Build It Once: Solidarity as Infrastructure

If you are a Black woman running an organization, you are already constantly being asked for solidarity.

Sit on this panel, review these proposals, and when you get a chance, mentor this person, sign this letter, and join this coalition. Most of it is unpaid, much of it arrives from people who would never ask the same of your white peers, and declining carries a cost that has nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with how you will be perceived afterward.

And the other side of it, which almost nobody says out loud, is that being on the receiving end can feel worse than giving. Many of us were built to be the one others lean on, so asking a peer organization for help can feel like admitting something, even when what we need is small, and the person we are asking would give it without a thought.

Both of those problems have the same root, which is that we have made solidarity a matter of individual willingness. Someone has to feel generous, and someone else has to be willing to ask, and the whole thing depends on two people having capacity for it in the same week.

But there is a version that does not work that way. When solidarity is built into how organizations operate, nobody has to be asked, and nobody has to ask.

Let’s talk about it.

Shared Systems Outlast Good Intentions

Solidarity as infrastructure might look like two organizations sharing a bookkeeper, four organizations co-locating in one building, or a coalition pooling money for a shared communications person; the arrangement holds through the months when everyone is depleted, and nobody has bandwidth for anyone else's problems.

Shared infrastructure converts solidarity from something you extend into something you build, and once it exists it keeps working whether or not anyone is feeling particularly collegial about it.

The forms are more established than most leaders realize.

• Shared space is the most common entry point. Nonprofit centers bring multiple organizations under one roof, usually at below-market rent, and co-location tends to produce the informal exchange that never happens over email.

• Shared back office covers the admin functions. Two or more organizations jointly employ or contract for HR, IT, finance, or grants management. TSNE outlines the main structures, including management service organizations that provide these functions, with each organization retaining its own 501(c)(3), and joint contracting arrangements in which partnering organizations create a shared entity to employ staff.

• Fiscal sponsorship places organizations under a single umbrella that handles compliance and administration, which is particularly useful for newer organizations that should be building programs rather than learning payroll taxes.

• Pooled benefits allow small organizations to access health plans they could never negotiate on their own, which matters most for the staff retention problem every leader is living with.

• Shared knowledge is the cheapest form and the most overlooked. Funder intelligence, prospect research, templates, salary data, vendor rates. None of it requires a legal structure, and most of it is being hoarded by accident rather than intent.

Interest in these arrangements has grown noticeably over the past year, and recent survey work found that smaller organizations are the most interested, with the highest demand for professional development, IT, and volunteer referrals. Accounting ranked surprisingly low, suggesting people will share almost anything before they share the books.

What Solidarity as Infrastructure Costs, Honestly

Two findings are worth knowing before anyone gets excited.

Shared arrangements often cost more before they cost less, because a function performed properly by someone qualified is more expensive than the same function performed partially by an overextended generalist. If you are comparing the quote to what you currently spend, it will usually look worse. But the argument for it is not primarily financial; it is that the work comes off the plate of someone whose time should be spent elsewhere.

These arrangements can fail due to unclear agreements more than anything else. Who decides, who pays what share, what happens when one organization's needs grow, and how either party exits. Practitioners who work on this consistently find that the financial and operational terms have to be explicit at the start, because ambiguity between partners tends to surface as resentment later.

The trust is that the work here is front-loaded, which is the whole appeal, because you negotiate once and then the arrangement carries you through the seasons when nobody has anything left to give.

Where to Start

The entry point is smaller than the examples suggest. It’s just one conversation with one peer organization about one function neither of you wants to be doing, and an assessment of what you are currently paying, in money and in your own time, to maintain separately something that could be maintained once.

If you are thinking about what shared infrastructure could look like for your organization, or you have a peer in mind and no idea how to structure the conversation, that is work we do.

Let's talk strategy.