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Life Cycle of Organizations w/Raquel Laviña

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Rad Ops - The Podcast
Rad Ops - The Podcast
Life Cycle of Organizations w/Raquel Laviña
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🎧The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this closing episode of season one, we take on the tough topic of the Life Cycle of Organizations with our guest, Raquel Laviña, Consultant, most recently with the Grassroots Power Project. 

Resources from this episode:

Discussion questions to take to your team:

  • Questions for our Organizations
    • How does the purpose of this organization need to pivot under the conditions of rising authoritarianism?
    • Is this organization we built in previous conditions still the one that is needed in this current moment?
    • If many organizations may not make it through this period of rising authoritarianism, how can we clearly assess the unique purpose of this organization?
    • What are the new formations we might need for the times ahead, beyond our current organizations?
    • How can the Rad Ops principles inform our collective understanding of what our organization can and cannot do?
    • How can resilient relationships be baked into organizational structures so we are not relying on individual mastery, or set back due to transitions?
  • Questions for Ourselves
    • Can I be okay with what my organization can and cannot put in place? 
    • How can I ensure my relationships outlast current organizational structures?
    • How can I use the qualities that I’ve learned of starting, stewarding, pivoting, sunsetting in our movement building, even if my organization doesn’t make it?
    • What will I need in order to sustain myself through whatever transitions are ahead?

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Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

Episode Guests

Raquel Laviña

A longtime organizer, Raquel was pushed, literally, into activism when she attempted to get services from Planned Parenthood as a teenager. She went on to help develop the form of youth organizing we know today before spending a decade in the domestic workers movement, at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, amplifying the value of all work and dignity of all workers. Most recently, she’s played a key role in a collaboration with the Working Families Party and Grassroots Power Project. As a healer, she integrates personal transformation practices into power building work, knowing we can show up as better leaders, comrades and strategists when we are not taking action from trauma, but from center.

About the Host

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.

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.