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A socialist approach can work in business

(originally published in JSK fellows)

In Philly’s activist circles, heading to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit was an annual tradition. I accompanied colleagues from the Media Mobilizing Project there one year and on one of the many field trips throughout Detroit, we visited an enormous abandoned factory. It was astonishing in its vastness and emptiness. We were the only ones there in the shell of a building that used to be part of what made Detroit Motor City. In our travels, we also learned about the unionization efforts at factories like that one and organizing efforts led by Grace Lee and James Boggs. It was a really formative trip for me, witnessing both the ravages of capitalism as well as the perseverance of the communities that remained.

About a decade later, I found myself in another place with an especially intense perspective of capitalism. As a 2024 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, it has been just as jarring to be immersed in a place where its local industry is seemingly running the world. The exploited workers that power much of the internet we know are not located here in Silicon Valley (and therefore harder to organize than meeting people at the factory gates), but the riches being reaped into this region are similarly astonishing. The fancy cars on every single block, the endless startup pitches droning on in the background at coffee shops, the sense I get in so many interactions that the rest of the world should really just be grateful that it gets to benefit from the concentration of intellect and innovation gathered in this one place. It shouldn’t surprise me, but the oppressive certainty (of the importance of money! the existence of meritocracy! the faith in continual growth!) of this place has (further) radicalized me.

Silicon Valley has just made it so clear: This isn’t the only way. I know it’s not because I’ve learned from activist communities about how to infuse values and justice into my work as a nonprofit leader. Our industries, including journalism, don’t have to follow boom and bust cycles. And as leaders, we can make our budgets work in ways that are collaborative, fair, sustainable, and push back on the actually quite fragile narrative we’ve been sold that the market is the only way to succeed.

Start with solidarity

I’m not going to claim to have solved the question of how to keep moving while everything burns around us, but spending 10 months in the town feeding that fire has only made it more clear to me that solidarity must be part of the answer . Solidarity, meaning understanding that our struggles are shared and working in coalition, is a concept I value in community organizing, but I think it can (and should!) be expressed in business as well, including in the journalism industry.

How solidarity can show up in business:

  • Redistribution: The concept of giving what you can and taking what you need can truly, I promise, be a sound business strategy.
  • Economic justice: We must value workers and have their needs central in budget planning.
  • Centering relationships: Let’s organize around people and our ability to learn from and support one another.
  • Not trying to do it all: Know your role, stick to it, and expand impact through collaboration

I’ve tried to experiment with these strategies in my own work as co-director at OpenNews, drawing inspiration and urgency from what I’ve seen in Detroit, Silicon Valley, and beyond. I share these ideas in the hope that the more we talk about alternatives to the status quo, the more we try out new ideas, the more we take action together, the closer we’ll get to finding ways to sustain journalism and the people within it.

Redistribute resources (that includes money)

I know it can be hard to believe, but it really is true that all of us giving what we are able can create abundance. Thinking about money can immediately make everything feel scary and scarce. But…who has ever gone to a potluck that ran out of food? (Ok, maybe you didn’t like all the food, but I bet it was there.) Most of us have had plenty of experiences of people showing up for each other when someone has a need, and then that person showing up for their community the next time. It actually can work that way in business, too. You just have to do it.

In one small example at OpenNews, we changed our conference ticket structure to make it easier for some people to pay more, some people to pay less, and some people to not pay at all. And you know what? We brought in a ton more money than when there was just one ticket price. In addition, the overall event budget structure included funds for scholarship payments to participants who needed funds for travel or participation.

Through this experiment, I saw how it was not only okay to bring solidarity values into a business plan, but it could be profitable for us and support the needs of even more participants. I don’t need every experiment like this to succeed to know that it is definitely worth the attempt.

Budgets are moral documents

The pressure with constructing an overall organizational budget can be immense, especially if you’re trying to layer in values-driven decisions. For most of the budgets I’ve worked with, staffing was the majority of the budget so that’s where I focus. I’ve learned a lot about different benchmarks and models and ways of thinking about salaries, but here’s how I try to understand fairness:

These factors and the needs of workers should be central to any planning around budget adjustments, too. For example, if an org feels it needs to increase the pay for leadership to compete for top candidates, what is the plan to similarly raise other salaries so as not to exacerbate the gap between roles? Unions are also obviously hugely important in setting the terms for compensation for employees. It’s been great how many negotiations have also covered related topics like limiting the amount of time freelancers/contractors can work before they must be given the opportunity to become a full employee.

It’s critical that we compensate workers for all of the time they spend doing journalism, including the often invisible and unpaid work that many journalists do, especially people of color and women. This background work of advising, network building, research, and relationship support is what powers reporting and the sustainability of our organizations.

Center relationships

Even though it’s often less visible: Work is all about relationships. I have seen it throughout my career, whether it’s tutoring kids, talking to voters, producing journalism to inform audiences, or facilitating events. All of these activities are ultimately about people. How to connect people with each other, with resources, with their power to learn and change the world around them. These relationships are already the foundation of the work that we do in journalism, and yet they are often not seen as central in how we do that work.

Hierarchies and received wisdom determine how many of our workplaces are constructed. Ideas of leadership often conjure an image of a single person. This simplistic idea of leadership driven by one person alone is another capitalistic narrative of scarcity and exceptionalism that infects many workplaces, but there are other options.

I’ve been experimenting with different modes of shared leadership, and have become really interested in scholarship around “relational leadership,” the idea that leadership is something that we ALL enact, together. Why not construct our organizations in a way that serves the needs of the entire staff? With back to the office mandates, we hear so much about the importance of informal discussions. That’s relationship building time! But it doesn’t have to just happen around a virtual or physical water cooler, it can be infused into how meetings are conducted, who makes decisions and how, into the structure and plan for the entire organization.

Part of what I’ve appreciated about scholarship on this style of leadership is that it has demonstrated that it actually makes good business sense. People with strong networks inside and outside of their organizations are powerful change agents who help to ensure new efforts succeed and don’t waste time and money. Let’s start making these relational skills core to our organizational structures.

Sometimes it is ok to stay small

One of the ways I managed to keep OpenNews’ budget going in recent years was by keeping the organization small. Staying small is always an option.

Chasing grants, chasing growth, chasing new projects, these are not the only ways to keep an organization afloat. Growth is also not the only way for an organization to evolve and flourish. I was really cautious about when to hire new employees and how. When so many people seem to measure success by growing budgets and team sizes, it can feel like it’s not really an option to stay small or that it is a failure somehow. But I don’t think that’s true (even if the imposter syndrome does continue to tug at me). In addition to having a more manageable budget to fundraise for, one of the other benefits of staying small is that it makes it easier to focus on your organization’s specific remit.

When I’ve shared this idea with other journalism leaders, I’ve heard responses like “but there’s so much more that needs to be done than our current level of staffing has capacity for!” And I can see that, but I think that’s where we get right back to solidarity being expressed through coalitions: you can get the other stuff done in collaboration and community with other people.

Expanding your own organization isn’t the only path to greater impact. When we collaborate across orgs, industries, and disciplines, we can find new ideas and ways to tackle the problems with journalism. As I’ve written before, public funding may not solve all our problems, but the coalitions building to experiment there are going to teach us a lot. Artists and activists rely on our journalism for their work, might there be ways to partner so we can strengthen the social impact we all seek?

Operating from a place of values requires taking action

Through my JSK Fellowship, I’ve learned from theatre and history, conversations and workshops. I am continuing to build an understanding of the kind of leader I want to be and the type of journalism I want to support.

Especially in a place of such deep economic disparity, I did not expect business strategy to become something I kept coming back to. But I guess in that way it actually makes complete sense: when faced with such blatant injustice, I want to do something in response. And, in the solidaristic mode of working from where I am in collaboration with others, I know how to make budgets work in a values-driven way and it seems like that is a useful skill. In addition, I have a willingness to not just talk about theory and ideas, but to find ways to put them into action. I love creating processes and procedures that center equity, access, and justice and get results. Working for justice and making organizations sustainable are not mutually exclusive goals.

If you’re curious about similar questions, please do reach out. I may come back to update this piece later as these thoughts are very much in progress. Thanks to Mago Torres and Krista Almanzan for feedback on this piece, and to this piece from Hamilton Nolan for the unexpected inspiration.

  • Header image description: the word “solidarity” in cursive writing on an orange striped background
  • Header image: Image credit: Tartantastic

Last modified on May 30, 2024

Erika Owens
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Ported from Makito's Journal.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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