Embracing Shared Leadership
By: Melanie Allen & Olivia Watkins
Co-Executive Directors, Black Farmer Fund
Co-Authored by Melanie Allen & Olivia Watkins
Co-Executive Directors, Black Farmer Fund
Change is a constant force that shapes the trajectory of movements and organizations. We are thrilled to announce an exciting shift in our organizational structure that aligns with our values of collective decision-making and decentralized power centered on liberatory practices. Black Farmer Fund (BFF) is transitioning from a traditional hierarchical model with a President to a dynamic shared leadership approach with Co-Executive Directors. With this new approach, Olivia Watkins, our current President, will transition to a shared leadership model with our now Program Director, Melanie Allen. Together, they will be Co-Executive Directors of our organization, fostering collaboration, inclusivity, and shared accountability.
By leaning into our value of accountability and our desire to increase transparency across and within the organization, we are sharing this blog post documenting our journey to shared leadership and the tools we are leaning on to navigate this process.
Why Shared Leadership? Why Now?
Since the beginning of Black Farmer Fund in 2019, the founding board members have always discussed wanting an executive leadership model that demonstrates a less hierarchical model. Within the first year of the organization’s inception, Black Farmer Fund went through a significant growth spurt in response to the COVID pandemic, heightened awareness of the cracks in our food system, and the need to support the Black-led movement building in the food justice space. Our attention turned to matching the influx of resources coming into our organization with holistic programming and financing distribution into our community. In our 2022 strategic retreat with the BFF board and staff, we mapped out our Theory of Change over the next ten years. One of our key takeaways was that to free our community and ourselves from oppressive structures, we must transition the organization to a place where we decentralize power.
As BFF has increased our organizational capacity and begun to make some impact on the black agricultural community, the board and staff feel like now is the time to make this transition. With the launch of our new fund, BFF Fund 2.0, a $20 million integrated capital fund, and an expansion of our financing across the Northeast, having a shared executive leadership structure that will continue to support this work and align with our values is critical.
“To free our community and ourselves from oppressive structures, we must transition the organization to a place where we decentralize power.”
Building our Alliance
We have worked together over the past three years, with Melanie being the first employee of Black Farmer Fund. We were now tasked with transitioning our relationship from one where there was an unequal power dynamic to one with an equal power dynamic, despite working collaboratively daily. In October 2022, we began this transition by seeking the support of a leadership coach to help us continue strengthening our relationship.
With our coach, she created a safe space for us to reflect on our current working dynamic, help process any unresolved conflict, and build an alliance that would allow us to shift into the new leadership structure. Building this alliance, we defined how we would like to work together, our expectations, feedback loops, and shared leadership values. Our shared leadership values are abundance, collaboration, trust, and relationship. These values will allow us to make decisions together and move through conflict with a sense of purpose. We will continue working with a coach to support operationalizing and embodying these values in these new roles.
Building the Roadmap & Collaboration Across the Organization
We were grateful to work with a coach currently in a Co-Executive Director leadership structure who provided us with a roadmap of the transition and tools to help us and our colleagues navigate this transition.
Our coach recommended adopting a model of becoming a team of co-collaborators who share a broad perspective on the organization and lead in some of the functional areas of the organization. This would allow each individual to operate in our zones of genius/strengths while demonstrating shared leadership on big-picture functions. Based on this transition, Olivia will transition to Co-Executive Director of Internal Resilience, and Melanie will transition to Co-Executive Director of Programs. We will share organizational management, strategy, risk, work culture, and fundraising. Melanie will work and lead in her zone of genius in programs (technical assistance, communications, skillshares, collaborations/partnerships, and community initiatives). Olivia will work and lead in her zone of genius in internal resilience (operations, IT, finance, HR, investment).
As we received recommendations on structures, we hosted a town hall with all BFF staff and created an intentional space for people to voice their desires, needs, and fears around this leadership transition. The primary trend across the organization was that while folks were excited and felt like there was alignment with our values and the discussions we had at the strategic retreat, there was still uncertainty around what accountability would look like between leadership and staff and what communication flows will look like through this transition. As a result, we created a shared leadership transition task force to address some of these things and ultimately develop new frameworks, processes, and communication flows that will benefit folks across the organization. It was important to us to have members of the staff across the organization infuse their expertise into this transition. Currently, the shared leadership task force members include:
Jared Davis, People & Culture Associate
Amanda Everich, Community Investment Committee Facilitator
Rhyston Mays, Black Farmer Fund Board Member, Board Development Chair
Mykalee McGowan, Communications Associate
Christina Reese, Operations Director
Board Buddy
As this is a new model for the organization, we are also engaging our board on this learning journey. Our former pilot community member and current board member Rhyston Mays is our designated care and support buddy. Rhyston has been supporting the coordination of the transition task force, has regular check-ins with us, and helps to serve as a liaison between co-directors and the rest of the board. The Black Farmer Fund board is thrilled about this new direction that the organization is heading.
We welcome any questions or discussions you may have regarding this exciting development. Your insights and perspective are invaluable as we embark on this empowering journey together. Thank you for your ongoing support.