Role of Assistants w/Felicia Martinez

🎧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 episode we talk about the Role of Assistants (and so much more) with our guest, Felicia Martinez, freelance consultant and co-founder of Rad Ops social media network. 

Resources from this episode:

• Rad Ops Workbook – Putting Rad Ops into Practice activity (pages 16–20)
• Choose and use a tool with teams of two or more people (such as a Director and an Assistant) to discern division of labor and coordination: DARCI/MOCHA/RACI
  • Check out descriptions and a comparison of these three models in this guide by Nonprofit Learning Lab
  • DARCI: DARCI ACCOUNTABILITY GRID Tool What it is What it can do How it works 
  • MOCHA: MOCHA Framework: How to Assign Responsibilities – The Management Center 

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• What does the Director want and need from the Assistant? What does the organization want and need from the Assistant? Is there alignment between the Director and the organization about what the priorities of the Assistant are? (Principles 4 & 6)
• What access does the Assistant have to professional and political development, especially as it relates to their work for this Director? (Principles 1 & 7)
• What possibilities does the Assistant have for building relationships across the organization? (Principle 2)
• If you don’t have positional power at your organization, do you have positional authority? Do you have a positional view point and discernment that no one else has but could reflect important emerging needs for the organization? (Principle 1) 

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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

Felicia Martinez

Felicia Martinez is a freelance grant writer and RadOps practitioner with over fifteen years of experience advancing vehicles for movement work in the nonprofit sector. Born into a family of labor organizers and Chicano student activists, Felicia deepened her political practice in the multi-racial educational justice campaigns of the late 1990s. Felicia has worked on organizational infrastructure and resource development in formations such as ReFrame, National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Funders’ Collaborative On Youth Organizing. Informed by her previous roles as an educator with first generation college students and with immigrant adult learners, Felicia brings to her work a commitment to curiosity and transparency in communication, and a steadfast commitment to accessibility practices. Felicia holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley. She is based in Brooklyn, NY where she spends her non-working hours exploring local waterways, brainstorming with her kids to figure out what’s for dinner, and tending to a small home zoo of oviparous animal companions.