If you make a cooperative, you have to know that you can’t design them; you can only grow them, like plants. If you grow one and you do it with other people, then everyone will undoubtedly have ideas about what the best way to grow it is.

My theory about power is that you never feel powerful, you only feel comfortable. Like, rarely are we like, “Ah ha ha, I am so powerful!” It’s more like, “I just feel really comfortable,” you know? But not feeling powerful usually manifests as feeling uncomfortable.

social acknowledgement of burnout, before it gets out of hand and things stop being sustainable, is really important.

I like to think of gardening metaphors, like growing trust. You have to water it—not too much, not too little. And things will always grow in different directions and with different outcomes than you’re expecting, but that’s okay.

in a cooperative, you are one plant contributing to the larger garden. Has it been hard to learn to operate this way yourself, and then teach other people how to operate this way? What has it been like to create these sorts of non-hierarchical spaces within a country that functions primarily through capitalist and patriarchal structures?

Consensus doesn’t mean unanimous support. Often, it means decisions are passed with some people being like, “I disagree with this, but I’m okay with it passing.” That, I think, is really healthy because it doesn’t mean everyone agrees; it means everyone is okay with something moving on because there’s enough trust in the group.

There are a lot of organizational structures and lived practices embedded in our bodies that we just enact by default. But through explicit facilitation practices or when we make meetings happen in a certain way, that helps change these conditioned ways of operating. In the process of learning to work this way, what really helps is, again, trust. T... See more

self-checking means asking, “Do I feel really comfortable?” And if I do, I’m probably holding some power that I’m not too aware of.