“Collective care feels like an exhale — like finally being able to breathe at work.”
– Nilou Khonsari
Most organizations that say they value collective care don’t actually build for it. They write values statements, flatten a few org chart lines, and hope the culture follows. (spoiler: it doesn’t.)
Nilou Khonsari spent ten years co-building Pangaea Legal Services, a nationally recognized immigrant justice nonprofit, into a model of what collective governance actually looks like in practice. Through her book The Future Is Collective, she helps organizations build structures that truly reflect their values.
Anna and Janel did a full winter book club around this one. We ate it up. Janel read every word of the appendices.
This conversation gets into hardcore collective scaffolding:
- The difference between advice process, modified consensus, and consent-based decision making
- What Nilou learned from almost paying her co-founder $1,000 less than herself
- How equal pay worked beautifully at Pangaea for years, until it didn’t
- How to redesign a nonprofit board so the people closest to the work are the ones driving it
- Boundaries as a collective practice, not a personal one
And woven throughout: Strange Birds’ own messy, ongoing, in-progress attempt to enact a lot of this fun stuff ourselves.
ACTION ITEMS:
- Does your organization have a decision-making process? What values does it reflect?
- What’s one value your business holds that isn’t documented anywhere yet? What would happen if a new person arrived without knowing it?
- Think about someone in your life who models boundaries well. What do they do specifically?
Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.
When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.
Listen anywhere podcasts roost (except Spotify).
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mBfJ3tii6lk
Learn more about Nilou Khonsari: https://www.niloukhonsari.com/
Learn more about The Future is Collective: https://www.niloukhonsari.com/thebook
Learn more about Bala Rising, Nilou’s consulting practice: https://www.balarising.org/
Follow Nilou Khonsari on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/niloufar-khonsari-4aaa6324/
The SELC: https://www.theselc.org/resources
RadOps: https://radops.substack.com/p/resources
Subscribe for easy access to transcripts, show notes, our secret insider thoughts on the interviews… and the occasional goof reel.
Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:00] Anna: Welcome to Flying The Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who it should work for. We are Janel and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company Strange Birds into a worker owned co op.
[00:00:22] Janel: And today we are interviewing Nilou Khonsari. Author, facilitator, lawyer, consultant, coach, advocate, social justice leader, community organizer. Shall we go on? I’m sure we’ll discover some other hats along the way. Nilou was the co founder of Pangea Legal Services, a non profit immigrant justice organization that became a nationally recognized model for collaborative governance and care centered culture. Right up our alley. Clearly, Nilou now supports groups in building structures that actually reflect their values, whether through governance that’s rooted in shared power and healing centered leadership, or practices that center care and accountability.
Anna and I have had a winter book club around the Future is Collective that I’ll hold up here for our many video viewers. This is Nilou’s recently published book. It tells a bunch of great stories that are enormously inspiring, but also serves as a really practical guidebook towards anybody who wants to start implementing some of these things themselves. We’ve been obsessed with it and we have a feeling some of you out there will be soon too.
[00:01:24] Anna: So let’s start this interview, shall we? We’re going to start big and broad.
What does it mean to have a workplace that practices collective care?
[00:01:34] Nilou: Yeah, thank you for that question and thank you for the introduction. I really appreciate it. The. Yeah, what does it mean to have collective care? It’s. It means we have shared language as a start, as a foundation, people are free to speak, make proposals. There’s an empowerment among workers to express both needs and solutions, not just complain or not just have this like sense of fear. Am I going to lose my job if I ask for something? And there’s also not this gossip culture of gossip in the office where people are. It’s a form of power, really gossip, or people are complaining behind the scenes, but instead there’s like a space where folks are empowered to speak and bring forward ideas and solutions.
[00:02:26] Anna: So you touched on it a little bit, but can you talk through the feelings behind it? I think that collective care, horizontal hierarchies, these are all words that are thrown around a bit now in the business world. And sometimes Janel. I’m not gonna speak for Janel. I feel like it’s a lot of lip service and not a lot of actual practice. If you are in a space, what. How do you know you are in a workspace with collective care? Like the feelings inside.
[00:02:52] Nilou: Yeah. The, the feeling. I would say the.
The underlying feeling is like a.
An ease, like a breath, an exhale. Oh, this is. This feels just light, I would say. And there’s a.
The underlying need that a lot of us have as workers, as humans in general, of being heard, being listened to, being really understood.
That need is met in a collective care space, and not just by the culture and the lip service, but also structurally and the way that the organization designs its policies and moves forward and its actual practices in the organization.
[00:03:38] Anna: It makes me think a lot about when Janel came on. So I had run Strange Birds on my own for six years, and then here’s this magical new bird in the nest flock. I’m going to stop the metaphor. And we’ve known each other for a really long time. And so I think we started with this assumption that, yeah, we’ll figure it out. We have more than almost two decades of mutual trust built up.
We quickly realized we were very wrong.
We needed to build structures around how we specifically showed up in this space. And I think that’s what I really appreciated about your book is that it talked not just the vibe, but creating the systems that ensure it stays in place. So Janel and I have quite a few systems now to make sure that we’re showing up for each other, specifically as business partners, but also maintain our very weird, nerdy friendship.
[00:04:29] Janel: I think there’s something here not just about the underlying vibes, but also underlying beliefs, because I’m imagining talking to a lot of more capitalistic optimization at all costs up into the right entrepreneurs that I know about putting in some of these structures. And I can hear in my head the immediate response being, but that’s not human nature. Humans are going to gossip. Humans are not going to take care of each other like that. And this, like being so intentional about setting up things that stand in sharp contrast to that, I think has to rest on some very different fundamental beliefs about who we are and how we’re capable of showing up for each other.
[00:05:07] Nilou: That resonates so much. I think that the, yeah, the framework or where we start with who we are as human beings, it can vary. But I, My, my view and what I kind of share in the book is a lot of us, a lot of the indigenous practices, a lot of our, like, origins, if we look back at most cultures, are and were very collective in many ways. And there has been a lot of rupture to that over time. And in a lot of ways where many groups and many people are coming back to that, some of Those origins and some of the. This idea of collectivism that’s not novel or cutting edge, it’s really ancient in practice and in our values as human beings.
[00:05:54] Anna: Yeah, and I think there’s something, when you talk about collective care, collective governance, it seems so obvious and I agree. We’ve forgotten how to do it. And once you. It just takes some practice.
We’re gonna. Something that you cover in your book. This is just basically an interview that’s turning into a book club. So in your book you talked about various decision making models and I think that might be a nice segue. Here. We’re talking about this collective care, collective governance working together towards specific goals instead of these hierarchical, very top down, power driven structures. So can you give the listeners a basic lesson on different decision making models? Because I think that especially in the United States, decision making model equals one person says yes or no or you vote on it and it’s majority wins. Right. Those are like the two options, but there’s a lot more out there. So can you talk through some more options for people?
[00:06:54] Nilou: Yes. I love that question, Anna, because it touches on what you, what we talked about, healing front, which is people feel heard and understood and listened to in organizations that are collectively led. And decision making is such a key part of creating that feeling the way that we hold it. And what we see in a lot of organizations is decisions or the organizations that want to be collective, that say smash the hierarchy or that are. That are looking to be very participatory. A lot of times there’s either a lot of talk and process, people get stuck in the process and no decisions are made or they’re made after long periods of time. It just sucks up everybody’s time, energy, resources or some discussion happens. But the loudest voices in the room are the ones that move a project forward or the decisions forward.
And neither of those are really collective, even though folks often go into it in the spirit of collectivism and the structure is not there.
So I want to share three of my favorite decision making tools and they’re all described in the book along with additional tools.
One is the advice process, the other is a modified consensus decision making process.
And a third is consent, different from consensus. So advice process.
In simple terms, it just means there’s one decider.
So if we are a team of five, one of us decides on like most or all of certain topics. Now let’s say I’m on your team here and I’m the point person lead. And as if we’re using the advice process I make decisions, final decisions on all things relating to fundraising. But the part that makes it collective and aligned with these values of collectivism and collective governance is I have to under the advice process, consult with those with the most expertise. So if Janel or Anna, if one of you have the most expertise, I consult with one of you or both of you on a particular fundraising topic or and consult with somebody with the most expertise and the person that’s most directly impacted. So I’m applying for a grant that’s going to heavily increase your load, Janel, your workload. You’re going to be consulted.
So that’s the basic rule advice process. One decider and two most impacted and most expertise are consulted in the organization.
That’s one form of decision making. It’s collective, even though there’s still one person because of the way that consulting and feedback is brought into it and expected. Then there’s modified consensus. Modified consensus is not I like it more than consensus as a whole because as organizations grow it becomes harder to reach full consensus.
And one specific example might be a consensus essentially means everyone agrees. But you create subcommittees on who gets to decide on certain things. And I would suggest having no more on most matters, everyday matters having no more than three to five people using a modified consensus or consensus decision making process.
So in that within that everyone votes in a consensus model and in modified consensus you can say for example, that we need three out of five votes or we need four out of five strong yes votes and you can use a scale on how strong your yes is. But you it’s modified in that you don’t need full consensus. One person doesn’t block or one dissent doesn’t block the entire decision. That’s what I like about modified consensus. And modified consensus is really great and important to use in larger groups even beyond five or 10 people for big decisions that impact a lot of people and that don’t have a high, very time sensitive turnaround.
The things that you can, you can, you can take some, a little bit more time around consent.
I love that. I love the consent based decision making for decisions that are, that are time sensitive, that need a short turnaround. And it essentially means you’re not getting consensus from everybody. Consent means you’re. No one is reasonably objecting. And the objection is a very high standard. It has to be something significant like it harms the reputation of the organization. Taking this money would harm the reputation of our organization or it would create some other kind of significant harm on us. Not I object because I don’t I have reservations about the person that’s giving us money.
I don’t like them. I don’t like their style of communicating with us.
That would not reach that level. Consent. You can send a message in a, in an email saying this is this. We need to make a decision the next 24 hours. Any objections? Please raise major concerns and move things forward. And that’s a nice tool to have and folks can use a combination of those. But my bottom line recommendation around decision making is we all should have one default type of decision making in our organizations, in our collectives, so that things can move forward with clarity.
[00:12:19] Anna: Yeah, we use consensus in our cooperative and have defined it like what you said about there’s a bar that has to be met for an objective objection. It’s a principled objection versus personal preference.
So it’s like the difference between I just don’t want the color blue versus the color blue means this in my culture. Therefore, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a different conversation.
[00:12:43] Janel: This is what we’ve come up with and are in the process of codifying. We have our bylaws written, almost ready to sign, fingers crossed. Next month. But this is something that works really well for us too, and that we’ve imagined working pretty well for a third person as well. We hope to expand sometime in the coming years. I’ll put a plural at the end.
[00:13:04] Nilou: Of that, but.
[00:13:07] Janel: It’S very much designed around us. And I’d be interested in hearing about how organizations can either transition into these kind of more collective ways of decision making or maybe if they already are there, transitioning to incorporating another kind to change, to map to the way that they’ve grown. How do you recognize when it’s time to make decisions in a different way?
[00:13:31] Nilou: Oh, how do you recognize. Some organizations recognize it proactively, and I work with some of those. And I’m just in awe and love seeing that because it prevents so much heartache and crisis moments. But other organizations, including in my organization, we hit a crisis point.
And a crisis point means, like, some level of conflict that’s beyond the, like small, everyday minor conflicts. And I think most organizations reach that point of realizing when there is a conflict and a crisis moment, and that’s okay. That’s a nice opportunity. Crisis moments are real great opportunities for growth and learning and shifting and so that we can wait for that or we can be proactive. It’s really up to us. And there really is never a good time because there’s. It takes time. One consultant we Worked with Kiran Nigam. She they described the. They suggested to us, you need to dedicate 30% of your time on governance, on your internal work. And we said from where we’re working 150% of the time, like you want us to add another 30. That’s a lot. But it was real. And that number stuck with me because I see now and I saw in the, as I was in it in my organization at Pangea where I worked for 10 years building collective structures that, that time and that investment was really necessary. And in the short term, yes, it was a lot of time. But in the long term it led to so much efficiency, higher retention, people being satisfied and engaged in the work rather than checking out and the quiet quitting that folks are talking about. And there was just like a meaningful drive towards the mission because we dedicated that time internally. So that’s, that’s one piece of it. The other piece is organizations in terms of scaling. In the book I describe organizations as small as two staff and then as large as 3,000 staff in the organizations that are practicing various forms and ranges of collective care and collective governance. And in the appendices there are, I have over 50 pages of tools and resources for ranges of organizations that people can take and adapt their samples. They’re not blueprints, but there are resources that folks are so welcome to use and any one of them is a great starting point, whatever fits. And there’s no one size fits all. I’ll say this as a starting point for growth for your organization, your collective of two. Right now, one thing that I’ve seen as organizations grow into larger numbers, you know, up to they grow, they start with a founder and then you have suddenly you have 10 people on staff or six, seven people on staff. What happens is a lot of information is in the founders heads and it’s not documented.
I’m seeing some nods and smiles and covering the mouth. Okay, listen, I.
[00:16:29] Anna: The amount of knowledge and like information that is still in my head that I after how many, two, almost three years of Janel being here that I’m still trying to get out of my brain.
[00:16:40] Nilou: And it’s a process.
You’re not alone. And that’s it’s real. One thing that as you grow, I would invite you and organizations in a similar stage or position who hold a lot of information in their heads, where leaders hold information in their heads to begin documenting or to begin getting support. As you bring in interns, have them interview you and write down some of the practices and get them on paper.
I’M seeing a face. Janel, what. What are you thinking?
[00:17:13] Janel: Such a good idea. Because there’s never, it’s like you said, until you reach that crisis point, until there’s this like on fire impetus, you just don’t do it because you’re doing other things. You’re running around, you wear many hats, whatever. But if you, if we had somebody interview us, a lot would surface that would be like, oh, that actually is an important thing maybe to mention upfront when we’re going to grow. I’m reminded of the bit in the book where I think in the midst of hiring on your third person, you hadn’t mentioned upfront that you have equal pay across all roles. And that was such a stumbling point because you hadn’t mentioned it before. And then the person tried to negotiate and then it was like, oh, wait a second, that’s not what we do. But we didn’t tell them. And it’s just, it’s up here. Right? And, and because it, it wasn’t documented in. This is how we onboard somebody even from first point of contact, all that stuff has to be worked out in advance. So that’s a great idea to have a way to surface that.
[00:18:06] Nilou: Yes, having starting to document things is one thing. And another really great foundational point is once you’re. You have a community, like a group of a few people, more than two, I would say, but even a. With two to start with this shared language around values. And a lot of times organizations have values written that are very external facing for the community and the work or that supports the mission. But what I’m talking about is more like a points of unity. Values that are both internal and can be external. So it’s essentially like the constitution, your like internal constitution, the values that you run by. And as you start writing down some of your practices and policies to reference and draw and highlight the values that you have as a foundation going forward.
[00:18:56] Anna: A favorite phrase that we use here a lot is simple containers for complex work. And when you have those values clearly written down and they’re in an active practice, it makes difficult decisions feel unnecessarily easier, but faster. We just had to go through a couple difficult decisions recently that we were like, no, this actually doesn’t really vibe with us. We need to like reach out. We need to have these conversations. And I think if we hadn’t been so clear on who we are as an organization, that would have been a much harder conversation or it might never have happened and we would have just continued on going, oh, this doesn’t feel very good and we don’t really know why.
[00:19:38] Janel: Yeah, it is. It’s uncomfortable nevertheless. But we have clarity on what is right for us. The value that’s live for us that I think we reference the most often is maybe the simplest. Just. We are humans first. I think we wrote that down in our very first pre me joining summit. And it is the one that I think about on a daily basis. It drives so many decisions that I make both between the two of us with my relationship to myself, my relationship to clients. Because we’re humans first. And like to borrow a phrase from you, Nilou, life happens.
You know it. And that helps guide so much of how we exist as a business.
[00:20:18] Anna: Yeah. And how we interact with our clients and also subcontractors. We’re subcontract with someone for the first time. And we had an important call with the client scheduled and they were like, I just. I don’t feel very well. I can push through. And we were like, absolutely not. We will reschedule.
Please go feel better. And so it’s not just advocating for ourselves in the business, but it’s for our subcontractors and also for our clients. There’s. How many times, Janel, have we told a client to please reschedule. You are so sick. Go take or go take care of your kid. Why are you on this call? This isn’t important. Nothing is on fire.
[00:20:51] Nilou: It sounds like it’s really served you already having your values or one of your values really shine through in your day to day work. And that’s. Yeah, that’s so important and wonderful to also have written down and weave into written guides and policies for future staff and colleagues.
[00:21:12] Janel: To go back to the story that I made quick reference to about equal pay because I think that’s one of the things that people are most shocked by when we tell them that’s how we operate. And I’m certain that you also maybe got a lot of. You’ve probably gotten a lot of feedback of people being surprised. That’s how you up. I’d love to know more about how you landed there, what barriers you had to overcome to get there.
[00:21:34] Nilou: Yeah, I landed there. Not initially by. By suggesting it off the bat. I. I did have this model, the worker cooperative model from Argentina in mind where I had witnessed workers in Argentina who had rebuilt and recuperated factories that after a massive economic crisis that were sharing leadership and rotating leadership in different ways and distributed resources based on people’s needs in the organization or in their businesses. And what I had learned there was some workers would get paid more because they had four children or one worker got paid more, a little bit more because their mother was ill and they needed to cover their medical fees. And it was a very need based salary situation. And even, and even though that was in my mind this cooperative, very humane way of leadership, collective leadership. As I was starting out Pangea Legal Services, my own nonprofit that I co founded, was my colleague Marie. When it came to hire Marie on as a full time employee, I proposed paying her $1,000 less a year than myself. And that was really nominal in given the times and given the small salary we already were starting with. But my board member who was also very much aligned with shared leadership and the values of. We had spoken about the goals of the organization to be collectively led. She asked me a simple question, why?
And that just led me to unpack a lot of these conventional norms and stories that were, had become a part of me that we value, we put place value on more education or we had the same amount of education. She was a lawyer, I was a lawyer. I had a few more years of experience out of law school than her. But there was, there were a lot of conventional norms. And what I was not looking at the moment in my practice was we were actually both, we were both co founders. We, Marie and I had started Pangea at the same time and she had laid a lot of the foundations and done a great deal of the work and was really, she was a co leader. And I had to deconstruct these conventions and norms and what success meant and what leadership and titles and all of these things meant and how that’s tied to salary and what that means. So that was a part of the process. And then later on as we grew I, I agreed with my board members question like why? And we decided to set an equal salary for all our staff and not just for me and her, but all future staff coming forward.
And what was really easy with that process was there was no negotiation when we brought on new people, not like other organizations where you have to spend a lot of time and resources defending and deciding and dealing with all these inequities, the issues of equity. Somebody is a better negotiator so they get better pay or somebody doesn’t ask and they don’t get it. We did not have to deal with that ever during my whole 10 years at Pangea because our salaries were equal. The other thing that was relatively easy was our salaries were already so low below market and below what is a living wage in the San Francisco Bay area where we, where our offices were, where we lived. And we agreed very easefully that everyone in the organization needed to get to a living wage. And we based it based on the MIT living wage calculator. In the US Everyone needs to get to a living wage before we even consider having staggered salaries or a different structure. Let’s get everyone to the base. And so that was, that was easy. What was hard down the line and that we, that we struggled with down the line was the market rate salaries. We never got to market rate salaries for certain positions and roles, for example attorneys or executive directors or we didn’t have EDs anymore where everybody became a director at the end. But the, the, especially for the attorney salaries, we, once we reached a certain level of seniority and experience and expertise, our attorney and positions in our lives, like some of our attorneys and staff started having families and they needed more salary and all of the extra time, the four day work week, the benefits, all the flexibility, those benefits were not enough. People just needed more salary. And certain attorneys in the market could get double or triple the salary working in other places and or significantly like tens of thousands of dollars more working at another nonprofit. And we started not, we started to have some transitions and, and I would say equal pay worked great for Pangea for a certain amount of time. I do not think that was what we needed by the time I transitioned. I think that we actually needed some level of scaling and a reckoning with the market forces and balancing the two.
[00:26:53] Anna: Who knows, Janel, maybe in a few years time we’re going to come to this right? But money is a complicated thing and it always is complicated. And I think if you practice collective governance and collective care from day one, those conversations are made a little bit easier because people like you said at the beginning of this interview, people feel comfortable saying, hey, raise their hand.
This isn’t working for me anymore. I want to stay here. This is how it will continue working for me.
What can we do? What can we do as a group together? But a question that I really want to ask is about nonprofit boards. Pangea Legal Services was a nonprofit. Nonprofits have to have a board.
And there is a very typical board structure. So typical that it just feels like this is how they must be structured. The board is there to hire the executive director and make big, yes, no strategic decisions. And then the staff does the work. And it is a, it’s a. I have always thought it was a weird power dynamic that personally made not a lot of sense to me.
And Pangea set up their board in a way that’s quite different from that. So I would love for you to walk through the paint us a basic picture of how you set up the board that also worked within the collective governance. I think that was key. Right? You can have a staff be collectively governing each other, but when you add a board structure to it and how do you integrate that?
[00:28:20] Nilou: Yeah, that’s key and that’s. The board is usually where I see organizations struggle, especially when they’re shifting from a more conventional structure to a collective structure.
Boards are always the slowest to come along because it makes sense. They only spend a limited number of hours volunteering their time to the organization staff. We’re, when we’re full time, we’re working a average of 2,080 hours a year.
Boards maybe 60 a year volunteer time.
So that extreme like disparity and lived experience and expertise about the organization is just, is a really like key starting point to how we want to direct the amount of power. When, when I was setting out to start Pangea, one of the, one of our first board members, Michelle Gaudet, was a, was very much aligned, had been working in a collectively led nonprofit and brought some of that expertise.
So that I think was key. And I would say that adding on and making sure there was always one, at least one, ideally two people on the board on a small, relatively small board who lead and move that vision of collectivism forward on the board is essential and is really important.
And when organizations are shifting, I would definitely recommend two people so who can be supported by each other. So it’s not just one person against a whole crowd.
The other thing that, that we did, as we developed and grew more advanced with our board member, Sarah Stevens expertise, who came from another collectively led organization, we passed a resolution on our board that explicitly said Pangea is going to be a worker self directed nonprofit.
So it made it concrete that board members are here to support.
The staff will direct the major vision, strategic direction, even the budget. But the board maintains its duties of loyalty and care, the standard practices and duties. Our board always still approved our budget or asked questions about our budget.
Our board did bring in expertise. They taught us. One of our board members, George Madrigal, he taught us like how to make budgets in a really like high standards kind of way. He brought in a lot of his financial expertise from the financial markets world and our board members brought in resources. And it was very different from what you started off with, Anna, that the boards are these big bosses that are driving the ship and everyone who’s closest to the work is just executing on what the visionaries give.
The staff were the visionaries in our instance. And that’s what collectively led organizations really want and build toward and have to balance with their boards.
[00:31:29] Anna: And the reason why I really love this structure is, to put it plainly, usually people who are on a board have amassed a lot of personal powered influence.
And I would say that quite often in nonprofits, the staff are.
Have less in general in society overall. And so you’re just repeating the same hierarchical structures that probably the nonprofit is trying to break down. But here it is existing within the nonprofit itself. And so it’s always this, it’s always been a head scratcher for me of why are decisions made this way if you are trying to eliminate poverty or eliminate hunger or what’s happening here. So I just really love that chapter.
Yeah. If you want to, if you want to change something in your society or in your community, it should start at home.
[00:32:19] Nilou: Yes, 100%.
[00:32:23] Janel: I know that we are getting close to time. And so in the spirit of respecting boundaries, I want to ask a question about boundaries. I thought the way you talked about them in the book was super, super interesting. The way that you framed it is that setting boundaries is a collective responsibility. I’d love to know a little bit more about that if there’s something you’d like people to take away there.
[00:32:44] Nilou: Yeah, I think I would say for leadership it is, it’s a responsibility for us to model boundaries for staff. But in my instance, because we were quite collective from the start and because we set out to develop our values, our points of unity, early on, one of them was around boundaries and balancing our individual well being, supporting as many immigrants in the immigrant justice world as possible. That was just part of our mission and taking on complex work.
And actually we had two, about two points of unity that we developed collectively. They were not spearheaded by me, they were spearheaded by my colleagues. Those points of unity and values that we center our well being and humanity, that was another one. And as it was very much a collective process to move me as a leader to model boundaries.
These values and points of unity helped me. And they were a reminder constantly over the course of years. And then once I had a kid, it just clicked and. And those were there. And my community and my colleagues and the structures, the collective system and support was there for me when I was ready to actually really fully live into those values and. Yeah. And name things that were. That that were coming up that were needed both for me, for colleagues was very much a collective process for us to move into a four day work week and to create boundaries around how much we work.
That started with one of our colleagues had already started a four day work week but at 80% pay and we moved into 100% pay once more and more of us had children were moving into this value collectively.
It’s very difficult in this environment of like work and grind and the ways that some of us are conditioned, especially my generation and above, I think the younger generation is teaching us differently. They’re really wonderful at teaching us boundaries and modeling them. But for those of us who need a little bit more support and who have been conditioned, we need the collective. We need a community. We need these shared languages and values and resources and tools so that when each of us are ready and when some of us struggle, we can be held by them as a community. It’s a collective practice.
[00:35:09] Janel: Yeah, it is really inverting some stuff that is very deep seated. And what I.
I don’t know, I guess absorbed by osmosis. That is correct. Like the way I show up for other people is by overextending myself and just doing it no matter what, pushing through and grinding. And that is something that I am constantly in a process of unlearning. I learn a lot from regarding gratitude there.
But yeah, it is collective. It’s collective. So I am, yeah deeply grateful to be in a group that is constantly reminding me that me setting boundaries helps the group be healthier and helps our, our container be healthier.
[00:35:47] Anna: Before Janel came on new newer to freelancing, folks would ask for my advice. What do I need? What should I do as I’m getting started. And usually I would be like, what do you want your work life to be? Look like work life balance look like in five years. Do it now because it’s going to be really hard to retroactively change that because you’ll have five years of bad habits.
And who is your truth teller? So the person that you go to that will tell you the truth no matter what, even when it really sucks to hear it. And it’s been really great to now have a truth teller within the company with Janel. Janel keeps me accountable. I’ll be like, hey, remember this thing that you said you were going to do for yourself? Why are you go away. Go do it. I just had that realization of oh, I have a truth teller embedded in the company. Now I don’t. We’re up on time. Is there, are there any last minute things that you would love to share in this conversation.
[00:36:42] Nilou: I hope that folks can take away that we don’t have to just revolutionize and turn things around all at once.
Small steps taking one one policy or exploring like what the decision making within one area of your team.
Just trying it on trying things on, iterating and thinking of this work as a process that we’re not fixed and done at any point is one thing I hope folks take away. The other is want to highlight the ref the appendices again. There are over 50 pages of appendix like samples and resources. I hope that some of those can be useful and adapted for folks and then I really love There are two organizations I want to shout out. The resources and tools available on the Sustainable Economies Law center website are wonderful. They offer great tools, great samples, templates, many additional resources for worker collectives, worker self directed or organizations. And then there’s a group called RAD Ops.
And there are a lot of wonderful resources on the Rad Ops website. And there’s also a Facebook group Rad Ops that nonprofits or maybe even worker co ops can join and ask questions from peers who are doing work in ways that are reimagining or recreating with systems of care.
[00:38:09] Anna: I love this little giggle of when you were like read the appendices. Before we started hitting record, we had this very funny conversation where I was like I finished the book but I haven’t looked at any of the appendices. And I was like that’s all I’ve done.
[00:38:24] Janel: Different brains the Power of Collective Thinking.
[00:38:27] Nilou: Yep.
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