Who Needs the Institution?
Our old ways of running meetings, making decisions, and holding onto power are killing Us All.
“Naming is the origin of all things.” –Lao Tzu (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Call the thing by its name. Even the institutions that were supposedly built to protect us, to heal us, to carry us toward something like justice have failed us and continue failing us. Not all of us. Most of us. Some of us have known this our whole lives, have felt it in our bodies, in our neighborhoods, in the silence where help was supposed to be. And an elite few want Us All to believe this is the ONLY way.
Look at where we are:
An institution of harm marketed as care: a City spending $58,000 per day threatening arrest and then forcing into privately-run, out-of-compliance treatment up to 25 people per day, claiming it is an opportunity for a “reset”,
An institution of housing controlling who lives and who dies: this same City on the verge of evicting trans and senior neighbors from their homes due to cuts dictated by the Mayor to housing subsidies while simultaneously shuttering shelters, affordable housing, and workforce development programs, all pathways to neighbors remaining housed, stable, and secure,
A governing institution sowing precarity as a means to subjugate and dominate: this same City targeting Indigenous, Black, Pacific Islander, Filipino, and Trans organizations and cutting their already inadequately funded culturally-specific and -responsive services by up to 20% in ways that directly mirror the federal administration and Project 2025 and of which will result in program and organizational closures of institutions actually serving their people.
These are not failures of imagination. These are not oversights. These are features. And they demonstrate how as of May 21, 2026, our institutions here in Yelamu / San Francisco construct the conditions of our oppression.
It is unsurprising that these same systems fuel our businesses, non-profits, unions, foundations, organizations, associations, and formations. And We All experience it as isolation, burn-out, despair, anxiety, fear, grief, rage, othering and for more and more of Us All it results in hunger, homelessness, illness and disease, incarceration and detention, and death.
The institution is not enough. Our old ways of running meetings, making decisions, and holding onto power are killing Us All. We must ask ourselves and one another, “What do we actually need here and now so our descendents have the possibility of being liberated from our current, generational, and systemic ways of control, domination, and oppression?”
What We Are Witnessing
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” — Audre Lorde
People come to us when they are in the middle of a turning point. A founder had a medical crisis and suddenly had to share power and reimagine the organization she built from scratch. A constituent-run nonprofit was pressured by a funder to rearticulate its purpose just as internal conflict and growing pains began surfacing. A culturally-specific institution who weathered displacement, COVID, deep loss and grief, and sudden funding increases and decreases and whose staff were barely holding things together with ever increasing administrative burdens placed on them by the government wanted to dream of something more liberatory than boom and bust cycles hurting everyone.
In each of these cases, the same pattern appears: the old way of leading stops working; everyone can feel it; and something new must not only be imagined but facilitated.
We facilitate using our culture tending praxis called Tree of Change. It is a culturally-specific and -adaptive way of being together rooted in a world of worlds after abolition. We believe what we want, need, and desire for our descendants is present in the here and now, and what is here and now grows from what we inherit from our ancestors. Our praxis (aka our frameworks, agendas, activities, tactics, and guides) offers our communities, constituents, clients, and stakeholders an experience of talking story and co-creating from inception to implementation to dispersion. It is our pasts, presents, and futures in conversation with one another.
What we are witnessing within the businesses, non-profits, unions, foundations, organizations, associations, and formations we work with individually and collectively is the limits of institutional thinking. This includes (and is not limited to:)
Opaque, top-down leadership that sows distrust among staff or members,
A quiet divide between “professional” staff and the people closest to the work (and who “knows best”,)
Programs and campaigns that move fast and leave staff, constituents, and stakeholders feeling disempowered and unseen,
Talk of “distributive leadership” without any practices to share power and make collective decisions,
Forced transitions by external factors (e.g. big swings in funding, funder-dictated administrative processes and initiatives, increased criminalization of the populations being served, etc.) that mandate quick shifts in how the work gets done and the relationships between organizations and the communities and peoples being served.
Our response is: Let’s be together here and now and talk story; we have a way to do this that honors Us All.
What We All Can Co-Create Together
“It is as transforming and creative beings that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods–tangible objects–but also social institutions, ideas, and concepts.” - Paulo Freire
No one can disentangle themselves from the systems and cycles oppressing Us All alone. This is why our Tree of Change grows from a seed planted by both of us, and it is what makes our culture tending praxis one where a world of many worlds is possible from its very origins. Every moment we gather is an opportunity to talk story and co-create, and no one way is the correct way. We have choice in every moment even when told we do not.
From our perspectives, positions, histories, and identities, we have noticed that when we pay closer attention to how we arrive and depart to / from moments where We All gather (e.g. staff meetings, retreats, planning sessions, supervision, etc.), we can better articulate the flow of time, of power, and of decision-making. This offers those gathered a possibility to consent to how they want to be present and participate within that space and moment. And while not a cure-all to generational, systemic, and institutional harms, it is an antidote to the status quo.
Through tending to openings and closings, we have worked with our communities, constituents, clients, and stakeholders to:
Hold transition and loss with both tenderness and rigor,
Create leaderful spaces where many people lead, not just one person at the top,
Design meetings so people understand their purpose — their why — and their role, rather than simply being told what to do,
Build trust slowly by making room for voice, conflict, repair, and imagination,
Center values as the real infrastructure that guides decisions — not just the language in the annual report,
Realign regranting processes that affirm and award all applicants fostering a cooperative grant-making cycle rather than cultivating a fiercely competitive and combative one.
Our outcomes are the result of talking story and co-creation from inception to implementation to dispersion. Thus, all gathered feel more ownership of and shared responsibility towards tending to the collective culture. When we end our engagement, we leave behind the agendas, guides, activities, and notes that can aid Us All in facilitating more moments where a world of many worlds is possible.
Systems of oppression survive, in part, by convincing us we are alone, by stripping away choice, by making the possible feel impossible, by erasing the evidence of what We All co-create when gather as peers and talk story.
So we want to ask: What stories are you telling yourself about choice, power, and how We All gather? Which ones affirm ways of being after abolition? Which ones reentrench the status quo? Which ones will you tell others?