DEMOCRACY IN PRACTICE

Notes from the nonprofit

In our efforts to transform democracy, we push ourselves to operate as democratically as possible. For this reason, our organization is structured in a unique way that we believe makes it more democratic, agile, and transparent than many traditionally structured non-profit organizations. We are incorporated in the State of New York, and as allowed by New York non-profit law we have no single "leader", no president or CEO, and instead our team works together as equals and makes important organizational decisions through consensus. Similarly, as allowed by New York law, our Board of Directors has no Chair and instead roles are rotated among all directors. To ensure that decisions are made by those who will be most impacted by those decisions (i.e. those doing the work), all permanent members of our team must be directors of the organization and serve on the Board and all members of the Board of Directors must be active members of our team engaged in everyday work. In this way, we see ourselves as a worker-run non-profit organization.

Guidestar provides limited flexibility for such an innovative organizational structure, as such we are required to provide names of "co-leaders" and "co-chairs", even though our organization does not have these formal positions/titles. Following Guidestar's suggestions, we randomly selected directors of our organization to fill these fields and will rotate different directors yearly. Similarly, although it unfortunately makes our organization appear less accountable on Guidestar, given that we have no president/CEO we cannot in good faith check the box that states that we conduct a yearly written evaluation of the president/CEO. We do conduct team evaluations, and part of our approach to accountability and oversight is decentralizing power in our organization throughout the team so as to not place a great deal of power and responsibility in the hands of a single leader figure. Also, given that all members of our Board are actively engaged in the day-to-day work, we feel we are better able to oversee each others' actions and hold one another accountable. Ours is not the typical Board of Directors that has limited inside insight and must resort to other measures to oversee daily operations.

Additionally, although we are actively striving to make our organization more diverse, our principles and structure restrict our ability to simply add diversity to our Board of Directors without dramatically impacting our team and our day-to-day work (to become a director one must also become a permanent member of our team). Thus, while in the long-run we are working to build a more diverse team and thus a more diverse Board, in the short-run we do our best to incorporate diversity through our Board of Advisors and through volunteers.

Please find more details about our organization's innovative structure in our bylaws, which are available in our Guidestar profile.