Rad Ops - The Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

In a time where social justice organizations are under attack, we bring you Rad Ops (that stands for Radical Operations), a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. 

Many organizations are in turmoil as they pivot to meet this moment. Rad Ops is a multimedia series offering principles, guiding questions, and tools that organizations can use to identify ways they can and cannot practice liberatory values in this unjust world.

The Rad Ops podcast is one component of a project designed for social justice organizations looking to strengthen their resilience. This project seeks to inspire people in Left movement organizations to get real with each other about what their organization can and can’t do, and make collective agreements about how they will act together when unable to fully practice their liberatory values. If people in movement organizations regularly dialogue with each other in courageous, creative, and collaborative ways, then their relationships and political visions will strengthen existing organizations and outlast both internal conflict and external opposition.

Podcast co-hosts Yashna Maya Padamsee and Sha Grogan-Brown together bring over 40 years of movement operations experience they draw from to facilitate these conversations.

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Explore the Rad Ops Resources page
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• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

Cover art by Kimmie Dearest

In this episode, Sha Grogan-Brown talks with guest Le Tim Ly, Chief Operating Officer of Center for Empowered Politics about how building “multi-entity infrastructure” can improve the resilience of organizations.

While the Left faces many crises in these times, underpinning everything is the vulnerability of the operations and infrastructure of our organizations. So many groups have chosen to establish non-profit organizations as the entity for their organizing, and now this administration is targeting the tax status of two primary forms of non-profit organizations – known as 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). Our movement has had critiques of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex for decades. We know this is not the ideal structure for our long term work. Yet the majority of Left organizations are currently dependent on non-profit structure and on philanthropy for the operations of their projects. We’re in a time which calls on us to be nimble and pivot many aspects of our operations. 

With this context in mind, Dear Rad Ops received this question: My organization is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and we are worried about being attacked by the current administration. What other options do we have for our organizational structure in case we lose our c3 tax status?

• Organizations providing support for exploring multi-entity infrastructure:
  • Definition List of organizational entities
• • Organizations providing support for exploring multi-entity infrastructure:
  • Center for Empowered Politics
  • Movement Politics Accelerator
  • Power & Protect Operations Network
  • New Left Accelerator
  • Want to go deeper on the difference between 501c3, 501c4 and PAC? Listen to this episode of Rules of the Game podcast, comparing tax-exempt organizations.
  • What to do if your organization loses 501c3 tax status

• What entities currently make up your organization’s infrastructure? Is everyone on staff aware of the reason or purpose for each of those entities?
• If you have a 501c3 organization, what is your back up plan in the case of losing your tax status? (Be sure to check out the next episode on risk assessment vs fear assessments, and be mindful of of reacting to this question primarily based on fear…)
• Which parts of your work could happen via a different entity?

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Explore the Rad Ops Resources page
• Follow RadOps on Instagram...

In a time where social justice organizations are under attack, we bring you Dear Rad Ops, a mini series advice vlog about live questions on the minds of movement operations workers.

In this introductory episode, co-hosts Yashna Maya Padamsee and Sha Grogan-Brown discuss their own Rad Ops movement operations experience, and the lineages they draw from in their work to run liberatory organizations in an unjust world. 

• Explore the Rad Ops Resources page

• What lineages do you draw from in your operations work?
  • Who is a figure who you see as a political and/or operations ancestor? 
  • What is an event in history that you see as a pivotal moment of movement operations? Feel free to reach for the well-known figures and events, or (even better) the lesser known! 
• How has your identity and your relationship to Operations work changed over time?
  • When and where did you get politicized? What political formations have you been a part of? How have they shaped what you think about operations right now?
• The definition we have for Rad Ops is: Rad Ops is short for Radical Operations, and it’s about running liberatory organizations in an unjust world. Finding the ways that we can be liberatory with each other while we navigate the constraints of racialized gendered capitalism, heteropatriarchy and rising fascism. Do you practice Rad Ops at your org? Where are you already doing this? Where are places at your org that you want to bring a Rad Ops approach? 

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Follow RadOps on Instagram
• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

In this episode, Yashna Maya Padamsee talks with guest Che Johnson-Long, Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win, about how we can be making grounded risk assessments in these times of escalated fear.

We’re in a moment where there is a chance that fear can lead our planning and decision making. It is a particularly escalated and scary time. And this time is calling for us to do clear organizational risk assessments and find, create, or improve upon operational scaffolding to meet the risk assessment, not the fear assessment. 

This topic has come up in many conversations throughout 2025, and Dear Rad Ops received a question with some context: I am in an operations role, and my Executive Director wants to implement a new security protocol for our organization. It seems to me like a decision based on fear without a grounded assessment of the real risk to our organization, but I don’t know how to distinguish between fear and risk in this situation. 

Question: How can I support my ED to reflect on whether asking for a new security protocol is an individual concern based on fear, or an organizational-level concern grounded in a risk assessment for our particular conditions?

• Vision Change Win offers many resources on community safety, including:
  • Get in Formation Training Series is an intro level training for basic community safety skills around verbal deescalation, event safety and organizational safety.
  • Organizational Safety Planning Risk Assessment Tool will guide your group through building a risk assessment, the first step in organizational safety planning.
  • Safety Recommendations from Sept 2025 can help you understand where to prioritize if you’re not sure where to start.
• Fascism Barometer podcast by Ejeris Dixon, helps us understand the current political moment which can inform our assessments.

• To get a sense of how to make a fear assessment rather than a risk assessment, you can start by asking yourself and your group these two questions:
  • What is the likelihood of this happening?
  • What is the impact it might have?
• To help discern the likelihood of something happening to your particular organization or community, talk with partners and ask questions like these:
  • I’m worried about this scary thing happening. Has it happened to you?
  • I’ve heard about this thing in the news. Have you heard about it at our local level or in our communities/sector?
• As you are making assessments around safety and security, regularly pulse check within your group: Are our assessments making us move away from or toward organizations we are in partnership with?

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Explore the Rad Ops Resources page

In this episode, Sha Grogan-Brown talks with guest Nat Smith, Finance & Development Director with House of gg and facilitator with A Bookkeeping Cooperative to offer advice to organizations needing to make major pivots to their budgets.

In these wild times, many organizations are needing to revisit their organizational budget, either due to loss of funding, pivoting their work for rapid response moments, taking a strategic pause to tend to internal tensions and challenges, among other reasons. 

Dear Rad Ops received a question on this topic, with this context: Our organization is currently facing a series of internal conflicts and disruptions that is calling for us to go inward to tend to these challenges. As a result, we're pausing on a lot of our current activities and adjusting most of our original org-wide and departmental goals/work plans for this year. We're currently drafting an organizational development process to tend to these tensions and there's a good chance that this work (ie OD process, skilling up/facilitation on navigating conflict, etc) will also continue into next year. Our 2025 budget was approved based on our initial work plan, but these recent pivots mean we also need to make adjustments to both our organizational and departmental budgets. 

Question: What advice can you offer on how to best reflect these changes within our budget(s)? Are there any other budgetary considerations that we should be aware of for both this year and as we plan out next year’s budgetary process?

Resources from this episode:

• Take a training with A Bookkeeping Cooperative - engage in conversation and take home tools
• If you really don’t have time to take a training and need something quickly, you could try out this Nonprofit Budgeting Scenario Planning Tool from Nonprofit Finance Fund:
  • Watch Instructional video
  • Download Nonprofit Budgeting Scenario Planning Tool
• National Council of Nonprofits has a lot of free resources on their website, in particular in the Budgeting for Nonprofits section and this 10 step budgeting checklist.
• Lastly, Nat recommends you check with current funders about what resources they have to support you in this process. They may be quick to recommend and/or share packets or tools they have.

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• Before reviewing the budget together, discuss these questions:
  • Based on the current conditions of our work, what are our hopes and dreams for this organization’s mission?
  • What are the top 3 values we want to lean into during this time? Which aspects of our work will best support us to meet those values?
  • What are the commitments we have made to our constituency? Which aspects of our work will best meet those commitments?
  • Which aspects of our hopes and dreams for our organization do we not have the capacity to take on during this phase of our work? 
• Based on the discussion of the questions above, what are the 2 scenarios that we should consider for revising our budget? Nat encourages us to frame this scenario planning as Alternative Futures work.

The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this origins episode, we flipped the script, and guest Denise Perry interviews co-hosts Yashna Maya Padamsee and Sha Grogan-Brown! 

Resources from this episode:

• Rad Ops Workbook
• Rad Ops Principles
• Rad Ops Resources Page
• Sanctuary Embodied for embodiment and somatics resources (like the centering activity within this episode) 

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• What lineages do you draw from in your operations work?
  • Who is a figure who you see as a political and/or operations ancestor? 
  • What is an event in history that you see as a pivotal moment of movement operations? Feel free to reach for the well-known figures and events, or (even better) the lesser known! 
• What Rad Ops principle do you resonate with the most, and why?
  • How often do you practice this principle in your work? What is one thing you could do to practice this principle more of the time?

Subscribe & Support Rad Ops and Convergence Magazine

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Follow RadOps on Instagram
• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence Magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

Guest Speaker

Denise Perry has spent more than 35 years in labor and community organizing work, dedicated to developing strong grassroots leaders, democratic organizations, and progressive social movements. She co-founded Power U Center for Social Change, rooted in Miami’s historically Black community of Overtown in 1999. She has served on a variety of Boards to support the process and development of organizations. She currently is a Co-Director and co-founder of BOLD Training Institute which is developing Black leadership for transformative organizing and building Black power across the country.

The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this episode we talk about Safety and Security with our guest, Che Johnson-Long, Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win. 

Resources from this episode:

• Vision Change Win offers many resources on community safety, including:
  • Get in Formation Training Series is an intro level training for basic community safety skills around verbal deescalation, event safety and organizational safety.
  • Organizational Safety Planning Risk Assessment Tool will guide your group through building a risk assessment, the first step in organizational safety planning.
• Fascism Barometer podcast by Ejeris Dixon, helps us understand the current political moment which can inform our assessments.
• Power and Protect Safety Resource Library - prevention and preparedness resources, and recommendations to help build organizational practices and resilience

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• To get a sense of how to make a fear assessment rather than a risk assessment, you can start by asking yourself and your group these two questions:
  • What is the likelihood of this happening?
  • What is the impact it might have?
• To help discern the likelihood of something happening to your particular organization or community, talk with partners and ask questions like these:
  • I’m worried about this scary thing happening. Has it happened to you?
  • I’ve heard about this thing in the news. Have you heard about it at our local level or in our communities/sector?
• As you are making assessments around safety and security, regularly pulse check within your group: Are our assessments making us move away from or toward organizations we are in partnership with?

Subscribe & Support Rad Ops and Convergence Magazine

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Follow RadOps on Instagram
• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie Davids. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

Guest Speaker

Che Johnson-Long is an abolitionist security practitioner and community organizer who can’t leave well enough alone. She is currently the Community Safety Director at Vision Change Win and serves as a board member of Third Wave's Accountable Futures Fund Advisory Council. Before this, Che organized with the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative of the Racial Justice Action Center, the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, and...

The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this episode we talk about Human Resources with our guest, Tara Shuai Ellison, Founder of Shuai Strategies and co-founder of Rad Ops social media network. 

Resources from this episode:

• Shuai Strategies 
• The Equitable Hiring Guide & Toolkit
• Webinars:
  • Be Strategic, Not Scared webinar with Tara Shuai Ellison and Kehsi Iman Wilson
  • Strategies for Equitable Hiring webinar with Tara Shuai Ellison and Kehsi Iman Wilson
• RadHR Community 
• Vent Diagrams 
• Books: Leading for Justice & Supervision Matters (Rita Sever)

Discussion questions to take to your team from the Rad Ops workbook: 

If you find yourself pitting concepts against each other, or believing one is more important than the other, it’s time to pause and consider:

• How are both sides of the binary existing in contradiction to each other?
• How might one side engage with or strengthen the other?

Download Rad Ops workbook (page 21-22) for an activity about False Binaries & Contradictions

Subscribe & Support Rad Ops and Convergence Magazine

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Follow RadOps on Instagram
• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this episode we talk about Non-Compliance with our guest, Roberto Tijerina, Organizer Journeyman/Popular Educator.

Resources from this episode: 

• LGBTQI+ CFO Network
• RoadMap Consulting Resources 
• Movement CFO
• Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)

Discussion questions to take to your team before tackling non-compliance:

• What is the organizational mission/north star? 
• Is there political agreement around it? 
• Is there political agreement around non-compliance? 
• Have you gamed out consequential scenarios and prepped contingencies?

Subscribe & Support Rad Ops and Convergence Magazine

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Follow RadOps on Instagram
• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence Magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

Guest Speaker

Roberto Tijerina is a queer, Latino, first-generation child of immigrants, organizer and keeper of the heart-space. Since becoming politicized in his early adolescence, Roberto has worked as an organizer connecting his queer, immigrant, multilingual experience to broader racial, economic, and gender justice movements.  His experience includes working for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Highlander Research and Education Center, the Audre Lorde Project, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG).  Learning at the feet of many and by doing the work, he has helped develop a Language Justice framework and lens that are informing current movement work. His political north star has always been the question: “Are you willing to be transformed in the service of the work?”

The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this episode we talk about the Role of Assistants (and so much more) with our guest, Felicia Martinez, freelance consultant and co-founder of Rad Ops social media network. 

Resources from this episode:

• Rad Ops Workbook – Putting Rad Ops into Practice activity (pages 16–20)
• Choose and use a tool with teams of two or more people (such as a Director and an Assistant) to discern division of labor and coordination: DARCI/MOCHA/RACI
  • Check out descriptions and a comparison of these three models in this guide by Nonprofit Learning Lab
  • DARCI: DARCI ACCOUNTABILITY GRID Tool What it is What it can do How it works 
  • MOCHA: MOCHA Framework: How to Assign Responsibilities - The Management Center 

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• What does the Director want and need from the Assistant? What does the organization want and need from the Assistant? Is there alignment between the Director and the organization about what the priorities of the Assistant are? (Principles 4 & 6)
• What access does the Assistant have to professional and political development, especially as it relates to their work for this Director? (Principles 1 & 7)
• What possibilities does the Assistant have for building relationships across the organization? (Principle 2)
• If you don’t have positional power at your organization, do you have positional authority? Do you have a positional view point and discernment that no one else has but could reflect important emerging needs for the organization? (Principle 1) 

Subscribe & Support Rad Ops and Convergence Magazine

• Subscribe to Rad Ops substack to get notified when we post new content
• Follow RadOps on Instagram
• Donate to Rad Ops
• Support Convergence Magazine producing this show and movement media like it

Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.