Inside The Shift: Our Team, Our Values, Our Movement (Vol. 2, No. 3)

By Andrew Vidales

The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 3 – “We have to build our own power”: Women’s Fight Endures

Power in Practice

As Fannie Lou Hamer said, we will “not only have to have political power, but we will have to have economic power as well.” That truth still resonates today. Economic justice doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not delivered by simply allowing people into systems that weren’t conceived for them. It takes courage to name what is broken, discipline to reimagine what we have outgrown, and the will to build a more equitable world together.

At LeadersUp, that belief informs not only the meaningful work we take on in the world, but also how we choose to do our work together. If we are truly serious about improving the outcomes for young people, particularly BIPOC young adults, we must start with ourselves. We each need to consider how power flows through our own organization, which voices are empowered in decision-making, and what conditions might allow people to feel seen, valued, and able to participate meaningfully.

For the past year, our People & Culture team has been intentionally focused on that work.

Grounded in our values of Safety, Opportunity, and Power, we have continued to move away from linear systems that govern through control and toward practices that promote shared ownership, transparency, and trust. This has taken the form of deepening involvement in planning and decision-making, making communication loops more transparent and accessible, and creating development opportunities that more closely bind individual contributions to our shared work.

That has not always been an easy task. Then again, building shared power also asks us to slow down, listen more deeply, and wrestle with how we might have inherited systems that suppress access, voice, and agency. But these are exactly the moments that tell us why this work is significant. Because the systems young people encounter daily usually mirror those same barriers. They are asked too often to be successful within constructs built around efficiency rather than equity, access rather than authorship.

It is not our task to merely guide young people through those systems. It is to help redesign them.

That starts with us. In building our shared leadership internally, we also better equip ourselves to lift up youth voice externally. By creating cultures of belonging at our own doors, we can better equip communities to build pathways that are more inclusive, sustainable, and just. Our internal culture work is intertwined with our movement work and should reflect it.

It is one way we do justice to the legacy of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer. Not just by holding their words in our hearts and minds, but by living the practice they showed us: naming oppressive conditions, building collective power, creating new possibilities where systems have failed.

To our partners, friends, and supporters, our work continues because you believe in the possibility. If we are to create a fair, future-fit economy grounded in justice, we must continue to invest in systems that are designed with the people they serve. Because power is not to be waited on. It is what we create, collectively.

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Andrew Vidales is the Head of People & Culture at LeadersUp, driving organizational development and building inclusive, future-fit leaders.