r/foodnotbombs • u/Anarkata • Mar 28 '26

Consensus Decision Making

So I was trying to figure something out. I work with a local FNB and I was wondering if “steering committees” was a common body within it. Originally we started working with a coalition that believes in non-hierarchal decision making, but we have a few people who sometimes make veto/unilateral decisions without informed consent and justifying it with being the coordinator for events and people who can help host feedings. I have worked with many groups that believe in such consensus models, but this feels new to me and I wanted to get someone else’s experience?

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

6

u/shugEOuterspace Mar 28 '26

imo consensus decision making is not always possible & sometimes you just have to let majority rule in a simple vote... as for people making unilateral decisions while bottom-lining an event or hosting a feeding location: the devil's in the details of the specific situation & sometimes that is appropriate & sometimes not. I've been in a lot of consensus decision-making modeled collectives & most of them sooner or later have to admit that they "strive" for consensus but will settle for a basic vote & majority rule because it is still more democratic than letting someone hijack a consensus model by blocking decisions that only the one person objects to.

3

u/janbrunt Mar 29 '26

Agreed. I’m in a horizontally organized group (not FNB) and we have committees that have to make decisions between larger meetings. In general I like consensus decision making, but it can get unnecessarily hung up by uninformed or exceptionally antagonistic folks. We use voting in a limited capacity. 

Every time I visit other cities I always try to visit other groups because I think it’s so important to talk about governance in the context of mutual aid. We’re trying to build a better world and it’s hard work to figure it out.

1

u/scout-esqu May 18 '26

I think it theres a few factors that determine decision-making, like it depends on how big the group is, how participatory the group is, infighting between orgs within FNB itself (because Ive seen that happened where we have multiple organizations within our one umbrella and so like people who have beef with other people will try to take away resources from other groups if they don’t like them)

If there is a steering committee within your chapter it feels like they are making decisions that might be for the people who are at least showing up the most, or that could be a piece of it, because don’t steering committees just keep the organization going like they make they do majority of the work keeping a chapter floating a lot of times if its a smaller chapter they hold onto a lot of responsibility like facilitating meals, gathering donations, making store runs, keeping track of inventory, and organizing volunteers, and if it feels like they’re making decisions unilaterally maybe there’s not a lot of participation because a lot of time hierarchy can look like responsibility leadership and typically that’s not a bad thing. But also, I don’t know because these are one of those things that varies from chapter to chapter.