Building Capacity for Exit to Community

We can't change the world by focusing only on dismantling, we have to really build up the alternative and show that it can work in a different way, and radicalize people, not through convincing them of the rightness of an ideology, but through their lived experience of true participation, of the collective power of livelihood in a non-capitalist pa... See more

Exit to Community is values-aligned, structurally-aligned, and financially-aligned. For us, it makes a lot of sense.

I've worked in a lot of "non-hierarchical" organizations, and management or leadership do not go away. You don't succeed in that space by removing them and leaving a vacuum. You succeed by reinterpreting things like management and leadership into distributed processes, transparent roles that can rotate and are accountable back to the community at l... See more

We knew that the traditional exit model was not for us. Obviously, we are very community and transparency oriented. We had aspirations for more tangible and meaningful involvement from the wider community of stakeholders in governance of the platform. But we hadn't been able to prioritize that and really do the legwork to make it the reality. Right... See more

I want us to be writing more of these utopian sci-fi stories, because that's my dream, living in that post-capitalist Star Trek world. We can start in the world that we live in now, creating little bubbles of that new future, really living it, and inviting more and more people to live in that different reality with us, in a in a deeply real, moving... See more

No one in our community is super excited about putting down their main thing they're passionate about to just do governance. Builders and activists don't necessarily want to do a bunch of bureaucratic stuff. I hope we can make it feel immediate, like 'I participate and my voice is heard and it really has an influence that positively impacts me and ... See more

There's what I mentioned about the mission failing to translate across time. For six years, Open Collective has had people in the center holding very strongly to a certain set of values. If those people are no longer there, where's that strength going to come from? That's difficult to design. You can see lots of examples out there of large, diverse... See more

Exit to Community was a very natural fit. It's giving us a north star to orient ourselves around strategically, and helping us figure out what capacities we need to build, internally and with our community, to be set up for a successful post-E2C future. It has really helped us get aligned as a team. Exit to Community is values-aligned, structurally... See more

it's important we don't rush.