It’s not enough to help each other survive capitalism. We need to help each other step away from, dismantle, and replace capitalism. I believe this matters even if it’s only in pockets of your day, your community, or the world.

Let’s beat capitalism at its own game of supply and demand.

We need to invert pyramids of power, putting leaders in positions to provide enabling services to their organizations and societies. We need to unleash and unchain innovations from members of Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC) communities. We need to turn out norms around gender and ability inside out to explore what perspectives and futuristic ways of being are already being practiced from individuals de-centralized from societies’ narratives and often made invisible or fringe.

We need to do this work together, but we also need the courage, talent and will of individuals to move forward anyway, even if we feel alone, and even if we feel the skills we have aren’t the right ones to ‘get us there’. We need all the skills under the sun, and more.

I believe that to accelerate the next world, we need to organize not only around the work to build anti-racist systems that promote equity, but also around supporting those organizations doing the work. Decentralizing support services leaves every group to fend for themselves, creating redundancies and increasing the load placed on all organization members while reducing their margin for adaptability and resilience in the work. We usually see this result in burn out, or possibly dissent within movement spaces and communities.

We can’t pretend to create utopias, but we could certainly agree that co-creating values aligned solutions and support services to these kinds of organizations is a worthwhile exploration. In the process, there may even be opportunity to stimulate a new economy that centers anti-racist and equity work as not only valid but value generating.

I don’t have much of a stake in the ground beyond these thoughts, but I’m looking for other knowledge workers (analysts, leadership and management coaches, researchers, facilitators, evaluators, designers) who would be interested in collaborating on a cooperative support services network. If you’re interested in teaming up, or are in an organization and have been hoping for a floating support team like this, shoot me an email about what you do and what here resonated with you.