In this episode, Sha Grogan-Brown talks with guest Nat Smith, Finance & Development Director with House of gg and facilitator with A Bookkeeping Cooperative to offer advice to organizations needing to make major pivots to their budgets.
In these wild times, many organizations are needing to revisit their organizational budget, either due to loss of funding, pivoting their work for rapid response moments, taking a strategic pause to tend to internal tensions and challenges, among other reasons.
Dear Rad Ops received a question on this topic, with this context: Our organization is currently facing a series of internal conflicts and disruptions that is calling for us to go inward to tend to these challenges. As a result, we're pausing on a lot of our current activities and adjusting most of our original org-wide and departmental goals/work plans for this year. We're currently drafting an organizational development process to tend to these tensions and there's a good chance that this work (ie OD process, skilling up/facilitation on navigating conflict, etc) will also continue into next year. Our 2025 budget was approved based on our initial work plan, but these recent pivots mean we also need to make adjustments to both our organizational and departmental budgets.
Question: What advice can you offer on how to best reflect these changes within our budget(s)? Are there any other budgetary considerations that we should be aware of for both this year and as we plan out next year’s budgetary process?
Resources from this episode:
Discussion questions to take to your team:
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Guest SpeakerNat Smith is the Finance & Development Director with House of gg, founded by Transgender activist Miss Major. Nat has been involved in the struggle for trans liberation since the early 2000s beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area of California with the Trans in Prison Project of California Prison Focus, also known as TIP. TIP would become the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), of which Nat is a founding member. It was through TGIJP that Nat met Miss Major and the lifelong friendship began. Nat approaches nonprofit accounting and finance from a liberatory standpoint, acknowledging that the historical and current gate keepers of this work are people who don’t look like us or come from our communities. From that vantage point, Nat works to grow the power of our organizations and movement builders so that we are our own Board Treasurers, Finance Directors, Accountants and Bookkeepers. Nat believes that our budgets must align with our values, that we must challenge capitalism and expect abundance.
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