A reflection by Megan Gómez MÁS’s Abundance Director
What is that? It’s basically what it sounds like: a process in which our organizational budgeting is done by all of us here at MÁS starting with all-staff reflections and dialogue about our previous years budgeting process, spending, resource mobilization, income and ending with a committee- and board-approved organizational budget.
This process, while it may sound very dry and quite boring or basic to most, has been one of the most transformative experiences over the past few years, not only for me personally as a staff member helping to guide us through it all, but also for MÁS as an organization. It reframed the ways I think about money and my relationship to it, not only in my personal life, but also in an organizational context and as staff at a US-based non-profit.
When I joined MÁS we decided to embark on this journey to collectivize the budgeting process to reaffirm our values of centering Black voices, centering the collective, and moving with equity. We also wanted to increase staff knowledge and autonomy and be more transparent about the inner workings of MÁS, and finally, to share the responsibility of managing and understanding MÁS finances. Through the previous 3 years we also achieved becoming closer as a team while deepening our collective ability to dream and heal our relationships with money.
We all know we don’t talk about money enough, and I say “enough” because I think we ought to, considering that our entire system and society is based around and shaped by the capitalist structures that function by way of the world’s monetary currencies, with the USD in an authoritarian position. People living in the US, especially those of us born with the privilege and burden of US citizenship, need to understand our relationships with money in order to interrogate it and come to terms with it to then be able to make the changes we want to, where we can (which always starts with ourselves first).
Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve all we did without our shared rootedness in our values and without support from community members such as Collective Liberation in Practice, RVC, and WRAP (Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practitioners). A big thanks to everyone who has been involved in bringing fruition to the collective budgeting process for MÁS. With our values as our foundation, we continue to deepen this work, learning alongside one another what it means to navigate the systems we operate within while we hold close our visions of shifting the needle to a place where dreams can embody Black-centered equity and guide us MÁS pa’lante.
