Rewriting Bylaws for Liberatory Governance

How SJPLA's New Bylaws Aligned its Governance with its Evolving Mission and Values

Bylaws are not often seen as an exciting part of the work, even in the realm of nonprofit governance. But when we decided to update our bylaws last year, we saw it as another opportunity to create a more liberatory organization from the inside out.

Our SJPLA bylaws hadn’t been meaningfully updated since our founding as SVPLA in 2004, and we’ve evolved a lot over the past 19 years.

SJPLA has changed and grown significantly in recent years: 

• Updated our values, mission, and name

• Removed the minimum Partner contribution

• Launched new initiatives, programs, and partnerships (Racial Equity in Homelessness Initiative, Systems Change Accelerator, anti-racism programming, LA2050 Grants Challenge partnership, Healing Justice offerings)

• Major growth in staff and budget

We have worked over the last 6+ years to make our organization more justice-centered in practice and policy. As part of that process, we rewrote our bylaws to ensure our core organizational governance document reflects who we’ve become.

Process

With such a major overhaul on the horizon to such a foundational document, we embarked on these revisions with an intentional process that would both convey and live out our values.

We began by convening a bylaws committee in November of 2021 of SJPLA Partners. The committee did extensive research, worked closely with our Board and staff, and conducted a survey of Partners to solicit feedback. They workshopped drafts with focus groups, solicited feedback at Partner meetings, and surveyed staff.

The result was a final draft presented in December 2022, where the new bylaws were unanimously adopted.

Key Updates

Updating our name.

We updated our name and brand from Social Venture Partners LA to Social Justice Partners LA a year ago, and our new bylaws will reflect that.

Upkeep

Several required items needed to be added and updated since the 2004 version to cover all our legal bases.

Infusing our mission and values into the bylaws.

We explicitly update our purpose and values and weave them throughout the document.

Representative decision-making

At the time of our founding in 2004, our Partners were our core stakeholder group. Since then, SJPLA’s stakeholder group has significantly broadened. Now, we make decisions in partnership with SJPLA program participants and alums, community peers, as well as Partners.

The new bylaws ensure the Board is reflective of our various stakeholder groups and becomes the representative decision-making body, with advisory input from our whole community on major organizational decisions.

This change is an important reflection of the evolution of our values to shift power from solely sitting with our financial contributors to now distributing it across our community. Our Board now serves as a representative decision-making body, as they have the strongest lens into the organization.

Governing SJPLA

These bylaws now enable us to reflect our mission, values, and name in our central governing document. We’re looking forward to using them as a guide for our work and continuing to examine and evolve them as we evolve.

We’re so grateful to this SJP community for believing in our shared vision and partnering with us in shifting from charity to justice.