Collective Governance: Sharing Power Through Sociocracy Webinar

How do we make decisions as a worker cooperative that is committed to sharing power and equitably distributing responsibilities? We are a diverse group with shifting capacity, navigating a wide array of access needs and neurodivergences so we need to utilize responsive systems that can meet our adapting needs over time.

In this free webinar we will share what we've learned about collective and collaborative governance, including highlighting core tools, systems, and practices that we implement as a group and share with our clients through out consulting and training services. We will also share about "Sociocracy," or "Dynamic Governance," a framework for collective decision making and internal structures for workload distribution grounded in circles, consent and feedback.

Join us on May 16th from 2-3:30 PT / 3-4:30 MT / 4-5:30 CT / 5-6:30 ET, to learn more and ask questions about our internal structures and governance practices. This webinar will also be recorded, so sign up even if you can't attend live and you will still get access to the whole presentation!

We have been a part of and studied many collective structures - from informal organizing or friend groups, to intentional communities, to cooperatively run organizations, to nonprofits trying to operate less hierarchically. “Collective” is not a formal title that one can incorporate as, instead it is a philosophy of practice and decision making. All collectives have hierarchies and differential power, whether they are formal and explicit or informal and implicit. Hierarchies and power differences can come from tenure, capacity, skill, knowledge, relationships, identity, or anything else. Informal hierarchies and informal power are more likely to make space for implicit bias, whereas naming and intentionally designing hierarchies within projects and different types of decisions can support everyone in understanding where the power lies and why.

Over the years, what it has meant for Spring Up to be a collective has evolved, but we have consistently been a collective bringing together voices and interests in the interest of collective liberation. Rather than an organization-wide hierarchy where the most powerful are at the top exerting power over (and extracting from and managing the labor of) those at the bottom, we are a web. Those who are most impacted by decisions and input the most work are at the middle holding the most formal power and practicing power with those further out (with the web going all the way out to community and student participation and input). We have held co-learning series looking at various models of collectivism and decision making, as well as co-design processes to adapt those ideas to apply to our structures, boundaries, and behaviors.