The Future
is Collective

About The Book

The Future is Collective is a book for BIPOC leaders and movement activists who want to align their day-to-day organizational culture with their values. From practical tips on how to make collective decisions effectively, to sample policies for organizing a shared leadership structure, Nilou helps us reimagine the way we work.

In 2012, Nilou founded Pangea Legal Services, a nonprofit organization advocating for the rights of immigrants and refugees through legal defense and community organizing. Informed by their time in Argentina, where they witnessed the worker-led factory recovery movement, Nilou set out to build Pangea as a horizontal, democratically governed organization. Over the past ten years, Pangea has grown to employ 21 workers with a 2.7 million dollar budget in service of over 500 immigrant and refugee clients — and thousands more impacted through Pangea’s community organizing, litigation, and policy advocacy work.

At Pangea, leadership is shared. Workers organize themselves into highly effective hubs, where they co-direct various aspects of the organization. Compensation is based on an equity, and democratic management is a form of wellness.

Drawing from their experience creating Pangea and interviews with movement leaders who are transforming structures and cultures within their organizations, The Future is Collective offers stories, lessons, tools, and resources – for aligning our day-to-day work with our struggle for collective liberation. It includes a review of variations on equity-based pay scales, decentralized leadership structures, decision-making processes, and more, accompanied by sample workplace policies to implement them.

Through living examples of high-functioning, leaderful collectives, The Future is Collective analyzes democratic systems that are accessible and relevant to today’s movement leaders. It sidesteps abstract academic theory in favor of rootedness in our organizations and our work now.