Facing Race: A National Conference in St. Louis, MO — November 20-22, 2024

Fayise Abrahim

Co-Director | Voices for Racial Justice
Fayise is Co-Director at Voices for Racial Justice (VRJ). She was previously the Organizing and Training Director for three years, working to build and coordinate the longstanding organizing training and Greater Visions network within VRJ. Fayise’s organizing began in rural Minnesota as a daughter of East African refugees and factory workers. She has cultivated cultural strategy from hosting and listening to intergenerational conversations in rural Minnesota’s factory working community. Fayise is also an artist and musician. You can find Fayise’s poetry in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, and in the Yellow Medicine Review.

Presentations from Facing Race 2020

Building Organizational Innovation through Shared Leadership

This session guides participants towards strategies on organizational transformation through shared leadership. It addresses the potential of decentralizing leadership in organizations to a horizontal model that allows for multiple leaders to guide the work. This session looks at how to prepare your organization for a leadership transition and the importance of building transition planning as an ongoing organizational practice. We will look at how to build shared values, systems of decision-making, conflict mapping and resolution within a shared leadership model.

Questions we will consider include:
-How do you map and utilize the skillsets of your whole team during a time of transition?
-What is the role of and what are some key cultures shift tools to ensure your team sees themselves as key players in a leadership transition?
-How do you build a plan to develop staff as leaders at all levels of the organization?

Our shared leadership model is the result of an organizational Strategic Planning Process that took place in 2017, after which we entered a partnership with healing justice practitioners for a year and half to help us integrate healing justice strategies at Voices for Racial Justice which included building infrastructures for accountability and conflict resolution. When our Executive Director transitioned out of our organization, we chose to implement a shared leadership structure with collaboration at its core. This shared leadership structure we believe is more sustainable and offers room for innovation, capacity building, and culture shift in ways that allow for expansiveness and growth organizationally.

Speakers: Fayise Abrahim, Monica Bryand, Gabriella Anaïs Deal-Márquez