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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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Rad Ops - The Podcast
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.
