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Our Leadership Model

A multiracial, co-led organization on the practice and possibility of shared power.

 

For twenty-five years, Common Future has worked to advance an equitable economy, with a sharpening lens on what racial and economic justice and radical inclusion require. Throughout our history, we have modeled new ways of working, including several iterations of co-leadership, which we re-launched in 2023, stepping into our roles as Co-CEOs as a multiracial, all-women team. 

Traditional top-down leadership systems ask more of CEOs than any single leader can hold. Between managing overall operations, serving as the primary link between the board of directors and the rest of the organization, and chasing new allies and funders through punishing travel schedules, the role blocks anyone with outside demands such as children, family, and community. We are living through a global leadership crisis. Only 11% of Fortune 500 CEO roles are held by women, 0.4% by Black women, and Indigenous women representation isn't even measured. Nonprofit leaders have been burning out and leaving for decades, with fewer and fewer employees rising to those roles across the sector.

At Common Future, we intentionally designed co-leadership to show another way, one in which we share power, sustain leaders through every season, and adapt to the moment in a turbulent society. Co-leadership means multiple experienced leaders, each holding the full role individually and cross-trained across the work, so the organization holds multiplicity and abundance when sustaining leadership is most mission-critical. People transition, as our former Co-CEO and Community Credit Lab co-founder Sandhya Nakhasi did in 2026, but the mission continues. We celebrated three years of shared leadership behind us while marking a consistent course toward the road ahead.

We are also aware that our model invites questions. We have more than a few tales of strong reactions to learning about our leadership structure, mixing incredulity, internalized patriarchal narratives, and assumptions to their detriment. As we shared in our 2024 Co-Leadership toolkit: Consensus, Collaboration, and Trust, shared leadership offers frameworks that anyone can draw from, such as the Gradients of Agreement tool, the SADE framework we developed for sharing power within our organization outside our Co-CEO office, and many others.

Like all the models we uplift, we ground co-leadership in intellectual method and a sharp critique of the economic systems we find ourselves in. We look at how these limits and norms were constructed in order to envision what might exist instead — drawing from the best work led by communities and folks closest to the economic challenges, and from lasting and long-standing philosophies, rooted in Black ancestral and Indigenous thinking. Among the traditions we draw from are Ghana's Sankofa an Akan principle that asks us to look to history, and all that came before us, when making decisions for the future, and North America's Seventh Generation Principle, rooted in Haudenosaunee thought, which asks us to weigh the next seven generations against what is most needed now.

These traditions look to the leadership of women and mothers, and teach that the right unit of measurement is not the quarter, the fiscal year, or the term of any one CEO, but the lifetime of a community, the future of generations not yet born. They teach us to take our cues from nature and its cycles. Perennials, such as native grasses, wildflowers, and trees, have roots that grow deep and hold soil together during times of drought and flood, renew with each season, and take new forms in each chapter. We lead the same way — rooted, renewing, and maneuvering to find the light, even in the darkest places.

The communities we work alongside have always understood what the dominant structure suppresses: that collective work built across generations outlasts anything accumulated individually. That a tree can be knocked down but a forest cannot. That we plant seeds so that our children might know their shade. We invite you to grow a better future with us, taking our cues from nature, and from the leaders and ancestors before us.

 

— Common Future Co-CEOs Jennifer Njuguna and Jess Yupanqui Feingold

MEET THE CO-CEOS

Jennifer Swayne Njuguna, Esq., Common Future Co-CEO 

LinkedIn | Fresh Speakers

Jennifer Swayne Njuguna, Esq., she/her, reads economic systems the way she was trained to read legal ones: as architecture, with rules, designers, and beneficiaries. Her work asks who those rules were written to serve, what they have cost the communities they were never built to hold, and what it would take to redesign them.

"Power can be with, it can be shared, and it is not based on a single, patriarchal hero. It is found in community and it can also be influential and used to get things done — things that would fundamentally change our world into one we have yet to know." —Jennifer Swayne Njuguna, Esq.

Before assuming the role of Co-CEO in 2023, Jennifer joined Common Future as Chief Operating Officer, implementing the four-day work week, equitable compensation audits, and supporting mergers and acquisition, before stepping into the Co-CEO role. Before that, she was Chief Strategy Officer, General Counsel, and Chief Compliance Officer at Brooklyn Community Services; advanced health equity through community lawyering at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest; supported K-12 education systems change at the Education Delivery Institute; and began her career as a Litigation Associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Jennifer is a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity and a 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival Fellow. She has spoken at the Skoll World Forum, Clinton Global Initiative, and Aspen Ideas Economy. She serves on the boards of Race Forward and Community Credit Lab Fund, and is a member of the New York City Bar Association's Nonprofit Committee. She is licensed to practice law in New York. Jennifer holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law, where she was an AnBryce Scholar, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Featured Media

Jess Yupanqui Feingold, Common Future Co-CEO 

LinkedIn | Fresh Speakers |Substack 

Jess Yupanqui Feingold, she/her, connects the stories and narratives we tell about the economy with the conditions people experience in their daily lives. She traces debt, burnout, the cost of care, the quiet disappearance of wealth, to the systems that produce those conditions, and highlights the systems that could exist instead. She connects people wishing for alternate systems to the models already operating locally in communities across the country.

"The number of models and leaders and folks who know how to do this, to create a more equitable economy, they're already here and they're already doing it. What we lack sometimes is power; that is political. What we lack sometimes is capital; it's a measure of power." —Jess Yupanqui Feingold

Jess assumed the role of Co-CEO in 2023 after five years as Chief Strategy Officer at Common Future, where she led the rebrand and financial turnaround that helped the organization receive the 2022 Skoll Award for Social Innovation. Before Common Future, she was Director of Development at Kiva.org, where she led corporate impact campaigns and launched the World Refugee Fund. As Director of Partnerships at Ashoka Changemakers, she brokered collaborations between Fortune 500 companies and leading social entrepreneurs. She co-founded LiV and served on the founding team of Move This World, and has advised dozens of other impact organizations across more than 15 years in the field.

Jess has spoken at the Skoll World Forum, Clinton Global Initiative, and Aspen Institute. She serves on the boards of Justice Climate Fund, Community Credit Lab Fund, and Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup, which runs the Dance Italia residency and Motore592 performance space. She is an RYS-200 yoga teacher, contemporary dancer, and ceramicist. Jess holds an MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA from the University of Virginia.

Featured Media

CO-LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE

Consensus, Collaboration and Trust - A Multiracial Co-led Organization’s Guide to Sharing Power.jpg

Co-leadership is one of the many ways we are exploring alternate models to norms kept in place by capitalism and the extractive thinking and systems that keep it in place, modeling what we could have instead. It is our hope that models like these and others can help us build a future where all communities have economic independence, abundance, and power.

This 2024 toolkit is meant to demystify some of the misconceptions and assumptions about how this works, to show the particularities of practice, and to lower the barrier for others who want to try it themselves. 

Download Here

CO-AUTHORED MEDIA AND PRESS

Media Toolkit Available Upon Request | Press Contact: cristina@commonfuture.co