Shifting and Sharing Power - Peer Governance and the Question of Stewardship
Power Shifting and Sharing
Central to our ongoing reckoning with racial, social, and economic justice and equity is the question of how power and authority is shifted and shared within and among nonprofits and the communities they support. The latter notion of power sharing is the focus of this post, in particular as it pertains to fiscal sponsorship and the sponsor-sponsee relationship.
First, it is important to understand the difference between power shifting and power sharing. Power shifting in a racial equity context entails, in part, lifting up organizations and leaders of color, alongside replacing white management and governance leadership with leaders of color. Power shifting has rightfully been a substantial focus in the discourse around racial equity concerning the nonprofit world, since the majority of leadership and governance in the sector remains white. The Daring to Lead reports of 2006 and 2011 of more than 3,000 nonprofit leaders found that 82 percent of respondents were white. BoardSource’s 2015 Leading with Intent report of nonprofit boards found that 89 percent percent of respondents identified as white.
While we don’t have data on how many fiscal sponsors are predominantly white-led from the standpoint of board and management, it’s likely that sponsors reflect the same majority white leadership that currently marks the sector. As an ally organization, Social Impact Commons maintains that if the nonprofit sector wishes to equitably support BIPOC and other marginalized communities, we need more fiscal sponsors with majority management and governance representing these very communities. We need more BIPOC-led fiscal sponsors.
In addition to the hard work of power shifting, we also need to think about power sharing within the structures of nonprofit organizations and with the communities our organizations serve. By power sharing, we mean creating structures (legal and otherwise) and apportioning decision rights that share substantial authority and decision making control with/to the people we are serving. In most cases, this means ceding control from traditional centers of authority (executive management and boards) to non-executive staff, core constituents, and beneficiaries.
Traditional nonprofit structures, including fiscal sponsors, tend to be top-down, “vertical” structures, where policies, practices, and management decisions happen at the top and are handed down to staff and beneficiaries. Over the past few decades, with changes in generational values (greatly influenced by the open-source culture of the tech industry) and expanding theories of how corporations and organizations function, there has been increasing interest in more horizontal or “holocratic” structures for managing together.
Source: Brittany Hunter, “Holocracy and Democracy”, May 8, 2019, futurefrontiers.co
Notions of decentralized and distributed organizational structures may appear “innovative” when compared to traditional vertical and centralized cultures popularized by the 1950s image of top-down corporate power lampooned in the Coen Brothers’ 1994 masterpiece The Hudsucker Proxy. In truth, we have had structures and practices for shared or distributed authority for a very long time, as seen in the ancient idea of commoning at the focus of Impact Commons’s work and, since the early Industrial Revolution, in the form of cooperatives. Both commoning and cooperatives place an emphasis on beneficiary-led governance or ownership. The people who are sharing the benefits of a commons or cooperative resource, should also be the ones calling the shots, or at least have substantial participation in ongoing stewardship.
Fiscal sponsors of all kinds are models for nonprofit resource sharing among multiple semi-independent missions. We commonize staff, systems, legal structure, tax exemption, etc. As such, we hold the potential to adopt more peer-governed or commoning approaches, where project representatives participate and have real say in conversations about substantial strategy, pricing, policies, and practices. Power sharing can also be manifest in how we draft legal agreements, our choice of legal formations, as well as operating and management policies and practices. It’s not just about governance.
Why share power?
Sharing authority and power in a sustainable and effective way, in our opinion, must be grounded in a clear sense and definition of community, built around shared values, worldviews, identity interests, mission focus, etc. Your community should be “defined but open”, meaning there is a clear identity that underpins belonging, and those who identify accordingly are welcome. This is the essence of intentional community building. Before you share power, you need to be sure that you share enough core values and views of the world to ground and build trust. From Impact Commons’s vantage, there are three main benefits to power sharing.
Foster equity and trust. Since effective power sharing is predicated on trust and shared identity and purpose, a virtuous cycle is the hopeful result. The more authority you share, the more trust is built. Power sharing also means power distribution, which can mitigate some of the forces of inequity, in particular in white organizations seeking to be better allies for communities of color. Such forces might include the influence of a single leader’s or a board’s implicit bias, practices rooted in white supremacy, and so on. Even BIPOC-led fiscal sponsors can themselves fall subject to the very forces of inequity they are trying to address. Peer governance can keep things in check and hold managers and systems accountable.
Manage more effectively and efficiently through relationships, not regulation. With trust and intentional community should come mutual care. If members can help each other out from time to time and we can leverage the collective wisdom of our communities, we may find more efficient paths to problem-solving and impact. Years ago, when I was first introduced to the coworking community (before it became commodified by WeWork at the like), the mantra was consistently “build community first, then space and resources”. Coworking was about intentional community, not fancy workspace with hip decor. Spaces that had cultivated strong community identities found they didn’t even need management staff; care for the space was assumed (and embraced) as a collective responsibility, sort of like how a family cares for its home and property. While that may not be a practical solution for fiscal sponsors, managing relationally and not transactionally through regulation with your members can alleviate many roadblocks and ease bumps in the road.
Develop organizational resilience. Fiscal sponsors operate in a very dynamic environment, marked by ebb and flow of capacity demands and a constant stream of challenges and opportunities from member projects. It is the nature of the work. If we build a firm foundation of trust and power sharing, however, mistakes can become learning moments (not “service failures”) and there is more mutual care and understanding during the messiness of problem solving and growing pains. This is especially true in times of extreme crisis, such as at present, with the compounding forces of the pandemic and economic troubles battering our communities. Strong community cohesion allows for more a swift and coherent response.
How can we mitigate risk?
The notion of power sharing may seem attractive, if you subscribe to the above goals. But the barriers to change in our nonprofit structures are substantial (organizations tend toward status quo, not change), and nonprofit executives and boards tend to see more risk than reward in sharing power and control. And rightfully so. Power sharing is hard to do well and requires some other substantial commitments, if it’s to be done effectively and sustainably. The more you share power and authority--the more “horizontal” your culture and decision rights are--the more critical ongoing learning, trust building, transparency, and clear structures and processes for decision making become.
Ongoing group learning and dialogue. Just because someone may be the beneficiary of a shared resource, such as the Project Director of a sponsored project, it doesn’t mean they are intrinsically endowed with the knowledge to make informed management or governance decisions that affect the greater community. The more you share decision making with a group, the more critical it is to engage in ongoing, intentional learning about how commonized resources are managed. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, in her landmark study of the history of the Black Cooperative movement in the U.S., Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, underscores the critical importance of “learning circles” in the history of healthy cooperatives. Cultivating common understandings, perspectives, and knowledge about patterns of practices is essential for a group to manage well together.
Trust building through transparency and social cohesion. Closely related to and part of the above ongoing learning process is the fostering of social ties and trust, both through regular communication and interaction, as well as through a commitment to transparency. There is nothing hidden behind the curtain or conducted in the back room. Candor is key, and trust should afford an atmosphere of safety where people can make mistakes, learn, and not worry about penalties. Sociologist Adam Grant who studies the behaviors of teams and organizations notes in his book, Think Again, that one of the key attributes of effective teams and leaders is the ability to create an atmosphere of safety where mistakes and candor are rewarded, not punished. Without that such an environment, innovation and learning become stifled.
Clear decision making structures and process. Lastly, clear decision making structures and processes are essential to ensure that progress is not halted by conflict or stalemate. Clear provisions (bylaws, meeting protocols, roles, and responsibilities) need to be designed to resolve conflict or ambiguity when it comes to collective decisions. Many shared authority and decision making structures employ alternatives to conventional consensus-based processes, where the decision is between “right” and “wrong”, as determined by majority rule. In contrast, for example, systemic consensing processes help a group assess attitudes and relative “resistance” to a range of possible solutions while lifting up all voices of a group. The goal is more to prioritize a range of solutions, so that they can be explored in a particular order, rather than picking the “best” solution or path and discarding the rest.
As the old saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. More horizontal, power-sharing structures place greater burden and responsibility on all parties to cultivate the skills to manage and husband resources together.
It is worth noting that the above ideas surrounding distributed and shared power within organizations are not right for every case or community. For these concepts to work in practice, you need broad-based commitment, which can take considerable time and effort to build. Many sponsors engage with these ideas in “lighter”, but meaningful ways. For example, a sponsor may allow in its bylaws for its members to nominate and elect voting members to the board. Some sponsors are entirely member-governed, which is common in the nonprofit sector, in particular among alliances and trade associations. Whether you are a fiscal sponsor or a single-mission nonprofit, it’s healthy to think about whether and how to engage your staff, board, and constituents in decision making. Does this support or not support your mission and values?
Sharing authority and decision rights is the difference between collective stewardship and traditional management. The former is collective, participatory, and empowering. The latter is top-down, regulatory, and often disempowering. Whether you apply them lightly or go all in, the above practices take time and real commitment to implement. But when practiced with intention and consistency, the returns in organizational resilience and overall wellbeing can make it well worth the effort.