In this episode, Sha Grogan-Brown talks with guest Nat Smith, Finance & Development Director with House of gg and facilitator with A Bookkeeping Cooperative to offer advice to organizations needing to make major pivots to their budgets.

In these wild times, many organizations are needing to revisit their organizational budget, either due to loss of funding, pivoting their work for rapid response moments, taking a strategic pause to tend to internal tensions and challenges, among other reasons. 

Dear Rad Ops received a question on this topic, with this context: Our organization is currently facing a series of internal conflicts and disruptions that is calling for us to go inward to tend to these challenges. As a result, we're pausing on a lot of our current activities and adjusting most of our original org-wide and departmental goals/work plans for this year. We're currently drafting an organizational development process to tend to these tensions and there's a good chance that this work (ie OD process, skilling up/facilitation on navigating conflict, etc) will also continue into next year. Our 2025 budget was approved based on our initial work plan, but these recent pivots mean we also need to make adjustments to both our organizational and departmental budgets. 

Question: What advice can you offer on how to best reflect these changes within our budget(s)? Are there any other budgetary considerations that we should be aware of for both this year and as we plan out next year’s budgetary process?

Resources from this episode:

Discussion questions to take to your team:

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Guest SpeakerNat Smith is the Finance & Development Director with House of gg, founded by Transgender activist Miss Major. Nat has been involved in the struggle for trans liberation since the early 2000s beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area of California with the Trans in Prison Project of California Prison Focus, also known as TIP. TIP would become the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), of which Nat is a founding member. It was through TGIJP that Nat met Miss Major and the lifelong friendship began. Nat approaches nonprofit accounting and finance from a liberatory standpoint, acknowledging that the historical and current gate keepers of this work are people who don’t look like us or come from our communities. From that vantage point, Nat works to grow the power of our organizations and movement builders so that we are our own Board Treasurers, Finance Directors, Accountants and Bookkeepers. Nat believes that our budgets must align with our values, that we must challenge capitalism and expect abundance.

In this episode, Yashna Maya Padamsee talks with guest Che Johnson-Long, Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win, about how we can be making grounded risk assessments in these times of escalated fear.

We’re in a moment where there is a chance that fear can lead our planning and decision making. It is a particularly escalated and scary time. And this time is calling for us to do clear organizational risk assessments and find, create or improve upon operational scaffolding to meet the risk assessment, not the fear assessment. 

This topic has come up in many conversations throughout 2025, and Dear Rad Ops received a question with some context: I am in an operations role, and my Executive Director wants to implement a new security protocol for our organization. It seems to me like a decision based on fear without a grounded assessment of the real risk to our organization, but I don’t know how to distinguish between fear and risk in this situation. 

Question: How can I support my ED to reflect on whether asking for a new security protocol is an individual concern based on fear, or an organizational level concern grounded in a risk assessment for our particular conditions?

Che Johnson-Long is an abolitionist security practitioner and community organizer who can’t leave well enough alone. She is currently the Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win and serves as a board member of Third Wave's Accountable Futures Fund Advisory Council. Before this, Che organized with the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative of the Racial Justice Action Center, the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, and the Safe OUTside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project. She holds a Juris Doctorate, comes from a long line of Blues singers, and calls Atlanta, GA home.

In this episode, Sha Grogan-Brown talks with guest Le Tim Ly, Chief Operating Officer of Center for Empowered Politics about how building “multi-entity infrastructure” can improve the resilience of organizations.

While the Left faces many crises in these times, underpinning everything is the vulnerability of the operations and infrastructure of our organizations. So many groups have chosen to establish non-profit organizations as the entity for their organizing, and now this administration is targeting the tax status of two primary forms of non-profit organizations – known as 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). Our movement has had critiques of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex for decades. We know this is not the ideal structure for our long term work. Yet the majority of Left organizations are currently dependent on non-profit structure and on philanthropy for the operations of their projects. We’re in a time which calls on us to be nimble and pivot many aspects of our operations. 

With this context in mind, Dear Rad Ops received this question: My organization is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and we are worried about being attacked by the current administration. What other options do we have for our organizational structure in case we lose our c3 tax status?

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Guest Speaker

Le Tim Ly is the Chief Operating Officer of the Center for Empowered Politics (CEP). Le supports the organization’s expansive programmatic work, organizational development, strategic planning, and finance and operations. Le has spent the last 25 years working for racial, environmental and economic justice with grassroots community organizations including Youth United for Community Action (YUCA), the Partnership for Immigrant Leadership and Action (PILA) and the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco.

In a time where social justice organizations are under attack, we bring you Dear Rad Ops, a mini series advice vlog about live questions on the minds of movement operations workers.

In this introductory episode, co-hosts Yashna Maya Padamsee and Sha Grogan-Brown discuss their own Rad Ops movement operations experience, and the lineages they draw from in their work to run liberatory organizations in an unjust world. 

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In a time where social justice organizations are under attack, we bring you Rad Ops (that stands for Radical Operations), a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. 

Many organizations are in turmoil as they pivot to meet this moment. Rad Ops is a multimedia series offering principles, guiding questions, and tools that organizations can use to identify ways they can and cannot practice liberatory values in this unjust world.

The Rad Ops podcast is one component of a project designed for social justice organizations looking to strengthen their resilience. This project seeks to inspire people in Left movement organizations to get real with each other about what their organization can and can’t do, and make collective agreements about how they will act together when unable to fully practice their liberatory values. If people in movement organizations regularly dialogue with each other in courageous, creative, and collaborative ways, then their relationships and political visions will strengthen existing organizations and outlast both internal conflict and external opposition.

Podcast co-hosts Yashna Maya Padamsee and Sha Grogan-Brown together bring over 40 years of movement operations experience they draw from to facilitate these conversations.

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Cover art by Kimmie Dearest