Culture
of Care
Here are our care practices that move us towards being better, more connected, whole people.
Protect Trust
We work to create and sustain a culture of trust at all levels of the Resist community. It makes our risk-taking possible, exciting, and safer. When a staff member says they need to go home early because their childcare fell through, we trust that. When a grant-making panel member misses a mandatory call, we trust they made the choice they needed to make for their well-being and check-in on them.
Make Our Work Human
Our covenant, or collection of agreements on how we are together, details how we make our work human. We work at a human pace. Our agendas are spacious. We support each other in prioritizing time for rest and activities that rejuvenate us. When we don’t do this, trust weakens, stress increases, and projects begin to struggle.
See Differences As Strengths
We acknowledge that privilege is real and believe having different identities, positions of power, and lived experiences in conversation which each other matters. When making important decisions at Resist, we include elders, grantees, board members, staff members, and others whose expertise and lived experience can give us necessary insight. This allows us to make smarter decisions and center frontline leadership.
Prioritize Healing and Trust Building
We start many of our meetings with meditations or other grounding activities. We also prioritize connecting and trust-building first by checking in with one another personally before jumping into work-related projects and topics. We understand that strengthening the “I” makes our collective “we” stronger.
By using these practices we became more connected, less reactive, and more open to the work of transformation. We practice a culture of collective care consistently and with integrity. It makes our work smarter and our organization stronger.
Read more about what a culture of Care looks like for Resist:
Mutual Support and Accountability
At Resist, we’ve developed this trust through a practice of mutual support and accountability.
Mutual Support
Mutual support is based on the idea that no one can truly function well on their own. We need each other. Without connection and attunement, work is less transformative and unlikely to reach its full potential. Attunement of a team to one another can look like many things, from an affirmation of someone’s work, to checking in if a colleague seems distressed, to calling in a colleague for missing a deadline. The team is attuned to one another and to the mutually agreed upon structures for collective work. Below are some of the building blocks of our mutual support and accountability systems. We use these spaces to check in with each other on life, work, and the future that’s emerging.
Staff Collective Retreats
In a worker self-directed nonprofit, workers give vision and direction to the organization in the same way an executive director would. In order to take a deep dive into our organizational development work as a team, we hold full-day monthly retreats. These retreats help us tackle bigger organizational development work while engaging with readings like Emergent Strategy and Decolonizing Wealth which increase our understanding of what’s possible and inform our regular work.
Communication and Project Management
Part of maintaining our culture of care is being realistic about work-life balance. Resist staff collective members work fully remotely. We use Slack to keep in touch with day to day tasks and check-in with one another as well as about the work we are holding. Since each staff collective manages a circle, we use project management tools like Google Suite to keep us on track. We also use zoom to host virtual meetings during the week.
Read more about our Mutual Support and Accountability Practices:
