You've seen it happen. A neighborhood group gets excited about a new initiative—maybe a community garden, a youth program, or a mutual aid network. Everyone's energized. Then someone says the magic words: "We need a steering committee." Six months later, the garden is still a vacant lot, the meetings have become exercises in bureaucratic theater, and half the original members have quietly stopped showing up.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the governance structures we default to often work against the very communities they're supposed to serve. We borrow models from corporate boardrooms and nonprofit hierarchies without asking whether they actually fit grassroots efforts. The result? Initiatives that spend more time being governed than actually doing anything.

The typical steering committee structure carries hidden assumptions that can quietly sabotage community work. It assumes decisions should flow through a small group of designated leaders. It assumes formal meetings with agendas and minutes are the best way to coordinate action. It assumes that representation—having the right people in the room—automatically translates into participation from the broader community.

In practice, steering committees often become gatekeepers rather than enablers. They slow down decision-making to match meeting schedules. They create invisible hierarchies where some voices carry more weight simply because those people showed up to more meetings. They can become self-perpetuating clubs that lose touch with the community members they're supposed to represent.

The most insidious problem? Steering committees tend to attract people who are comfortable in formal meeting settings—which often means people with more education, more professional experience, and more time flexibility. This isn't intentional exclusion. It's structural exclusion. The governance model itself filters out the very community members whose participation matters most.

Takeaway

Governance structures aren't neutral tools—they shape who participates, whose voices matter, and what kinds of action become possible. Before adopting any structure, ask what it assumes about how decisions should be made and who should make them.

What if we stopped asking "Who should be on the committee?" and started asking "What decisions need to be made, and who's affected by them?" This shift opens up alternatives that better match how community work actually happens.

Working groups with rotating coordination let people contribute based on interest and capacity rather than elected positions. Instead of a steering committee deciding everything, separate groups handle specific tasks—outreach, logistics, finances—with coordination rotating among active participants. Consent-based decision-making replaces majority voting with a simpler question: "Can everyone live with this?" It's faster than consensus and prevents the tyranny of slim majorities. Distributed authority gives individuals or small teams the power to make decisions within clear boundaries, only escalating when those boundaries are exceeded.

These aren't just theoretical alternatives. Community land trusts, mutual aid networks, and worker cooperatives have been experimenting with flat and flexible governance for decades. The common thread? They prioritize movement over meetings. They build in accountability without creating bottlenecks. They recognize that the best governance structure is often the lightest one that still gets the job done.

Takeaway

The goal of governance isn't to govern—it's to enable collective action. The best structures are often invisible to participants, creating just enough coordination to keep things moving without becoming the main event.

Here's where things get real: governance structures distribute power. Even when everyone involved has good intentions, the structure itself determines whose input shapes decisions. A steering committee that meets Tuesday evenings excludes parents with bedtime routines. Monthly meetings favor people with predictable schedules. English-only documents shut out community members who communicate in other languages.

Effective community governance requires what organizers call structural inclusion—building participation pathways into the governance model itself, not as afterthoughts. This might mean multiple meeting times, asynchronous input options, translation resources, childcare provisions, or stipends for participants who can't afford to volunteer their time. It definitely means regularly asking: "Who's not in the room, and why not?"

The deeper work involves examining what counts as participation. Traditional governance privileges verbal contributions in formal settings. But community members contribute in countless other ways—cooking for events, spreading word through their networks, showing up consistently. Governance structures that recognize and value diverse forms of contribution tend to reflect community diversity better than those that only count meeting attendance.

Takeaway

Diversity in governance isn't achieved by recruiting diverse people into exclusionary structures—it requires designing structures that work for the actual lives and capacities of community members you want to include.

The next time someone proposes a steering committee, try asking a different question: "What's the lightest governance structure that would let us actually do this work?" Start there, and add structure only when you hit real problems—not hypothetical ones borrowed from organizations that work nothing like yours.

Community initiatives succeed when governance serves action, not the other way around. The best structure is one that most participants barely notice—because they're too busy doing the work that brought them together in the first place.