Define members & studios
Goal: name relationships with people enough to show who and how people and groups affect decisions and coordinate or cooperate in a system.
The term “community” is often used very broadly, to describe everyone who we have any form of relationship with, whether they are close friends and family, neighbors, individuals with whom we are in affinity or values alignment, and more. While broad terms are important, we also need to make it clear with whom we actively share power and how.
MJN organizes areas of work into studios and community groups.
Studios
We've begun applying a studio model to embody circular leadership that enable members to practice creative autonomy while consistently centering justice.
Community Groups
We currently use the term “member” to group all of the people who receive a voting role that reflects their level of participation in various activities. We use terms like “family” and “partner” to describe more flexible relationships (see below). As most of our programs are in their early stages, we look forward to learning as we go.
Embodied Characteristics
Studios
MJN avoids centralized hierarchy, which tends to consolidate power — and thus consolidates wealth. What this means for us right now is that MJN will never have a “CEO” or “director” that makes global decisions affecting all team or collective members.
But decentralization does not need to stop us from bonding in solidarity over common values and practice. Nor does it mean that leadership isn't meaningful and worth recognizing.
Our current studio model strives for circular leadership. It designs to stay bonded over our values and governance, decentralize teams to live the values in their own way, imagine leadership in collective form, and recognize that there are times in which individuals uniquely hold and steer projects, based on their own passion and willpower.
System Studio
Organizing individuals to evolve and document what it means to make justice normal. Example: Power Project, values research, and overall fundraising strategies for MJN activities.
System studios define values, philosophies, procedures, governance processes, and cross-program funding. In most organizations, this kind of work is allocated as “overhead,” “culture,” or “operations.” Instead, we are asking ourselves what the justice-guided version of “B-certification” looks like and seek to build methodologies in which values can become systemic norms.
Unfortunately, the traditional overhead paradigm leaves very little funding for this work. Currently, MJN’s system studios involve extensive volunteer work, deep collective thinking, and work-in-progress management structures that limit the ability to scale participation. We hope system studios can grow over time.
Venture Studio
Practicing system innovations in services, products, creations, or unique research led by collective members in their own way. Examples: Into the Record and The Arisen.
Any individual collective member or members willing to engage with our values can imagine a venture to make justice normal, build a team according to the roles below, and receive support from system studio members with capacity.
Ventures are our way of protecting space for creativity, many wisdoms, and individuality — while keeping values consistent and intact. We are all leaders, creators, free agents, and followers. But values ideally follow us wherever we go. We can only design just systems through practice, and ventures are how we learn by doing. We are here because we believe in the values, want to test the philosophies, and want to help improve them finding out how and why they need repair.
Until MJN has funding to support the venture studio model, creators often develop and find seed funding for their ideas independently. They are supported by MJN's system studio team within their capacity. Any venture can also spin out, such as if an alternative operational structure is necessary to serve justice. However, we pride ourselves on developing a community in which collective support systems will be what make us better together.
Community Groups
We currently have three groups identified. Together, we would describe these as the collection of close community. But there are many others with whom we hold affinity and care that don't need a defined role.
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MJN names members, for now, as individuals who have the option to accept any one of 5 voting rights.
In order to leave voting frameworks partially in the hands of studios — while guided by common principles — no 2 people are likely to have the exact same voting rights at this time. Members must be individuals, not organizations.
System studio members: In it for the long haul, these members are dedicated to designing MJN’s just system frameworks, including living by our commitments to make just normal and developing the processes and philosophies that could be scaled— in our organization or elsewhere. They have voting roles in all system studio projects. We currently have no term limits for system studio members.
Venture studio members: These members, as a whole, work on various ventures. They have voting roles in one or more ventures. Voting in ventures may be time bound, because a project completes or its scope and structure change.
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There are many individual and organizations that we support and love in their work to make justice normal but don't necessarily assign specific voting rights in decisions. We mutually and proactively support one another however we can and are grateful for their brightness in the world.
Family can be individuals or organizations, but we generally avoid describing organizations as family unless we can know every member.
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Partner is the term we currently use for organizations with whom we work on specific projects. For now, we see partners as always organizations, represented by delegates. It is possible that a delegate can also be an MJN member; we're working on a partner framework to help us structure strong partnerships built on shared power and values.
How We’re Evolving
What is a “member”? When we first came together, our impulse to lead with loving care and solidarity was strong. Everyone that served justice could be part of a collective! Why would we not want to name everyone we believed in as a member?
But the truth is, a system — including an organizational system — cannot be just without voting processes that we can operationalize to distribute power among specified individuals in a consistent way. And when MJN formed, we had neither a method for voting nor a system for operationalizing it. Beta philosophies to practice at small scales will hopefully allow us to refine and expand our definitions in new ways.
