From Corporate Culture to a New Organizational Landscape—A Conversation with Steve Dubb, Rithika Ramamurthy, and Ananda Valenzuela

Editors’ note: This piece is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s summer 2024 issue, “Escaping Corporate Capture.”

In this conversation, Steve Dubb, senior economic justice editor at NPQ; Rithika Ramamurthy, former economic justice editor at NPQ and now communications director at the Climate and Community Project; and Ananda Valenzuela, consultant and professional interim executive director,¹ talk about how to move the nonprofit sector from corporate culture and practices to healthy, joyful, liberatory ones.

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Steve Dubb: Can you begin by telling us a little about your background and how you came to be a consultant around issues of leadership and equity in the nonprofit sector?

Ananda Valenzuela: I grew up in Puerto Rico. The experience of growing up in a modern-day colony shaped my orientation toward social and racial justice, and kept me curious about how to weave those strands of work together. Enacting progressive social change in the world requires both an equity lens and an understanding of the nuances and complexities of American history and how they continue to show up today.

I became interested in student activism when I was at Hampshire College, where I was involved in pedagogical change and movement-building work. I sat with the question, How do you get a group of people to change? As in, How do you most effectively organize, operate, and move toward transformation within entities like organizations? What are the formations in which we can work together most effectively? It was an interesting conundrum, and one that I had the unique opportunity to explore as a student—building out a thesis project on facilitating organizational change, in parallel with student activism that resulted in major changes to the academic program.

“We have had an entire sector whose theory of change is one that’s fundamentally flawed and doesn’t actually attend to the systemic issues that we face in our society.”

These questions have continued with me in my career over the years, becoming central to my consulting work. Because I fundamentally believe that the change we want is going to take a lot of people running in—generally—the same direction. And the more effectively we can organize and collaborate, the more movement we’ll make in that direction. I believe that culture is far more important than structure, but structure is where we get stuck. We spiral around questions of power, decision-making, and leadership. So my consulting practice focuses on how to move quickly and thoughtfully through questions of structure, land that, and then work to build a healthy, joyful, liberatory culture. These days, I do a lot of consulting work in that realm, as well as interim executive director work focused on transition as a time of transformation.

Rithika Ramamurthy: To bring this to the economic context—the nonprofit sector has grown tremendously in past decades even as economic inequality has also grown rapidly. Do you think there is a relationship between these two facts? And even if there isn’t, why do you think that nonprofits have been so ineffective at preventing the growth of inequality?

AV: I think it’s a purposefully built ineffectiveness. I’m thinking back to that great article NPQ published last year about Claire Dunning’s new book Nonprofit Neighborhoods—and how, at that pivotal moment in the 1960s, when we had an explosion of growth in the nonprofit sector, there was an active, conscious choice by government and foundations to fund localized self-help instead of funding antipoverty and antiracism.² We have had an entire sector whose theory of change is one that’s fundamentally flawed and doesn’t actually attend to the systemic issues that we face in our society. Of course, here we are now all these years later, and we haven’t solved any of these problems—because we weren’t meant to solve these problems.

SD: What do you see as some of the leading ways that corporate culture—by which we mainly mean the logic of for-profit corporate America—influences the culture of the nonprofit sector?

AV: So many ways. Corporate culture intersects deeply with White-dominant culture, White professionalism. In the US, there’s a focus on rationality that’s divorced from emotion. And that mentality sits alongside the assumption the sector inherited from the corporate world that the right and most efficient, most impactful way to operate is that classical, rigid hierarchy with a visionary, charismatic leader at the top who’s grossly overpaid. Those fundamental guiding beliefs of “professional,” White-dominant culture have been inculcated into every aspect of what we call “best practices” in the nonprofit sector.

There are a million different ways that this shows up in our assumptions and day-to-day work. And it causes a lot of unnecessary pain and puts people into boxes where they don’t have the landscape of imagination to envision an organizational culture outside of those boxes. That is such a limiting factor for much of the sector.

There are many incredible organizations that have broken out of these boxes, which is inspiring; but it’s often an uphill climb, especially when it comes to boards—because boards are a concept that we inherited from the corporate world. And fundamentally, again, there is the classical idea of hierarchy, by which I mean the concept, in the nonprofit sector, of the top of the hierarchy being the board—which is a group of volunteers who aren’t in the work and who don’t actually know what’s happening day to day in the communities the nonprofit serves. And in the US context, boards have historically been older, wealthy, White men, for the most part. They bring their corporate-culture mindset to the sector, because many of them have made their wealth from classic corporations, and they judge the success and viability of the nonprofit by those standards. So there are these weird power dynamics at play that reinforce this ongoing orientation in the sector toward White professionalism and top-down hierarchical thinking—because the folks who are instilled with this power over the whole, including legal power, are so attached to those ways of working and being.

SD: The nonprofit sector has had government functions thrust upon it—so much so, that government is the leading funder of nonprofits. This means that in some ways, the structure of nonprofits encourages the offloading of public responsibility. How prevalent is that influence, do you think? And are there ways of righting the ship a little so that there’s an important civic role the nonprofit sector plays, but that the role doesn’t devolve into a means of, essentially, patching over inequalities rather than addressing the systems that are creating those inequalities in the first place?

“As long as we continue to cycle around this mentality that philanthropy and privatized giving are going to solve our social ills, we’re never going to get there.”

AV: If we look back historically, the US concept of charity came from England, from back in the late 1500s, early 1600s, when Queen Elizabeth I noticed that there were a lot of poor people out there.³ She decided that the easiest way to fix the problem was to put into place a system whereby rich people were rewarded for doing charitable works and devoting some of their money to the common good. In this way, the queen outsourced societal good to the charitable sector. And we simply brought that right on over here to the United States—along with many other aspects of colonization.

When I’m traveling outside of the US and I tell people that I work for nonprofits, they’re like, “Oh, that’s what our government does.” Many of the examples that I give of what nonprofits do are what they experience as social services coming from government. Fundamentally, we’ve created this system where, instead of having a strong social safety net from our government, we’ve outsourced that responsibility to the nonprofit sector. Now there’s another corporate cancer: we’ve outsourced our social safety net to nonprofits, and it’s just this tattered net—this really messy array of nonprofits that are just struggling along, trying to do these things that need to be funded in a really fundamental way.

I recently learned about PCORI [Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute]. They were created out of the Affordable Care Act. Often, when I do consulting projects with organizations, I hear, “We have five staff,” or “We have 10 staff.” PCORI said, “We have 400 staff. We are a 501c1, directly funded by the government, but an independent entity.” And I’m thinking, Oh, so this is what it can look like when government properly and directly funds core social services! It could be abundant, and it could be beautiful—but instead, we have this mess. And it gets me thinking about just how fundamentally broken it is. As long as we continue to cycle around this mentality that philanthropy and privatized giving are going to solve our social ills, we’re never going to get there. We need our government to provide a strong social safety net. We need universal basic income and universal healthcare. And then the nonprofit sector can stop struggling to provide basic social services and instead engage in art and creativity and beautiful things, because we’ll all be abundantly supported in our basic needs directly by the government, as opposed to having all of that done in this patchwork way by nonprofits in which White people and wealthy people are deciding who deserves to be served.

RR: So we have nonprofits in the United States working to build this social safety net that we’re not supposed to be building. How has competition for philanthropic support among nonprofits impeded solidarity in that work, and how are efforts that you have supported, such as the coalition of BIPOC executive directors in Washington State, built solidarity despite those constraints?

AV: One of the strategies of the nonprofit–industrial complex is to make us compete with each other, and that has its roots in our racist US history—having White and Black working-class people competing with each other. These are very smart tactics that are used very successfully over and over again. Solving this requires us to start at a high level: there’s a philosophical shift needed from scarcity to abundance. A core orientation of the BIPOC Executive Directors Coalition is the question of how to embrace and live in the mentality of abundance—because paradigm shifts are the most transformational way to engage in systems change work. And if we can have a paradigm shift from scarcity to abundance, then that is truly transformational, because the wealth is abundant. Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully invites us to shift to an economy of abundance, in her essay “The Serviceberry”;⁴ we need to learn from the natural world. What this looks like in action is that foundations should be giving out far more than the traditional 5 percent that they do. And that’s why the BIPOC ED Coalition started with the demand to philanthropy to change their ways—to embrace a paradigm shift that says that giving 5 percent is just not enough. That is not an abundant orientation; foundations are the ones making us compete with one another. The BIPOC ED Coalition is helping our sector to see and name this mentality together—that the problem is not one another but rather the system and the way it’s not funding us; that we’re relegated to scrabbling over a tiny piece of the pie, when instead the norm should be that rich people are properly taxed and that foundations sunset—in fact, that we don’t even need the foundations in the first place, because the money is coming directly from government to nonprofits.

SD: This speaks to the idea of the nonprofit–industrial complex—that nonprofits are locked in a system with foundations, governments, and corporations in a way that perpetuates inequality and constrains grassroots activism. Do you see this system of control as being effective? And if so, what can be done about it?

AV: Yes, it’s been effective; otherwise, we would have made many more systemic changes by now. I’m a big believer in the both/and of abolition and reform. As in, let’s work toward abolition and let’s find better strategies for operating within this broken nonprofit–industrial complex in the meantime. And I think that the kind of thought leadership that NPQ offers is a key part of this approach. I want to see us all continuing to build our muscle in understanding and talking about the nonprofit–industrial complex and what it takes to actually tear it down—which includes things like the government properly and directly funding services. That represents a huge shift. It is no longer giving tax benefits to the rich for donations and instead is taxing the rich directly—far more. I do think that education and smaller strategies can help us to better navigate this trap that we’re in, but there are some really big shifts that we need to make at a systems level if we’re really going to solve this.

RR: You consult with nonprofits regularly regarding their governance and management practices. We’ve talked a little about how corporate culture affects boards and how it creates competition among nonprofits. Can you talk more specifically about how corporate ideas of good governance and good management have influenced—in good and not-so-good ways—nonprofit governance and management?

AV: One thing I’ve noticed is that people often come to me with the complaint that their hierarchical structure isn’t working for their organization. They say they want something different. And there are a couple of things I’m noticing about that. Obviously, as we’ve talked about, the classic hierarchical organizational structure was inherited from the corporate world. Now, personally, I don’t believe that hierarchy is bad or inherently inequitable or anything like that. But because we’ve inherited this hierarchical concept from the corporate world, and because it’s very much tied to this corporate culture of White professionalism, people in the nonprofit sector are having this reaction of, ”We need the opposite!”—right? “We need to get as far away from this crappy corporate culture and structure as we can get!” And often, when people say they want something different from hierarchy, they go directly to flat, to circle, to we’re all equal—we make decisions in groups. That’s as far away as you can get from one person at the top deciding everything. And I think that this reflexive reaction of going toward the opposite causes its own harm.

I get it—we are having that negative reaction because of what we’re experiencing that we inherited from the corporate world. But the management–leadership path forward that I coach folks through is to step back and understand how we want to make decisions, what we want leadership to look like, what our values are, and how all that shows up in the culture of how we want to operate together. We shake that out and choose a structure that reflects the answers to those understandings instead of a structure that is chosen in negative reaction to how crappy the dominant culture is.

I think that’s where some of the really interesting energy lies, when we’re trying to break out of one way of being that is so deeply steeped in our sector. Because it’s really hard to break out of where we are in a way that doesn’t create its own problems and then its own backlash. For example, a lot of focus these days is on co-EDs—with ensuing debates on whether or not coleadership works. But that’s simply one structure option, and in fact it works really well for some people and not at all for others. Engaging in black-and-white thinking, in which you either have co-EDs and everything shared or you have your typical hierarchy, is unhelpful. We need to stop falling into that kind of binary thinking.

RR: As an aside, I think the same is true in the political context of some movements, generally speaking. There is this allergy to hierarchy and leadership. And it doesn’t have to be “bad” just because it didn’t work the way it was operating. You don’t have to throw it away altogether. There are other forms of power sharing that still involve leadership and delegation.

AV: Honestly, it really scares me in this moment—the fact that we’re so stuck in these spirals around things like governance and decision-making and how we organize together—it’s a really bad place to be in an election year. I get contacted by some of these organizations, and their stories about the struggles they’ve been in around power and decision-making just break my heart. We’re stuck in these limiting narratives about what is right and what is equitable and what is wrong and inequitable.

SD: You have advocated loving accountability as an alternative framework for nonprofit governance. How would adoption of that framework address some of the problems you’re seeing with nonprofit governance?

“Loving accountability is a pathway we can walk together that gets us to a more generative set of options for how we do right by one another.”

AV: First, a shout-out to Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith, who wrote that wonderful article “The Liberatory World We Want to Create: Loving Accountability and the Limitations of Cancel Culture.”⁵ I think this is another example of paradigm shifting, right? Accountability has been so tied to policing, which is incredibly harmful. And we have got to let go of that kind of equation. It’s another binary that doesn’t help anyone. I just talked about some of the organizations that are struggling. But I also get contacted by a lot of organizations that are just so inspiring. I was on a call the other day with an organization that is doing really deep work around feedback and anti-oppression and has a thriving team that’s moving in really creative and cool ways. And they’ve solved some of the core problems we’ve been talking about with this paradigm shift of loving accountability: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”⁶ We know that we have to build these deep, trusting relationships, and part of operating in that space of deep trust is an orientation toward loving accountability, of knowing that, at the end of the day, we are messy, imperfect humans who have our own unconscious biases and don’t know what we don’t know. And so if we want to be in these kinds of authentic relationships together, we’ve got to be able to invite each other into difficult conversations, into feedback, and invite each other to grow—to, fundamentally, have an orientation toward one another that is an adult–adult relationship, as opposed to a parent–child relationship.

And if we can crack that nut on building cultures of loving accountability, then we have an entirely new landscape to be in—because now accountability is no longer fundamentally bad. And boards, if built properly, can be a beautiful tool for loving accountability—for asking challenging questions, for inviting nonprofits into serving their communities well. We don’t have to overcorrect to zero power only to re-create that dominant–submissive power dynamic in the other direction—so that instead of the board being in charge, now the staff are in charge. It doesn’t have to be that binary. Loving accountability is a pathway we can walk together that gets us to a more generative set of options for how we do right by one another.

RR: You’ve written about the need to rethink the nonprofit CEO or executive director role.⁷ What alternatives to this have you found, and which have you found most effective? And what cultural changes are needed to make that shift effectively?

AV: First of all, it’s about rethinking leadership on a high level. I really appreciate shifting the frame from executive director/CEO to executive leadership. There are realms of executive leadership that need to be energized in an organization: overall strategic direction; high-level financial management (directionality in terms of budget and fundraising); being a public face of the organization. There are certain aspects that are about the organization as a whole—its mission, its ongoing evolution—and those matter! I’ve worked with some organizations that, in their efforts to overcorrect away from hierarchy, have wound up with fuzziness around who is holding the whole and thus who to turn to in crisis. They have done away with that person, and that opens the door to, among other problems, invisible emotional labor—a situation in which some people wind up providing care to staff but it’s not honored or compensated. So I think it’s important for any organization to emphasize that executive leadership—holding the whole of the organization—is critical, and to identify and name the people who hold those realms of executive leadership and are, ultimately, accountable for making sure that those realms are attended to well.

“I do think it’s important to center and say, again, that executive leadership matters greatly. There does need to be someone (or someones) holding the whole with respect to mission and direction.”

And then in terms of success stories—I don’t have any beliefs in or attachments to any one structure. I think you can have really beautiful co-ED formations; I think you can have beautiful ED and managing director designs, or deputy director and senior leadership team configurations. Any design can be healthy in some instances and terrible in others. So I appreciate that when you ask the question you’re asking about the culture that accompanies it—because that is the fundamental part, right? These executive leadership formations work when there’s deep trust in the leadership, they’re sharing the right values with the rest of the team, and there’s a culture built that’s healthy and joyful—that’s liberatory for everyone involved. And fundamentally, I think it really matters to have one person who is (or a few people who are) officially responsible for setting that kind of culture, setting that direction in a collaborative and meaningful way—but to have that work well. And so the success stories I’ve seen have been ones where folks have gotten really clear on roles and responsibilities and on who’s doing that holding of the whole work—and who see it as important work and make visible that emotional labor as well as hold those leadership folks accountable to doing right by the mission, the values, and the directionality of the organization in a generative way.

RR: I have a background in the labor movement, so I have some ideas about ways to distribute decision-making power and that kind of accountability. But I think that one of the challenges can be that sometimes it’s not really clear who holds the whole, because there’s a leadership vacuum. And there’s a lack of discussion about what actually needs to be done to lead. So I’m wondering if you have any insights about the problem of deciding mission and then the problem of people taking, or not taking, that mission up.

AV: I think this is another example of where we can overcorrect in our reactivity to how crappy corporate culture can be. A leadership vacuum is a real thing and a real problem. And I do think it’s important to center and say, again, that executive leadership matters greatly. There does need to be someone (or someones) holding the whole with respect to mission and direction.

And we don’t need to be stuck in this box that says one person holding the strategic direction means one person deciding alone. There are all kinds of collaborative approaches to decision-making, in which one person holds the whole on directionality but deeply engages others. We need to not have an allergy to deferring to other folks’ leadership. I love the concept of natural hierarchies: You’re really amazing at this; I’m really amazing at that. I’m a leader in this, and you’re a leader in that. Some people are going to be really amazing at setting strategy, vision, and direction, and we should celebrate that—how they can do it in a way that weaves it all together and brings people along, and that still has that utter clarity around their organization’s North Star. Because if we overcorrect too far in the other direction, then we get these squishy strategic plans that are just a giant laundry list of to-do items. We do need folks who are able to coach and support everyone in moving in the same direction. It just doesn’t need to look the way that the corporate world tells us it needs to look—where one charismatic, visionary leader is telling everyone what to do.

“The systems are so utterly opposed to movement-building and organizing work that, every step you take, the nonprofit–industrial complex is trying to tear you down and get in the way of that.”

I like the concept of evolutionary purpose from Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations,⁸ that there can be a core this is what our organization is, this is how it lives and breathes as an entity—and that all of us have the ability to tap into that, to understand the core and make strategic decisions. There needs to be clarity about that whole, so that everyone can build that muscle.

SD: You were talking before about the need to shift paradigms and so forth. What factors do you think hold nonprofits back from full-throated advocacy that challenges systems of power? And what can nonprofit leaders do to address those barriers?

AV: Lately, I’ve been thinking about what a wonderful strategy of the nonprofit–industrial complex’s it was to create 501c3 versus c4 designations. Right? Like, let’s make everyone’s lives miserable by having a completely different entity that you now have to build if you want to move outside this very constrained realm of acceptable advocacy and movement work. I was managing director, and then interim ED, at RVC—Rooted in Vibrant Communities—in Seattle, which does capacity building for BIPOC-led-and-serving grassroots nonprofits. I remember when we were trying to get an insurance provider just for general liability insurance, and they told us that they weren’t going to cover us because we had a photo of a protest on our website!

The systems are so utterly opposed to movement-building and organizing work that, every step you take, the nonprofit–industrial complex is trying to tear you down and get in the way of that. So there’s a paradigm shift in there somewhere around our attitude toward the political in this country. And there’s just something really strange about how the systems of government that shape the direction of this country have somehow been put in a separate box that you don’t get to engage with unless you do it in this very constrained, approved way. This is a huge problem, when politics are where we’re actually going to change these systems and accomplish the much bigger things that I’m naming.

I’m glad that there are organizations like New Left Accelerator that are trying really hard to help nonprofits have both c3s and c4s—that there are folks working within our broken systems to help people access the levers. But it does really worry me that we are so dependent on 501c3s when they have limited capacity to engage in systems change. The vast majority of funders will only fund 501c3s, which means that there are scant resources available to other types of entities that have more flexibility to engage in changing our political landscape. So I see a lot of that both/and tension. We need to get every dollar we can through philanthropy right now to solve the problems that oppress us right now. Which means continuing to rely on 501c3 structures to access those funds. And at the same time, we need our own 20-year plans to get out of this place that we’re trapped in that’s never going to get us to where we want to go.

SD: There has been a rise in unionization in the nonprofit sector. And I think that’s often seen as a threat to nonprofit management. But could nonprofit unions provide leadership that would empower some of this shifting around power?

AV: When I run my organizational structure options workshop, a unionized workplace is one of the options I always put on the table for folks to consider for how they want decision-making power to be held. And I think unionized workplaces are another example of a structure that can be great for some and terrible for others—because yes, when you have an unhealthy hierarchy, unions can be a great way for workers to have more power to make sure their needs are heard, to make sure they’re paid well. From that perspective, I think that is an excellent organizing tool for building more power in our sector. But like I was saying earlier, I don’t think that any one structure solves all our problems. I had a client whose staff had decided to unionize before they hired me. And I was really struck by how it had jammed them into this small box of possibility when it came to how they would be structured and how they could make decisions—because now they had to follow the legal rules of a union. And it left me thinking that I hope unions don’t get seen as the one solution to fix our sector. I hope that they can be used as an excellent tool in the toolbox—but that the toolbox has an array of organizational structures that we can look to and choose from in a really thoughtful way, weighing the pros and cons of each option.

So that really weighs on me, because I think unions are one of the most powerful tools in the corporate world. And the current rise of unions in the corporate world is an incredibly transformational thing that I’m so excited we are a part of. But in my world, where I work with a lot of small nonprofits, it’s not always the right tool—it can create this big divide in a small team. So I want to find better ways for us to be able to fully understand the beauty of unions and when they’re great in nonprofits, while also understanding when they’re not the right match for a nonprofit. I don’t think we should be automatically assuming that unions are the one right and equitable way forward.

RR: I agree that unions emerged from a context of opposing corporations, so maybe that makes them seem unsuited for every workplace. But I think they’re the best tool for people to protect themselves and make their workplaces better.

“I hope that we lift up and celebrate the many incredible organizations that are operating in a completely different paradigm and don’t even need to focus on tearing down these corporate cultures, because it’s not even where they are anymore.”

AV: Again, I think unions are an incredibly important tool in the toolbox. What I get tripped up by is that if you have an organization that’s truly engaged in a paradigm shift toward a very different liberatory way of walking—where salaries and budgets are public, and decision-making is distributed (and by this I’m not even talking about shared executive leadership but rather distributed leadership, which is a totally different thing)—then everyone is on the same side, walking together. And there are amazing organizations out there in which all staff are engaged in these big questions about equitable pay and benefits and the direction they’re going in and what they can accomplish. It’s a united front of all staff together. I think if you have liberatory organizations that are walking a very different path in terms of how they organize and make decisions internally, unions aren’t always going to be the right tool for them, because everyone is on the same side as opposed to needing a union to balance power between the opposing sides of senior leadership versus workers. But there are certainly nonprofits out there that are enormous and very stuck in corporate culture—and for them, unionization could be the best tool in the tool kit, for sure.

SD: Is there anything else you would like to say before we close?

AV: I would like to stress the importance of walking more liberatory paths and imagining different futures. When we get out of the box of what’s possible within these cultures and structures that we’ve inherited from the corporate world, we open up into a totally different landscape of different formations, of different ways of operating—like self-management and distributed leadership. That then opens up a different plane of conversations, right? When I get called into an organization that is dealing with some really difficult stuff, I’m struck by how in healthy, self-managing organizations, the hard stuff still happens but there’s a way in which it doesn’t escalate in the same way as with unhealthy organizations, because they’re playing by a fundamentally different set of rules. When you play by a set of rules that says, for example, We give each other feedback in a direct and timely way, then this whole huge box of deep tensions and drama and conflict—problems that require mediation—rarely gets created. Because you talk about things as they happen. You trust, you heal, you’re vulnerable with each other, and there’s a fundamentally different cultural fabric weaving you together. There are many incredible organizations already doing that work, and they may not even look different, because some are operating in a hierarchy. But there’s a way in which their staff are so joyful, which is inspiring. In particular, I want to underline that these organizations are often BIPOC-led—particularly BIPOC women–led—organizations.

So I think it’s an interesting both/and moment, because yes, we need to critique and we need to continue to undo the limitations of these inherited corporate structures and ways of thinking and I hope that we lift up and celebrate the many incredible organizations that are operating in a completely different paradigm and don’t even need to focus on tearing down these corporate cultures, because it’s not even where they are anymore.

 

Notes

1. See Ananda Valenzuela, professional website, accessed April 29, 2024, anandavalenzuela.org.
2. Cyndi Suarez, “Nonprofits as Battlegrounds for Democracy,” NPQ, March 20, 2023, nonprofitquarterly.org/nonprofits-as-battlegrounds-for-democracy/. And see Claire Dunning, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
3. See Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, “The Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601,” in Poor Relief in England: 1350 to 1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 273–93.
4. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022, emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/.
5. Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith, “The Liberatory World We Want to Create: Loving Accountability and the Limitations of Cancel Culture,” Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine 29, 1 (Spring 2022): 112–19.
6. Proverb of unknown
7. Ananda Valenzuela and Andrea Caupain Sanderson, “Rebalancing Power to Build Solidarity: Lessons from the BIPOC ED Coalition,” NPQ, July 7, 2022, nonprofitquarterly.org/rebalancing-power-to-build-solidarity-lessons-from-the-bipoc-ed-coalition/.
8. See Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness (Herefordshire, UK: Nelson Parker, 2014).