WORKER-LED EQUITY FROM THE INSIDE OUT

The Pangea team is majority immigrants and children of immigrants. We envision a world in which all people have the freedom to move and be with their loved ones and communities safely in their home of choice.

A Horizontal Structure for Democratic Management

Pangea is a democratically managed organization governed by its staff collective. Everyone at Pangea makes the same salary. The staff share leadership and responsibility in directing the organization and establishing systems for operations, programs, and collective care. We do not have an executive director or a traditional hierarchy. Instead, every member of the staff has the opportunity to become a co-director after a candidacy period. The staff collective is organized into hubs, committees responsible for directing and managing the growth and administration of the organization.

Part of Pangea’s approach to creating a more just and free world is to be the change we want to see. Since our founding, Pangea has adopted a shared leadership structure to distribute ownership and accountability horizontally throughout the organization. In practical terms, this means:

Equal salaries - Every member of our organization is compensated equally for their work, regardless of title, role, and educational attainment.
Task redistribution - Every six months, we assess all of our tasks and re-distribute them among our team to create equity and address our personal and organizational needs. By doing this exercise regularly, we are better able to see and freely propose new projects where needed, in addition to dissolving old and inefficient projects or tasks that no longer serve our goals.
Individual autonomy and collective responsibility - We are proud of our ability to get a lot done, and much of this is due to the efficiency of our structured system and shared decision-making policies. Contrary to popular belief about non-hierarchical organizations, most decisions that we make are not made by consensus. They are made in smaller groups tasked with managing a particular sphere of our larger organizational structure, while only major decisions are brought to the whole team for a vote. Our decision-making processes enable each Pangea staff member to propose projects, take significant leadership roles, and optimize individual autonomy as well as collective responsibility.

As we grow, we actively turn to partners and other horizontal organizations, like the Sustainable Economies Law Center, for guidance and inspiration on how to further develop our horizontal structure.

We have made the policies we use to collectively govern Pangea in our DIGITAL LIBRARY OF DEMOCRATIC WORKPLACE POLICIES & RESOURCES.