TogetheringPartner
NEW INC, New Museum
Project
Designing Impact Organizations Through Partnership
Engagement
Learning & Development Workshop for Incubator Community
Designing Organizations for Change
The Purpose & Challenge
We designed and led the workshop “Emergent Organizations for Change” with NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator, that galvanized its community to invent new impact organizations and the partnerships to sustain them.
The workshop had two aims: deepen relationships across the 9th-year cohort, and give NEW INC an evergreen learning and development program for tackling systemic problems. Bringing together new cross-disciplinary teams of artists, designers, technologists, and organizers, we created values-based organizational models, governance tools, and resource-sharing structures that enable collective action. The cohort's range was its greatest asset. Nearly everyone in the room was working toward a fairer world, through climate and ecology, racial history and memory, access to technology, or the design of public space, each in the vocabulary of their own field. Our task was to give that range a shared process, so members could combine their passions, values, and skills into new organizations.
The ecosystem an impact organization draws on
The Work
We ran a live session in which cross-disciplinary teams founded new organizations.
We introduced five steps to help define their new organization: align values, converge on a mission, share skills and resources, map the ecosystem, and chart challenges to navigate. To frame this process, we opened with a survey of how collaborative models such as cooperatives, mutual aid networks, DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), and metalabels embed themselves in the ecosystems they serve. We then reviewed headwinds and challenges, including exploitation of power and resources, short-termism, and disconnection from social and environmental ecologies. We closed the framing with the idea that successful organizations start with people and relationships, and the structure follows. The cohort's shared wisdom emerged over the session, allowing each group to gain insight into the systems they wanted to engage.
Collaborative models
Our Impact
Incubator members left with a hands-on understanding of how partnership is a foundation of organization design, and with tools they can apply in their own studios and initiatives.
The shift was practical: every team found concrete ways its surrounding network could activate community resources, source funding, create access, build trust, or reach new groups. The five teams invented organizations spanning community technology, education, healing, communications, and nightlife. The session also connected the cohort. People from different tracks who had shared a program at a distance learned what each other could do and cared about, and found a common language for building together.
- 01An alternative-futures creative agency bringing marginalized groups into emerging technology, funded by redirecting money from big tech.
- 02A community-building platform for local skill-sharing, reaching people offline through SMS, volunteers, and in-person programming.
- 03An education and healing initiative connecting educators, healing practitioners, and policy researchers around the body and living systems.
- 04A communications firm for nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and artists, designed to balance profit with purpose.
- 05A touring party organization bringing activism into nightlife, partnering with abolitionist and cultural groups and funded by values-aligned sponsors.
Why We Loved This Project
We love creating experiences that help people see themselves, each other, and their work in a new light.
It was a joy to work with people so adept at inventing new worlds, each opportunity grounded in clear possibility. We love to witness collaboration literally creating new pathways, especially as this group built organizations from scratch that share resources to sustain each other. It brought our core belief to life: change happens through ecologies of relationships.