Growing the Table: Why We Expanded Our Movement-Led Advisory Body for 2026-2028
This blog is a part of the Cypress Fund Governance Series: Building and Sustaining Community-Rooted Institutions.
We are living through a moment that is asking everything of our institutions and revealing what they’re actually built to do. In 2026, the threats to civil society aren’t theoretical; they show up as budget lines that disappear, rights that get rolled back, organizers criminalized for doing their jobs, and the quiet targeting of the connective tissue that makes collective action possible. The question isn’t whether the work is urgent. The question is whether our institutions are governed in a way that can meet urgency without becoming reactive, risk-averse, or quietly complicit.
For institutions like Cypress, built to resource and sustain Southern movement work, this is not just a test of our programming. It is a test of our governance: who has power when the stakes rise, how decisions get made under pressure, what we protect when there’s backlash, and whether our accountability lives in our values or in our fears. That is why, as we enter our 2026–2028 term, we choose to grow, not as a symbol of health, but as a strategy of resilience: widening the circle of leadership so the institution can hold the moment without collapsing into one lane, one voice, or one definition of “safe.”
What We Did
For this term, we have expanded our Movement-Led Advisory Body, or MLAB, by five new members. This wasn't a reactive move. It was a deliberate, values-driven decision that we'd been building toward since we first launched the MLAB as an alternative to the traditional board structure.
But the expansion carries particular weight right now. In a political moment defined by consolidation of power at the top, we made a choice to move in the opposite direction: to bring more voices in, to widen the circle of leadership, and to deepen our accountability to the communities we serve.
The five new members joining us are in full alignment with our values. More significantly, this expansion brings us to a place where approximately 40% of our MLAB now includes members who come directly from our movement partners, representing both our C3 and C4 work. That is not a small thing. That is a structural commitment to the principle that the people closest to the work should be closest to the decisions.
Why This Matters Beyond Cypress
We started the MLAB because, as a fiscally sponsored organization, we weren't required to have a traditional board. Instead of treating that as a footnote, we treated it as a design opportunity. What if governance could be built from the ground up to actually reflect the communities we're accountable to?
What we've learned, and what we want to lift up publicly as part of this governance series, is that shared, community-rooted leadership is not just a values statement. It is an institutional strategy. Especially now. Here is what we mean by that:
Movement partners aren't advisors to the work. They are the work. When 40% of your advisory body is made up of people from the organizations you resource and stand alongside, your governance is no longer a separate layer sitting above the movement. It becomes part of it. Decisions get made with proximity, not just with good intentions.
Governance is where values either hold or collapse under pressure. It's easy to say you believe in community power when things are going well. The real test comes in a moment like this one, when resources are scarce, when political pressure is high, when the instinct is to consolidate decision-making in the name of efficiency. Expanding the MLAB at this moment is our answer to that instinct. We are choosing accountability over speed.
Representation without investment is extraction. This is a lesson we carry directly from our institutional lineage. Inviting movement-rooted people into governance structures without giving them the tools, time, and support to lead fully is just a more sophisticated form of co-optation. As we expand the MLAB, we are equally committed to ensuring that every member has access to the professional development, coaching, and peer learning they deserve. Shared leadership has to be resourced, not just declared.
What the Expansion of the C3/C4 Balance Means
One of the more intentional dimensions of this expansion is the decision to bring both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) movement partners into meaningful MLAB representation. This matters because the South’s movement ecosystem does not operate in a single lane. The people doing base-building, voter registration, civic engagement, narrative work, and electoral power-building in the C4 space are not “adjacent” to liberation strategy—they are core to it. And the policy, advocacy, service, and organizing formations in the C3 space are equally essential, often working in tight coordination with C4 efforts even when philanthropy insists on pretending those connections don’t exist.
For too long, philanthropy has treated these as separate worlds, often privileging the C3 side because it is more familiar, more funder-friendly, and more legible to traditional grantmaking norms. The result is a distorted picture of how change actually happens, and a funding landscape that rewards what sounds safe over what is structurally necessary. When we build a shared leadership body that reflects both C3 and C4 leaders, we are making a different claim: we see the full ecosystem, including the strategies that are often under-resourced precisely because they are more honest about power. We are accountable to the whole field, not just the parts that fit neatly into philanthropic comfort.
At the same time, this choice requires real discipline. It asks us to be more rigorous, not less, about how we structure conversations, how we move information, and how we hold clear boundaries across C3 and C4 work so that participation is meaningful and compliant. We refuse the false choice between power-building and responsibility, between bold strategy and sound governance. If anything, bringing C3 and C4 partners into the same governance body makes it even more important that we build shared fluency around what is permissible, what is protected, and what it takes to steward institutions with integrity.
I’ll share more about this in a later piece on compliance as care, because we’ve learned that the clearest boundaries are not bureaucratic red tape, they’re part of how we protect our partners, our mission, and the long-term conditions for movement work to thrive.
An Honest Account of Where We Are
We started this governance series with a commitment to building in public. That means not just sharing the wins, but naming what is still unresolved, and being specific about what “in progress” actually looks like.
We are proud of this expansion. The MLAB is growing into what we said we wanted: a shared leadership structure that’s wider than any one personality, any one staff team, any one moment. And we also know that growth doesn’t automatically equal depth. Bringing new people into a shared leadership body takes time: time to integrate, time for trust to build, time to learn each other’s rhythms, time to get clear about decision-making lanes, and time for new members to move from orientation into genuine co-creation. We are investing in that time intentionally. We are not rushing the relational work in order to perform coherence. We would rather be honest about the messiness than pretend we’ve mastered something we’re still practicing.
That practice includes the unglamorous questions we’re still working through in real time: What does shared governance look like when the calendar is full and the world is on fire? How do we keep decisions distributed without making the process so heavy that it becomes inaccessible? How do we honor movement partners’ time and expertise without reproducing extractive dynamics, especially when those partners are carrying frontline impacts, organizational strain, and political backlash? How do we ensure participation isn’t limited to the people who already have proximity to philanthropy’s language, pace, and norms?
We also know that 40% representation from movement partners is meaningful progress, and not the finish line. Representation is not the same as power, and seats at the table are not the same as shared agenda-setting. The deeper work is building a governance culture where movement partners can shape what gets prioritized, how tradeoffs are made, what risks we take, and what we refuse. It’s building processes where community-rooted leaders aren’t simply consulted; they are resourced, supported, and positioned to lead alongside us with clarity and real authority. As a practice from our founding, we compensate every MLAB member. We recognize that shared governance requires real resourcing, not volunteer labor, and we want to honor the time, preparation, and care it takes to show up with integrity. We also offer paid opportunities for professional development, including conference participation and learning experiences, so members can deepen their fluency as leaders within a grantmaking institution and bring that growth back into our collective decision-making.
So yes: we’re celebrating the step forward. And we’re also naming that we’re still in the middle of becoming. Deepening community-rooted governance is ongoing work, and we expect to keep learning from it publicly. Our commitment isn’t to appear fully formed. Our commitment is to keep building structures that can hold trust, accountability, and shared power over the long haul, and to tell the truth about what that actually requires.
What We Hope Other Institutions Will Take From This
If you are a funder, a governance practitioner, or someone trying to build or sustain a community-rooted institution, here is what we want you to sit with:
This moment is demanding that institutions choose. Choose who they are accountable to. Choose whether shared power is a practice or a posture. Choose whether governance is designed to protect the institution or to serve the mission.
Expanding the MLAB is our answer to that question for this term, at this moment. It is imperfect, evolving, and deeply alive.
And we believe that is exactly what community-rooted governance is supposed to look like.
This piece is part of Cypress’ ongoing Governance Series, which explores what it takes to build and sustain institutions that are genuinely accountable to the communities they serve. Learn more about Cypress Fund at cypressfund.org or subscribe to our updates here.
