Radical Hospitality Part III: The Alchemy of Care in Organisational Life
The Internal Workings of Relational Infrastructures
I’ve been reflecting on my decades of care work across different settings. This week, my offering continues the lineage of work that began with my enquiries at MAIA beginning in 2021 around Infrastructures of Care — a framework that guided our practice then of building ecosystems rooted in justice, tenderness and transformation. Radical Hospitality grows from that foundation, moving inward to consider how those same principles live within teams, organisations and the daily cultures of work, in ways that resist ‘giver-receiver’ dynamics. It asks how we tend to each other as those who are tending to the world — how we collective design conditions of care, coherence and safety for each other as people taking active responsibility in the long labour of building alternative horizons.
As a framework, Radical Hospitality continues to unfold across disciplines — from hospitality itself, to civic infrastructure, to architecture and spatial practice to governance, policy and cultural production. It draws from a long Black feminist and diasporic tradition of making livable space within systems of exclusion. It asks what becomes possible when we approach our institutions, our collaborations and our collective experiments not only as systems to manage, but as spaces to host, while challenging the host vs guest binary: places where the ethics of welcome, boundary, collectivity and repair are woven into the fabric of how we organise and imagine.
This deep investment in hospitality — as concept and practice — feels urgent in an era marked by displacement, dispossession, misinformation, and rising fascism. As the world hardens its borders and narratives, the work of holding space with integrity becomes radical in itself. Radical Hospitality is not a metaphor for kindness; it’s an infrastructure of survival, a methodology for coherence amid fracture. It insists that care, structure, and transformation must live together — that to build otherwise, we must also learn to host otherwise.
The Organisational Nervous System
To root Radical Hospitality within an organisation is to listen to these signals. It’s to understand that the culture we build is not only intellectual or procedural, but deeply embodied.
Every organisation has a nervous system — an invisible yet palpable network that determines how it moves, feels and responds. Like any living organism, it holds memory. It carries stories of urgency, survival, joy, disappointment and hope in its collective tissues. You can sense it in how meetings begin, in how conflict is approached or avoided, in whether rest is permitted or pathologised.
When that system is dysregulated — overextended, undernourished, or fragmented — everything tightens. Communication becomes clipped or overly cautious. People move from connection to protection. Decisions get made in the shadows of scarcity. The organisation starts to mimic the wider conditions it’s trying to transform: extraction, fear, defensiveness.
But when that nervous system is resourced — through relational care, clear agreements, and a rhythm that honours the body — something else becomes possible. The organisation develops a kind of collective proprioception: a sixth sense, an ability to sense itself, to notice imbalance early, to adapt without collapsing. This is not about comfort; it’s about capacity. It’s what allows a team to stay connected even in complexity, to move from reactivity to responsiveness.
Nkem Ndefo’s work on resilience and alchemy offers a profound lens here. She reminds us that resilience is not endurance by any means, but adaptive capacity — the bandwidth to be choiceful about how we move in alignment with our purpose and the ability to maintain connection under stress. Alchemy, in her framing, is the transformative process that happens when discomfort is metabolised rather than suppressed. In this way, the organisational nervous system becomes a site of collective alchemy: a place where tension, instead of being feared, becomes material for growth.
Radical Hospitality within a system, then, is the practice of hosting the organisation’s nervous system with intentionality. It’s not about fixing people, but about cultivating environments where regulation and repair are normal, where pauses are as valued as productivity, and where clarity replaces chaos as the baseline condition for care. It recognises that burnout, conflict and confusion are not personal pathologies but somatic signals — feedback from the system asking for recalibration.
To root Radical Hospitality within an organisation is to listen to these signals. It’s to understand that the culture we build is not only intellectual or procedural, but deeply embodied. The nervous system becomes both mirror and compass: it tells us when our pace is unsustainable, when power is imbalanced, when our internal structures are out of sync with our stated values.
In a culture of Radical Hospitality, tending to this nervous system isn’t ancillary to the work — it is the work. Because if transformation is the goal, then the capacity to stay present, relational and grounded in the midst of it is the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
Care and Structure Are Not Opposites
We often inherit the belief that care and structure sit on opposite ends of a spectrum — that to be caring is to be flexible, intuitive and emotionally attuned, while to be structured is to be disciplined, efficient and detached. This binary is a colonial artifact, Cartesian in essence, stemming from systems of “value creation” that separated feeling from function, embodiment from intellect, people from process. It’s a split that has made organisations deeply unwell.
Radical Hospitality begins by refusing this split. It understands that care is not the absence of structure — it’s what gives structure meaning. A well-designed process can itself be an act of care. Clear roles, time boundaries, transparent decision-making and explicit expectations are not bureaucratic burdens; they are architectures of safety. They allow people to bring their whole selves to the work without drowning in ambiguity or inequity.
Maurice Mitchell’s Building Resilient Organizations articulates this beautifully when he calls for “cultures of rigour and care.” He recognises that too much structure without care reproduces the very systems of control and punishment we claim to resist, while too much care without structure dissolves into confusion, resentment and burnout. Radical Hospitality lives in the tension between the two — not as a compromise, but as a choreography.
In practice, this means designing organisational rhythms that breathe. Meetings that have spine and softness. Policies — rather, commitments — that protect and evolve. Accountability processes that are built not for blame or shame, but for repair and generative course correction. It’s understanding that clarity is a form of compassion — that people feel most held when they know what they’re being invited into and what’s being asked of them.
This is what it means to build care as design principle rather than sentiment. It’s how we turn values into architecture — how we translate tenderness into governance. Mitchell’s framework grounds the poetic language of hospitality in the pragmatics of governance. He reminds us that care isn’t something that happens after harm — it’s embedded in pay equity, meeting design, conflict processes, and decision-making clarity. Care is not what softens the work; it’s what makes the work possible.
To hold care and structure together is also to refuse the myth of neutrality. Structure is never neutral; it either reproduces harm or redistributes power. Radical Hospitality demands structures that are porous enough to let care flow through, yet grounded enough to sustain it. In this sense, structure becomes the vessel through which care can scale without dilution — an infrastructure for dignity.
When we build this way, our organisations stop oscillating between rigidity and chaos. They start to hum. They begin to feel like places where complexity is held with coherence — where the human and the systemic can coexist. And in that harmony, we glimpse a new organisational ecology: not mechanical, but alive.
Belonging, Discernment and the Complexity of Care
In many movement-based or justice-oriented organisations, belonging is treated as the ultimate proof of a healthy culture — a sign that the team is doing something right. But I want to trouble the idea that belonging in the workplace is the ultimate marker of effectiveness.
Under capitalism, where alienation and disconnection are the norm, it is understandable that people come to liberatory work yearning for refuge. They seek in the organisation what society has denied them: safety, visibility, affirmation, family. These longings are sacred — they speak to our deep human need for connection — but when projected onto the workplace, they create impossible expectations. The organisation becomes not a vessel for shared purpose, but a surrogate for healing, identity, or home.
Nkem Ndefo reminds us that this yearning for sanctuary is precisely what can destabilise an organisation’s nervous system. When the workplace becomes the primary site where people attempt to resolve systemic wounds, the collective’s energy turns inward. The mission begins to collapse under the weight of unmet individualised need. What was once a space for coordinated purpose becomes a theatre of transference — where conflict, disappointment and burnout echo the very traumas we came together to transform.
Radical Hospitality does not deny this longing; it honours it with discernment. It recognises that organisations cannot be homes, but they can be hosts — temporary, intentional containers where care is practiced with reciprocity and boundary, where the conditions for safety are nurtured collectively, not hierarchically nor guaranteed even. Belonging, in this sense, is not unconditional acceptance; it’s mutual accountability. It’s the invitation to show up as a whole person, within a structure that is itself finite and purpose-driven.
In cultures of Radical Hospitality, discernment becomes a collective discipline. Teams learn to differentiate between what belongs to the mission and what belongs to the personal. They develop the capacity to notice when care becomes rescuing, when inclusion becomes avoidance, when empathy becomes enmeshment. This is not coldness — it’s coherence. It’s how we maintain the integrity of the work while still holding one another with respect and tenderness.
This kind of hospitality is not a promise of sanctuary; it’s a practice of stewardship. It says: you are welcome here, and you are also responsible here. It refuses both the transactional logic of corporate belonging and the familial overreach of movement culture. It invites us into right relationship — one that recognises the limits of what an organisation can hold and the abundance of what it can make possible when those limits are respected.
In this way, Radical Hospitality redefines belonging not as safety from the world, but as capacity to face it together.
Resilience as Collective Alchemy
When we practice Radical Hospitality, we become alchemists of the everyday.
When Maurice Mitchell writes about the “dual project” — tending both the external struggle and the internal ecosystem — he’s describing the same alchemical process that Nkem Ndefo names, and that Infrastructures of Care began to trace: transformation as the ability to metabolise contradiction.
This is what resilience really is: not the individual’s capacity to endure pain, but the collective’s capacity to transform energy. To turn conflict into clarity, exhaustion into rhythm and breakdown into revelation. In the context of Radical Hospitality, resilience is less about strength and more about aliveness — about staying supple enough to respond, connected enough to adapt and grounded enough to remember why we’re here.
Yet resilience is so often misinterpreted. In the lexicon of capitalism, it’s framed as toughness — the ability to keep going despite depletion. But Ndefo reminds us that true resilience is relational and rhythmic. It depends on our ability to recover together, to cycle between exertion and rest, to stay connected in the midst of rupture. It’s not a badge of endurance; it’s a practice of restoration.
In organisations committed to transformative change, this redefinition is critical. We are often operating inside hostile conditions — scarcity, precarity, racism, bureaucracy — all of which reward overextension and call it commitment. But a resilient organisation is not one that never breaks; it’s one that knows how to repair. It’s one that recognises rupture as part of the rhythm of growth and has the capacity to return to relationship after disconnection.
Here, I return to a belief that threads through my own work: under capitalism, organisations are not, and cannot be, sites of liberation.As Nkem Ndefo reminds us, under capitalism, there is no such thing as a liberated organisation. “Organisations are simply ways of organising resources”, to quote Malkia Devich Cyril.
If we accept this — that organisations are mechanisms, not movements; containers, not the transformation itself — then resilience becomes less about permanence and more about permeability. It becomes the ability to hold our structures lightly, to adapt them in service of life, not legacy.
Through this lens, the work of Radical Hospitality is to design for alchemy: to use the materials of organisational life — money, time, energy, attention — as instruments of transmutation. Through the intentional and ethical use of resources, we can create portals: temporary but potent architectures that gesture toward the worlds we are longing for.
These portals aren’t illusions of liberation; they are rehearsals for it. We may not be building liberation inside the organisation, but through Radical Hospitality, we can build conditions that prefigure it. We can build spaces where we practice coherence, equity, and tenderness in real time; spaces that give form to our longing and help us remember what it feels like to be whole together — where we remember what it feels like to be in integrity with our own values, even within systems designed to erode them.
Resilience, then, is not the ability to hold everything together, but the willingness to keep reconfiguring the vessel. It is the quiet, disciplined faith that what we build can be both impermanent and holy — that even within the limitations of the organisation, we can still make contact with freedom.
When we practice Radical Hospitality, we become alchemists of the everyday: turning budgets into care, strategy into relationship, and infrastructure into invitation. We learn that resilience is not a destination, but an ecology — a living process through which the impossible becomes, even for a moment, tangible.
This writing sits within a lineage of practice, informed by my journey in youth work, community work, cultural practice and as an incessant listener to the stories of my elders, long before building my own organisation. Then, what began as MAIA — an experiment in building infrastructures of care and cultural agency — has since evolved into Hood Futures Studio: a community infrastructure organisation working to address the root causes of displacement and dispossession in the ends.
That evolution has not been a rupture but a continuation — an unfolding of generative threads that began in the earliest imaginings of MAIA: how to build otherwise, how to hold space for Black life, imagination and belonging amid structures that seek to erase it. Those same threads now extend through new architectures of radical hospitality — from ABUELOS, our emerging “hotel”, cultural centre and home for intergenerational practice, to the ways we design our governance, our residencies and our internal rituals of care.
But this phase of the work also carries new influences, new organisational cultures, and new questions. The conditions have changed; the stakes have deepened. Hood Futures Studio continues to build infrastructures of radical hospitality, but we do so while holding the complexity of what it means to work from within community, against dispossession, and toward self-determined futures.
This offering, then, is not a blueprint — it’s a reflection of that ongoing experiment. It’s written from inside the practice: from the body of a Black woman who has spent years building, breaking, rebuilding and supporting organisations that try to live differently. What follows, and what continues, is a collective effort to remember that structure can be sanctuary, that care can be coherence and that through our work — however temporary, however imperfect — we might still open portals to the worlds we’re longing for.
If you’re interested in exploring offerings that informed this text, you can check out:
Thank you for this. I read it at a time where I’m trying to learn how best to describe the magic that my team create (at Educafe CIC) and ‘translate’ it for technocrats & policy makers. Your writing powerfully explains this rich, human alchemy which I’m very grateful to have experienced within my team - through the good & bad times! I’ll be sharing this with them & re-reading in months to come 🙏
Thanks for sharing this Amahra. I'm new to the language (and practice) of radical hospitality, but it's something that has - through my conversations with people who have rich traditions of hospitality (people who are more naturally hospitable than me?!) - caught my attention in recent years. I look forward to learning more, and being more hospitable.