Artists are great at thinking outside the box. And sometimes, that means thinking outside the boardroom.
If you’re dreaming of moving away from traditional modes of management that often involve some kind of hierarchy, catch some inspiration here.
These Midwestern arts organizations have gotten creative when it comes to leadership and organizational structure. The results are promising, to say the least.
ZOMA House: Customized Leadership Roles and Democratic Decision-Making
ZOMA House in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the brainchild of three Black-owned arts organizations in the Twin Cities: ZOMA Studios, an animation studio; The Heartcraft Collective, a craft wellness business; and Seat At The Table, a media collective. It is a community art studio, event venue, and storefront dedicated to arts-based programming with a specific emphasis on local BIPOC and marginalized artists.
These three founding organizations run ZOMA House using a circular organizational structure. Each individual organization keeps its autonomy, and all members have an equal say in how ZOMA House is run.
A key feature of this structure is its customization. Different members hold different leadership roles based on their skills and interests, including booking management, event coordination, photography, videography, and social media.
At the moment, the day-to-day operations are volunteer-based. ZOMA House is actively pursuing new sources of revenue, including grants, so they can move into a new model of consistently paying the team. For now, members can earn money through producing ticketed events or selling work at the consignment shop.
While the volunteer model is temporary, the circular structure is here to stay, Uzoma Ngwu, ZOMA House founder, says.
“It supports collaborative leadership, while also supporting democratic decision-making,” Ngwu says. “We’re able to create an organization that doesn’t only rely on one person to be fully functional. Each individual organization is responsible for themselves, and then we all share equal responsibility for ZOMA House.”
One challenge ZOMA House faced early on was “making sure our roles were clearly defined,” Ngwu says. “We didn’t have very defined leadership structures, [so] that led to confusion and certain tasks not getting completed.”
Rather than giving up or defaulting to a less democratic structure, ZOMA House got specific; they encouraged members to identify what they were best at, and built specific roles and departments based on those talents.
Another challenge? “Creating a standardized workflow, since we all run our individual organizations differently,” says Ngwu. “We address this issue by creating centralized documentation that outlines how ZOMA House operates,” along with weekly team meetings to keep communication flowing.
Bringing three separate organizations together allows each organization to bring their own skillset, point of view, and creative focus to the fore. This equips ZOMA House to program for a wide variety of audiences and disciplines. Their monthly Kitchen Table features a rotating selection of speakers in creative industries. The Living Room features acoustic sets by local musicians. Home Theater screens work by local filmmakers. The list goes on, and the calendar is stacked.
“We’re all working towards the same common goal,” says Ngwu. “ZOMA House belongs to all of us, and we can each use the space as we see fit, assuming it’s aligned with our mission. No one organization needs to do everything.”
ZOMA House’s advice to others?
“Identify and clarify your shared organization’s values and vision early on, and develop a leadership structure that ensures all tasks and responsibilities are accounted for.”
Fallout Creative Community: Sparking Ideas Through Lasting Relationships
For thirty years, Red Rooster Coffee House has been Aberdeen, South Dakota’s artistic hub. Hours away from a major city, the area’s writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists have found community and inspiration here, as have many youth, seniors, people with disabilities, and others just seeking connection.
In 2009, Fallout Creative Community was born from this culture of creativity, dedicated to preserving and supporting what makes Red Rooster special: not just hosting events, but shaping the community itself through building relationships around art and action.
“We believe art, music, film, etc. are ideal tools for relationship-building, civic participation, and shared care,” says Red Rooster co-founder Dan Cleberg. “We build community with people, not for people, and many of our strongest programs have emerged directly from the passions and leadership of the people involved.”
Fallout sponsors concerts, open mics, collaborative art gatherings, filmmaking events, leadership groups, youth programs, potlucks, and mutual aid initiatives. These low-barrier opportunities not only offer creative outlets, they cultivate a model of relationship-based group leadership that makes Red Rooster an incubator for new ideas.
Though Fallout does have a board and staff, their structure is less hierarchical than many traditional nonprofits. Programming often stems from community members themselves, rallying around a shared interest or need. From those relationships, with support from Fallout, organic teams converge to make cool things happen.
Fallout has named this process “spark, flame, torch.”
DAN CLEBERG“A spark begins when people gather around an idea, activity, or unmet need. The flame grows as relationships strengthen, group identity forms around the initiative and participants begin contributing creatively and collaboratively. The torch phase happens when leadership becomes more distributed and community members begin helping guide and sustain the work themselves.”
The results of this kind of decentralized workflow have been exciting. People become participants, rather than attendees. Investment and commitment deepen. With leadership and agency shared by a greater number of people, Fallout can respond “quickly and organically” to support new ideas and stretch resources further.
Additionally, crossover between otherwise disparate groups—musicians and visual artists, filmmakers and activists, young people and seniors—becomes a core feature of their programs.
A flexible and relationship-centered structure, Cleberg continues, allows people to discover their own capacity, creativity, and leadership potential, all at their own pace.
“A more traditional model might produce polished programming more efficiently, but our approach prioritizes belonging, participation, and long-term relationship-building,” says Cleberg . “In many ways, the community itself becomes the creative engine.”
Fallout Creative Community’s advice to others?
“Prepare to dig in and invest yourself into a place and people if you want to go this direction. Don’t underestimate the importance of physical gathering spaces and recurring rhythms. Have a plan, but don’t become rigidly attached to it.”
Racket: Equal Partnership Based on Trust and Respect
Racket is a news and arts publication dedicated to keeping alternative journalism thriving in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a “writer-owned and reader-funded” weekly, their main audience is paying subscribers, and their owners are the four local journalists who run it.
Co-owners and editors Jessica Armbruster, Jay Boller, Em Cassel, and Keith Harris started as colleagues at City Pages, another Minneapolis alt weekly that shuttered in 2020. While City Pages had a more typical newspaper structure with an editor-in-chief and managing editor, on a day-to-day basis, the writers could work fairly independently on a bedrock of cooperation and trust.
“It felt much different to me than the early days of when I was working in newspapers, when it really was the writer at the bottom of the pyramid, getting through one editor and then another editor and then to print,” says Harris. “This felt much more cooperative, and so we inherited that structure in a lot of ways.”
Racket’s co-owners operate on equal footing in a four-way partnership. Each has the power to make independent decisions about what Racket covers. Harris says it’s a necessity; with such a small newsroom, there simply isn’t time to discuss every choice to be made.
“What it allows us to do is make fast decisions daily on what we’re going to run and what we’re going to cover, where a more traditionally hierarchical model would require approval and slow things down,” says Harris. “So I think the big thing it gives us is flexibility to do what we want.”
This model of diffused leadership comes with some risks: namely, identifying which questions do require group input, and figuring out what happens if there isn’t consensus.
But Harris says neither of those have been a problem. Thanks to their shared history at City Pages, Racket’s team knows each other’s habits, strengths, and values. Trust and respect are foundational.
“It’s very important that going into it, you all trust each other, because there’s so much independence required,” he says. “You don’t have someone in charge, so you’re your own manager. This only works if you have the right people.”
With all members’ work and wisdom weighed equally, Racket keeps itself nimble and its team invested.
“Other organizational structures are possible, and they’re worth exploring,” says Harris.
Racket’s advice to others?
“Even if you do have one decision-maker, create a structure where there has to be buy-in from the people who are doing the work. That can be useful even if you have something more hierarchical.”
Building Blocks
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Opting for less hierarchical structures takes trust.
When people know each other’s work and share each other’s values, they can make choices democratically instead of relying on one decision-maker.
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When more people contribute, more people buy in.
Having a say in how an organization runs on a day-to-day basis generally leads to a lot of investment from the people working there.
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Circular structure thrives when goals and roles are clear.
Outlining responsibilities through consistent communication ensures that everything gets done without any one person needing to manage everyone else.