RoadMap’s

Practicing Liberation Report

Letter From Leadership

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz

Welcome to RoadMap’s report on how we practice liberation across the capacity-building sector, written by our network consultants, Brigette Rouson and Clay Smith.

We are grateful to all the RoadMap practitioners and comrades in the broader field who participated in focus groups and one-on-one interviews over the past year and a half. Collectively, everyone’s contributions led to manifesting the vision for this report. It was always intended to be an invitation to more profound liberatory practice for our RoadMap network and other practitioners across the field.

When Brigette, Clay, and I began talking about this project, it was clear that none of us wanted to position any one capacity-building shop or practitioner as an “expert” in liberatory practice.

We approached this project with as much humility, curiosity, and depth of understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of liberatory practice and political analysis as possible. Like many of you, we are grappling with big questions about how to practice liberation in all aspects of our capacity and movement-building work.

Consider this report an invitation — an offering of sorts — that provides some collectivized grounding, framing, and praxis as it relates to our work to flank movement organizations and leaders as they tackle big organizational and strategic questions in the political conditions we face.

I want to thank Brigette and Clay for being magnificent thought partners throughout this process. They took this project on as a labor of love, and their commitment to liberation and justice shines through with every page turn (or scroll).

I look forward to being in discussion and liberatory practice with all who engage with this report. Please direct questions and comments to info@roadmapconsulting.org.

Framing and Invitation

Supporting organizations to bring about systemic change requires liberating ourselves as people and teams.

As a national network of seasoned capacity builders, RoadMap exists to strengthen organizations, networks, alliances, and leaders through their internal and external shifts.

Therefore, we are documenting and developing approaches that align with our movement-building philosophy. Our Theory of Change states, “RoadMap is a people of color-led community of practice that serves leaders, organizations, and movements. Through a liberatory consulting strategy, we transform the material conditions of our lives.”

By the time we became an independent entity in 2023, our work had become increasingly focused on strengthening communities of practice for liberatory consulting and supporting the development of new organizational forms, strategies, and practices. We ground our approach in the conditions our clients face on the ground, which often feel like intersecting “storm systems.”

In today’s turbulent and transformative times, RoadMap’s most impactful contribution lies in providing leaders, organizations, and movements with strategies and practices that focus on building the collective political power essential for transformative change.

Toward that end, with this report – part of the New Tools for New Times Series – RoadMap brought its members together to assess the current moment and how we can most powerfully support our clients in moving our society towards equity and liberation. We aim to explore questions that arise from our consultants’ experiences with their clients over the past years of multiple crises in health, governance and democracy, climate, and the economy with the rise of white nationalism and authoritarianism.

These are among the questions we explored with leaders and consultants from within and outside RoadMap. We sincerely feel the need for liberatory approaches to address the systemic oppression that our communities face and the growth of far-right authoritarian movements.

We need clear answers to the questions before us. Our objective is to spotlight and explore liberatory practices and strategies rooted in the expertise of our inspiring community. We invite consultants to explore how we can collectively embrace liberation as a core aspect of our work supporting organizations and movements.

What liberatory strategies and practices can move us toward new possibilities and, ultimately, a more compassionate, equitable, and just society?
What current trends and patterns are creating crises and opportunities?
How can we address these trends deeply and transformatively at multiple levels?
What new approaches do we need to stay grounded and create alternative futures?
What do we need to let go of to create space for something more powerful, healing, and strategic?
How can we invite changemakers into new ways of being – into shared power rather than hierarchy?
How do different generations interpret liberation, leadership, and accountability?
What’s bubbling up that we can process with each other and the organizations and movements we support?

Initial Definitions Of Practicing Liberation

We initially define Practicing Liberation as an approach that:

Another way to frame this concept, as offered in our survey of RoadMap consultants, comes from Anand Kalra: “Liberatory practices are intentional, chosen, patterned actions that move our organizations and movements towards self-determination and distributed power for the people.” Our interviews and conversations further deepen these definitions so we’ve included them in the report.

Insights

Key insights that we gleaned through this process include:

Practicing Liberation is essential to shift out of old ways that no longer serve our collective interest. It requires integrity, discipline, creativity, and joy.

We seek alignment so that what we do and embody is consistent with what we guide and support others to do toward justice.

We seek to work with skillfulness to reduce and prevent harm and to support healing.

We honor the origins of practices in cultures and contexts that often go unacknowledged; we counter unwitting and even blatant appropriation.

We support transformative systems change by centering interdependence and intersectionality while dismantling oppressive practices.

We want to be intentional about historical context – including settler colonialism – that allows us to get to the root of what needs to change.

Knowledge Building

This report is a launching pad followed by videos offering practitioner perspectives, gatherings within RoadMap for peer exchange about how we roll and what we aspire to make possible, and an advisory council to continuously bring this work to life. We also share this knowledge through media and spaces for capacity building and movement.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Practicing Liberation

We designed the RoadMap Practicing Liberation Project to identify a range of approaches we can use to strengthen our internal community of practice and our external work with clients across movements. This work was launched through the New Tools for New Times series and began with surveys and conversations with RoadMap consultants, and interviews with leaders in the field.

We initiated this project to learn from others, to explore the landscape of approaches to Practicing Liberation, and to invite our community to discover how we can collectively build liberatory strategies and practices as a central part of our work supporting movements and movement organizations.

Origins Of Liberatory Practices

For generations, social justice leaders across the country and the world have been experimenting with Practicing Liberation. Many of the liberatory practices used in social justice work originated in traditions developed before our time. We want to acknowledge and honor the origins and creators of these practices. We also want to celebrate the fantastic work people do today to liberate themselves, their relationships, our institutions, and societal structures.

Manifestation Of Practicing Liberation

Practicing Liberation means using strategies and practices that reimagine and transform our individual and collective lives. These approaches bring liberation from oppression at the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels. They foster healing, wholeness, love, agency, and justice.

The first element of Practicing Liberation is developing a liberatory strategy. By strategy, we mean our overall approach to achieving our desired social justice outcomes. We want to explore several guiding questions:

The second element of Practicing Liberation is liberatory practice. As shared in one of our practitioner circles, many of our old ways no longer serve us; the nonprofit industrial complex is replete with anti-democratic, racist practices. It is time to evolve. What do we as individuals and as a network need to implement our broader strategy intentionally? By intentionally practicing how we want to show up in the world, we can fully embody our values, increase our power of choice, and better serve those with whom we work.

Practicing Liberation For Collective Impact

We see our broader efforts to support social transformation in organizations and alliances as interdependent with our work to liberate ourselves as people. As RoadMap consultants Pamela Chiang and Ejeris Dixon affirmed in one of our gatherings, their work intends to fundamentally support, aid, guide, and nourish organizations to be effective in winning systems-level campaigns for structural change.

Ejeris named our collective interest in liberatory strategies that can deeply change us individually and collectively and “can win campaigns aligned with our deep values like defunding the police, abolition, and anti-violence work.” Truly freeing ourselves and our collectives requires changing the oppressive systems in which we live.

Why We Care About Practicing Liberation:

(Drawn from Reflections by RoadMap Consultants)

Supporting leaders and teams through a framework of love and liberation

Exploring the interdependence of individual and societal change

Decreasing suffering and increasing compassion

Stepping out of the box in movement-building practices

Focusing on internal intersectional racial justice and equity work

Disrupting the status quo

Repairing historic wrongs and traumas

Organizing ourselves to collectively build to scale the capacity of BIPOC/Global Majority leaders and organizations

Many RoadMap consultants stress that Practicing Liberation requires integrity, discipline, creativity, and joy. We are committed to embodying what we strive to pass on to others.

We recognize that despite good intentions, doing this deep work without shared commitment and skillfulness can cause harm. Using practices that advance liberation also requires honoring the practices’ roots while acknowledging and resourcing these roots, cultures, and contexts.

There is a curiosity about how these oppressive structures get dismantled, for instance, by paying attention to the following:

Base-building to a larger scale, managing growth, and building deeper alliances to build real power, and increasing political education (Mary Ochs)
Crafting shared agreements/expectations around communications, navigating feelings, and looking beyond the spreadsheet to “the story of how we got there, where we are, and how we get to a more functional way of being.” (Anand Kalra)

Consultants also affirmed that breaking down oppressive structures is insufficient; identifying the liberatory edge – as historically with LGBTQ rights – involves imagining what has not yet come into being.

Chapter 2

Existing Conditions And The Need For Practicing Liberation

In the current era of rapid upheaval and disruption, the root causes of many societal problems — including racialized capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression — are more visible than ever. The need for liberatory analyses and approaches is pressing. A convergence of conditions and trends is brewing a near-perfect storm. The threats are grave, but there are also possibilities for leaping forward to a more just and sustainable society.

We realize the clear imperative to address the intersecting levels of systems at which oppression and liberation happen:

Individual: Related to a person’s beliefs and actions that serve to perpetuate conditions, including internalization of oppression or transformation.

Interpersonal: Related to the interactions between people, both within and across differences.

Institutional: Related to policies, practices, and culture at the organizational level that perpetuate oppression or spark transformation.

Structural: Related to how these effects interact and accumulate across institutions and across history, especially through deep, existing political, economic, and social structures.

(Sources: National Equity Project and others)

Major External Conditions And Trends

A climate crisis is causing devastating climate and weather events that are significantly affecting poor and BIPOC communities in addition to threatening life as we know it across the globe.
Increasing militarism and state violence are exhibited through policing, surveillance, mass criminalization, incarceration, and war.
Growing white nationalism is resulting in high levels of violence against people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, and others.
A growing political divide is characterized by right-wing extremism that threatens to replace our already limited democracy with authoritarianism.
A COVID pandemic led to severe illness, trauma, isolation, death, and related impacts that are exacerbated by structural oppression.
An economic crisis is mainly affecting poor and working class and BIPOC communities.
General volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity prevail.

Major Internal Conditions And Trends

Suffering and trauma resulting from racialized violence, which includes police violence, incarceration, mass shootings, and more.
Suffering and trauma resulting from the COVID pandemic, as well as the fear, isolation, and economic stress it has caused.
Increased disruption is prevalent within social justice organizations, including a level of conflict and toxicity not seen before.
We lack clear approaches to transforming ourselves, our relationships, our organizations, and our alliances to align with RoadMap’s vision for justice and equity.
There is increasing resistance to white supremacy and the growth of movements for racial justice and equity.
We must build more robust and integrated organizations to meet these challenges and complexities.
We need a coherent and effective movement infrastructure.

These conditions are a mix of long-term trends, dynamics, and shorter-term crises. They are all based on or related to oppressive structures that profoundly shape our society and demand a profound and transformative response.

Practicing Liberation is a strategic approach to address these challenges to bring about meaningful change. Implementing liberatory strategies and practices is vital to navigating these conditions and pursuing justice and equity.

Chapter 3

Examples Of Practicing Liberation At The Individual, Institutional, And Cultural Levels

This report offers examples of liberatory strategies and practices on different levels, from the individual to the collective and systemic, to inspire and guide us in stepping into this work.

Individual And Relational Work, Including Coaching For Liberation

The individual is the most basic level of change. People are the heart of our movements. We have fantastic potential and resilience. And we also suffer under our current structures from interactions with each other. Healing and development are needed to bring our best to the world and relate to each other with love, compassion, and authenticity. Our efforts to change society must include healing and developing ourselves and our relationships.

I. Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation

—Damon Azali-Rojas and Sarah Jawaid of CHJL

CHJL is a recently founded coaching school for movement-minded folks across the country that guides people toward a deeper understanding of:

Through a nine-month program, cohort participants learn to discern what contributions coaches can make while integrating their personalities and personal experiences. The program focuses on the individual; not to elevate a single personality as a site of transformation, but to help participants experience their wholeness as part of the path to collective liberation.

CHJL believes that a historical grounding is necessary for deep change. Damon Azali-Rojas asks: “How [has] decolonization not been part of the left movement’s conversations for so long? We all are settlers even if here because of displacement, or for Black folks because our ancestors were brought here [forcibly]. How do we talk about that, and… systemically address oppression? If you go deep, settler colonialism is an example of what we need to work with.”

What makes CHJL a Trailblazer in Practicing Liberation?

Liberatory coaching practices focus on the self and continually relate to the collective. The CHJL program identifies the cultivation of skills for:

The CHJL Participant Selection Approach

How CHJL carefully selects participants for its learning cohorts

CHJL places a strong emphasis on several crucial factors like diversity, representation, and overall dedication to the Practicing Liberation.

STEP-1

STEP-2

STEP-3

STEP-4

Another unconventional CHJL practice is redistributing resources by partnering with organizations to offer coaching for participants in learning cohorts at Rockwood and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD).

—Damon Azali-Rojas and Sarah Jawaid

CHJL also supports growth through creative expression by commissioning local artists to illustrate each student’s vision for themselves, their communities, and their journey to date. The artistic visuals help people claim their vision and move forward on their path.

—Damon Azali-Rojas and Sarah Jawaid

II. Blooming Willow Coaching

Leslie Avant-Brown created a coaching program that draws inspiration from Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad; a legacy of freeing ourselves against seemingly insurmountable odds.

The Healing Centered Coaching Model

Pause. Take time for yourself. In a fast-paced society, stopping is often one of the hardest things to do. You’re encouraged to slow down as you prepare for transformational growth and healing.

Ground. Connect with your higher self and disrupt the disorderly patterns that cause chaos and resistance. Listen to your inner wisdom, seek clarity, and find your center.

Align. Create unity with your mind, body, and spirit by tapping into your resourcefulness. Begin to strategize how you’ll navigate options and troubleshoot barriers with our support as you move forward.

Act. Once the strategy is clear, put motion behind your goals. Track the progress made as you achieve goals with accountability from a supportive team.

Participants become “conductors” who offer healing-centered coaching that invites a slowing down to focus on what is most important. This approach allows coaches to heal as they step in with a commitment to profound change. The coach or conductor, in turn, becomes a partner for changemakers powerfully moving forward in their growth. “Blooming Willow coaching supports a shift from “doing” to “being ” that allows one to recharge, realign, and make authentic choices,” says Avant-Brown.

Practicing Liberation shows up in several ways:

Creating learning spaces tailored to different groups — a Black conductors cohort, Black women conductors cohort, and an “all aboard” multi-racial/multiethnic cohort.

Honoring lived experience in composing the group as a prelude to coaching that honors the changemakers who will benefit.

Focusing on recovery from the burnout that can contradict our vision of the world as changemakers. Suffering exhaustion from battling oppressive systems is common in movements. Some find themselves voiceless.

Avant-Brown weaves a full array of transformative practices into Blooming Willow Coaching:

Sharing cultural content (music, poetry, and videos).
Tapping into embodied wisdom with yoga and breathing practices.
Engaging participants in activities that sharpen intuition.
Assignments, resources, and words of encouragement designed to bring heightened attention to all of the senses.
Deepening awareness of identities and the way people experience and express themselves in relation to power.
Trying on different methods for developing clear consciousness.

Learning goes beyond skill building to cultural infusion that nurtures people to live as healed and whole individuals. The overarching intent for the healing-centered coach is “liberating myself and others from mental slavery” with a process of “transformation to a new sense of wholeness, spiritual transcendence, and reinterpretation of life.”

Embodied Leadership

Embodiment helps us understand human development and growth by exploring questions like these:

Embodied leadership work can transform our deep habits to align our actions with our vision.

One person might want to embody confidence instead of doubt or fear, vulnerability instead of infallibility, or care instead of aggression.

Embodiment work encompasses various approaches. It can work at the individual, relational, organizational, and even societal levels. This section explores specific examples to illustrate its diverse forms and applications.

III. Rockwood Leadership Institute

The Rockwood Leadership Institute and one of its trainers, Helen Kim, use the language of transformation more than the language of liberation in their work. As an established and long-time independent consultant with RoadMap, Helen adds her value perspective to this ongoing work. She describes the language of transformation more colloquially as “change that sticks.”

-Helen Kim

Helen and many of her Rockwood colleagues, such as co-founder Robert Gass, often speak of collective liberation as their goal.

“We have been using the language of “transformation" for over 20 years. But I see the frame of “liberation” as very valuable for our current times as it so clearly highlights the centrality of equity. Similar to our training, the language of liberation encompasses the interdependence of inner and outer work, of personal empowerment, and social change, which has always been integral to how we understand transformation.

Helen also believes an important aspect of transformative change is that she herself has to participate in her own process of transformation. She needs to have the ability to model this with the people she supports. This involves building self-awareness and creating a vision for oneself. A big part of Kim’s work involves helping people develop a better understanding of themselves and interrupting their deep habits.

Wheel of Change Model for Transformation

Using the wheel of change model developed by Robert Gass, Helen explains the full arc of deep change through attention to changing:

On the pervasive nature of capitalism in our lives, Helen acknowledges our over-reliance on foundations and the need to find alternative resources and strategies for our movements. She poses challenging inquiries:

Exploring these questions, she emphasizes the significance of practice in creating the world we envision. Kim notes the time and commitment necessary for an embodied approach, highlighting that living within a capitalist system often fosters a culture of individualism, objectification, and commodification.

She advocates for deliberate practices centered on connection, rigor, and responsibility. These practices set a high standard for oneself and others. Reflecting on her transformation since joining Rockwood in 2008, Helen underlines the role of continuous practice in personal evolution.

She stresses that consistent practice eventually becomes ingrained within us, shaping our identity and becoming a way of life rather than merely a tool. For her, transformation is a communal endeavor, necessitating collective effort.

She draws inspiration from Norma Wong, a teacher of more than 40 years at the Institute of Zen Studies and Daihonzan Chozen-ji, and Collective Acceleration. Kim incorporates movement as an avenue for profound change within the body and advocates for an expanded sense of time, considering the seven generations before and ahead of us.

Summarizing the nature of an embodied approach, Kim stresses the time and depth required for individuals to experience and progress through its various levels, suggesting that those teaching it must undergo substantial mentorship before imparting this knowledge.

Rockwood coach and trainer Pamela Chiang shared related reflections.

“It’s about how we prepare the soil. It’s about our own vitality. I do practices to recalibrate and reharmonize myself spiritually, mentally, and with my family. It is about the depth of time I spend, and about spirit energy. I practice so I can bring it when I need it. It takes work and boundless energy. But it allows me to return to love and compassion with a client, and how I support people to be leaders in their systems. To use these approaches requires integrity. When I work with Rockwood, they require that I evolve myself so I live and walk the talk. There are standards I have to meet. Not everyone is down with that, but it is important. We need skillful means and skillful speech. We need to tell ourselves the truth.”

IV. generative somatics (gs)

generative somatics advocates a form of embodiment work known as politicized somatics, in order to help align our actions with our values and allow healing from the effects of trauma and oppression. This approach to embodied individual and collective transformation engages several components:

generative somatics supports social and climate justice movements in achieving their visions of a radically transformed society by partnering with grassroots organizations and alliances that are making demands on the state. gs’ methodology and approach is informed by a feminist orientation that values the interdependence of individual and collective change.

gs Co-Director, Saima Husain explains:

gs Co-Director Usa Lee Prompongsatorn emphasizes:

All of these forms of change are inextricably linked and support each other. By bringing somatic transformation to movement leaders, organizations, and alliances, gs aims to advance loving and rigorous movements possessing the creativity, resilience, and liberatory power needed to transform society.

generative somatics (gs)

Somatic Theory

Arc of Transformation

Sites of Shaping & Change

Somatic Awareness, Practices, & Opening

The Arc of Transformation outlines the basic approach for individual or collective transformation.

How do you want to show up?
What do you long for?
What are the habits (often unconscious) developed through your life to take care of your basic human needs, including love, safety, dignity, and connection?
How have these habits helped you and kept you safe?
And how do they limit you as conditions change and your habits live on?

Using this process for individual, organizational, or community/societal transformation poses several important questions:

What does an organization or community embody as a result of its history?

How can it build self awareness, appreciate its deep habits, and begin to let go of those that no longer serve it?

And how can members of the organization or community practice to build a new shape and culture that aligns with their collective values, even under pressure?

V. The Embodiment Institute

Prentis Hemphill, co-founder at The Embodiment Institute, leads a related stream of work.

“We believe that the combination of activated and politically engaged practitioners, alignment around liberatory principles of culture building, and the development of clearly articulated emotional competencies will support a more thriving and inviting ecosystem supportive of movement. The healing necessary to fully reinhabit our own bodies and ecosystems is the healing that will ultimately transform oppressive systems. Healing happens through relationship, and that relationship is the primary site of change. It is healing in relationship that transforms systems.”

—Prentis Hemphill

Black Practitioner Development Cohort

In the Spring of 2022, The Black Embodiment Initiative, which aimed to specifically cultivate Black somatic practitioners, successfully launched its inaugural Black Practitioner Development Cohort, marking a significant step toward addressing the pressing need for trained leaders in our communities to support collective healing.

This initiative envisioned a pathway for practitioners to train in an embodied framework and approach. The goal centered on developing a cohort of well-trained practitioners capable of providing valuable support to individuals, leaders, and organizations within the movement and beyond.

One of the few of its kind in the country, the cohort, which ran from April to October 2022, comprised monthly teaching sessions led by Prentis, along with periodic learning sessions facilitated by trusted practitioners, mentors, and teachers.

The program emphasized engaging in healing practices and delving into personal learning between sessions, providing a space for experimentation and refinement of The Embodiment Institute’s methodology.

The aspiration was for it to serve as a platform for mutual learning, enabling practitioners to practice skills collectively and apply them within their respective communities for greater impact.

VI. Movement Strategy Center

RoadMap member and Strozzi Institute coach and trainer Dara Silverman notes the current proliferation of social media and online training in somatics and other embodiment practices, and reflects on the importance of the Movement Strategy Center’s Transitions Initiative.

This initiative, led by Norma Wong, consisted of a series of gatherings turned into labs. In those labs, leaders could share embodiment practices for social and racial change as well as develop audacious visions and radical connections.

Participants would then go back to test these strategies and approaches in their movement work, and later return to the broader learning community for additional feedback.

VII. Move To End Violence

Dara also notes the Move to End Violence (MEV) project shaped the field as a broad 10-year effort to achieve transformative change. The time-limited initiative focused on transformative leadership development and building critical mass for the U.S. movement to end violence against trans and cis girls and women and those who are gender non-conforming.

To help build the capacity of this movement, MEV’s program focused on conversations, explorations, training, and practice in convenings with movement makers, regional workshop offerings, and online in the areas of several “core elements.”

The project closed in 2022, which some observers attribute in part to the realities of foundation funding. Major support often came from wealthy elites who do not identify as part of the groups supported and do not necessarily have a direct stake in transformative change and the time that it requires.

VIII. Conflict Transformation

Richael Faithful, in alignment with the healing justice community rooted in the spirit of liberation and the practices of Black women/femmes in the South, specifically has sought to increase understanding of harm, and experience navigating conflict, with principles of repair and accountability. Richael and their colleagues, including Whitney Benns, work to develop discernment and skills, not simply for change at the individual or organizational levels, but more expansively toward a healthier ecosystem of relationships.

Essential to the process is creating shared language around concepts such as conflict, harm, abuse, accountability, critique, and contradiction, drawing on the work of colleagues such as Adrienne Maree Brown and Mariame Kaba.

Richael and colleagues also point to the value of a framework known as “Principled Struggle” voiced by N’Tanya Lee. Principled Struggle calls on people in movements to practice five principles, such as the foundational principle: “We struggle for the sake of deepening our collective understanding and getting to greater unity.” The other principles echo common calls across restorative justice, transformative justice, healing justice, and related justice work for our movements to move with even more honesty, directness, compassion, responsibility, deeper understanding, and continued engagement as we find the right spaces in which to engage.

In their approach to conflict transformation, Richael finds it important to bring the lessons of all of the frameworks that inform healing justice (restorative justice, transformative justice, community accountability, disability justice, and harm reduction) over the past 40 years into how we relate to and navigate conflict within our movement spaces, which include organizations.

Part of their current learning is how to integrate the creativity and power of these frameworks and what has been learned into settings that are inherently constrained by legal systems, professionalization, isolationist tendencies, among other challenges. They have found it a rigorous and joyful area of work for the past decade.

Organizational Development

Organizations play a crucial role in launching and guiding change efforts from the local to the international. They are basic structures that allow people to take collective action across time for different purposes. They vary greatly in size, formality, structure, leadership, and scope. They are a key level of change in our work, as they often serve as the foundation for broader alliances and movements. Key questions around developing effective organizations include:

How can we build organizations that have the capacity to transform our society?
How do we reimagine supervision and other internal structures?
How do we pay people equitably?
How do we create organizational models that allow us to practice the world we want to create?

I. Imagining a Different Collective Future

Angélica Otero, a member of RoadMap, practices a liberatory approach to organizational development. She has over two decades of experience as an organizer, trainer, and consultant to social justice organizations, especially in immigrant communities. She has experience working in immigrant communities in the Bronx, in her ancestral home in Ecuador, and across the US.

Angélica acknowledges the lineage of her work, saying the “knowledge that lives in me comes from so many people and traditions.” She worked with and learned from the largely women members of the Parent Action Committee in the Bronx. She was deeply influenced by liberation theology, the Latin American humanist movement, liberation struggles, and Marxism. More recent influences include the work of generative somatics and Social Justice Leadership, and all the consultants and partners she has learned from over the years.

She understands social justice organizations as places where people get to practice liberation. Organizations are vehicles for creating change: for visioning, and for imagining how we can dismantle capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity. And organizations are, of course, places where individuals come together as collectives. They are places to experience interdependence and to come together to imagine and move toward a different collective future.

The approach she uses, as mentioned above, comes from the traditions that have influenced her. “I support people in doing assessments of the conditions they are working in, and of their organizations, and how to do and be their best.” She does regular centering practices with organizations so they can think about their work, feel the emotions of the work, and feel their commitments. “We have to move beyond our brain to really imagine the new world we are fighting for. And to help us take action, build resilience, and move towards more choice. We need that when we’re working to resolve the challenges our organizations face.” She acknowledges the many brilliant people and organizers out there who are pushing our imagination around the kind of organizations that could dismantle capitalism in this country.

Angélica shared an example of her organizational development work, done in partnership with Griffin Moore, a fellow RoadMap consultant, with an immigrant rights organization. Their approach provides insights into Practicing Liberation for organizational development.

“We were doing a strategic plan with the organization, and had just done an organizational assessment. Part of what came out of it was that staff were feeling overworked and burnt out, and members felt that more work needed to be done due to the urgency of the situation. This was an immigrant rights organization working in an area where people are, on a daily basis, being deported. Those were the conditions under which they were working. And so it feels like there’s a need to do more, and there’s absolutely a need to do more. And the staff are overworked.”

“We needed to have an organizational conversation about this. So one morning of the retreat, we combined a few practices for the group to explore this contradiction. We started with a practice of “hand on heart” from somatics, which is about really listening to your body. So we asked people to put their hand on their partner’s heart (with their permission), to ask them a question, and to listen from that deeper connection. The question was ‘How are you? How are you feeling?’ We did that in the morning to support people in being more somatically aware. And then in the afternoon, we did a fish bowl, which is another form of deep listening practice. We walked through what deep listening means – being present, being curious about what the other person is feeling, and doing reflective listening. And we had one staff person and one member on the inside of the fishbowl, really sharing their experience of both the urgency and the overwhelm. The goal was for people to hear each other, more deeply understand what was happening for them, and engage this contradiction to help them move into action.”

“One of the staff shared. They said that they felt they were repeating the historical trauma of their parents, who had to have two jobs just to make ends meet. They felt that, as part of a new generation, they should have more choice and opportunities. But they were working 60-70 hours a week. The feeling of pain that person shared was powerful, and was felt by everyone in the room. And the difficult question was on the table: what do we do, though, when a member calls and says they’re being deported in the middle of the night? But the depth of connection and understanding changed the situation. There was no judgment, and people were not blaming each other, but this is the reality they faced. We had a few rounds of that deep listening practice. After that, some of the feedback we got was, wow…. we knew something was happening with the team. And now the members knew what the staff were deeply feeling and what was happening for the team.“

“As part of the follow-up later, we met with the co-directors. They shared there was a sense of people feeling validated. And they admitted they were setting the culture and setting the pace to really move fast. They said they needed to scale it back because it wasn’t sustainable. This is still a work in progress. They’re continuing this work, and the staff are meeting to think about next steps.”

“The idea of setting up this practice was to share feedback and assessment, and to do it in a way that people got to hear deep stories that were in each others’ hearts around this contradiction they were experiencing. I think this is the learning and the work. And yes, we want to see change and ensure there is a shift, and this will take time. Often the expectation is that there will be immediate shifts in an organization or how we show up, and this comes from white supremacy and the culture of urgency, where there is a need for a quick fix, or immediate results. We forget there is value in building a culture of practice together and of seeing each other’s humanity. As organizations, we need a practice of being in the hard conversations and in the contradictions, without feeling we need to fix something right away.”

“This type of work can be powerful. There are moments when organizations are open to this kind of practice, but others might not be ready for this kind of deeper liberatory approach. It may be hard for them to create that opening. For me, it’s a learning every time.”

II. Practicing Freedom vs Practicing Liberation

RoadMap consultant Makani Themba describes liberation as a collective practice that transforms how we do things together so that we’re practicing freedom (affirming individual choice) and Practicing Liberation (generating collective experience) while finding balance between the two.

Envisioning liberatory practice as more holistic means going beyond an old emphasis on “discipline and sacrifice” and embracing self-care (think Healing Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland) with more space and rest (think Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry).

We locate authentic care at the intersection between how I love me and how I love you, and honor commitments and set boundaries even as we deal with trauma that people hold.

True liberation requires an abolition mindset, and finding ways of offering fugitive space, maroon space, or sanctuary to form community in new ways. True liberation allows for mistakes with integrity and grace, never under the illusion that people engaged will be above or free from criticism – which would perversely use a Western idea of perfection. As Themba quips, “Harriet Tubman was probably a hard person to get along with, you know. Right now, people would probably be like, ‘I know that you freed all these people, but your attitude…’”

Liberatory work looks to transform organizations as well as people – rather than discarding them. This means that we become intentional about liberatory practices such as people’s assemblies, shifting away from conventional human resources roles in favor of positions such as director of people and culture, and creating participatory budget processes where people practice making decisions together.

The example of the “Assembly as a process” approach by Project South People’s Movement Assembles is illustrative. The assembly is an organism of social movement organizations and people, not a network, coalition, alliance, or political party. Rather, it is a new formation that is inclusive and not exclusive to one political line or ideology. The assembly results in immediate action steps and processes that connect the social movements and fronts of struggle. People come closer together by virtue of working through the assembly and working together.

They get to know each other better, bringing about mutual accountability and stronger relationships between people and organizations. These gatherings also bring awareness of the fronts of struggle on the ground and thus inform the social movement of the pulse of the mass movement. And finally, it compels the assembly towards coordinated action.

Broadly speaking, the conditions for liberatory practices to thrive include knowledge, trust, resources, intentionality, and courage.

III. Collective Care in Movement Work

Ejeris Dixon of Vision Change Win speaks to how movement work and collective care come together to address the dilemma of holding exhaustion, being overwhelmed, and feeling burned out.

When this experience shows up, Dixon, who is a RoadMap member, points out the importance of not going into a mode of care that focuses simply on staff. A movement organization should explore how the communities with which it works can be supported in taking up practices for wholeness or taking a pause for renewal.

Can mutual aid be developed or expanded?

Can staff have breaks in a staggered way so that work being done in the community doesn’t grind to a halt for an extended time?

IV. Leadership Reimagined

Elsa Ríos and Lisa Garrett serve as Co-Leads of a new initiative called Leadership Reimagined working alongside their team members, Sonya Kharas, Caroline Hotaling, and Surei Quintana.

Elsa notes, “Given the outsized impact senior leaders have on their organizations and movements, it’s imperative that we support executive leaders and leadership teams to operate with a liberation mindset. This requires leaders to build their reflective leadership practice, asking themselves: how am I living into a liberation stance in my own life, within my team, and in movement spaces? What is my active daily practice in shedding old notions of leadership and default behaviors steeped in white supremacy thinking and internalized oppression?”

“A liberatory leadership mindset also invites us to think strategically about how we actually construct that full-scale liberation we want for all of us,” continues Ríos. “Our social justice organizations are good at developing vision statements but we are less adept at actively designing the future we want to create. We need to fully take on the role of liberation architects mapping out the longer-term milestones that are needed to achieve our collective liberation, and making sure that our short-term and intermediate strategies align and create the critical momentum needed to achieve the revolutionary goals of collective liberation.”

Leadership Reimagined creates a safe, joyful, and generative space for social justice leaders from diverse movements to be in community with each other, share strategies and deepen their liberatory leadership practices. The Leadership Reimagined model includes Leadership Coaching Circles that bring together primarily BIPOC and LGBTQ leaders from diverse movements to address the complexities of what it means to lead in this new and complex movement era marked by escalating violence, polarization and the demise of even basic democratic reforms. During the coaching circles, various liberatory leadership topics and peer coaching skills are introduced that participants can immediately apply in their own leadership practice, with their coaching circle peers, and in their organizations.

“Another part of our work,” says Ríos, “is to incubate and push out new ideas, bright spots, tools, and strategies that advance liberatory leadership through learning labs, clinics, book parties, and praxis panels. We’ve brought together an amazing group of Community Faculty who are practitioners experimenting with different liberatory practices. We provide a forum for those practitioners to share their ideas, approaches, and tools with members of organizations across diverse movements. In this way, we are helping to seed and grow new ways of thinking and practicing liberation.”

V. People-Centered and Values-Aligned Management

Mala Nagarajan, a senior HR consultant with Vega Mala Consulting and a RoadMap consultant, approaches human resources (people) management from a people-centered, values-aligned, and movement-oriented lens. Her work grounds people management in one of its lineages: organizing for the welfare of the workforce. She specializes in compensation systems, supporting social justice organizations to re-imagine and reconstruct compensation, and to move away from a market-based system toward a market-informed system that embodies social justice values.

As an HR professional, Mala’s work prioritizes reducing the racial and gender income gap in the workplace, understanding that this is the fastest way to reduce the racial and gender wealth gap – a central and seemingly intractable problem of our times. Her work asks how we can exemplify just compensation policies in our organizations that could inspire the broader society toward similar practices.

If we want to address this problem on a systemic level, we need to start by doing it in our own organizations. If we can’t do it ourselves, how can we expect society to do it?” Mala says. “This is a fractal practice,” she adds. “If we get 25% of non-profit employers to create and use just compensation policies, starting with social justice groups that share these values, that will create a force that will change the broader status quo.”

— Mala Nagarajan

To ground the work historically, she cites scholar Caitlin Rosenthal’s research on accounting methods used by plantation owners and traces current management practices back to enslavement–a “cautionary tale” that raises questions about what cost calculations highlight or overlook, as “normalized” ways of using numbers to obscure exploitation.

Mala supports organizations to align their compensation system with their mission, vision, values, and theory of change. She points to the professionalization of the nonprofit sector and growth of the nonprofit industrial complex as dynamics that led mission-oriented organizations to use the market to set staff salaries. In doing so, they typically replicate the values and inequities that are inherent in the market. Some organizations have continued paying low salaries across the board, or are paying everyone equally with little regard to cost of living or equity. This ignores the reality that not all staff come from wealth, and that those from communities most impacted remain under-resourced and unable to cover basic necessities, with some needing a second job or governmental welfare assistance.

The restorative compensation equity process and framework Mala has developed reverse-engineers supremacy out of the salary equation. It lifts unseen and undervalued labor, and takes a harm-reduction approach to factors and practices that have traditionally widened the racial and gender income and wealth gap.

The framework advocates for organizations to develop a well-articulated employer philosophy, in order to rewrite the employer-employee contract. The employer philosophy makes explicit how an organization will relate to its employees and clarifies both the employer’s aspirations and how the organization will balance any constraints it faces.

Mala emphasizes the articulation of unique constraints in the nonprofit sector – inviting employees, especially newer staff, to balance their hopes for an ideal workplace with the realities of what choices leaders are making and why. An employer philosophy also helps move staff of different generations and cultures – who may have different assumptions about work, workers, and the workplace – toward a shared set of operating assumptions.

The framework moves organizations toward having a salary scale that promotes the adoption of the following elements:

A base salary that is the same for all employees, not a base salary for each hierarchy-based salary band tied to market benchmarks.
A set of organization-informed areas of responsibility that reflect the critical functions of the organization, including labor historically unseen and undervalued by the economic and market system. Organizations may uplift, for example, lived experience, emotional labor, and high-risk/vulnerable labor. Each area of responsibility is divided into equally-valued levels. The levels capture the contributions of every position to that area of responsibility, thereby embodying the interdependence of our work.
Each area of responsibility is given a dollar value, thus allowing organizations to reflect and fine-tune how they value labor in service of their mission. All positions are evaluated on each area of responsibility. For example, leadership as an area of responsibility is not associated with a person’s title, but rather reflects what a leaderful organization would embody.
Policies and practices that reduce the wealth gap are implemented. For example, the ratio between the highest salary and the lowest salary is set intentionally and shared with staff. This means higher salaries can only be increased above the ratio if lower salaries are also lifted. As another example, If salary bands are used, they would all have equal ranges. As a third example, organizations would eliminate the use of percentage-based increases, which widen the wealth gap.
Employees are invited to redistribute income. At the leading edge of restorative compensation work, Mala is creating a process that allows staff who have received advantages in their life to voluntarily take less, and colleagues who have been more disadvantaged in their life to earn more.

The prototype for employees to redistribute is called the Reparative Distribution Factor™ (RDF), an emergent practice based on interpersonal and community reparations with a little “r”, as articulated by kuwa jasiri indomela and Aaron Goggans.

RDF centers an organization’s mission and the social identities and the material conditions of the communities that an organization serves, advocates on behalf of, or is most impacted by the issues central to the organization. For example, an environmental justice organization might use the material condition “Grew up in or currently lives in a neighborhood that is high on the social vulnerability index” as a compensation factor that supports employees who grew up in or currently live in areas that are highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

There are different ways to implement the RDF. One method, for example, draws from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality, inviting employees to consider their privileged and marginalized identities with respect to the organization’s mission and relative to their peers. Employees may then consent to take less or more based on how their relative identities differentiate the skills and effort they are called to bring forth in service of the mission.

Building this new equitable compensation system requires deep shifts in perspective. Too often, organizations continue to reference the old system’s culturally unaligned ideas and practices, that are based on competition, profit, and minimizing labor costs. Countering these ideas and practices is not easy. We can begin by explicitly discussing these issues through questions like:

How do we shift the social-psychology of money in our organizations?

How do we explore our practices and wrestle with those that are entrenched and difficult to realign?

How do we behave based on our own social justice values, rather than based on capitalism?

What would a values-aligned reduction in force look like when we experience a global economic downturn?

What compensation and support allows everyone to thrive?

Mala’s framework calls upon organizations to practice risk leadership. Risk leadership pushes organizations to the edges of existing legal structures. Risk leadership also requires organizations to reckon with polarities intrinsic to compensation structures, polarities like “activity” and “rest,” both of which need to be compensated in order for our labor to be liberatory and regenerative. To quote Audre Lorde from Sister Outsider (1984): “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

VI. Human Resources at RoadMap

Human resources became an area of practice where RoadMap members formed a working group to address social justice – including alternative compensation systems that counter conventions that have roots in U.S. management practices that originate from enslavement.

These practitioners craft and share innovations with an intention to stop replicating historical harm. The approach begins with acknowledging historical structures that members seek to change, and clarifying their vision and intentions moving forward.

Group members exchange practices to support organizations in looking for deeper solutions and building culture, expectations, and systems that will move toward those visions. Throughout the process, the aim is to contribute toward increased adoption of liberatory practices by organizations within an ecosystem – ideally to reach a “tipping point” of 25 percent of people – leading to much broader change.

In addition, several RoadMap consultants have focused on how to practice liberation by shifting attitudes and approaches to finance and operations, including “the information backbone of social justice work,” as Anand Kalra describes it.

These are areas where internalized oppression, particularly misogyny, racism, and classism prevail. Many workers in our movements have struggled against expectations of servitude and a kind of invisibility or devaluing that can undermine the support available for programmatic work.

VII. Freedom Lifted

Freedom Lifted accompanies groups in making organizational change. Mia Henry is its Founder and CEO. She and her team support organizations in creating a vision for a world where everyone is liberated.

Freedom Lifted helps people learn about the past and how it replays itself in the present. Based on this, they help organizations make shifts based on a deeper sense of history and power. People are invited to search for multiple truths and make a historically informed commitment to equity and justice in their own organization.

Online participants cover, chapter-by-chapter, historical patterns of racism and injustice and then engage in activities individually and in small groups. They use a facilitator guide that positions staff of the organization to own and continue the learning. This helps them take action in the longer term to identify and resist ways oppression appears in organizational life.

These actions could include putting new organizational policies in place, finding ways to shift internal culture, or restructuring more broadly. Part of what marks the work liberatory is that the consultant is not directing the pace and time of learning, nor prescribing solutions; organizational change is not dependent on an outside expert or on any one position, time, or place.

Mia seeks to guide people toward a more collective orientation rooted in identity and clarity about roles in the broader scheme. A bedrock is drawing the difference between resistance and solidarity in justice work. Resistance is the work of people directly impacted by oppression based on identities and conditions, while solidarity is the work of those who are not (those who hold power derived from unearned privilege).

A social justice collective is about sharing a deep commitment to ending oppression and making a world where everyone is free. As a liberatory practitioner, Mia connects the self to the structural, and embraces the notion that people hold multiple identities with differing relationships to those being oppressed or those being the oppressor. Henry supports organizations to create their own infrastructure with power-sharing as a main principle — making organizational liberation about partnership, cultivating trust within an organization, and building internal muscle to carry hard things with a shared understanding of history. Organizations look at how hierarchy works in a capitalist system that assigns roles and uses identity markers as ways to exploit.

The experience is intended to change the use of power at every level through developing new cultural and institutional norms.

Internally, Henry seeks to practice this with her team – being transparent about revenue goals for their work, and departing from typical approaches to compensation. For instance, she sets pay based on expectations for the roles and how they work together – not just on individual credentials or conventional valuation of work responsibilities. She also provides staff bonuses whenever revenue is higher than expected.

VIII. Racial Equity Tools

Maggie Potapchuk, the founder of MP Associates Consulting, is a seasoned RoadMap Consultant and advocate for racial justice and liberation. She draws strength from her relationships in the local community and colleagues across the nation.

In addition to consulting with organizations about racial equity, she co-founded and currently serves as curator for Racial Equity Tools (RET), which is now managed by Equity in the Center.

This ambitious website offers a treasury of 5,000 resources in 98 categories, bringing together in one place perspective pieces, templates, guides to action and more – in multiple formats such as documents, videos, audio material, and mapping.

RET helps those strengthening movements for racial equity and justice through various roles and methods so they can access a baseline of materials to guide their thinking and action. They range from historical analyses to current action resources.

Potapchuk’s recent writing, “Transforming Organizations by Operationalizing Racial Justice” discusses how we can collectively eradicate structural racism, “… to build power, co-create racially just and liberatory organizations, and fully support and contribute to the racial justice movement.” It is a comprehensive update based on conversations with nonprofit staff who – in the wake of a tidal wave of racist repression – seek a “long-haul approach of transforming their organizations based on an understanding of capitalism, structural racism, colonization, and the system of white supremacy,” and express demands based on “the urgency of taking quick action steps now.” This challenging but common situation highlights that “scaffolding (is often) needed for a transformative change process.” Though difficult, we often need to balance longer-term transformation with urgent action.

Potapchuk also practices liberation by helping connect consultants and coaches to increase knowledge, work through dilemmas, challenge and stretch one another, and share resources. She is one of the core members of the Deep Equity Practitioners Network (DEPn) – a group of colleagues who regularly convene and exchange approaches and learnings from experiments rooted in shared values and aligned around a common frame.

Among other ventures, Potapchuk previously co-led Within Our Lifetime, a ground-breaking organization which launched an anti-racism initiative, #DisruptPhilanthropyNOW! that made space for foundation grantees to speak their truths about ways that funders have done harm and perpetuated racism as a means of influencing philanthropy to change. It is an example of bold truth-telling on the path to liberation. An example was “calling in” a major foundation that pulled funding with little lead time or explanation, even as it proclaimed its commitment to racial equity.

This work experiments with being ever more faithful to a core principle of love in the way that we enter space and hold space, which makes it possible to be present differently and invites clients and colleagues to be explicit about how love shapes their work. It becomes a priority to ask what structure shows love and what tactical ways of demonstrating it. Toward that end, leadership development is an emerging area, for example, work being done by the Leadership Learning Group, which works in partnership with organizations to maximize talent and organizational effectiveness.

This is also a wide-loving invitation to our colleagues, friends, and comrades in the racial justice movement to say ‘enough!’ We need to speak the truth on the impact of the current grantmaking system and practices. We can no longer protect our own resources by being silent when we know one of our funder’s unjust practices have devastating effects on other organizations or in the communities where we work. For us as movement building organizations working to dismantle the system of white supremacy and structural racism, disrupting the philanthropic sector must be part of work. We need to stand in solidarity. We must disrupt inequitable practices and transform the philanthropic sector by redistributing wealth so we collectively end racism within our lifetime.”

—#DisruptPhilanthropyNOW!’s call to action

IX. Building Resilient Organizations

Maurice Mitchell, the National Director of the Working Families Party, recently worked with a group of national movement leaders to explore conflict in social justice and movement organizations, and wrote an essay “Building Resilient Organizations” and a discussion guide to share these ideas.

His approach identifies and seeks to address root problems based on shared values.

Executives in professional social justice institutions, grassroots activists in local movements, and fiery young radicals on protest lines are all advancing urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces.The themes arising are surprisingly consistent. Many claim that our spaces are ‘toxic’ or ‘problematic,’ often sharing compelling and troubling personal anecdotes as evidence of this. People in leadership are finding their roles untenable, claiming it is ‘impossible’ to execute campaigns or saying they are in organizations that are ‘stuck.’”

— Maurice Mitchell

Mitchell argues we must shift movements for justice toward a powerful posture of joy and victory. Such a metamorphosis is not inevitable, but it is essential. Mitchell outlines the ten common trends he believes movement organizations are currently experiencing, and the fallacies inherent in each. Some of these include:

Neoliberal Identity: "Using one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position." The fallacy here is that “while it is true that the ‘personal is political,’ the personal cannot trump strategy nor should it overwhelm the collective interest. Identity is too broad a container to predict one’s politics or the validity of a particular position."
Maximalism: "Considering anything less than the most idealistic position as a betrayal of core values and evidence of corruption, cowardice, lack of commitment, or vision." The fallacy here is that our “organizations and movements need to grow. Holding on to tactics and overly idealistic demands that keep us small but pure ignores the basic strategic imperative of building power.”
The Small War: "Elevating the power dynamics at play among actors internal to a movement over the larger power dynamics in society. In nonprofits or social justice organizations, this often takes the shape of focusing on tensions playing out between junior staff and leadership. In social movements, it may show up as conflicts between movement formations, sectarian ideological groupings, or movement leaders... These battles can implode and rupture institutions, leaving constituencies with less institutional power to wage the broader struggle. Both/and is again a key concept here."

Mitchell describes several other trends and their fallacies including Anti-Leadership Attitudes, Unanchored Care, and others, which we are leaving out for the sake of brevity. He then brings us from the problem to the solution:

Mitchell then shares an outline of the four dimensions of resilient organizations, including key points of each, a sample of which follows below.

All excerpts below are sourced from Maurice Mitchell's Building Resilient Organizations (11/29/2022).

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Structural: The organizational form, roles, and mission. What kind of vehicle are we?
Managers should support and recognize unionization efforts inside movement organizations as a reflection of our values.
Leaders should be clearer and more transparent about where hierarchies exist, why they exist, and where and how decision-making lives. And more….

Ideological: The organizational vision for the world. Where are we going?
Organizations should be trained and retrained in their own ideological location and destination.
Continuing political education should be a cultural norm for all. Ideological education should be offered and promoted movement-wide so that there is a common movement vocabulary. And more….

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Strategic: The organizational plan to advance toward this vision. How do we get there? The organizational vision for the world. Where are we going?
Leaders should ensure that the organizational strategy is clear and understood across the board.
Strategy and theory of change should be the ultimate arbiter of which tactics to employ and demands to make as well as how to assess inevitable compromises in a situation where we have limited power. And more….

Emotional: The organization’s expectations of its people and people’s expectations of the organization in matters of emotional, physical, and spiritual care and well-being. How do we behave on the journey?
See yourself as the center of your work, the establishment, and re-establishment of connection, meaning, and belonging.
Make the celebration of the individual and collective contributions of your people a rigorous practice.
Less experienced leaders or staff should have clarity as to where they are expected to collaborate, contribute, follow, learn, or lead.
Normalize the idea that rigor, seriousness, and excellent work should coexist with fun and joy. And more….

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Mitchell concludes with a call to action to build movements with a vision for joy, power, and victory. He believes our people deserve mass movements that exude joy, build power, and secure critical victories for the masses of working people.

Such movements would be irresistible. People associated with these change projects would themselves exhibit liberatory values, including the practice of radical compassion and humility.

He also writes that we are closer than we think to such a reality. “We must go through a humbling but necessary period of change to achieve it. We must call out fallacies that weaken us, even when it’s hard and we face criticism for it. And we must meet our problems with grounded solutions … on the other side of the uncomfortable journey is an abundant, playful, and powerful home for our freedom dreams. Will we choose it?”

Collective Care and Sustainability

X. Nonprofits as Models of Participatory Democracy

The Nonprofit Democracy Network (NDN) first emerged through gatherings of movement leaders in September 2017 and March 2019 to share and spread liberatory approaches.

The network brings attention, energy, and resources to make nonprofit workplaces models of participatory democracy. Sustainable Economies Law Center provided support for launching the network, including staff time and an online platform, with the purpose of cultivating experiments that depart from typical organizational structures.

Beyond the inaugural gatherings, the network has identified and shared resources, as well as provided a platform for self-initiated workshops and conversations among staff and capacity builders.

With a liberatory impulse, the focus is not on deliverables, quantifiable metrics, polished programs, practices with tools and instructional manuals, quick shifts, or readily defined impact. Instead, the network looks to increase the extent to which the relationships, culture, and governance of the organization enacts values of justice, community, and sustainability while creating the potential for systemic transformation with the vision of a liberated, resilient, and dynamic movement capable of solving social problems at their roots. Emphasis is on the risky, the creative, and the experimental.

A recent peer group session offered by the Nonprofit Democracy Network, “Feminist Economies: Collective Care and Sustainability” (August 2023) involved shared pre-readings and discussions on the balance of Collective Care and Sustainability in democratic workplaces that embody the urgency of markets and philanthropy. One session focused on exploring the collective subversion of markets and the NonProfit Industrial Complex.

Other sessions focused on how to organize a workplace transition to democratic practices by:

Earlier, NDN offered a 15-month cohort learning program, “Collaborate to Co-Liberate: Structures and Practices for Democratic Organizations,” (see resources section in this report) providing a wide-ranging exploration of best practices and living models of liberatory organizational culture, structure, and practice. Containing over 12 modules, it aimed to examine some of the stickiest and most challenging questions facing social movement organizations striving to build organizational structures that exemplify their values of a more inclusive, democratic, embodied, and life-giving world.

The modules together present a journey along the iterative, dynamic, and spiraling path through organizational transformation.

Alliance And Movement Building For Liberatory Governance And Economies

I. People's Assemblies, Radical Electoral Politics, and Transforming the Economy

Operating out of Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson serves as an important example of building the bold vision and the skills to engage governments in ways that lead to deep, transformative change. Widely known in circles of people focused on reimagining the political economy, Cooperation Jackson calls for an “ecosocialist future” by creating transformation on the ground now.

Their long-term vision is to develop a cooperative network based in Jackson, Mississippi which will consist of four interconnected and interdependent institutions: a federation of local worker cooperatives, a cooperative incubator, a cooperative education and training center (the Kuwasi Balagoon Center for Economic Democracy and Development), and a cooperative bank or financial institution.

Cooperation Jackson’s theory of change is centered on the position that organizing and empowering the structurally under and unemployed sectors of the working class, particularly from Black and Latino communities, to build worker organized and owned cooperatives will be a catalyst for the democratization of our economy and society overall. It uses tools of the solidarity economy, and changes lives through principles of decolonization, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-heterosexism, and degrowth. The work includes a community land trust, creating and connecting worker-owned cooperatives, collective self-help in times of crisis (for example, water access and trash disposal), and organizing against public policies that are repressive and colonizing.

Kali Akuno, a cofounder and codirector of Cooperation Jackson, recently shared reflections with NPQ on the organization’s work and 10th Anniversary. He reflects on how their post-Katrina Just Reconstruction work was the impetus to “create and push for the creation of the Jackson-Kush Plan” that “we released in 2012. Within that, we identified three priorities. First, broad democratic decision-making bodies through People’s Assemblies; second, pushing a radical agenda through electoral politics by electing candidates that would come from the community and the assemblies, so independent electoral politics; and third, transforming the base of the economy in and around a solidarity economy, around economic democracy. Cooperation Jackson was explicitly born to be a tool of this strategy.”

II. Reparations

Another form of resourcing change with great potential, reparations can implement liberation at and beyond the organizational level. As a vital part of liberation, it makes recompense for ways the system has virulently and violently denied resources that targeted groups require to live and thrive. It is the remedy to the hoarding that is characteristic of our social and economic order.

The National African American Reparations Commission voices the goal of “reparatory justice, compensation, and restoration of African-American communities that were plundered by the historical crimes of slavery, segregation, and colonialism and that continue to be victimized by the legacies of slavery and American apartheid.” The Commission’s 10-point Plan calls for a full range of methods, not limited to payments of some type.

Reparations could resource efforts to foster repair that includes culture change, healing, new organizational forms, and innovative efforts to distribute wealth differently. It is relevant to groups beyond African Americans. As an example, Equity in the Center, an organization with which RoadMap has partnered, took the initiative to contribute $40,000 of its funds to land rematriation of Indigenous people.

At the heart of liberatory practice is radically sharing resources. This raises hard questions for practitioners to grapple with:

What might it look like inside of our own capacity-building (coaching, consulting, training, accompanying) practices?
What does liberatory practice look like in the ways we compose our teams and do the work?
Finally, what does liberatory practice look like in the resources we provide to organizations with which we work, and beyond?

III. National Liberation and Organizing Inside Government:

When asked about liberatory governance, Elsa Ríos of Strategies for Social Change reflected on her time in the Puerto Rican independence movement decades ago. She and her colleagues worked to envision a liberated, independent Puerto Rico, and how to bring about the deep social, economic, and political transitions this would entail.

This shaped her work today, and how she thinks about community liberation and governance. Despite being one of the oldest colonies still in existence, people in Puerto Rico are creating alternative local governance structures and practicing a liberation mindset by developing networks of cooperatives such as Organización Boricua de Agricultura Ecológica and community-wide solar energy projects, led by groups such as Casa Pueblo.

For additional learning and inspiration, she urges us to look at liberation movements throughout the world, and those of sovereign Native American Nations as well as others who are advancing decolonization efforts.

An essential marker in the road to our collective liberation is our ability to practice and experiment with community governance structures and various inside/outside strategies that are a precursor to large-scale liberation. Elsa cites Race Forward’s Government Alliance on Racial Equity (GARE), a network that works to advance the leadership and efficacy of racial equity advocates embedded within local governments, as one example. GARE works to transform local governments from the inside. Work like this, she says, requires a corollary outside strategy for building community governance models that will prepare us for building a more robust liberatory future.

Chapter 4

Practicing Liberation at RoadMap

As noted at the beginning of this report, conditions have shifted dramatically over the past decades. Social justice organizations and movements are working to address an accelerating climate crisis, the growth of white nationalism and state violence, and an increasing political divide.

As they fight these external threats, they simultaneously face the internal threats of suffering and trauma from the pandemic and from political violence, disruptions within movement organizations, and lack of movement infrastructure and impact. The change in conditions demands a change in our movement-building strategy and approach.

Practicing Liberation is not a new concept. Current conditions, however, make it more relevant than ever. The contradictions in our “democratic” society are stark, with growing wealth disparity, increased racial and political oppression and violence, setbacks in the rights of people of color, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ communities, autocratic threats to our already weak democracy, and a climate crisis that feels more undeniable and pressing by the day.

Practicing Liberation can help us understand and counter these threats by addressing them at their root. On an individual level, it can help us embody the values we are fighting for. It can help us relate to each other with understanding, compassion, and curiosity for the sake of deep change. It can support us in building powerful organizations and movements aligned with our values of interdependence, equity, and justice. And it can guide us in making structural change.

At its heart, Practicing Liberation is about getting to the root causes of the challenges we face, recognizing their interdependence, and making deep change aligned with our values. This work is not easy or sure. But without a focused collective effort to address the roots of oppression in our society and how they live in us, our prospects are grim.

RoadMap, as an organization that connects experienced consultants to social justice organizations and alliances, has the potential for greater impact in strengthening movements.

The depth and variety of liberatory approaches in use today is inspiring, as is apparent in the previous sections of this document. RoadMap has attracted a range of consultants with deep experience in social justice work. Many worked on the front lines of organizing and movement building for years and decades, and bring deep personal experience in building organizations and movements.

But current conditions necessitate deeper collective experimentation in how to defeat authoritarian movements, build a deeply impactful movement for social justice, and move toward a collaborative, just, equitable, and peaceful society.

As consultants, we know we are not the drivers of change. But our support to front-line organizations can help them create democratic, impactful organizations, alliances, and movements that can move us towards a more equitable and sustainable society.

RoadMap is being called to bring a more liberatory approach to the organizations it serves. In our meetings and interviews with RoadMap consultants and other social justice leaders, we heard several priorities for the network:

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RoadMap has recently restructured itself as an independent organization. In our new form, we strive to learn from the organizations we serve, and from others who have gone before us in this transformative work.

We will work to be a thought partner to movement organizations – generating and sharing new ideas and frameworks, and engaging in conversations around movement building as thought partners with the social justice leaders, organizations, and alliances we serve. This means asking questions and inviting all of us into bigger conversations.

We will support writing by network members to highlight bright spots – tools and strategies that can significantly advance movement work and impact. We will work with and help organize funders for this work. We are already working to bring liberatory approaches to our work with organizations and alliances around unionization, management and equitable compensation, racial justice within organizations, and approaches to conflict resolution.

We welcome feedback on this document and will hold forums with our client organizations and allies for reflections and input. We invite questions and suggestions from any and all readers. We want to go deeper in our exploration and practice of this work and are just getting started on our journey. We offer thanks and gratitude to all the individuals and organizations highlighted in the paper, and look forward to continuing our exploration with you.

Acknowledgement of Contributors

RoadMap Consultants Who Participated in Initial Discussions on Liberatory Strategies and Practices in the Spring of 2022:

RoadMap Consultants and Leaders in the Field Interviewed by RoadMap in 2022 and 2023:

Resources for Liberatory Strategy and Practice

Participant Bios

Angélica Otero

Angélica has 25 years of experience in the field of social justice as a founder and executive director, organizing trainer, professor, coach, and a longtime community organizer of several justice organizations in the United States and Ecuador. She brings a deep understanding of intersectionality, and an unwavering commitment to racial, gender, and economic justice. Her work includes supporting grassroots organizations to build strong memberships, develop leadership, and create campaigns that support groups to win concrete changes in their communities. She has experience in organizational change, strategic planning, management, and supervision systems. Angélica has experience in leading racial justice processes including creating space for courageous conversations and developing organizational plans for a racial justice journey. Her methodology of coaching and facilitation works to create space for people to build intimacy and trust. This encourages trust, candid conversation, and shared lived experiences that ultimately yield knowledge and solutions for transforming oppression; and creating solutions for how to structure organizations in service of their vision and mission. Angélica is a Black, Indigenous, Queer, Immigrant, Latine, Woman living in NYC with her fun-loving and curious daughter.

Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. has been involved in social justice work ever since he was a teenager. He has been active in the labor movement through his work as a welder in a shipyard and through working for various labor unions. Bill at one point served as a senior staff person in the national AFL-CIO. While working for the Service Employees International Union in the 1990’s he aided and strategized with local unions to help them achieve their goals. Bill is the former president of TransAfrica Forum, the author of several publications – nonfiction and fiction, and has served as a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. degree in government in 1976.

Brigette Rouson

Brigette Rouson, JD, MA, CPC (she/li/ella), principal of Rouson Associates, brings more than 25 years’ experience building capacity to create a just society. Brigette seeks to connect self-transformation to social transformation. She has consulted to over 250 groups, independently or with nonprofit capacity building groups. Her organizational development focuses on BIPOC/global majority-led liberation groups, especially governance, organizational assessment, and change processes. A graduate of Blooming Willow’s Black Conductors program, and certified by the International Coaching Federation, she supports changemakers to grow and heal toward collective liberation. Earlier, as Alliance for Nonprofit Management program director, Brigette co-founded a capacity-builders of color network that sparked field-wide equity initiatives. Previously at Ms. Foundation for Women, she directed girls’ and young women’s leadership grantmaking with a $4 million collaborative focused on gender justice, racial equity, and intergenerational power-sharing. Brigette is a co-founder and board member of Diverse City Fund, which makes grants for social justice work by BIPOC/global majority people in the nation’s capital, and served as an early co-convenor of a regional funders’ group, Resourcing Radical Justice. She is involved in local organizing and activism, including faith-based initiatives. A graduate of Howard University (B.A.), Georgetown University (J.D.), and University of Pennsylvania (M.A.) she completed all coursework toward a Ph.D. in communications with cultural anthropology approaches.

Carol Cantwell

Since 2004, Carol Cantwell has been the Chief Officer of a consulting practice she founded, focused on creating and supporting the financial health of social justice organizations. Her organization, Fun with Financials, works with social justice nonprofits to help them build durable and long-lasting financial systems that they understand to the fullest extent. Carol teaches leaders, staff members, and board members how to read and effectively analyze income statements, balance sheets, budgets, and other financial statements. When working with foundation boards and staff, she stresses the responsibility that funders have to understand all the details surrounding grantee financial information. Using examples from recent grant dockets, she teaches funders how to read and understand financial statements that are requested. Carol recommends that funders focus on financial information that grantees have at hand instead of asking for budgets.

Clay Smith

Clay Smith has worked in social justice organizing for over 30 years. He is currently an independent consultant and coach to social justice organizations and alliances. He supports them in developing strategic plans, shifting their organizational culture and structure for greater impact and sustainability, and developing effective supervision and management systems, among other areas of work. He also provides somatic coaching to organizational leaders, staff, and members. Previously, Clay was a founder and leader of Social Justice Leadership, which introduced organizers around the country to a model of transformative organizing that integrates deep personal change, impactful grassroots organizing, and political analysis. He developed and led training in all these areas, supported groups in organizational development, and coached individual leaders. He was on staff at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition for over a decade, and served as its interim director. He also worked as an organizer at the Stamford Organizing Project, an innovative multi-union alliance. Recent consulting and coaching clients include Right to The City, Make the Road New York, Mano en Mano, United We Dream, and others. Clay lives in Upper Manhattan with his partner, son, and dog.

Cole Krawitz

Cole Krawitz (he/him/his) brings 25 years of community organizing, transformational leadership coaching, social change communications, and creative arts to his experience as a spiritually-rooted certified transformational coach, facilitator, poet, singer and direct action organizer.

He is a 45-year-old doykait believer, a teenage cancer survivor living with the long term impacts of treatment and chronic illness, a gratitude practitioner, a trans, queer, white Ashkenazi Jewish ritual leader, a caring uncle, an award-winning writer and poet, and leadership coach who for over twenty years has been working across liberation and social justice movements for freedom and dignity for everyone.

As a writer, Cole has been awarded poetry residencies and fellowships from Summer Literary Seminars, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Lambda Literary Foundation, and Makor/92nd Street Y. He’s been a Lecturer in Creative Writing in the Master of Arts in English Program at Holy Names University and in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People Program at University of California, Berkeley. Cole’s writing and translations have been published in Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics, Tidal Basin Review, Zeek, The Forward, NewsDay, The Advocate, and more. He’s also performed his work throughout the Bay Area at Lit Crawl, Museum of Performance & Design, San Francisco Public Library, Bay Area Poetry Marathon, SOMArts Cultural Center, and the National Queer Arts Festival.

He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Poetry, from Lesley University’s low-residency program and a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Smith College. Cole was also a Jewish Community Fellow at the Graduate Theological Union in 2019-2020. He lives on Lisjan Ohlone land and is a monthly contributor to the Shuumi Land Tax to support the critical work of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.

Cole is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, leads and facilitates Jewish ritual offerings and was recently selected to be a participant on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. You’ll often find Cole singing, ambling amidst the redwoods, rose gardens and flowering neighborhood blocks, and embracing the joy of Shabbat.