Who We Are
✓ What is the Rad Ops Project?
Rooted in generations-old care-based methods, the Rad Ops project draws on deep lineages of radical approaches to Operations and articulates how Left organizations can expand capacity and impact through strengthening their operations in liberatory values-aligned ways. This project aims to articulate a political framework for Radical Operations, to get a pulse on what resources would be most useful to our movement ecosystem, to spark dialogue, and to increase visibility and connection amongst the creative operations experiments that are already out there. Yashna Padamsee has been compiling perspectives and input toward this resource since 2021. Sha Grogan-Brown joins the project in summer 2025. Both bring over two decades of operations experience in movement organizations.
The Rad Ops framework offers principles and guiding questions to support organizations in the process of identifying the ways they can and cannot adopt liberatory practices under non-liberatory conditions. It is just as important to collectively understand what our organizations will not do as it is to commit to what we will do.
Using this framework, organizations can strengthen their resilience by:
Integrating operations strategy from the start of visioning and planning.
Visibilizing, honoring, and empowering operations workers as visionary strategists.
Strengthening the skills of all social justice workers to engage in courageous, collaborative and caring dialogue with each other in order to find creative ways of implementing the vision of their organizations.
Assessing what calculated risks the organization will take to simultaneously safeguard their current structures, and prepare to carry forward the vision of the work beyond current organizational forms.
What is the Rad Ops Project NOT doing?
We are not seeking clients or taking on contract work, and do not have the capacity to offer recommendations on particular platforms, apps or consultants (although you can check out and comment on the Resources page for an evolving list of practitioners and tools).
Yashna Maya Padamsee
Yashna Maya Padamsee is a first generation south asian immigrant queer femme raised in and by the US South. Yashna has spent 20+ years supporting social movements through creating innovative infrastructure and sharing liberatory healing practices. She uses systems thinking, organizing, art making, somatics, faith and yoga for healing and transformation at the intersections of immigration, labor, gender + sexuality and bodily autonomy.
During Yashna’s 7+ years on staff with The National Domestic Workers Alliance, she created containers of care through foundational systems that continue to be built upon at and beyond the organization today. She has also been an Adult Literacy program coordinator in Durham, NC, a faith-based immigrant rights organizer at the Bay Area IAF, moderated a Community Care discussion on OrganizingUpgrade (now Convergence Mag), the lead of a Disability Justice committee at generative somatics and the Gatherer of the Lineages of Change Tarot. Alongside Felicia Martinez, Tara Shuai Ellison and Mae Singerman, Yashna is a co-founder and moderator of RadOps, a justice based group for Operations workers in movement organizations.
Yashna enjoys watching good (and not so good) TV shows, eating dumplings or dal with her partner Ang, and taking their sweet dog Monkey on a walk at sunset at the Eno River.
Contact Yashna: yashnapadamsee@gmail.com
Sha Grogan-Brown
Sha Grogan-Brown is an anti-racist white queer transman and rad dad. Sha has worked to strengthen movements for social justice since the late ’90s, and is dedicated to increasing the effectiveness and self-sustaining capacity of grassroots organizations. For many years he identified as a plumber and then an architect for the movement, ensuring systems and structures for successful organizing.
Sha worked with Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) from 2001–2008, was the Grassroots Fundraising Coordinator for the U.S. Social Forum 2010, and worked at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) from 2010-2025. Sha currently serves on the boards of GGJ Action Fund, Justice Funders and CISPES. In the past he has served on the boards of Grassroots International, Resource Generation and Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), and was the Art Editor for the second edition of Trans Bodies Trans Selves: A Resource Guide for the Transgender Community.
In his free time Sha bikes around the city, paints, draws, writes, reads gay romance or YA sci-fi novels, and spends time eating yummy foods with his partner and 10 year old kid.
Contact Sha: radops.sha@gmail.com