Many people are coming to pay their respects and honor the elders’ wisdom because the main organizing force of this community is care. We are laughing not because laughter is food or medicine, but because of the air we breathe.
Everyone rests at whatever time of day they need to for however long. All the children are cared for by the beings around them. People can sleep in the woods, understand spirits, and be guided to the right places within them.
All of us are there. We are ancestors. We are looked upon fondly by everyone present. The way we work together matches the rhythm of our humanity.
May it be so.
Day by day, meal by meal, check-in by check-in, people all over the country are choosing to grow and feed deep networks of care, belonging, and reciprocity. These networks are not new but are essential movement infrastructure—the relationships, systems, and ways of being that enable more visible organizing to defend communities in the short-term and secure long-term wins for love, dignity, and justice. By creating glimpses of a future organized around care and our well-being rather than extraction and cruelty—a future not unlike the one above, dreamed up by folks at our Prefiguring Futures Lab—these networks nourish the systems that weave us together across issues, identities, and networks.
Many leaders feel called—and are being called—to fortify the internal systems and structures that support our movements by shaping their own organizations into containers of care, well-being, and mutual thriving. We are sharing our internal “Holding People and Teams: An Organizational Handbook for Growth, Care, & Accountability” to support leaders who don’t know where to start or how to begin this infrastructure-building work. This Handbook guides us in building a culture rooted in vision, well-being, care, and loving accountability at Change Elemental, because how we be matters as much as what we do in prefiguring the future we want.
As we face unrelenting violence, chaos, and fear-mongering, shifting our ways of working and being together to embody our envisioned future can feel like an impossibly tall order—our organizations can’t be everything to everyone, and people are burned out, under-resourced, and stretched thin. It is part of the playbook—chaos is cultivated to disconnect us from ourselves and our purpose, causing us to show up in ways that divide and isolate. Sometimes this looks like engaging in conflict that doesn’t build, or giving unskillful feedback, or setting requirements that promote overwork.
It is not surprising that so many groups have come to us in the last few months to create or update working agreements and processes for staff growth, feedback, and “performance.” Leaders are striving to respond to chaos with envisioned clarity by creating greater transparency and aligned ways of working together to advance strategy and organizing. By making visible what is so often invisible in organizations, or relegated to a static policy document that only emerges when there is “an issue,” we are aiming to create opportunities to experiment with living our vision through policies, practices, systems, and culture. We are sharing our Handbook not as a solution, but as a jumping-off point for others in the field looking to create some ways forward when it seems daunting, if not impossible!
What’s In It?
The Handbook is divided into four sections.
- Team Expectations and Agreements. Here we outline our shared practices, agreements, and expectations which hold us in mutual and loving accountability with each other and to advancing our individual and collective work in service of our vision and values. They necessarily bridge the world as it is and the world as it should be, aiming to support us in more firmly stepping into our vision.
- Feedback, Growth, and Development. We are working toward everyone in the organization holding feedback, expectations, and accountability together with love and rigor. This section outlines our approaches to feedback, our understanding of different kinds of feedback, and our feedback expectations. It also provides coaching for folks to give feedback, from gifts to growth edges to critical and developmental feedback. Finally, it contains information about our annual feedback and performance review processes.
- Supervision: Tending to Individuals and the Whole. The overall goal of supervision is to support the organization and its individuals in thriving. In this section, we clearly lay out the roles and responsibilities of a supervisor, including which decisions should be made by the supervisor or by the leadership team. Supervision is a place where reality and our desired future often meet and are sometimes in tension with one another, a tension we hold guided by liberation.
- Powerful Performance and Loving Accountability. To grow a culture rooted in vision, we create the conditions for people to powerfully perform in their roles, grounded in their purpose, gifts, talents, and passion. And too, performance challenges can arise in several circumstances and can be among the hardest things for us to face. This section walks through our approach, feedback, and accountability processes for when this happens, and how we can make any necessary changes to serve human and mission sustainability.
Know Before You Go
This is a living handbook. It doesn’t just sit on a shelf off to the side. To actually embody the agreements, we need to practice them. And then learn what works and what is sticky. We’ve made tweaks along the way, and more are sitting on our seemingly never-ending “to-do list.” It was supposed to be an internal document, and we started getting so many requests to share something like it that, rather than wait until this document arrives at some elusive state of “readiness,” we decided to let you all in on the sausage-making so you can jump in, re-arrange, re-blend, and make it your own. It is a work in progress, and so are we.
Context, culture, and values matter. You’ll find references throughout this living document that are Change Elemental-specific, as well as figurative language with particular meanings within our organizational culture. Rather than removing everything that makes this ours, we have mostly left it in. Both because it may spark something for you and because this handbook is not a rigid set of rules to be applied without consideration of your particular context and what we don’t yet know about our collective context. The handbook is a tool and a reference, and should be adapted to meet you and your organization wherever you are—and in alignment and advancement of your vision and values. Skill, agility, and “beingness” affect how tools and guides are implemented, so, again, it is not enough to have guides on paper; individuals and the organization need to embody the being alongside the doing.
This is not new or “ours.” The handbook is a collage of ideas, frameworks, references, and words from our incredible team and from many other brilliant people—we have pulled them together in the shapes and formations that make sense for our team. You will see various references to changemakers throughout, and find a list of the shoulders this handbook stands on at the end. And we want to extend a huge thanks to The Management Center and RVC. Hi friends, you will see some of your work uplifted here (let us know if we have linked to or pointed to something incorrectly… again, this was an internal document, and we may have made mistakes). And deep gratitude to Ananda Valenzuela, former Change Elemental Governance Team Member, for your partnership and offerings to this handbook.
Explore the Handbook today!
“We get distracted from our [true work]…but we are meant to be co-creating thriving for all of us.”
– adrienne maree brown
*Banner image: Inspired by Collective Acceleration’s Horizon Circle Guide, Prefiguring Futures Lab participants created a story (excerpted above) about the future worlds we’re building toward, along with images that reflect those worlds.
