Soft Works
Comments Off on Soft Works“Love is a practice of mutual care and accountability.” –bell hooks
May 2026
As a community-first organization, The LP is making visible what we call our “soft work”—the internal processes, rhythms, and operational choices that often remain unseen but are essential to how we practice our values. At The LP, the Finance & Operations department is led by Shana Wolfe (she/her), who stewards the organization’s infrastructure with a deep commitment to equity and community power. Shana is a classically trained, multimedia artist, and an active organizer in Central Brooklyn through mutual aid distribution networks and childcare collectives. Across all of these contexts, Shana brings organizing principles, a restorative justice lens, and a vision of radicalizing internal nonprofit administrative practices to better serve the pursuit of a more just future. To help our community learn more about how The LP operationalizes liberatory practices, we asked Shana Wolfe, Director of Finance & Operations, what it looks like to run operations and manage finances through a community care lens. See Shana’s response below.
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In the nonprofit sector, community care, as a practice within internal operations, often gets lost in the shadows, becoming forgotten work. But how we build community relationships hinges on a healthy organizational culture with and for a team of uniquely talented individuals who work on the front lines of the community every day.
As an arts & cultural organization, we collaborate with a community of artists, neighbors, and cultural organizers to fulfill our mission. It is important to take stock that nearly all of our staff are artists and cultural organizers themselves; this may explain why they are so drawn to this work. Further still, failing to recognize and nurture the rich assets that our team holds in first-hand knowledge would be shortsighted and out of alignment with our methodologies and approach.
‘Doing the work IS the work.’
Early in my career, I was focused on spreadsheets, policies, and mediation practices, losing sight of the larger impact our organization’s programs and events were having on both external and internal communities. I would joke that the organization’s actual mission was all its internal processes. The longer I am in this field, though, the more I recognize the two to be immeasurably intertwined. Without internal processes grounded in community care practices, there would be a falseness in the execution and impact of program metrics. It is essential for community care to be authentic, and for that to be true, it must be an extension of ourselves—not a check mark off a procedural task list. Our team won’t have the capacity to not only show up but also notice and attend to the small things in a larger ecosystem if they aren’t receiving the same care and attention themselves.
The most important and also challenging way we center community care in our operations and finances is by always entering our work with the understanding that our foundations were built on harmful structures. The modern workplace was created for a cis-het, white, factory-working man providing for his family.
Nearly every system and practice that has been standardized in operations, administration, and finance has been built on practices of white supremacy, and, even if the veneer of office life has changed over time, the harmful impacts on intersecting marginalized groups remain.
Standard protocols for working hours, policy templates, accessibility guidelines, compensation structures, hiring processes, benefits packages, and performance review processes are steeped in ableism, classism, racism, and sexism. For us to operate from a place of care, it’s important to weed out the rotten roots and plant new seeds.
Building by Undoing
Operating through a community care lens, for me, looks a lot like questioning why we do things the way we do. In our department, we are always considering ways to reenvision and rebuild systems that actually respond to the unique needs and preferences of the individuals within the group. Given all legal requirements, what flexibility can we offer to address those needs?
This process is ongoing for the Finance & Operations department at The LP. It involves constant experimentation, dialogue, and deep listening. Sometimes it feels like we’re making things up as we go, and other times it feels like we’re getting it all wrong. But overall, there’s a much more encompassing sense that we’re on the right track, something I think the entire team also feels and appreciates. The LP doesn’t have any pretense of thinking there is an ‘end’ to this work. We understand it as something with a life of its own that must continue evolving as we, both as individuals and as a collective, grow and change.
Be Propelled by Love
One of The LP’s organizational mentors, healers, and coaches, who is lovingly known among the staff as “Doc Nic,” calls love at work “directed attention.” That feels most important to me in doing this work—care, in the form of attention, that shows up in the many small ways we make space for people to be people at work. Some small things that, I find, make a big difference, include creating financial dashboards for non-finance staff that are easy to read, with the most useful information for them right up front; hosting annual listening sessions for each individual on the team; incorporating projectfeedback into an ever evolving annual process —so that everything happening is created, and continues to build off of, what is needed right now for this iteration of staff. These small moments of attention, paired with larger institutional shifts towards responsive, people-centered ways of being—like adopting a thriving wage framework and having a staff therapist—are, to me, what community care looks like in action.
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Stay tuned for our next soft works with Shana!