Agreements

The types of agreements we make are up to us.

While there are contexts where organising practices can benefit from being dynamic and/or undocumented, we also need durable groups that streamline horizontal decision-making by establishing clear standards for relating to each other, and clarifying the conditions within which these standards can be challenged, revised, or even disposed of all together.

This handbook is where we will maintain records of our current collective agreements.

What types of agreements are we forming?

Decision making agreements

Our current approach to making our initial decisions is outlined in an interim process; we intend to replace this process with a more comprehensive decision-making agreement based on our experience of making our initial decisions together.

Agreements to delegate operational decisions

Specific operational decisions are currently being delegated to crew based on their ‘scope and delegated decision making’ proposals, including:

• Solidarity Crew: responsible for functioning as a ‘radical core’ that reminds the broader collective to keep prioritising solidarity actions and support political engagement.
• Seedling Crew: responsible for determining the requirements and criteria for the initial property to be purchased by the Collective.
• Process and Strategy (PAS) Crew: responsible for ensuring that the Brassica Collective can implement the RAD housing approach to retrofit, and decommodify existing suburban housing so that we, and others, can live in secure, resilient and affordable housing.

Participation agreements

We are in the processes of clarifying our shared understanding of different aspects of participation, including:

• Responsibilities & Expectations: outlining what responsibilities we each agree to by participating in this collective in different ways, and what we can expect as participants in the collective

• Entry & Exit Pathways: outlining our processes for inviting additional people to participate in the collective and our processes for opting-out of participation temporarily or indefinitely.

• Conduct: clarifying how we can expect others to conduct themselves in relation to us, our responsibilities to conduct ourselves likewise, and how we intend to respond in situations where the conduct of any participants are not aligning with our expectations of each other.

• Conduct Supporter Roles: establishing a distributed support structure to help us learn to collectively take responsibility for navigating conflict well together.