Designing care within systems of power: the invisible work of leading together
Chiara Portinari · 2026 · Work in progress
About this framework
Collective leadership is often described as a democratic ideal: decisions made together, power distributed equally, everyone’s voice heard. In practice, it is more complicated. Teams form inside institutions that have already positioned people differently, and much of the work that holds a team together is never recognised as leadership.
This framework offers a way of seeing that work and three practices for making space for it. It is for team leaders of any kind who want to share leadership rather than hold it. It grew out of student partnership, where the line between roles is especially thin, but roles blur in every field. Practised regularly, the activities also help a team keep track of its members’ new skills and aspirations.
This framework draws on two years as Project Leader of the Situated Evaluation Framework (SEF) at LCC Changemakers, the student-partnership programme at London College of Communication, UAL. I led two teams of student partners, in the 2024–25 and 2025–26 cohorts, while being a student partner myself.
Student partnership is still a relatively new model. At LCC Changemakers, every member holds the same title, Changemaker, and receives the same pay. Within a project, one person may be designated Project Leader, and the same person may be a member of another project. The designation brings more responsibility, but no change in standing.
As Project Leader, I tried to decentralise the authority the role carried. The tension between an assigned role and an intentional practice of stepping back is the starting point for everything that follows.
Part 1 The ideas
The core tension
Collaborative work rarely begins from a blank slate. Institutional structures position people differently before any meeting has been called. A returning member brings knowledge of contexts, systems and processes that a newcomer doesn’t yet have. One person is designated to lead; others are not.
Assigned authority
Visibility given early
Positioned differently by institutional structures
Expected to facilitate, coordinate, decide
Prior knowledge of the project
Intentional decentralisation
Actively trying to step back
Supporting others’ leadership
Not dominating the space
Collective decision-making
Navigating this tension honestly, without pretending it doesn’t exist, is what collective leadership actually requires.
Blurred roles
In genuinely collaborative work, roles rarely stay clean. This is especially true of student partnerships: beyond the shared title, formal roles are minimal by design, usually just “project leader” or “project member”. The team self-organises from there, so roles emerge through practice rather than assignment and shift as the project develops. In the SEF teams, this showed up in three ways.
Fluid roles
What someone does shifts with the project phase, members’ skills, who is present and what is needed. With no organisational chart to fall back on, the team keeps negotiating what leadership looks like in the moment.
Overlapping responsibilities
Two people can both be responsible for something without confusion, as long as the overlap is acknowledged.
Intersecting interests
People join because they share values, but often also because they come from the same course or are heading in similar professional directions.
Beyond education and work, each person brings a whole life — identities, experiences, ways of seeing — that shapes how they collaborate, what they notice and what they care about. Values, skills and interests intersect humanly as well as professionally, and that intersection often gives a collaboration its character.
Blurred roles are not a problem to solve. They are a feature of complex, multidisciplinary work. As I argue in Beyond the Staff–Student Binary (Wonkhe, 2026), fixed categories help us make sense of an institution, but they shouldn’t limit what people can be or do. The task is to make roles legible, to the team and to each individual, rather than to iron them out.
Structural care
A large part of what makes collective work possible is what I call structural care: the work that holds collaboration together but is rarely named as leadership. Coordinating logistics, writing summaries, sending reminders, holding the thread between sessions, noticing when someone has gone quiet.
This work is often invisible, frequently feminised, regularly undervalued and difficult to quantify. Yet participation, trust, safety and collective engagement all depend on it.
Student partnerships make it unusually visible. A project leader takes on more coordination and responsibility than other members for the same pay, so the difference exists in the work and nowhere else.
“You brought care.”
A teammate describing my contribution to the SEF project, 2025
Hearing this, I realised I had been building care into the structure of the project: into how it was led, facilitated and designed.
In leading
Collective decision-making, starting with team mapping
Coordination, from organising meetings to booking rooms
Accessible meeting summaries, reminders and polls
In facilitating
Trauma-informed facilitation, such as content warnings and reminders that anyone can step out
Safeguarding and rights awareness, such as clear, simple consent forms
In designing
Respecting people’s time and energy, for example by keeping surveys few and clear
Reducing unnecessary stress, boredom and complication
Choosing clarity over confusion
Recognising structural care as leadership is not about sentimentalising it. It is about making it count: in how we evaluate contribution, in how we distribute it and in how we talk about what leadership looks like.
Reframing leadership
Leadership does not require a title or a position. For the SEF teams, collective leadership took six forms.
01
Stewardship
Holding the project’s purpose and wellbeing over time.
02
Coordination
Taking charge of the logistics that let others focus on the work.
Understanding, and making visible, how power, hierarchy and institutional structures shape the space.
05
Relational labour
Building and maintaining the relationships that make collaboration possible.
06
Conditions for participation
Creating and maintaining accessibility, clarity and safety, knowing that each can mean different things to different people.
+
Your own forms
These six are ours, not a checklist. What collective leadership means depends on the team, the field and the work: your team might name four forms, or nine. The practices below include a way to name your own.
Part 2 The practices
Three practices put these ideas to work. Each one turns a question teams rarely ask out loud into a regular habit: what does each person bring, what does leadership mean here and who is actually doing it? Team mapping was run with both SEF teams. Naming your forms and the check-in are simplified versions of similar work we did across the same two years, and haven’t yet been tested in this exact form.
Practice 01Tested with both SEF teams
Team mapping
Team mapping was the first activity I ran as Project Leader in both cohorts. It makes each person’s strengths, experiences, interests and areas for growth visible to the rest of the team.
It does not assign roles. It surfaces what each person brings, gives the team a shared vocabulary for its capabilities and opens a conversation about how work might be distributed with care rather than assumption. It is a collective decision-making practice, not a management exercise: the project leader is mapped alongside everyone else.
OnlineA shared board, such as Miro
In personSticky notes, pens and a large poster
ColoursOne per person, so contributions stay traceable
115–20 min
Map yourself
Each person writes notes on their strengths and experience (where they are now) and on their interests and areas for growth (where they’d like to go).
210 min
Merge
Bring everyone’s notes onto one collective map, clustered by area, such as experience, interests, skills and areas for growth.
320 min
Talk it through
Discuss the collective map as a group: what the team can do, what people want to learn and where the gaps are.
4As needed
Match the work
Draw up the project’s task list and use the map to see who is interested in each task, who is able to do it and who could teach or tutor a more interested teammate.
SEF Design Team, 2024–25SEF Design Team, 2025–26
Practice 02Not yet tested in this form
Naming your forms of leadership
Before the check-in can work, the team needs its own answer to a simple question: what does collective leadership look like here? Naming the forms together means everyone recognises them, and the forms fit the team rather than the other way round. This uses the same sticky-note method as team mapping.
1
Collect
Each person writes down the kinds of work that have kept the team going, including the small, unglamorous ones.
2
Cluster and name
Group similar notes and give each cluster a name. These are your forms of leadership.
3
Compare
Hold your list against the six forms above. What’s missing, what doesn’t fit, what would you call differently?
4
Agree
Settle on the forms the team recognises, however many there are, and revisit them as the project changes.
Practice 03Not yet tested in this form
The leadership check-in
A quick activity at the start of regular meetings, built on the forms your team has named. It has three short steps: an anonymous digital survey, a brief conversation, then a second anonymous survey.
1 · Answer alone
Which of our forms of leadership have you been doing the most this week?
Stewardship
Coordination
Ethical responsibility
Systems awareness
Relational labour
Conditions for participation
2 · Talk together
Reflect as a group
Talk briefly about the work that has kept the team going this week, including the parts that are easy to miss. Sharing your own answer to question 1 is optional.
3 · Answer alone
Has anyone else in the group stood out for one of our forms this week? Who, and for which one?
Who
A teammate’s name (not your own)
For which form
StewardshipCoordinationEthical responsibilitySystems awarenessRelational labourConditions for participation
+Add another teammate
Both surveys are anonymous and studied as group data, not as an assessment of individuals.
The conversation in between is what makes the second question work: it gives everyone a chance to notice each other’s work before naming anyone.
Naming others matters: we don’t always realise that what we are doing is labour, or that we are carrying more of the collective work than others. Over time, the answers show how leadership is spread across the team, including the forms that usually go unnoticed.
Bringing it together
The practices work best as recurring habits rather than one-off exercises. Map the team and name your forms at the start of the project; after that, each practice has its own rhythm.
Start of the projectTime →
Team mappingAt the start of the project, then again at key moments to track new skills and aspirations
Naming your formsAt the start of the project, then revisited as the work changes
Leadership check-inAt every regular meeting, once your forms are named
Practised this way, they help people feel valued for the work they actually do, not only the work their role describes. For the same reason, the framework can also be a useful resource for HR.
Part 3 The outcomes
What happened
Leading collectively is what allowed us to complete the SEF on time. Within two cohorts, the team took it from first ideas to a complete framework, a toolkit of activities and an evaluation report, an ambitious scope for the time we had.
LCC Changemakers · 2024–26
Situated Evaluation Framework
Framework, toolkit and evaluation report, completed on time across two cohorts. Explore the SEF
Team mapping made a concrete difference. Rather than spending time working out who could do what, we split tasks early, based on the skills and interests the map had surfaced instead of at random. It also helped us see what our combined skills made possible. The whole process moved much faster as a result.
Talking openly about what each of us brought mattered just as much. Those conversations are where this framework began; it was in one of them that a teammate told me I had brought care. They helped people gain confidence, take up space and be recognised, and that acknowledgement is what allowed us to share the weight of the work, understand one another and advocate for each other.
Since then, members have taken this approach to collective leadership into their own projects outside Changemakers.
Some of the impact on the team was never meant to become evidence: it lives in what teammates recognised in one another, and it stays with them.
On impact
The impact of leadership is not always visibility.
Sometimes it is the infrastructure that allows collective work to happen.
Evaluation of collaborative projects often measures outputs: documents produced, events held, numbers reached. This framework argues that the conditions for collaboration — the trust, the coordination, the care — are outcomes in their own right, worth naming and evidencing.
The same thinking runs through the SEF toolkit and Stories as Evidence (ALDinHE #Take5, 2026), written with Saranya Satheesh and Jiayi Wu. Every team has to find its own ways to make structural space for what usually goes unspoken: labour, overlooked expertise, unjust systems. The three practices here are some of those ways.
