We’ve shared a bit about Change Elemental’s leadership journey and experiments over the years – from a single Director, to CoDirectors, to a multi-person Chrysalis, and then to the Leadership Hub and lily pads. Earlier this year, we celebrated our latest leadership transition: Delia Allen O’Brien, Natasha Winegar, and Natalie Bamdad are continuing to lead the organization as CoWeavers (our language for CoDirectors), and Elissa Sloan Perry has taken on a new role as Director, Prefiguring Futures. This transition marks a shift from a temporary, experimental Leadership Hub to a longer-term three-person CoWeaver leadership team, with Elissa leading our Prefiguring Futures Lab.
One Foot on Water and One on Land
Elissa, Delia, Natasha, and Natalie on the shore of Lake Michigan
Over two and half years ago, the four of us—Natasha, Delia, Natalie, and Elissa— met in Chicago for our first in-person retreat as leaders. We were six months deep into our four-person Leadership Hub, the latest evolution in our shared leadership experiments. Natalie had just returned from a sabbatical, and we were seeding a transition into a new leadership shape, what would eventually be a three-person Hub. Its contours were still undefined as we worked to create space for Delia, Natasha, and Natalie to lead the organization and figure out what was needed for Elissa to advance her desire to shift out of executive leadership and into a new role, advancing what would become the Prefiguring Futures Lab.
While the details are fuzzy, the feeling of that day stuck. After hours of bridging tensions between vision and values (risk, moving towards liberation, experimentation) and the day-to-day constraints of our 501c3 formation (resources, operations, governance), we walked to the beach and stood with one foot in water and one on land¹. Together, we were feeling into the push and pull of the possibility that comes from trying to live into our values and vision while we create the world we want. As we moved our executive leadership team from a Hub of four to a Hub of three, we continued to return to this embodied commitment to leading with our vision while taking into account what is.
Co-creating Power with Movement Elders
Typically, when an executive director is ready to move on to a different role, they leave the organization. The organization loses a valued elder or yelder (young elder), their institutional knowledge, and their gifts. In Elissa’s transition, the team sought to try something different, where Elissa could continue to bring her gifts and wisdom while new leaders could also continue to bring theirs in new and deeper ways. It is something that our colleague Mark Leach had already modeled several times over as he moved into an interim CoDirector role and then back into a staff role as Senior Advisor.
However, we didn’t have many models for what the relationship could look like in Elissa’s transition from visionary CoDirector to Director, Prefiguring Futures. We were committed to finding new ways to evolve our vision and programs in partnership with Elissa, honoring the visionary role she’d played in executive leadership over the last seven years while continuing to grow and weave this work with a different leadership configuration.
At its heart, this transition required (and requires) us to reckon with power and how it is held in the organization and by individuals. We each had (and have) different work with power: knowing when to wield it, share it, build it, and let it go. What’s been crucial is tending to power transparently, letting it grow and flow in ways that serve our vision, seeing it as an abundant resource, not a limited commodity. We are deepening our capacity to step into power with and power within by naming it and cultivating it in service of our transformation towards liberation.
Inspired by Nature’s Wisdom, CoWeavers and Director of Prefiguring Emerge from Underground
The three of us—Delia, Natasha, and Natalie—had not worked closely together before the Hub, and only Delia had previously held an executive leadership position. We needed to develop our relationships, trust, ways of working together, and each of our own leadership stances. For many of us, shifting power relationships would require flexing new muscles and working through new tensions. We were hesitant to take on our roles in the Hub, even temporarily, but holding this as an experiment gave us the opportunity to move forward in the face of uncertainty and possibility.
The advantage of experimentation is that it provides a lightweight structure for trying things out, breaking up significant consequential decisions into a series of iterative action learning cycles. Our Hub and Lily Pads experiment encouraged risk-taking, discerning our leadership needs and shape, and deepening the team’s capacity by sensing the whole of the organization.
After 18 months of the Hub experiment (much longer than its initial design), while we began Elissa’s final transitions out of executive leadership, we and the rest of the team were hungry for something more stable, efficient, and long-term. Together, the team took on the question: How might we meet the moment with the leadership needed now and in the future?
After much deliberation across the organization about different configurations, practices, and structures of leadership, and almost two years to the day after our retreat in Chicago, we sat in circle with our Governance Team at Earthseed Land Collective and later with staff in New Orleans, to celebrate our latest leadership transition: Delia, Natalie, and Natasha as CoWeavers continuing to hold the whole of the organization with Delia leading our financial strategies, Natalie leading our consulting practice, and Natasha leading our narrative strategies and team learning. We also celebrated Elissa as Director, Prefiguring Futures, growing Change Elemental’s lab practice through the Prefiguring Futures Lab, with Alison Lin as the Lab’s managing director. Aja Couchois Duncan, an organizational yelder, is co-lead in our deep equity, liberation, and sovereignty work and our philanthropic strategies work. Finally, we have evolved the lily pads to be smaller and more nimble teams. Now that we have more people with deeper capacity to hold the whole of the organization, we are discerning decision-making approaches with greater intention rather than defaulting to collective decision-making so that we can weave together with greater focus, agility, and flow.
With Governance Team members at Earthseed.
While at Earthseed, Trish asked, “What do we know about cicadas?”² Someone said: Most of their work happens underground. In reflection, someone wrote this on an orange post-it note: Taking a long time to emerge/flourish is natural and incredible.
The planning, deliberations, and dreaming—along with the conflict, tensions, and challenges of this transition—was rich, difficult underground work. We are carrying our most important learnings to the surface (and kicking up some dirt, too). We will share more about this underground work, what we’re still wrestling with, and the multiplicity of stories and experiences that got us here. And part of what made this emergence possible is our ongoing transformation, individually and collectively.
Weaving Forward
The Change Elemental team at a recent staff retreat in Virginia.
Over time, we—Delia, Natalie, and Natasha—have grown in our connections to ourselves and each other, developing deep appreciation for each other’s strengths and growth edges. Together, we will keep learning and growing; our commitment to each other, the team, and our interdependent liberation guiding us toward the next stepping stone—until one of us, the organization, or the mission requires something different.
We have deep, deep gratitude for our coconspirators on staff who have held us and the organization in mutual and loving accountability and for our governance team for their wisdom and partnership (if you ever need a workshop on organizational structure, call Ananda Valenzuela!). We also want to thank our coach, Belma Gonzalez, who has partnered with Change Elemental in many configurations, bringing presence, love, clarity, and hard-as-hell questions.
These are destabilizing times. With burgeoning authoritarianism, racialized violence, and climate catastrophe, social justice leaders, organizations, and funders need to evolve both what we do and how we be while doing it. We will continue partnering with you, our beloved community, in this sacred work, weaving and reweaving our interdependent joy, care, connection, and transformation.
Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change
Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.
Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.
Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.
Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.
The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.
¹Scholar and poet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs has said, “one foot in the water one foot in the sand is where I hear the best.” In our organizational context, the “water foot” attends to things like our vision, values alignment, and prefiguring the world we want. The “foot on land” takes into account the world as it is—the requirements and legal constraints of our 501.c.3 tax designation and current financial realities, for example. We are in a practice of leading with our “water foot” while holding the “land foot” as a valued, crucial partner to advance our vision has been both nourishing and generative.
²Read more about what we can learn from cicadas about building movements in this blog by Trish Adobea Tchume.
