A Legacy of Care Turned Towards Ourselves
Our Co-Executive Director, Erin Stephens, talks about the new structural changes The Beautiful Project has undergone in this last year as we have been working towards creating our own culture of a non-profit workplace that is embedded in care, more equitable, participatory, responsive, and leaderful to meet the challenges of our current times.
My first memory of The Beautiful Project is walking into a community center that was adorned with photographs Black girls, the people they loved, and the people who loved them.
But more than the images, what stands out in my memory is the feeling of fullness in my heart. The exhibition was crowded with the girls and their loving community and there was so much love and joy that it was tangible. I immediately knew I wanted to be a part creating and holding spaces that celebrated our youth; I wanted to be a part of Beautiful.
Now almost 13 years later, I have tread the path from an adoring fan to co-leading this institution. I’ve experienced time and time again the incredible impact of the ways we teach Black youth and Black women to love themselves unapologetically and unconditionally through collective art and care. And yet it holds true that you can be a powerful facilitator of love and healing for others, and not turn that back on yourself. Black women have demonstrated time and time again a deep capacity for giving their time, resources, energy, and lives to the communities they care about. This generosity has fueled social rights movements and enabled the survival of families and communities; it has also led to a lot of burnout and wounds that have sometimes taken lifetimes and generations to heal.
This year, we were presented with the opportunity to learn to love ourselves more as facilitators of care and creation for others. Turning this legacy of care to ourselves meant examining the patterns we had established that prevented us from engaging in deep creative and collective work with freedom and trust. It required us to reimagine what work looked like at Beautiful and to create an organizational structure that empowered open communication and generated trust, hope, and joy. The first way we did this was to shift to a co-executive directorship in January 2022, in order to share and distribute the weight of the role, to expand capacity, and to hold ourselves accountable to being well in our work. However as the year continued, we discovered that there truly was a need to facilitate collective power and wellness across the organization.
Here are some other ways that we have internalized our mission and legacy of care this year:
We collectively created a vision for our workplace: We started with crafting a vision of a workplace in which we each felt valued. From here, we developed a set of values and norms to guide our work for each together. Here is an excerpt: “At Beautiful, it is important for us to find meaning, hope, and joy in our work. We value our full humanity and aim to elevate the voice and power of every contributor. We value creativity, innovation, and imagination. We cultivate a culture of growth through learning, reflection, and risk-taking.”
We discarded models of leadership that undermine collective power and contribute to burn out and are instead creating a model that facilitates collective possibility and wellness in our work. Each staff member acts as a steward of their respective work and takes turns leading different projects and decisions. A practice of feedback and partnership helps us to stay in sync.
We have embraced a pay model that recognizes the necessity of each of us in this work and our inherent value as individuals. With all of the precarity that many of us have experienced these past years with COVID-19, the erosion of human rights, and rising living costs, it was important for us to create a funding structure that provided our team with a stable means of living. We decided that we each deserve for our work to generate the means to have our basic needs met and to build towards our futures. This looked like establishing an employee model with an equal pay structure and discretionary wellness stipend.
We adopted a 4-day work week and policy of unlimited leave. In accordance with our value of acknowledging our full humanity we recognized that a traditional work model of a 5-day work week and tracked leave does not serve the work culture we are establishing. As a team of people excited and committed to the work, we desired a workplace that was rooted in trust and accountability. We use project management tools and strategic meetings to maintain open communication and collaboration in our work. We have adopted a model for accountability that supports individual growth and open communication around support and setbacks. Unlimited leave demonstrates trust and enables us each to make our best decisions around balancing work with care responsibilities and other life demands. It also disrupts the capitalistic idea that rest should be earned or calculated according to your labor.
We are still experimenting and learning together what it looks like to build a workspace that empowers collective voice and possibility. We have benefited greatly from exchanging ideas with like-minded organizations through participating in the Collaborate to Co-Liberate cohort-learning journey with the Nonprofit Democracy Network. For those of you who also value a workplace that is embedded in care, what are the cooperative and other practices that you have engaged or are exploring? We would love to learn with you.
