Level Ground, Los Angeles
In conversation with Yétúndé Olagbaju, Samantha Curley, Leslie Foster, Bri Stokes, Rebekah Mei, Lily Epps
This interview excerpt is part of FCCW’s development of a co-leadership model, learn more here.
Mandy:
Okay, you gave your titles, but will you talk about how the co-leadership model is structured? How do you all work with each other day to day, week to week, project to project?
Samantha:
Yeah, so I’ll try to be very brief in the history, but when Level Ground started, it was entirely volunteer run for the first five years. I started it with a friend and collaborator, who, just life circumstances, kind of moved on a couple of years after we started it, and Leslie and Rebekah and I were all part of a team of all volunteers that were trying to put things together. And then obviously it got to a point where we were like, we can’t keep doing this without getting paid.
So we started to apply for grants and figuring out a structure that would support us getting more resources. We’ve really only had official roles and a staffing structure for four or five years. Our current iteration came out of Skew Magazine, where we wanted it to be an artist-owned magazine and collectively owned by the contributors, and we were really thinking a lot about cooperative models. And this is in 2020. Really thinking through, “Okay, should Level Ground become a cooperative, a worker-owned cooperative?”
We want to reflect, internally, what we’re trying to do in the world, and so what are our options? And it really came to the point of: It doesn’t make sense to lose our nonprofit status, that’s pretty valuable in terms of fundraising, but it’s also really harmful in terms of structure, so trying to dismantle that as much as we could.
The other thing is we were all working varying part-time jobs. Leslie and Rebekah have transitioned into full-time jobs, so they’re very few hours right now, and the rest of us are between 10 and 15 hours a week. So wanting to create some stability with a lot of flexibility for that. And so our first attempt in this shared leadership model was thinking about having two staff members co-lead each of our programs, and then come together, and we have these three internal teams. So we have a communications team, a finance team, and a partnerships team. And so we were collectively, through these teams working on the internal stuff, and then in pairs working on the external program facing stuff.
So yeah, how we’re right now set up to work. We could definitely talk about what’s not working with that. But the other thing I’ll say, that I think is cool and is working, is that we tried to pull as much as we could from cooperative practices. And so we established three different community groups; we have our staff artists, our collective artists, and our contributors. And that structure is reflected in our board. So we transitioned our board last year where there’s three members from each of those groups that are nominated and voted on by the community to serve on the board.
Mandy:
And so how quickly is the board transitioning, or going through a somewhat major transition?
Samantha:
Last fall, last September was when we did our first nominating process, and then the board officially started in October of last year.
Mandy:
And then they’ll do one year? Oh, wow, okay.
Samantha:
We’re currently working with the board on the board term policy and basically building all of our policies from scratch now, within this new framework. So we’re still kind of tweaking what the board terms will look like. I think this current board is going to stay on for another year to finish out that infrastructure building, and then I think it’ll end up being a two-year term that people serve.
Mandy:
Cool.
Sarah:
I had a question, you mentioned that structure is particularly difficult for nonprofits?
Samantha:
The structure…
Yétúndé:
When talking about the-
Rebekah:
The model.
Yétúndé:
The Co-op model —whether or not we didn’t want to lose our 501C.
Samantha:
Oh, yeah. Well, a true cooperative is based on ownership, and nobody owns a nonprofit, and so it’s kind of conceptually intentioned in that way. So to be a worker-owned cooperative, you would have to be a for-profit company because there has to be ownership shares that you’re dealing with.
Like it’s into the weeds. We worked with, I think it’s called the Sustainable Economies Law Center, it’s in the Bay Area, but they have a whole thing. I forget exactly what they call it, but basically being a nonprofit that is cooperatively structured, and we’ve followed that model.
Sarah:
Can you talk a little bit about the experience of some of the newer folks, onboarding with that information from that particular document? Any details that stood out to you about that document, and the experience of trying to make it happen as well?
Lily:
Okay, I guess I was the first guinea pig of this experiment. Yeah, so I didn’t mention, I started off as a collective artist, so that’s how I just even knew what Level Ground was. I actually applied to the residency and then became a collective artist, and then saw that they were looking for people.
Sarah:
I hate to interrupt you, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about the Artist Collective?
Lily:
Yeah, okay. Word. Yeah, this was 2021. I had never been a part of an Artist Collective because I’m like a fresh baby out of college, so just trying to figure out what I want to do, who I want to be. And a lot of stuff was online, and so I was just really just trying to connect and talk to people and meet people, and I was enjoying the vibes. So when I saw that they were looking for people who wanted super part-time work, my EdD ran out on the re-list, and so I was like, “Okay, word, this seems like something super fun.”
And while I was in college, I knew I wanted to learn more about collective work and art making and just trying to be radical in those types of ways and spaces. And so I just told Sam, I was like, “Hey, I just really want to learn how this runs and how this works so I can do better at it out in the world.” And so then they were like, “Yeah, we’d love to have you help us.”
So I was doing that for a couple-ish months or so. And then February of 2022, they were just the staff artists, because I wasn’t a staff artist, but I would work directly with the staff artists, they were just like, “So do you want to be a staff artist?” And I was like, “Okay, sure. What does that mean? What am I going to do?”
So I was paired up with Rebekah to help run the collective. Yeah, so that happened, and I feel like it was definitely a learning process in just seeing how they were also still learning how to work together, and have shared leadership and stuff. Because like Sam said, it was Sam and another person who co-founded Level Ground, and so Sam had really been carrying a lot of weight and in some ways still does carry a lot of weight. And we’re still learning how to pick up those pieces so we can all know how to do the finances, all know how to do all the legal stuff, just all the really nitty-gritty, invisible kind of work that needs to happen.
Leslie:
I can throw in something there too. One of the things that I think was done well, is how do we disseminate information? So having those different teams, like the finance team, it meant that we were all looking at the budget, we were all managing budgets in a way where before, Sam withheld so much of that information and then sharing that out. So now we have a view of the budget in a way that we didn’t before, and an understanding of the budget, so as just an example, I think that’s one of the things that I like being able to see.
Samantha:
I think I saw my role for most of Level Ground, especially because of those volunteer routes, as “I’ll be the person that does whatever no one else wants to do.” And then getting to a point where I was like, “Oh, this is really heavy to carry…”
And I don’t actually think that reflects what we’re trying to do as an organization, and so then trying to figure out, “okay, what are those things?” And then figuring out how to disseminate them across the team has definitely been a process. I think your experience coming into our shared leadership model is so unique, Yétúndé, because we had a hiring process and we found Yétúndé that way.
Yétúndé:
Yeah, they had a hiring process. And I came into Level Ground already having this experience of working within shared leadership models and also co-founding collectives and spaces under the guise of: “We are working towards shared leadership, this is how we’re starting.” And so it is interesting to be joining Level Ground at this moment where it was this sort of handoff, right? And so I joined knowing it was really clear that I was working in the art residency, but also I was sort of expecting like, “Oh, we will be engaging you in other aspects of transforming the structure of the organization.”
I think it’s always interesting to see how people arrive at the space of deciding to share leadership, because sometimes it can come from this place of one person is holding all the information and it doesn’t feel bad, but it also feels like it’s a big burden for people to maintain and it’s not sustainable, right? Ultimately, shared leadership, in my personal opinion, is something that’s made in order to make things more sustainable for people long-term.
The way that we work is shifting and changing, people are becoming sick, having to work until they’re 65, 80 hours a week. It’s just not sustainable. And so to me, a shared leadership model allows for people to arrive as themselves and with varying levels of capacity, as our lives shift and change. So I came in knowing like, “Okay, this is going to take a minute…” I might have some direction with the residency, because that feels very clear, it’s been happening. Leslie, Rebekah, people who are staff artists have now interfaced with this program, so it feels like a sort of legacy program, as part of Level Ground.
So I was like, “Okay, cool. I can figure that out.” But then also it’s going to be all of the extra stuff around it, sharing leadership that takes so much time. Figuring out decision-making matrices, how are we making choices? How are we going to take into account the way that our capacity and lives and mentality around the work shift, as we’re making these large decisions? How do we communicate this out to our community?
Yes, we internally as staff artists, have communication systems, but how do we communicate to the rest of the collective and our community? There’s a community out there that is being held and connected through our internal work, the webs that go in and out of that takes time to create. So it just takes time and patience and intentionality. I was like, “Okay, I’m doing this one program that will be pretty obvious, and the other stuff may not really be obvious, and it might take a long time.”