The annual report is a good time for a check-in on how we are doing with our organisation development, especially the transition into participatory governance (read more about the background here, here and here). The first part is a conversation between Joris (Activist Council), Thomas (Funders Circle) and Romy from the team about how that transition feels for everyone involved and the tensions and questions that inevitably have surfaced.
Disclaimer: The text below includes reflections by a person of wealth on their journey through radical redistribution. We acknowledge that it can be disturbing to read about the ‘challenges’ of wanting to redistribute wealth. These are, comparatively, luxury problems. Yet, we hope that sharing such experiences might support others who are on a similar journey or those who work with people with wealth on their journey towards radical redistribution.
Romy: Romy: How did the journey of becoming sociocratic at Guerrilla feel from the inside your circles?
Joris (AC): In all honesty, I believe the entire process of joining the Guerrilla governance has been quite overwhelming and confusing for many of us on the AC. We were invited on a ticket of “participatory grantmaking” that would allow us to scout and fund groups, movements, and organizations we knew that were doing important frontline political work. But what I think many of us were not prepared for was the deep involvement with the organizational restructuring of the entire foundation and moving to a model of sociocracy that requires active and dedicated input from all those involved to give that process meaning and direction. And then there’s the other half of GF’s work on transforming philanthropy that many of us on the AC simply don’t have the time, brain space, or interest to engage with.
It wasn’t easy for us as a dispersed and only loosely connected collective of activists from all over Europe (and beyond) to actively self-organize, take and share responsibility, and align our expectations of the work that needs to be done. It’s great to have the freedom and encouragement to self-organize, but self-organization needs to have an internal drive. It cannot be imposed externally if there’s no strong internal cohesion within the group or a clear sense of purpose and direction toward a specific end goal.
I feel that the Activist Council has come a long way since its inception. There’s a lot of important work that we managed to get done; we scouted, reviewed, and approved grants for many dozens of applicants; we’re taking initiative and offering input on the foundation’s internal organization as well as its external funding priorities; and, lastly, we’ve grown as a collective, getting to know each other and forging strong relationships between us as individuals as well as between the ecosystems we’re part of.
Thomas: We have grappled with similar challenges in the FC, especially because many of us had very little experience with having to self-organise. It took us a couple of months to figure this out. But now, the FC is important for us in terms of honing our shared understanding of what the role of funders in philanthropy should be.
One of the biggest problems with philanthropy is funders interfering—or even dictating—funding decisions or strategies based on personal preference or their biased analysis based on their positionality. At the same time, there is another—less frequent—extreme, in which funders completely disengage and just give money as a way to soothe their discomfort with being wealthy, but do not want to take any responsibility or do any personal work. Giving up decision-making power or subscribing to technocratic solutionism (like effective altruism) might then become a convenient excuse to help moderate your guilt and shame (speaking from my own experience here).
We have a range of approaches between those two extremes among the members of the Funders Circle. I think that guilt-driven giving and the associated disengagement make it impossible to deeply change and build meaningful relationships. It can be a hindrance in really learning to discern where you as a person with wealth have a responsibility that’s yours to fulfill and where it’s important to step back.
What I like about the participatory approach at Guerrilla is that while we are very clear that funders don’t take funding decisions, we do have a role to play: in fundraising, sharing networks and access, holding others with wealth accountable and supporting each other in starting redistribution conversations in their families, for example. These are important aspects of building a radical redistribution movement where people with wealth have the chance to put their power and access to use. Building that awareness and supporting funders to step up to these responsibilities is an important function of the Funders Circle..
Romy: I’m realising more and more how intense and confusing these first months must have felt for both activists and funders and that all of us had to hold a lot of unknowns because there was a lot of emergence: We had a rough idea that participatory grantmaking was not the ‘end goal’ of our journey and that we were exploring how to shift power more broadly, but it’s true that the current sociocratic governance, and the deep involvement and time it requires, was not explicitly in the cards when we started inviting people into the Guerrilla Foundation. We worked from the intention that activists should increasingly be involved in our work and that also funders have important roles to play, but, beyond the participatory grantmaking part, we were (and still are) making sense of things as we go. Our evaluation was a great opportunity to take a step back and get ideas for how to move on from here (see below), this is clearly not the end of our power-bending journey. All these structural changes to increase participation need to be matched by an evolution of internal communication, feedback and conflict resolution processes. Again, the peer circles (AC and FC) are important here. As per our new guideline, any staff, activist or funders circle member who wants to raise an issue or has a conflict is asked to first address that within their immediate circle. The hope is that peer-to-peer conversation might often be enough to help resolve tensions that inevitably will come up, to put things into perspective, and disentangle personal preferences from organisational interests. Tensions individuals lived in 2024 were manifold, ranging from being ‘unhappy’ about some of our grantmaking, perceiving a mismatch between personal politics and internal ways of working, issues with specific wording in our communication, the list goes on…
Sharing power more horizontally also means that all Guerrilla members need to learn to hold space for such conversations, keep an eye on our organisational mission, and help each other in disentangling the basis of tensions that will inevitably arise: are they personal, interpersonal or organisational? The personal share needs to be met with high levels of individual responsibility, e.g. for communicating needs or working through own trauma. The other part, which for example might lie in unclear role definitions or ‘orphan’ responsibilities that aren’t clearly assigned to one circle, needs to be solved at the organisational level. Finding a balance between individual responsibility and collective space-holding is important, as are extensive selection and onboarding processes for staff, funders and activist council members. These processes should not only emphasise expectations in terms of time commitment or the nature of one’s contribution to the organisation but also focus on abilities such as self-regulation and willingness to grow as a person.
Thomas: One of the most intense discussions that we’ve had in the FC was around the Palestine solidarity statement. While everyone was deeply appalled and outraged by the ongoing genocide, there were differing views and concerns about the impact of such a public statement. Some funders were worried about exposing Guerrilla too much in a climate of state repression in Germany against pro-Palestinian voices. But there were also personal concerns among some funders regarding impacts on personal relationships. Emotions were rather high. Was this the right move or should we silently fund and support Palestinian solidarity?
It was a learning journey for us funders to first align within the FC on our views and concerns before bringing these into the wider Guerrilla structure to discuss them in a constructive way. Many wealthy people, myself included, are socialized to solve problems with money and power moves. In philanthropy this manifests as, “I am uncomfortable with this, if this isn’t changed I am pulling my funding,” which is a very harmful, but far too common practice. At Guerrilla we’re trying to do this differently by engaging in constructive conversations and relationship building instead of silently (by not voicing any concerns) or violently (by pulling funding) disengaging when we face discomfort or disagreement. That certainly is an ongoing journey though. I found these conversations helped to ultimately align on a statement and shared analysis so that we as Guerrilla could speak up jointly.
I am incredibly grateful for the many conversations we’ve had around the statement and for the patience and insistence of the team and AC members in underlining the importance for us as a German philanthropic foundation to speak up. This changed my perspective on the conflict and the role we need to play right now.
Joris: In the AC, I think the deeper learning processes that we had to go through did not so much have to do with political issues—we appear to be quite aligned on most topics—but more with our internal organizing structure, and the responsibilities, expectations and requirements around that. By this, I mean that we had to navigate the different levels of availability, experience, and capacity to make sure that everyone has equal opportunity to learn and engage while also holding one another to account. How do we prevent certain people with more time on their hands from dominating the space on the one hand, while on the other understanding the limits of democratic decision-making structures that rely on everyone’s input when not everyone is always available to engage? By learning and experimentation, we’ve collectively come up with different solutions for the challenges we encountered, ranging from introducing rotating coordinator roles to the sharing of different responsibilities. This was not always an easy task, and we’ve certainly come to appreciate the importance of in-person gatherings and face-to-face team-building efforts to facilitate these processes.
Romy: I do believe that personal transformation happens through this kind of deep engagement and collective work, even though it feels painful and lengthy at times. These processes are as important as getting funding out of the door, which many of us have a high sense of urgency around. This conversation is a good reminder that it is indeed worth it to invest in the collective sensemaking and internal organising work.
However, we also realised this past year that everyone has limited capacity to engage that deeply. Staff are tied up in daily operations and for the vast majority of Activist Council and Funders Circle members, Guerrilla is only one of many things they are involved in. We faced some real capacity challenges in 2024 and I think there were times when people felt fatigue and/or were overwhelmed by the amount of ongoing projects, processes, online meetings and Slack communication. In both the AC and the FC it proved helpful to clearly define the minimum level of contribution that is considered necessary for circle membership so that people don’t always walk around feeling they’re falling short, not living up to expectations. As those who are steering this organisational development process, the team is learning to be more selective and to take things a bit slower. We will also keep improving the participatory elements of our governance to create clear and time-bound opportunities for AC and FC to be meaningfully involved.
We now also introduced a Backers category of funders who do not want to be so deeply involved like the FC but still wish to support us financially. There was quite a bit of debate around this because of what Thomas said earlier about shame and guilt. We are wondering whether that will provide an ‘easy opt-out’ of responsibility for funders not willing to do the work and it remains to be seen how this plays out.
Joris: I think this is a clear example of the learning-on-the-go we’re doing. In an ideal situation, every individual funder would have brought the same level of commitment and enthusiasm to engage in everything GF has to offer. But that’s not how reality works. By creating this new category, we’re facing and embracing the situation that’s in front of us. Instead of feeling disappointed that the original plan hasn’t worked out, we redirect our energy into creating something new that’s a better fit for the situation at hand.
This is also the spirit with which the AC is looking ahead. In March 2025 we had our first in-person meeting with the new AC members who joined the past year, and this brought about an immense amount of positive energy and a renewed enthusiasm for the work we’re doing. Collectively, we looked at what works well and what can be improved about our internal organizing; how we understand the role of the AC within the Guerrilla Foundation; and how we see the function of the Foundation within the broader political landscape in which we operate. Not everything is clear from the onset in the work we’re doing here, so that’s while we figure things out on the go, “Caminar preguntando,” as the Zapatistas say; walking while asking.
Thomas: In 2025, our focus in the FC will be to strengthen our self-organization and find FC members who have some capacity to actively contribute to the work funders should take on within Guerrilla. On the one hand, we have many funders who already do a lot of other important political work and have many other obligations, so, understandably, capacities for FC work are limited. But we also want to avoid catering to the service culture that many wealthy people are socialized into, that other people do all the organisational work for them, and that they can just show up for the interesting and fun parts. So it’s also important to challenge this a little bit. It’s not easy to discern the two, but I am confident that we’ll find more capacity within the FC. After all, it’s also super interesting and rewarding work, I’ve certainly learned quite a lot.
