In 2023, MAIA set out to reimagine accounting, beyond its confinement as a due diligence exercise, into a practice in deeper alignment with our values, principles and what we want to be effective in. Our process began with a provocation: “what is accounting in the Black imagination?”
Why accounting?
Accounting is a process to help businesses consolidate, track and keep data. Cardiff University’s International Study Centre articulate one of the biggest advantages of accounting as allowing “businesses to keep a systematic record of their financial information. Having up to date and accurate records is crucial to running a successful business. Without this information, owners would not know whether they are making a profit.”
Traditional organisations are created around such value propositions, typically concerning profit maximisation, economic growth or charitable objectives. Traditional structures and governance models are then designed to facilitate ‘trickle-down’ concentrations of power which sustain these objectives — yes, even the charitable ones — in which a system is dependent on somebod(-ies) being at the bottom of the value chain to function. In this context, the role of a Board or a group of Trustees, for example, is to sustain the organisation by any means. Even (often) if this means completely dehumanising people or extracting from the Earth. We are living in the consequences of a society engineered upon such a violent hierarchy.
Within this context, accounting makes no room for the multiple ways organisations like ours want to understand ‘value’, never mind how we document or disseminate that.
At MAIA, as a group of people trying to use the tools, knowledges, resources and configurations we have to the best of our ability to imagine and build conditions for a world towards liberation, we know that the life-affirming systems and structures we need for that horizon are not going to emerge from these archaic conditions.
“With these norms of governing and organising, we lose accountability to the communities we set up to serve; to the planet that we rely upon to deliver it; and to the future generations that will inherit what we create.” — Dark Matter Labs
MAIA sits within many contradictions — principally in acknowledging a legally registered organisation is not a liberatory form, nor is it the best form to do liberation work in. But it is a critical form that can accommodate the scales of organising and resource needed for liberation movements.
Within this form arises the due diligence that comes with being legally accountable to entities that require we share declarations of our financial information (HMRC, Companies House, the CIC regulator and funding partners, for example). And herein lies more of the contradictions that come with being accountable to a fundamentally broken system. What we are expected to count, measure, record and report often feels reductive, part of the problem or even oppositional to the values, principles and intentions our work is grown from.
As an organisation situated within a broader transition, conspiring for — but not yet in — a liberatory paradigm, our work at MAIA is focused on designing and building cultural demonstrators and prototypes that make our vision of a world towards liberation one that is tangible, tactile and interactive; one that prioritises material shifts and works to create openings so that more possibilities can manifest. We take the same approach to our internal work, seeing our organisation as a site of imagination and experimentation. In fact, we also understand organisational design to this end as a critical part of culture-making.
And here is what we know — even fiscal accounting is storytelling. As an organisation that tracks two data sets across two different time periods — one that aligns with the seasonal rhythm we originated in, the other tracks the standardised April-April tax year that correlates with some of our funding partners’ rhythms — we know that at any given moment, our different spreadsheets might be telling two radically different stories about our financial health. And this is still only a microcosm of the story of what we are. So if accounting is a representation of narrative, a fiction masquerading as fact, what are the more generative stories we want to tell about the effectiveness of our work, in a way that doesn’t entirely negate legal compliance? Could accounting be an intentional cultural practice? Could the Black imagination offer portals into this enquiry?
From conceptualising to materialising
The intention started as a speculation, imagining ABUELOS, the cultural infrastructure we’re building and the systems that will underpin that. Drawing back, we sat with what it takes to have the capacity to hold both the technical requirements of finance, data collection and management with the ability to transform our day-to-day for something more liberatory. Could we instead grow a wider values literacy across more people and invest that capacity in aligning what we measure with what we care about and are actually trying to be effective in?
“Structural change requires structural tinkering.” — Jack Ky Tan
As much as we might need to track how much money is in the bank at any specific time, we might also want to recognise ‘solidarity economy’ tangibly on a balance sheet. While it might be necessary to account for how many people came to an event, we also want to talk about how love was present in the room. Or how our values are alive in a budget. Yes, we could talk about our carbon offsetting targets, but can we account for our commitments to the more-than-human in a way that affirms life and recognises spirit? What are the data systems for our future infrastructures going to be modelled on?
Exploring the many tensions of organisational contradictions with interdisciplinary artist Jack Ky Tan, he introduced the Quipu, a beautiful knotted tally system used by the Inca people, as an example of Indigenous accounting. Jack then posed the question: ‘What would accounting in the Black imagination look like?’
This prompt led to a research residency, delving into Indigenous and diasporic accounting methods. Seeing the ways in which the collation and sharing of data sets in our Afro-Indigenous lineages has always been a creative, cultural endeavour offered a new (and ancestral) lens — from the forensic accounting of the hieroglyphs, to the subversive cartographies of African braiding techniques.
From there, sparked the design of a 6 week collaborative residency, in which we would reimagine the ancestral technology of accounting for the 21st century, that continues this legacy: if Black imagination presents opportunities for expansive forms of storytelling, can we become the griots for our organisational “data”?
More about the origins in our previous reflection: Black Imagination and Organisational Praxis
What is GRAFF?
In 2023, GRAFF was birthed. We collaborated with educator, designer and strategist André Anderson who created the framework for GRAFF, which we defined as:
- A practice at the intersection of art, design, evaluation and accounting
- A method that encourages us to be specific about what it is that we value
- A way of measuring the tangible and intangible elements of our work
- A verb still being defined by our community
“This is more than a residency. This is the early stages of creating a new vocabulary, a whole new language. It’s important we name it, document our process and put energy around this bigger practice we’re rehearsing into being.” — André Anderson
Designing the methodology, André encouraged us to start with a basic set of measures, framed around three different elements:
- The Work — what we do, which includes our public programme, prototypes and demonstrators, concept development and consultancy
- The People — who does the work, which includes our staff team, governance ecology, artists, freelancers, community and other collaborators
- The Resources — what we need to do the work, which includes money, space, materials and knowledges
In our first iteration, we defined four example measures for each element, ensuring that we had both tangible or quantitative measures, as well as intangible or qualitative measures defined, to give us a starting point for experimentation. For example, one tangible measure in The Work element was ‘the number of events delivered within a given year’. An intangible measure was ‘how much did our work advance the Black imagination’.
To co-create GRAFF as a verb and to build out the vocabulary of this new language, we invited four phenomenal artists into practice with us: Janet Douglas, Kassessa, Sipho Eric Ndlovu and Courtenay Welcome; artists whose emergent, interdisciplinary, porous and diverse practices offered a generative way of building a new language.
Throughout the residency, our attention turned to designing prototype tools, games and artefacts that would allow us to remember, make visible and interact with the tangible and the intangible, the quantitative and the qualitative. Prototypes developed included a board game to help us track how we advance the Black imagination and a sensory interactive reimagining of the dice.
You can read more about the residency here.
At the end of the residency, we hosted an exhibition to share the prototypes and open up the GRAFF methodology for our wider community to play with, develop their own value propositions and prototypes and offer critical feedback to the continuous process.
“We turned accounting into a world building practice; a demonstration of what we believe. Reconnected spiritual and ancestral practice with our current value systems. Returned accounting to art.” — Amahra Spence
At the end of this phase of our GRAFF process in 2023, we wanted to prioritise operationalising GRAFF in our day-to-day activity, which meant working with a prototype that allowed us to interpret and chart MAIA data in real time.
In January 2024, we began a deep dive into the next iteration of GRAFF, noticing the practice of GRAFF encouraged a breaking up and resynthesising of the measures we began with. In this way, GRAFF becomes a tool for accounting as much as evaluation — inviting us to critically question and assess what we want to be effective and its purposes, while allowing the ability to track the data that measures that effectiveness.
Ababu
Ababu was one of the prototypes created by artist Kassessa, using the ancient knowledge and Black imagination of ancestors from various African regions the ABABU aims to create a new ancestral tool for our descendants.
Starting with how we can explore data without primarily recreating a spreadsheet, ABABU felt the most feasible way to begin exploring tangible and quantitative data sets and measures. With the many interconnected components of ABABU, the prototype allowed for repeated measurement over time and included a mechanism for documenting and comparing between different points over time. We started exploring how different elements of ABABU could track predicted data and ‘actuals’ in different ways.
Holding the question of what we deem valuable, within the context of accounting in the Black imagination, felt integral to working with the ABABU tool. With so many possibilities in front of us, we chose to stick to data that we already had, from recent events that were fresh in the teams’ memory. This allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the ABABU and begin working with our hands and out of our minds.
Starting with how we can explore data without primarily recreating a spreadsheet, ABABU felt the most feasible way to begin exploring tangible and quantitative data sets and measures. With the many interconnected components of ABABU, the prototype allowed for repeated measurement over time and included a mechanism for documenting and comparing between different points over time. We started exploring how different elements of ABABU could track predicted data and ‘actuals’ in different ways.
Holding the question of what we deem valuable, within the context of accounting in the Black imagination, felt integral to working with the ABABU tool. With so many possibilities in front of us, we chose to stick to data that we already had, from recent events that were fresh in the teams’ memory. This allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the ABABU and begin working with our hands and out of our minds.
Using a recently completed project — (Returning to) Black Frequencies, a Radical Imagination Lab, curated by inaugural MAIA Fellows, Daniel Oduntan and Adéọlá — we decided to start with the event data using the following questions:
- What was the total capacity for the event? (a measure of Potential)
- How many people booked a ticket? (a measure of Commitment)
- How many people came? (a measure of Connection)
- What depth of connection was created? (an intangible measure that would be assessed by questions asked of participants and team — we didn’t have live data for this so we made an estimate)
We had to then decide on which parts of the ABABU we could use that would hold the information we were inputting. Seen in the image below, we decided:
- Each block represented an event within the Radical Imagination Lab
- The sticks represent the 3 tangible questions above
- The beads represent numbers
- The position of the block represent the depth of connection (the further out they are, the greater the depth)
It was necessary at this stage, to create a coding card, that would exist alongside the tool and be used to decipher the information. Using beads, we coded them with numerical meanings by colour and size and worked our way through the 6 main events that happened during the Radical Imagination Lab.
During this process, we held the knowledge that the potential, commitment and connection data sets as mentioned above, may not be what we (always) hold to be most valuable. We talked through questions and thoughts such as:
- What we value and wish to account for may be different for each event, based on the intention and who we wish to reach at any given time
- If we use the ABABU as a predictive tool, what do we want to predict and how will this hold value in our accounting and evaluation practices?
- Even if we ended up using the ABABU as a replacement for a spreadsheet — what is it about physically building something together, that adds value to our ways of working?
Although we didn’t have all the materials we needed, with some retrofitting and creativity, we were able to successfully translate the data from the 6 events into the ABABU tool. The next step would be to translate this information into an ABABU tablet — a clay print with the sticks and beads becoming decorative markings, and the blocks making different depths of print — and that this will create a story and an artwork of the information collected from each event.
Collective building and accounting during this session felt like an active antithesis to individualised, gatekept accounting methods we see too often within organisations and institutions. Building and using ABABU together holds space for reflection and accountability.
While we coloured in beads and added them to sticks, we were also reflecting on the preciousness of having even one person attend an event. We could see attendees as more than numbers, but beings whose energy impacts the space and overall vibe of an event — the knock on effect of small interactions that contribute to depths of connection felt in a space.
While we pushed and pulled at the ABABU blocks and attempted to calculate depth of connection, we were also reflecting on the purpose and intention of each event. We could hold space for accountability — recognising if the intention and outcome were misaligned, or went in a direction that was not anticipated.
With collective work, comes the value of knowledge that each person brings. When building ABABU based on the Fellows’ Radical Imagination Lab, we naturally delegated tasks in a way that aligned with our interests, learning styles and modes of working. This further amplified the intention of an accounting tool that works within the intersection of art, ancestral technology and accounting. It is honouring how our rhythms can align toward a mutual goal and what gems we can take from the process and not just the final product or assortment of data.
GRAFF as Evaluation and Accountability
What became clear along the journey is that GRAFF has also become a practice to open up core questions about our purpose and evaluation strategy. We invited collaborators CoLab Dudley and Talking Birds to join our process, as peers and collaborators across our ecology who are also reimagining value, accountability and what it is to be regenerative, learning infrastructures.
Our beloved peers Jo and Lorna at CoLab Dudley introduced us to the Principles-Focused Evaluation (PFE) framework, developed by Michael Quinn Patton. Jo describes PFE as “a form of evaluation that uses collectively developed principles and counter principles to GUIDE action and understand change. PFE supports continuous learning feedback loops that enable informed practice, experiment, network and infrastructure iteration”. There were many generative parallels between what PFE and GRAFF both open up. In CoLab Dudley’s reflections, they share how PFE has become:
- An aid to navigation, orientation and alignment
- A form of lived governance
- Instructive in revisiting their purpose as a lab
- A values based theory of action
- A practice of shared learning and sensemaking
The exchange and collective, embodied experience we shared prompted lots of discussion and reflection points on how our GRAFF elements and measures relate to our existing organisational values and mission. Could we use PFE as a tool to draw out and activate GRAFF from our principles, instead of what currently feel like transactional elements? Are there more expansive ways of describing the different elements? What would change if we reframed ‘The People’ as ‘Kin’ for example, does that create space for us to consider the more-than-human in what we measure?
The Journey Ahead
In the infrastructure we’re developing, is there a way in which accounting — and all due diligence — could be a practice and demonstration of care? GRAFF reflects one of the ways we are practically growing our organisation as an infrastructure of care, in which the organisation is a site to demonstrate practically a life-affirming system. How is this creating the conditions for the value system that ABUELOS facilitates?
In the year ahead, we’re turning all of our attention to the interdependent layers of ABUELOS, creating organisational portals to demonstrate how we embed care and radical hospitality into the system.
As we look to GRAFF as a model of transparent and accessible accounting in the Black imagination, we aim to develop our coherence around ABABU as a working prototype; using real time data to continue our interrogation of value outside of, within, and beyond legal due diligence. We are aiming to experiment with our own GRAFF prototypes, but also holding space with and for community, to strengthen the muscle of tangible and intangible accounting. With our ‘resourcing the movement’ strategy in mind, and as cultural imagineers, we strive to learn alongside community and extend these questions around value. Returning to ancestral technologies and undoing the notion of accounting for profits’ sake, is integral to how we resource artists, account for the more-than-human and turn towards the full stack theory-of-change ABUELOS embodies with a firmer foundation to build upon.
Alongside this, we’re considering other fugitive tactics for embedding the concept, approaches and outputs of GRAFF in our wider relationships, especially those where ‘due diligence’ is a defining feature. Might we include a Sona map of the year’s journey in our annual accounts? Emboldened by the practical support and showing up of some of our funding partners, we’re now exploring how we’ll bring GRAFF into our reporting? How can we meaningfully engage with those who resource our work to open up the conversations around value beyond that which is reductive, quantitative and easy-to-measure, so that our explorations can inform how they work with other organisations also working for social and ecological transformation?
The structural shifts we need in the swathes of crisis we are witnessing will come from the deep code work we invest in today. Change isn’t always grandiose, rather made up of many small, iterative and intimate shifts. As André says “the revolution might feel underwhelming.” Many of our peers and partners have been co-investing in the practicalities of the boring revolution for decades — we extend gratitude to them as we extend gratitude to the ancestors who knew that the design of life-affirming systems would be embodied, cultural and spiritual worldbuilding portals.
Thanks to Jack Ky Tan, André Anderson, Courtenay Welcome, Sipho Eric Ndlovu, Kassessa, Janet Douglas, CoLab Dudley, Dark Matter Labs, Talking Birds, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, everyone that has GRAFFed with us and everyone who continues to co-inform what this practice is. In particular, thank you to all beings that are building structural shifts towards liberation, past, present and those to come.
