Ananda Valenzuela
Ananda Valenzuela
Interim Executive Director @ RVC
“At the core, we’re humans. If we can’t deeply care about each other as humans and see each other as whole people to be respected as equals alongside us, then we’re not going to really revolutionize the way that we do our work. ”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
Employing empathy is a challenging, powerful practice. It’s work that’s focused on the quality of our relationships. We must invest in healthy channels of communication, so we can increase our capacity to deeply listen and respond to what's emerging.
Recall a challenging interaction with another person at work. Reflect on the words that were said, and the emotions that were (and perhaps not) being expressed. Now think about the other person in that dynamic -- their possible commitments, fears and worldview.
Now write them a short letter (sending optional) acknowledging their emotions, and what their fears and commitments may have been in that moment.
// TEAM EXPLORATION
Gather your immediate team to hold a 60-minute retrospective. Use a tool like Trello so everyone can contribute topics. (We recommend you do this every 1-2 weeks!)
1. Acknowledge what's going well (kudos & hi-fives).
2. Discuss ideas to improve the team flow & decision making process.
3. Take turns answering the question: What’s one thing that would add to your happiness at work?
Ground rules:
• Everybody must participate
• Deeply listen to others words
• Feel their emotions
• Imagine their intentions/worldview
• Thank them for sharing their truth
• Resist (and notice!) the urge to fix or advise them
Resources
Transformational Capacity Building: RVC leaders identified seven emerging key approaches to supporting nonprofits of color.
RVC employs a holacracy organizational model, emphasizing distributed leadership. Check out this resource on 7 ½ Common Business Organizational Structures.
Ananda Valenzuela (any pronouns), interim executive director of RVC and board member of Change Elemental, centers their work on organizational development, with a focus on equitable self-management and liberatory practices.
We loved chatting with Ananda on how his team at RVC partners with community organizations to resource BIPOC leaders and build grassroots networks that lead change from within.
Ananda’s wisdom highlights that organizational structure is itself a manifestation of cultural values and our relationship to power. It’s no accident that her focus on leveraging capacity building and shared power is their structural response to racist and elitist bureaucratic and fundraising systems.
Ananda offers some provocative thoughts on how funders and businesses often inadvertently conflict with their espoused values, reinforcing the very dynamics they profess to oppose.
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Intersectional Ecosystem of Change
There are some important issues that are close to my heart (like campaign finance reform, and the potential downfall of what's left of our democracy) but it’s challenging to choose one issue when they’re so intersectional. Grounding in that intersectionality is crucial when we talk about what's most important, as opposed to doing what we all love doing, which is cherry picking the one issue and focusing on it, which can accidentally cause harm at times.
That’s part of why I've devoted my life to RVC, because we need so many leaders working on so many issues to really change our systems, and because those leaders, from RVC’s perspective, should be BIPOC leaders coming from the communities that they're trying to serve and partner with to change the systems.
They're able to do really transformational work, because they're from their own community, they know their community, and they know what to do. They’ve to come at it from a very different cultural orientation of community and relationship building, and have been able to accomplish deeper change in a way that isn’t possible if you try to come in with a white savior complex from the outside, saying “I'm going to fix this community,” or “fix these people.”
Decolonization is a Journey
We talk about anti racism work being a constant journey, just like decolonizing ourselves of our attitudes around success and outcomes. It's constant work. It's also not a binary situation where you want to see one is wrong, and the other is right. Yeah, outcomes do matter, because we're trying to change seriously important things in our society. It's really about holding that tension of “both, and.”
At RVC we’re doing really deep work around power, because we all have these things we've learned from our family, from our culture, and from our workplaces about power. There’s a lot of learned powerlessness, especially amongst BIPOC folks, because what we've often been accultured to think it’s good to step back and become small. We are trying not to not be the one that becomes ostracized and becomes the enemy.
Building Strength Through Capacity Building
We’re a capacity building organization. We're responsive to those we serve, which are our partner organizations, and then they’re serving their communities directly. We're a step removed, so what we're really deep in on is listening to our partner organizations, understanding their needs, and how they're changing with everything going on, and moving very quickly to adjust what we do internally to support that. The way we operate as a self-managing organization has made such a difference in actually being able to support our partners properly in this time.
Capacity building is about strengthening people and organizations. How do we support leaders in being able to work to their strengths? How do we support organizations in growing or changing the way that they're hoping to change? For us, capacity building means walking alongside in partnership, not dictating the way, and doing so in a way that's really deeply values aligned.
Distributed Leadership Empowers Leaders Across the Organization
As an organization, we’re in the process of becoming fully self managing, and have a deeply distributed leadership structure. As a result, it's a very different orientation towards our collective liberation, and what it looks like to be in the work every day together. It's been really transformational for our team, and it's really hard. It means that everyone in our organization has more responsibility, because they're holding the decisions themselves, as opposed to looking up to the person higher in the hierarchy and deferring to them to make decisions.
This aspect of how our team operates has been really crucial to weathering the storms, because instead of it feeling like this hard, impossible thing for a couple of leaders at the top of our organization to figure everything out when everything is so uncertain, we have this distributed model where each person has their own domain that's really close to them, and they know best and are able to continue to make decisions. They don’t get caught in these chokeholds of everything centering on a couple people at the top of a pyramid who are overwhelmed, stressed, and scared about the world.
Relationships Matter More Than Outcomes
There’s obviously a tension between relationships and outcomes. Our business mind thinks “What are we getting out of it? Are we being as efficient as possible? Are we succeeding in these clearly delineated goals?”
What’s more important is the relationship piece. If you're not in right relationship and not centering people's humanity and their whole selves in the work, then you should not be trying to explore alternative forms of management.
Mainstream culture centers efficiency and outcomes as opposed to people and what those people need to be happy and healthy. People love having these really complicated organizational assessment tools but for me, there's one question: It's your staff happy? Is there deep joy in your organization, where people look forward to coming to work and being in community with their co-workers and getting work done?
Wherever you are in the spectrum of assessing that one question speaks so much to the health of your organization, and what you're passing on to our society as a result. The impact of having happy, healthy people in these ecosystems, as opposed to there being a lot of pain and harm. Are we actually meeting people where they are and celebrating people's humanity in these organizational contexts or are we centering efficiency, money, and outcomes?
Accountability to Care Isn’t Just a Non-profit Thing
I really want us to get away from this elevation of nonprofit as the way to do good in the world. Become a social impact business! Add in a certain amount of time to support others with your work and have it be a part of your business model. Don't try to go off and start a nonprofit. Our assumptions around where you do good in the world -- we have to really challenge that. How do we all do good and have that be core? It's frustrating and sad how this orientation towards caring for each other and caring for our world has been painted as this thing that's done over here, that there is no kind of accountability for our leadership to be oriented towards that in the business world.
Hierarchies Hidden in the Triple Bottom Line
B Corporations are what the business community should be working towards, the concept of the triple bottom line. But I have heard business leaders saying that even in a B Corporation “The money always has to be the top priority.” When I heard this, it boggled my mind that there wasn't an elevation of the people and the environment above the money. That’s my challenge to the business sector.
There's a lot of greenwashing or social justice washing now with businesses where there's the one thing that they do that makes them look shiny and great. To me, what’s a transformational business orientation is when I see they’re oriented deeply at their core and mission towards the greater social good, as opposed to just being about money.
Collective Liberation Through Disruptive Structures
In my ideal vision, we orient towards this concept of collective liberation: A world in which everyone feels like they have the freedom and the power to pursue meaningful work, and be able to pursue it in groupings of people in organizations. To have an orientation towards joy -- that we can do the work, and we can be making change in the world, and do it in a way that we're enjoying, as opposed to it feeling so hard every day. It pains me to see us constantly recreating these organizational structures that cause so much harm. The way that we've put hierarchical organizational structures on this pinnacle sense of, “this is the right way to run organizations.” It's just caused so much harm.
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Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.