While strengthening core leadership is important for scaling, building the capacity of decentralized leaders is also vital for survival and growth. A decentralized leadership approach focuses on providing autonomy for community-based organizations. It may lead to a more inclusive leadership structure; however, this is not its main focus.

A Black Lives Matter activist in the Southwestern US explains that in a decentralized leadership model, “everybody has to be able to hold their own weight… because everybody makes a decision and we take action together.” Thus, it is important that all members within the organization or network have access to capacity building resources, to enable them to act on behalf of the organization as individual nodes and as a group. Investing in the development of a decentralized leadership structure enables greater autonomy among local organizational chapters and facilitates relationship-building across the organization’s network.

Decentralized or local leadership can also occur within a broadly centralized model. For instance, a Palestinian activist in Israel described two ways in which the organization with which she is affiliated encouraged the development of women. First, they made a strategic choice to scale women’s leadership by working in multiple locations. Second, they gradually trained women on how to engage with political issues central to the social change agenda by starting from personal and individual topics and then introducing local and national level subject-matter. In her words: 

It’s really a very long-term process because it’s very hard to start, for example, from the first year to talk with women about political discrimination…we start with their own sphere, with family, neighborhood, community, after that, their society circle, after that, the country or the society, the larger society that we live in.

While the existence of decentralized groups within a centralized organization differs from decentralized leadership across a coalition of organizations, what is key for both is a focus on flexibility and autonomy that enables each leader to emphasize local issues that are relevant to the cause.

The local focus of decentralized leadership can help motivate group members and bring in new activists. For instance, an activist with a feminist group in Israel notes: 

We do what we call parallel meetings in the different neighborhoods that the women themselves lead with our support. And they meet tens and sometimes hundreds of other women in their community and ask them about their needs. On the one hand they know what women really want, on the other hand they introduce themselves, so this is the way they start to develop their own program and priorities... So, this is the way that community work, local work, develops. And they continue from year to year to be more active.

Leadership structure may depend on the type of social change pursued. For instance, organizations engaged in high profile social justice causes might use a decentralized approach in order to enable flexibility and ensure the safety of their core activists, but also to promote collaboration and consensus decision making within and across local chapters. Decentralized structures also enable activists to mobilize easily for a cause without the burden of a formal structure.

Challenges you may encounter using this tool

• Decentralized leadership can lead to collective burnout across the leaders within the organization. Horizontal leadership structures require a greater breadth of knowledge and action for each individual. 

• Cultivating leadership takes time for any one individual, so decentralized leadership models require an exponential investment of time and capacity building given that leadership responsibilities are spread across many individuals.

• Given that it is a long process to cultivate leadership, doing so 'at scale' can be extremely difficult.

• Decentralized leadership structures can make it difficult to maintain consistent messaging and strategies across a larger organization with a chapter structure or across a coalition.