have circular conversations about the ways to address the tensions we were experiencing. Conversely, if performance interventions were left up to the whole group, it could take months or more to reach alignment on the correct course of action.

There are also decisions that call for deeply collaborative processes. The crowning achievement of our move to Collab was our strategic framework design process which was a year-long, organization-wide process led by a committee of staff, board, and members in partnership with consultants from Dragonfly Partners. We revisited and updated the foundation of RG’s strategy. This resulted in an updated strategic framework affirming our mission and vision, updating our organizational values and organizing model, and establishing a new theory of change. This framework was approved through integrative consent—a process in which everyone has an opportunity to ask questions, put forward amendments, and state any valid objections—by RG’s board, staff, and national member council (a representative governance body made up of volunteer member leaders). Involving fifty people in approving such a foundational document where any one person could object and derail the entire process felt like a daunting proposition, and at the same time it was an important demonstration of our values and a trust-building practice across the various stakeholders within the organization. Collab equipped us with the tools and practices to accomplish such a large and important task smoothly and powerfully.

Explicitly Examining Power Differences

We’re now three years into adopting Collab. We still struggle sometimes. We can still get very stuck in continuously amending proposals, and we can be hesitant to push them to the objection and decision-making round of process. Like many organizations, we are constantly striving to improve our ability to communicate with each other directly and move through conflict productively. I’m grateful for our continued practices of caucusing and circle process, because Collab alone would not be able to meet our needs for explicitly examining differences in experiences along the lines of race and class on our team.

How to Start Your Own Journey to Shared Power

For those who are considering something like this, I would encourage you to start by introducing practices to build psychological safety on the team—spaces where people can share their hopes and desires for the organization and see them taken seriously and implemented by leadership (like RG did around caucuses). Then I’d suggest building on those discrete spaces by making certain projects or areas of work participatory and collaborative (like RG did around budgeting). See how those go and what you can learn from new ways of sharing power together. If all signs are pointing towards these shifts being positive for your organization, reach out to a consultancy that specializes in organizational structure and shared power to begin your own journey of organizational transformation.

Return to the main page to see more highlights from “Navigating Change: Toward Equitable, Democratic Organizations,” a series on bridging generations, expanding leadership, and envisioning the future of work by ten Content Fellows.

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