After years of perfecting dialogues designed to meet the needs of diverse communities, CIT began looking at ways to align its own operational structure with the dialogic practices used with our beneficiaries, and in particular how our own internal systems would allow for collaborative decision-making, self-determination and multi-stakeholder participation.

Over several years of programming as a US-based organization in the Central African Republic (CAR), CIT was able to explore various management structures from collaborations between independent consultants to hierarchical reporting structures. We found that when working in a space steeped in racial and ethnic power inequities, that self-managed local teams driving their own work led to the healthiest and most productive model of human resource management and program impact.

Top-down control was thus replaced with distributed leadership.

New internal systems around decision-making, resource flow, information sharing, feedback and conflict engagement were established and institutionalized in our by-laws to form the bases for our interactions inside the organization. For example:

• Decision-making system: is based on seeking the advice of those impacted by the decision under consideration.
• Resource flow: towards needs and are regenerative in nature.
• Information sharing: is done transparently within the organization. 
• Feedback: is gathered iteratively from inside and outside the organization and used to improve our work.
• Conflict engagement system: conflict is harvested for learning and used to grow.

A diverse number of professionals in the field of peace-building were invited to constitute CIT’ Board of Directors, including local representation from countries where CIT intervenes. Local Boards were also established to guide the work of frontline organizations emerging as a result of our work. Investments in translation and technology were made to build up and ensure broad access to decision-making spaces, particularly during a pandemic year when public WiFi spaces closed down and isolated some of our overseas members. The purpose shared by those who join the Board is to support our frontline workers and we do so using the following principles:

• A balanced care for the whole of people, planet and profit;
• A nurturing of the inter-connectedness of all members of CIT; and
• A commitment to seeking out the consent of those impacted.

Legal requirements obligated CIT to create officer positions on the Board which provided again an opportunity for CIT to design a governance structure using an equity lens. In March 2020, with guidance from a liberation systems expert, Uma Lo and training inspired by Frederick Laloux’s Reinventing Organization framework, the Board formed an Officer Task Force (OTF) to propose 1) roles and responsibilities for CIT’ Board officer positions; and 2) a process for selecting CIT Board officers. 

Critical structural components of CIT’s system of governance designed by the OTF include:

• The Board is composed of representatives of the people CIT serves
• We maintained the number of Board officer positions above legal requirements to facilitate the inclusion of diverse leaders
• Officers are those Board members who demonstrate additional effort towards implementing CIT’s mission and emerge as having active relationships with CIT’s members.
• The Board exercises its oversight role by being in relationship with members of the organization and by being invited into the reality and activities of CIT's work.
• Board members’ tasks arise from members' needs and their responsibility is to respond back to the Board about the needs they uncover. 
• Board expenses can be reimbursed by obtaining prior approval from the CEO
• Board meetings are open to all CIT members. All present at a Board meeting are able to vote.

CIT’s governance structure is designed to give all CIT members agency within CIT and to enable people to contribute to decisions that affect their lives, all the while being supported by a Board that seeks to advance the work of frontline practitioners to fulfill the mission of the organization.