Leadership as Practice in Collective Care and Accountability. Reflections on holding power, complexity, oneself and each other. By Jamie Schearer and Anu Priya
Jamie Schearer is a freelance trainer, consultant and facilitator specialising in anti-racism, intersectional justice and relational intelligence. With over a decade of experience, she has co-founded several organisations across Europe advocating for racial justice, including the European Network of People of African Descent and the leadership programme Working On Our Power. Beginning with grassroots organising through the Initiative of Black People in Germany, Jamie now designs workshops and organisational development initiatives that empower marginalised communities. Her approach centres on supporting organisations navigate discomfort, build equitable cultures and foster emotional safety to drive transformative change. LinkedIn | Website | Email
Anu Priya is a community builder, facilitator, trainer and consultant whose work is grounded in their lineage of deep connection to land, collective care and resistance, and shaped by their lived experience of navigating the world as a Disabled queer migrant. Their work is at the intersection of radical imagination, grounded strategy, and the often-unseen barriers between where we are and the liberatory futures we long for. Drawing on 15 years’ experience in the UK and India’s social change ecosystems, Anu works with organisations to cultivate anti-oppressive cultures, shift power through equitable resourcing and grow practices necessary for liberation. Linkedin | Website | Email
We first met at a gathering for facilitators working in “for social good” sectors, and had a beautiful conversation about leadership. We questioned the expectations, struggles and deep conditioning that shape how we see leaders and ourselves within those individualised roles.
This article and the co-writing process are a natural extension of our initial conversation and our personal and professional work to challenge generational injustices and co-create systems that allow us to be with each other in more generous, honest, and accountable ways.
We don’t claim to have all the answers. This piece is a practice in itself - of reflecting, unlearning, imagining and sharing with each other. It comes in a moment of escalating violence and deepening crisis: genocides unfolding with impunity, imperialist aggression, intensifying binary logics, the global rise of far-right ideology and fascist regimes. In this context, dominant ideas of leadership often reinforce control, hierarchy, and dehumanisation, forcing us into survival patterns of scarcity, survival, and fear.
This piece is an offering - reflections, questions, tools and resources - for those who don’t fit (or refuse to fit) into the imperial, colonial, white supremacist ideals of a ‘leader’ and leadership. It is an invitation to consider leadership as a relational and spiritual practice of collective care and accountability.
You may notice shifts in tone or language throughout this article; that’s because we have written from our personal experiences as much as from shared inquiry. We have spoken honestly and openly from where we are, rather than a place of ‘expert’ or authority. We invite you to engage in whatever way feels nourishing, useful or challenging.
Questioning the Myth of Leadership
What is leadership? Who is a leader?
Familiar questions, familiar answers - control, command, authority, influence, firmness. Positional… related to a role, title, rank; hierarchical… ‘chosen’ ones, tasked with maintaining order. Glorifying and celebrating the individual.
What are the sensations and feelings in our bodies when we think of this model of leadership?
Tightness. Tension. Pressure. Anxiety. Fear.
What We Inherit, What We Carry
Our institutions value individuals who assimilate to the logic of empire; who see power as something to be wielded to maintain ‘order’. We have been shaped by generations of traumas caused by the violence of colonial systems that move us, unwittingly, to become their foot soldiers.
One of our earliest associations with leadership was from school. Children who were chosen to play a leadership role were often popular with other children and met the teachers’ standard of approval. We saw how conformity and how well one played the part through compliance and being palatable were rewarded as special, even exceptional. It was alluring.
For children who didn’t fit in, being chosen could mean safety and acceptance, but it was never belonging. It laid out a pathway to ‘success’ that many of us follow unconsciously. For years, in many small ways, we contort ourselves into shapes beyond recognition, trying to seek approval and love from people and places that only offered it with strict conditions.
The deeply ingrained intergenerational conditioning to see ourselves, and leaders, as individuals, exceptional and defined by roles or positions, reflects imperialist and white supremacist ideals of being. We must consciously interrupt it within ourselves and in relationship with each other.
A resource that we find useful in understanding hardened traumas and the deep social conditioning we carry, especially in reflecting on leadership, is ‘My Grandmother’s Hands’ by Resmaa Menakem. He offers this powerful insight:
“Trauma in a person, decontextualised over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family decontextualised over time looks like family traits. Trauma in a people decontextualised over time looks like culture.”
Another resource is Tema Okun’s work on white supremacy culture, which outlines how ‘order’ is manufactured and maintained. Codifying and packaging characteristics such as urgency, perfectionism and individualism as ‘professional’ are new forms of centuries-old oppressive systems. These cultural patterns continue to shape our institutions and relationships, and we each play a role in upholding or interrupting them.
These frameworks prompt reflections:
What are our early experiences of ‘leaders’?
How have our conditioning or traumas shaped our understanding of leaders and leadership?
How does normative/ dominant culture teach us how to show up, perform and lead?
Who benefits when we perform leadership as control?
Creating Space Within for New Possibilities
While we hold the truths of what we have been socially conditioned to uphold as leadership, we find it helpful to turn inward, not to critique, but to get curious.
What if we develop the capacity to notice how we are conditioned and how traumas show up in our roles and behaviours? What might be possible if we interrupt the flow of what feels familiar and within reach? Would we be able to recognise when we are being played as puppets to a system that exists to extract from us? What would become possible if we claim our agency, refusing to follow the agenda of quiet and loud violences of oppressive systems?
Here are some questions for reflection that have helped us:
What are the sites of tethering to the systems I resist?
How does my assimilation show up in my behaviours and relationships?
What activates within me when I come up against my conditioning or traumas?
Intergenerational Wisdom: Leading as ‘We’
We want to acknowledge how elders have shaped our understanding of power and leadership in service, rather than for control and maintaining order. We have been taught by elders and leaders who are deeply committed to the community. We have learned from them that the labour of making tea, cooking and looking after the children, things considered domestic and unglamorous, are just as important as being in the spotlight. They tend to connection and relationships, they are acts of love and deep care.
They have taught us that leadership is:
A collective responsibility to one another - those who came before and those who are yet to come
A practice of collective accountability and care
A commitment to tend to the ground that makes worlds that don’t yet exist possible
We have witnessed elders believe in communion and belonging in a world where people are marginalised and ostracised. This has looked like really wrestling with values that hold people together, even as conflict emerged. Sometimes, it wasn’t clear what belonging would look like; sometimes it meant not meeting people’s needs initially but showing commitment to learn and understand, while defensiveness and avoidance were present. To us, this represents a fundamental departure from traditional leadership paradigms that usually replicate colonial power structures that are built on the idea that “there is only one way”. The wisdom these elders embody typically transcends hierarchical structures.
Leadership is not a one-person show. In movement spaces, leadership is often an act of many, where the person who is designated ‘leader’ can only do the job well when they are supported by others. One person might bring task-oriented capabilities or have the skill, ability and capacity to hold space; another might be naturally skilled and energised by networking; another might thrive on creating processes. All of these skills, capabilities and capacities are needed to lead well - one person cannot do it all.
We have increasingly seen this recognition through co-leadership models that gesture towards collective responsibility. These models are an initial step away from hyper-individualism. While these are often better alternatives, they remain shaped by dominant culture and limited by broader systems that dictate what is legible as leadership.
Leadership, then, is not just about navigating tasks, responsibilities, and roles but also systemic barriers. Many of our elders and leaders have carried the weight of leading while navigating their own troubles and difficulties, often in isolation and often harmed by the very people and systems they are working to change.
These challenges have ultimately informed their own leadership journeys -in part, creating multidimensional wisdom that acknowledges complexity and, in part, passing down undigested pain. This pain is linked to survival and impacts people around them. It is interwoven into the foundations of our spaces, and our current incentive is to create leadership that tends to the pain so we can heal.
Having experienced structural barriers, their leadership has, at times, been impacted by challenges of imagining something different or outside the current circumstances. This complexity reflects the nuanced nature of leadership in an oppressive system and how we are impacted by it. As Audre Lorde reminds us:
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within us.”
So, the challenge for the next generation of movement builders is to dream wild and build more bravely than imaginable, building on the hard-fought wins of those who came before us.
Centring Most Impacted: Practices for Self and Collective Accountability
Liberation-oriented leadership requires centring those most impacted, even when institutional demands and personal pressures create competing priorities. This practice demands active awareness of one's internal responses while attending to others' needs and reactions, especially when they differ from ours. This skill of attunement directly counters white supremacy culture, which prioritises comfort and certainty over authentic relationships. It means being able to sense one's own responses and actively recognise what is happening inside oneself and the other person, acknowledging their responses and needs even when different from our own.
However, this work presents significant challenges: creating enough relational safety for people to share vulnerably while maintaining a structural understanding of oppression that contextualises individual experiences. The focus on professionalism often undermines this attunement, privileging detached "expertise" over embodied knowledge and connection.
Here’s a fictional example to demonstrate how we can use the practices we mentioned above:
Sarah, the Executive Director of a housing justice charity, is faced with a critical decision: accept substantial funding with restrictive requirements or risk financial instability. Amara, a Black community organiser with lived experience of housing insecurity, raises concerns about how these requirements would undermine residents’ agency and the trust between the organisation and the community. Sarah notices two responses within herself: anxiety about organisational survival and recognition of the wisdom in Amara's challenge.
Rather than dismissing Amara's concerns as “impractical” and rushing ahead or simply deferring to her perspective without addressing institutional realities, Sarah practices attunement. She acknowledges the tension she feels, names the competing priorities openly, and suggests pausing the decision to create space for housing estate residents to review the funding requirements themselves. Despite the fundraising director's visible discomfort with this “inefficiency”, Sarah remains present with the complexity rather than rushing to resolution.
By recognising her own bodily responses (tightness in chest, quickened breath) whilst simultaneously attending to others' needs (Amara's concern for community voice, residents' right to self-determination, even her fundraising director's valid worries), Sarah models leadership that challenges the white supremacy culture of professionalised expertise and false urgency.
This attunement creates the conditions for a more discerning outcome: residents ultimately develop creative modifications to the funding requirements that maintain their power while addressing institutional needs, a solution no single “expert” could have designed alone. It makes space for more collective ownership and responsibility, honouring and giving space to residents in decision-making that will directly or indirectly affect them.
Embracing Complexity: Staying with the Mess
Creating internal capacity to stay with complexity means resisting the binary thinking that upholds oppressive systems. When we perceive the world through rigid frameworks of right/wrong or good/bad, we embody this constriction - our tissues harden, our breathing shallows, our perspective narrows. These aren't merely intellectual positions but embodied responses that maintain hierarchies of power. True liberation work requires the nervous system's capacity to hold multiple truths at the same time.
Anti-oppression isn't neat; it demands that we stay with discomfort rather than rushing toward false resolution that preserves dominant comfort. This capacity develops through committed self-awareness practice:
How do I respond in moments of activation - flight, fight, freeze or fawn?
Do these responses shift depending on who holds power in the room?
Where exactly do these responses live in my body - the tightening jaw, a collapsed chest or a hardened belly?
Through regular somatic inquiry, we can identify patterns without judgment:
What story am I telling myself about this person or situation? What do I fear will happen?
What does this activation protect me from feeling?
Whose voice from my past am I hearing in this moment?
Rather than labelling these responses as failures, we can recognise them as information, often signalling where we're unconsciously defending privilege or avoiding our own complicity. The question becomes: Is my defensive response potentially silencing someone else's truth or preventing collective healing?
These practices directly challenge the charity sector’s addiction to superficial solutions and colonial saviourhood narratives. Being with what is demonstrates a commitment to the need to tend to intergenerational wounds. Doing so will create possibilities that might not have been available or accessible to those before you.
The practices below support movement away from leadership being a professional role to one about qualities that support deeper connection and relationship, clarify purpose rooted in our collective wellbeing, centre accountability in repair:
Track bodily sensations before forming judgments
Notice how power registers differently in different bodies
Breathe fully when institutional pressure demands we make ourselves small
Distinguish between productive discomfort and actual harm
Name whose bodies are consistently expected to accommodate discomfort
When all the dominant calls to leadership ask for separation from ourselves and each other, simplifying complexity and maintaining comfortable fictions… what if we considered leadership an embodied practice of accountability?
Our bodies know the truth - they hold wisdom that strategic plans and impact reports cannot capture. By staying with the mess long enough, by feeling what’s actually present rather than what’s professionally convenient, we create space for transformative possibilities that binary thinking could never produce.
Practices for Accountability: From Knowing to Acting
The leadership journey towards justice and liberation is ongoing; perfection remains an impossible horizon. The journey does not have a destination - it is a living relational practice. There will inevitably be moments when we need accountable action and relationship repair with communities, within teams, and between individuals. The past decade has witnessed a profound shift from merely strategising our way to justice toward actively practising it through repair and accountability.
Accountability fundamentally concerns responsibility - claiming ownership of one’s actions and their impacts. It demands the humbling recognition that we are all interdependent; our actions create ripples, some elevating and uplifting, others harmful and painful. No one navigates this terrain flawlessly. As Mia Mingus elegantly outlines in her work on accountability and giving genuine apologies, true accountability encompasses self-reflection, genuine apology, meaningful repair and sustained behavioural change.
Yet because accountability reflects how we treat others - and often how we treat ourselves - we require the honest mirror that only others can provide. Our fundamental interdependence means that taking full responsibility flourishes best with support from those who genuinely care for us. These precious companions possess the courage to call us in when we falter and walk alongside us through the challenging terrain of repair.
This vital practice might begin with an accountability mapping approach developed by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC). This framework helps identify different relationship levels, the care they contain, and appropriate accountability practices for each. The approach acknowledges that we inhabit a society where accountability faces profound structural barriers, making intentional ‘pod-building’ and cultivating a group that holds us responsible for our actions, which is essential ongoing work. Transforming our world demands precisely this kind of intentionality.
For those beginning this journey, even simpler approaches might include establishing an accountability partnership. This partnership creates a trusted mirror between two (sometimes three) people who commit to reflecting back what they witness in each other. Such relationships can illuminate challenges within organisational contexts that might otherwise remain obscured. However, a critical caveat: if the aim is genuine growth within a justice-oriented leadership journey, your accountability partner must be prepared to speak truth to power with clarity.
By developing care rituals, nurturing accountable relationships and engaging in embodied practices, we maintain alignment with our purpose and values despite institutional pressures and interpersonal complexities. These collective approaches starkly contrast with individualised leadership paradigms that so often reproduce harm while claiming to heal it.
The practice of accountability reminds us that liberation work isn’t about achieving moral perfection but about creating containers strong enough to hold our inevitable mistakes and transform them into opportunities for collective growth. When we build these containers together, we make possible leadership that doesn’t just speak about justice but embodies it.
Moving Forward
As we reimagine leadership, these embodied practices offer concrete pathways toward more just and liberatory ways of working. By centring attunement, embracing complexity, and building robust accountability systems, we challenge the pervading white supremacy culture while creating spaces where those most impacted by injustice can truly lead.
The journey toward transformative leadership is neither straightforward nor comfortable - it requires ongoing commitment to our own growth alongside collective liberation. Yet in this messy, imperfect practice lies our greatest hope for creating organisations that truly serve justice rather than reproduce harm.
What becomes possible when we lead from this place of embodied wisdom?
How might our organisations transform if we prioritised attunement over efficiency, complexity over certainty, and collective accountability over individual achievement?
These questions guide us toward the more just future our communities deserve.
Further Reading and Resources
Resmaa Menakem
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Tema Okun
White Supremacy Culture Website: www.whitesupremacyculture.info
Audre Lorde
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984.
Mia Mingus
“How to Give a Good Apology: Part 1 – The Four Parts of Accountability” (2019), Blog: Leaving Evidence
Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC)
Website: batjc.wordpress.com