Concentric Circles of Care
About the Author
Rose Kaz
CEO of Business 4 Good. Former tech exec turned ecosystem builder — connecting women entrepreneurs with the infrastructure, community, and intelligence to grow businesses that matter.
This past year handed me lows on every front. A toxic ex-partner who crossed the line from difficult into something I'll just call unsafe, and I'm done pretending otherwise. A role I was unanimously hired for, my face on the cover of the city's own publication celebrating it, and then three months later people who once wanted their photo taken with me could not meet my eyes in the same room.
I could sit in those two sentences and call it a victim impact statement. I've earned the right to. But that's not the story I'm interested in telling anymore.
What I'm interested in is the deep, unglamorous work that came after: therapy, accountability, actually knowing myself instead of performing a version of myself for rooms that only wanted me when I was useful. That work doesn't end with the self. It extends outward, because the same patterns that show up in an abusive relationship, extract what is useful, discard the rest, show up identically in business ecosystems that claim to be about empowerment. Restructure the body, restructure the relationship, restructure the business. It's the same muscle.
So here I am, still doing that work in my body, in how I choose partners now, and in the business I'm building specifically to replace the extractive systems I keep running into. And I'm not quitting.
What I'm building looks like a circular economy, in the same spirit as the cooperative model I've studied for years out of Mondragon, Spain. There, worker-owned cooperatives don't just share profits. They share infrastructure, education, and social support in concentric circles radiating out from each individual member. Nobody is left to fend for themselves at the edge of the system, because the system was built with the edges in mind from the start.
That's what I mean by concentric circles of care. A center of women sharing expertise directly with each other, peer to peer, no gatekeeper skimming value off the top. A next ring of shared infrastructure, the tools, the directory, the training, that any one of us could never build or afford alone, but a collective can. And an outer ring where the aggregated knowledge of that collective, with consent and shared ownership, trains something bigger than any of us individually: a model literally built by us, for us, instead of extracted from us without our knowledge or our cut.
Women sharing expertise directly with each other. No gatekeeper skimming value off the top.
Tools, directory, and training no one of us could build alone, but a collective can.
Aggregated knowledge, with consent and shared ownership, training something bigger than any of us individually.
Mondragon has run this model for close to seventy years now. Seventy years is not a pilot program. That is a proof of concept most businesses never live long enough to claim. And in the one period where it faltered, one of its largest cooperatives collapsed not because the model itself failed, but because that particular branch drifted from it, chasing acquisitions and market plays that pulled it away from the cooperative governance holding everything else together. The lesson isn't subtle. The system works when you stay inside its purpose, and it cracks the moment you chase growth for its own sake instead.
That's the whole argument for purpose-driven, values-driven business: not as a marketing layer, but as the actual structural integrity of the thing. Values aren't the soft part you bolt on after the real business model is figured out. They are the load-bearing wall.
Values aren't the soft part you bolt on after the real business model is figured out. They are the load-bearing wall.
And let me be clear about what I'm not building. I'm not interested in a Pollyanna, kumbaya version of women supporting women, the kind that sounds lovely on a panel and evaporates the moment real resources are on the table. This is brass tacks. This is infrastructure, governance, and consent built into the mechanics from day one, because that's the only version of this that survives contact with reality. It's time to build collaborative systems.
I didn't arrive at concentric circles of care as an abstract theory. I grew up in a three-generation household where the door was never locked, where community was simply the water we swam in. We were raised on food stamps by a single mother, and still I never once felt like we were doing it alone, because we were not. There was always someone else's hands helping carry it.
I miss that. And it turns out we tend to build the things we miss most. Not only have I been missing that particular family structure, I've been missing a version of business that hasn't fully existed yet: one built on the same bones, concentric circles of people actually sharing what they have with each other, instead of hoarding it or gatekeeping it. We are pack animals whether or not business culture wants to admit it. Sharing isn't a soft value to make room for once the real work is done. Sharing is actually the work. Sharing is caring, and I meant that as more than a platitude when I wrote about it two falls ago.
So here I am, still building, in the same season I'm still healing in. Not because I have it all figured out, and not because the gates have gotten any easier to open. I'm building it because I know exactly what is missing, I lived inside it once, and I refuse to accept that it only exists in memory or in some family I was lucky enough to be born into.
Business 4 Good is my attempt to build the door that never locks, at scale, with the receipts to prove it works. Not kumbaya. Not charity. Infrastructure, governance, and yes, sharing, because sharing is caring, and it is also, it turns out, just good business. I'm done asking anyone to let me in. I'm building the door myself, and leaving it open behind me.
Business 4 Good
The door that never locks.
Come in!
A women-owned cooperative marketplace built on shared infrastructure, peer expertise, and the principle that sharing is not a soft value. It is the work.
