About
Make Justice Normal (MJN), a collective founded in 2021 to develop and implement justice-centered organizing models, including equitable budgeting, democratic decision-making, and circular leadership structures.
As a non-hierarchical collective, MJN members create independent ventures with MJN members or others, and apply its standards for just organizing. Like a school of fish or a murmuration of starlings, each venture acts with autonomy, but we remain in relationship, learning from, advising, and supporting one another in our common commitments to values.
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Create mental space to radically question norms, consider wild futures, and remember ancestral wisdoms. Name and bring honesty to implied or unspoken dynamics, to bring them out into the light, analyze them, and generate solutions.
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Feature and share what embodied systems look like, to listen & learn in community.
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Describe and organize characteristics of contracts, norms, pledges, & methods of embodied systems.
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Pilot, practice, and live in embodied systems ourselves, as doers not theoreticians.
Values
Our values of justice, loving care, and solidarity are our mission. Making justice normal requires testing and scaling our values in organizational systems. As a nonprofit operating in a circular structure — one of our four characteristics of justice — we expect each program may need an extra layer of values unique to its purpose.
Justice
Justice is rooted in the idea that all people are inherently of equal value. Most organizations aren’t designed around this, and complex systems obfuscate how unjust things really are.
Loving Care
Before we were workers, we were children, family, neighbors, and friends. We’re people-first and practice space for healing and full selves, recognizing that systems often make it hard.
Solidarity
We believe in shared abundance & ownership that enables us to foster collective benefit, not just individual. We hope to turn solidarity into a daily ritual.
Process
Values aodify behaviors that shape a system — how we coordinate, cooperate, and live side by side, including how we govern and distribute money. To design values into systems, we follow these steps.
Clarify Values
What is justice, loving care, and solidarity? What does this future world look like in which they are norms? And do we have a common understanding of the language?
Describe Characteristics
What are functional characteristics of a system where our values are norm? Why do status quo systems incentivize injustice or disincentivize justice?
Write Philosophies
When you know it isn't working and what you want, you can propose alternative governance guidelines. We call these philosophies, because they express beliefs.
Model
To embody circular leadership, we turn values into policies in a centralized system studio. Each collective member can lead, support, advise, and invent based on their capacity and interests in a decentralized venture studio. MJN will never organize in hierarchy.
System Studio
In the system studio, we evolve what it means to make justice normal, by defining values and translate them into system practices that each project tests.
Venture Studio
In the venture studio, collective members imagine and work on what they love while testing the policy standards generated in the system studio. Ventures can spin out. But we strive to foster collective support that makes us better together.
Studios
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Into the Record (Venture)
What if just were normal? Across the globe, people are asking this question and practicing change in their organizations, communities, and homes. To write their stories into the record, MJN co-founder, Monique Aiken, takes us on their journeys to build alternative futures.
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Street Works (Venture)
Street Works, are public-space “galleries” for participatory art. Sister to the protest and block party, Street Works center co-creation, as a form of shared power, on our shared streets. Our pilot Street Work is dedicated to Earth and climate action.
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Power Project (System)
Power Project is an effort to create a library of tactics and examples for how organizations design policies, contracts, and norms embodying MJN's four characteristics of justice.
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Narrative (Venture)
We partner with or help values-aligned organizations design and advance narratives that will make justice normal. Our goal is to serve justice by sparking participation in aligned movements, supporting community building, and creating joyful pathways to action for people of all ages & backgrounds.