In most businesses and organizations, the pressure to grow comes from everywhere: from investors, boards, market expectations, and an implicit logic that bigger means more legitimate. A team of 10 looks scrappy, while a team of 500 is serious. Scale, especially unchallenged scale, becomes a proxy for impact. And when organizations scale, what’s rarely examined is how those decisions reshape who holds power, and whether the work still belongs to the people it was built to serve.

What we've seen, again and again, is that growth without purpose makes democratic workplaces dramatically less self-governing. Power that was once carefully distributed is gradually re-centralized. 

Research on cooperative economies helps explain this. A 2025 study in the Basque Country found that when democratic organizations grow conventionally, they tend to undergo what it calls “degeneration,” a gradual weakening of cooperative principles.

But there are examples where growth doesn’t lead to degeneration. The study examined Agintzari, a nonprofit that expanded its impact through inter-cooperative networks. These networks let organizations coordinate with peer cooperatives, operating outside traditional corporate models. Agintzari’s impact spread through the network instead of through the organization’s size. 

A similar pattern appears in the work of Cooperation Jackson, a solidarity economy ecosystem in Jackson, Mississippi, built around interlinked cooperatives and community institutions. Cooperation Jackson scales capacity across connected enterprises, so as reach increases, decision-making stays distributed across the community it serves.

In both cases, it's the organizational model (not company size) that determines whether power remains distributed.

This dynamic extends far beyond cooperatives and into how leaders make decisions about growth every day. Ninety-six percent of executives say a well-functioning democracy matters to a strong economy, and yet most weren't sure what role they could play in pushing back against global authoritarianism. Leaders have an important role to play inside their organizations—every time they decide how their organization expands and who holds power in that process, they have the opportunity to contribute to a democratic economy.

For pro-democracy organizations, scaling with integrity means paying close attention to how power gets distributed as everything grows. If revenue scales, governance has to scale with it. If headcount doubles, the infrastructure for shared decision-making should expand, too. It's easy to build the topline; it's harder to advance democratic practices alongside that growth. But our research suggests the payoff is immense; breakout innovation stays possible at scale when the shared power underpinning it isn’t left behind.

So we return to the questions Jess raised at Mozilla Festival late last year: Growth for whom? To what end? Measured by what? Accountable to whom? These are the beginnings of intentional scale and the questions brave leaders are asking right now.

In solidarity,

Jess Rimington & Joanna Levitt Cea

Organizations often hire for diversity and then assume the work is done. Too often, the room may look different, or the lived experience present may have expanded, but decision-making and influence remain the same. And new team members are just expected to conform to the existing norms and culture.

Beloved Economies’ research finds that diverse perspectives only generate breakout thinking for an enterprise when all team members feel inspired and able to share the insights they hold. This is critical to what we call deconsolidating rights to design, which expands who shapes decisions and how they are made.

Deconsolidating those rights can look like many things, including:

Both practices work best when organizations create multiple ways for people to contribute, like working in pairs before full groups or individual reflection before open discussion, so the loudest voices don't dominate. Beloved Tip: Before your next convening, ask the question co-learner Aisha Shillingford recommends building into regular practice: Who is impacted by this work, or has a perspective on it, that isn't present at this table? Then ask a second question: Once they're there, will the conditions let them lead?

Building a Beloved Economy requires more than just vision or good intentions. You need tangible skills to lead, strategize, and stay grounded when everything feels hard.

That's why we're excited about the Next Economy MBA from LIFT Economy. It's made for people who are trying to build a more just, regenerative economy.

Over nine months, you'll gain practical skills, a peer community, and strategic clarity to transform organizations, launch a new venture, or influence change from within. LIFT has been doing this work for eight years now, with 850+ people having gone through the program.

Registration opens September 29th for their 17th cohort, and the Beloved Economies community gets 10% off. It stacks with early bird and BIPOC equity pricing, too. Apply the code BELOVEDMB@ during the checkout process to unlock the discount.

We'd love for you to consider the program. Learn more about the Next Economy MBA here.