An interview with Aja Schmeltz of the Good Work Institute on how emphasizing material and non-material needs inside organizations can transform us. Interview by Matt Birkhold
Matt Birkhold: Aja, what does it mean to make your non material needs for thriving as important as your material needs for survival.
Aja Schmeltz: I will always choose non material, because I have to make sure that those are solid before I can even start thinking about material things. Because if you are not solid in your non-material foundation, once you add the layers of material, that shit is going to collapse. Those are the things that people cannot strip me of. So I have to take care of myself, not just for myself, but I have to take care of myself for other people that I'm in community with.
Matt: How do you describe the work that the Good Work Institute does?
Aja: It's layered. We do systems change work, and our work is rooted in the just transition framework. That means that we offer programming to support just transition, shared leadership, and conflict resilience, social justice, and racial equity within our workspaces. We are a worker self directed nonprofit. So that means that we don't operate under a traditional hierarchical system. We don’t have an executive director, we have worker trustees. Right now we are a collective of 5 worker trustees and we all have our hands in the executive functions of the organization.
Matt: Thanks, Aja. So what do you all do to emphasize the non material needs of people inside the organization?
Aja: We have policies in place around how to navigate our own internal conflict. We can't be naive and say, “Oh, our workplace is so magical we all just get along all the time.” We all have our own personalities, and we come in with our own working styles and our own language, and our own fashions, and all of the things that a person enters a space with. And when you have a shared leadership structure, we all have space. And we all take up space the way that we need to. Sometimes it moves things at a slower pace than what some of us are used to, and that can get tough. That can cause tensions, because if you have some of us that want things to move more quickly, and you have some of us that want to just move at the pace that things need to move. That's gonna create tension. So that's when conflict resilience comes in. We can come to a resolution, and we all feel like our voices were heard, and we feel satisfied with the outcome. It's hard, but it's also a relief to know that we share all of those things. We can share the load. We can share our celebrations and we can share the tough shit with each other. So it is a huge relief. But it’s hard.
Matt: So how has existing in this work culture where people’s non-material need to be seen and heard is important changed you?
Aja: I have grown more as a person. When we started our transition to the worker self-directed nonprofit it pushed me immediately to my edges. I've been in a leadership position, I've been mid level staff, I've held all the positions, and knowing that we were making this transition into a more shared leadership structure meant that I had to start really pulling away from the I and embracing the We, which it was a hard transition for me because of how I was very much used to working before. I came from a very traditional hierarchical background. I worked in corporate for a really long time and I would have stayed there if I wanted stuff to be easy. In the corporate world you know the structure, you know your place and there is no swaying in and out of the lines. But I wasn't learning. I wasn't learning particularly about me, I wasn't going deep about me, who I am as a person, and it was draining for me and my soul. I knew that eventually I was gonna explode out of that box. I was just turning into this little tiny, confined person. And I was like, “Nope, I have to break away. I have to find something else. I have to find something that ignites my soul.” Doing this work now, as hard as it can be and will continue to be, is totally worth it because I am pushed to my edges constantly, but I also know that within that pain I'm growing, I'm learning.
Matt: What does GWI do to make sure that those practices to emphasize non-material needs don't get overpowered or overshadowed by the organization's need to meet its material needs?
Aja: That’s a really good question. We have created this real community of care around each other, and that shows up in a lot of different ways. One of our practices is to do what we call soul-hosting. So each one of us will pick a day and create a day of shared experience that reflects that person. So we've had like really, really cool, cool experiences with our coworkers. One of my co-worker stook us on a walking tour of her hometown of Poughkeepsie. We stopped at some of her favorite spots. We went to her favorite deli, Russo’s Deli, which is incredible. They have the most amazing sandwiches!
Matt: Is it that those relationships then make economic logic a less compelling way to run an organization?
Aja: It’s Hard to say. I know that you have to really invest in culture building. You really have to not omit building a solid culture, because it's easy to just say, “These are the policies, these are the practices.” But if those two things fail, the only thing that's gonna save you is your culture. Because if you're all constantly at each other's throats and you're not practicing conflict resilience, you're not taking the time to work together in the same room–not on zoom–but to absorb people's energy and learn how they work, learn their working styles, know their triggers, know something about their families, something personal about them–if you’re not doing these things–when all that other policy and practice business fails, the only thing that's gonna save you is your culture. If you're like, “I can't stand any of these people. I don't care what happens,” it's gonna crumble. But culture creates a real like that solid third leg of the tripod (policy & practices), because it's not going to stand the same way if it's imbalanced. So you have to continue to build that cultural muscle and that's arguably the hardest one.
