The Haven in Stonehaven is a health & wellbeing charity in the Northeast of Scotland. We had a paid summer internship last year through Aberdeen University. The intern was amazing and worked with a board member on a report for the board. This is a practice brief of the work. The ideas than feed into the internship happening kind of came about from conversations after I did some social enterprise leadership training that I found very frustrating as it pulled a lot from corporate HR approach of team building/management, goal setting etc. It was geared for the 3rd sector/social enterprise which is primarily made up of women/marginalised/at risk folk, with staff working in small teams and mucking in, with constantly changing priorities, precarious funding etc etc. I did a little deep dive into matriarchal and indigenous governance frameworks & decision making and didn’t come up with much. This from the Pacific Northwest was about as close as it got to what I was searching for. Charlotte Cote’s book ‘A Drum in One Hand, A Sock Eye In The Other’ was also very valuable especially in relation to health, care, landscape and reciprocity. I welcome thoughts and am wondering if anyone here has experience with policy and governance change in this area. I come from an activist background, NVC and consensus decision making approach and am feeling frustrated with the mismatch of the work we do and the language/legalities/documentation we have to work within to deliver it. I like to think there is the ability to dovetail circular ways of working with box/hierarchical frameworks and come up with new ways of working where everyone’s needs and expression can be supported.
Hi @NatNat - thanks for the thoughts and links (have looked up Charlotte Cote’s work) - this last question is definitely one of the ones that has guided a lot of our work at RadHR, so appreciate the contributions.
While I try to be careful about drawing too generally on Indigenous governance practices (like all broad categories, there are better and worse examples within them), there is definitely some really foundational stuff from the Iroquois Confederacy. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-government/analysis-constitution-iroquois-nations#the-great-law-of-peace
There are several more useful references that have come from David Graeber’s work here, grounded in wider democratic thinking (some of which translates to organisations, some of which doesn’t as easily): https://a4kids.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/The_David_Graeber_Pirate_Library_and_Vis.pdf
The contextual translation piece - how to make some of these concepts applicable in the world of bureaucracy, without losing their essence - continues to be a challenging one! Definitely keen to hear other people’s experiences of trying to do so!