Lessons from our Staff Transition
Since October 2020, a youth-led staff transition team has been working with great care to design a hiring and transition process that lives into the STAY Project’s mission and values.
To start, we formed a team.
We set goals at the beginning of the process—voicing the parts of the process that felt scary, recounting transitions that felt bad, and rooting in our intentions and values. We affirmed that
Our work is to decentralize the knowledge and relationships that it takes to make STAY function and thrive, to ensure that folks feel empowered and accountable, and to make it possible for Lou to let go and feel great about the new leadership being set up to succeed.
We should communicate clearly internally and externally in order to invite our leadership, membership, and community into the process.
This process should be sustainable, organic, and replenishing to our relationships. This process is relational work
This process is the transition. Gathering and finding our way together is the work.
We have met as a group consistently. Bringing our whole selves, tending to our relationships, caring for each other, supporting each other, investing time to deepen our relationships. We’ve also paid people to show up; we all deserve to be paid to show up.
Learning to trust this process, to trust each other, to trust ourselves.
Learning has been ongoing in this process. Learning that
Transition can be slow. Transition can be thorough. Transition takes labor.
Healthy transition is proactive.
We need to talk honestly about power dynamics, conflict, and labor distribution.
We aren’t going to be perfect but we can stay in touch with our values and feelings, we can be emergent and tend to the needs that arise.
This process can be a container for development for all of us. This is transitional work and our lives are transitional work.
Leadership reflects who we are in relationship with; how will we continuously commit to Black leadership, especially for staff roles?
Learning organizational histories, particularly the joyful and tender history of relationships and the challenging history of sticking points, growing edges, things that didn’t work, and places that felt hard offers us wisdom for how we want to show up with one another.
The power is in this process being an onboarding and an offboarding at once.
This process offers a model and tools that we can make use of in other parts of our work and lives. We have documented our time and work together.
In this process we have moved at our own pace, at the speed of trust, from a value of abundance, with collective care, and with the intention of doing right by each other. We have recognized and affirmed the power and brilliance of young people.
We understand that transition is built into our work. The labor and learning of transition will continue and be ongoing in our work.