One of the most common and dangerous mistakes in community organizing is confusing the personal with the institutional.

Once you’re part of an organization that manages a resourced budget, employs staff, and holds material power and influence over vulnerable populations and smaller groups, you are no longer acting as just an individual. You represent an institution. Your words, actions, and decisions carry institutional weight, especially when you hold leadership roles. You wield institutional power.

Institutions, no matter how community-based or grassroots they claim to be, are accountable to the people and organizations that invest in them through time, money, labour, or trust.

Accountability means being open to internal and external critique when you are in leadership, because you are no longer acting solely on your own behalf. Institutional critique—meaning the practice of holding organizations accountable for how they wield power—is necessary for any group that claims to be community-rooted. Without it, you stop being of service and start gatekeeping power.

The danger arises when institutional leaders and the people around them blur the lines between their personal journeys, feelings, relationships, and the structures they control. When that happens, power gets misplaced.

Feedback is taken as betrayal. Calls for accountability are received as personal attacks. Personal trauma becomes a shield against institutional responsibility. Punishment is framed as protecting relationships and boundaries. Discomfort becomes a justification for retaliation. Harm to others is disguised as care for oneself.

This is not to say institutions are inherently bad or that community organizing should never become institutionalized. People deserve to be paid fairly for work that has often gone unpaid. Community care is more sustainable when it is resourced.

But power and leadership must come with accountability. And accountability begins with knowing the difference between personal discomfort and institutional responsibility.

If not, the oppressed eventually become the oppressors. You end up reproducing the very harms you once resisted, just with different people at the top.

Justice becomes an aesthetic. The performance remains, but the purpose is lost.