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Dear Rad Ops: Pivoting Budgets, w/ Nat Smith

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Rad Ops - The Podcast
Rad Ops - The Podcast
Dear Rad Ops: Pivoting Budgets, w/ Nat Smith
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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:

  • Before reviewing the budget together, discuss these questions:
    • Based on the current conditions of our work, what are our hopes and dreams for this organization’s mission?
    • What are the top 3 values we want to lean into during this time? Which aspects of our work will best support us to meet those values?
    • What are the commitments we have made to our constituency? Which aspects of our work will best meet those commitments?
    • Which aspects of our hopes and dreams for our organization do we not have the capacity to take on during this phase of our work? 
  • Based on the discussion of the questions above, what are the 2 scenarios that we should consider for revising our budget? Nat encourages us to frame this scenario planning as Alternative Futures work.
    • Once you identify the 2 scenarios, use the budgeting scenario planning tool.

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Episode Guests

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Nat Smith

Nat 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 gatekeepers 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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About the Host

Yashna Maya Padamsee

Yashna Maya Padamsee is a first generation south asian immigrant queer femme raised in and by the US South. Yashna has spent 20+ years supporting social movements through creating innovative infrastructure and sharing liberatory healing practices. She uses systems thinking, organizing, art making, somatics, faith and yoga for healing and transformation at the intersections of immigration, labor, gender + sexuality and bodily autonomy.

During Yashna’s 7+ years on staff with The National Domestic Workers Alliance, she created containers of care through foundational systems that continue to be built upon at and beyond the organization today. She has also been an Adult Literacy program coordinator in Durham, NC, a faith-based immigrant rights organizer at the Bay Area IAF, moderated a Community Care discussion on OrganizingUpgrade (now Convergence Magazine), the lead of a Disability Justice committee at generative somatics and the Gatherer of the Lineages of Change Tarot.

Alongside Felicia Martinez, Tara Shaui Ellison, and Mae Singerman, Yashna is a co-founder and moderator of RadOps, a justice based online network for operations workers in movement organizations. She is Co-Director of Sanctuary Embodied, which brings transformative practice and embodied skill building for Left movement leaders and formations to build collective power and develop compelling cultures that can sustain for the long haul.

Yashna enjoys watching good (and not so good) TV shows, eating dumplings or dal with her partner Ang, and taking their sweet dog Monkey on a walk at sunset at the Eno River.

Sha Grogan-Brown

Sha Grogan-Brown is an anti-racist white queer transman and rad dad. Sha has worked to strengthen movements for social justice since the late ’90s, and is dedicated to increasing the effectiveness and self-sustaining capacity of grassroots organizations. For many years he identified as a plumber and then an architect for the movement, ensuring systems and structures for successful organizing.

Sha recently joined the founding team of The Patients Union as the Chief of Member Engagement and Services. Sha worked with Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) from 2001–2008, was the Grassroots Fundraising Coordinator for the U.S. Social Forum 2010, and worked at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) from 2010-2025. Sha currently is Project Co-Director of Rad Ops, and serves on the boards of GGJ Action Fund, Justice Funders and CISPES. In the past he has served on the boards of Grassroots International, Resource Generation and Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), and was the Art Editor for the second edition of Trans Bodies Trans Selves: A Resource Guide for the Transgender Community (aff).

In his free time Sha bikes around the city, paints, draws, writes, reads gay romance or YA sci-fi novels, and spends time eating yummy foods with his partner and 10 year old kid.