Merry Christmas one and all (seven actually)

A very Merry Christmas to all of my 7 followers and anyone else who happens to stumble upon this humble blog.

This snowman was made by Maya to wish you all a Happy Christmas!

On Wednesday Children Unite got it’s own Christmas present in the form of a grant to be able to take six child domestic workers to Geneva in June to lobby the International Labour Organization!  (see post of 11 November).....Hooray! 

Slavery, servitude and committing sin (NGO style)

Us NGO types have an aversion to using emotive language when discussing our issue.  This week, however, I found myself talking about ‘domestic servitude’ and ‘slavery’ in efforts to explain what I meant by ‘child domestic work’.

I had to make an ‘elevator’ pitch on Tuesday for Children Unite.  This supposes you are in the ‘elevator’ with someone you want to influence and you only have the time it takes to get from the ground floor to whichever floor this person is getting out to ‘pitch’ your idea – no more than a minute for most people.  So, I had one minute to explain what Children Unite does (and squeeze in a bit about why) to a room full of social entrepreneurs and finance industry staff.  I also had to do a bit of ‘speed networking’ where you have 4 minutes to chat to the person next to you (about your organisation) before you move on to the next person.  The whole event was organised by UnLtd (an organisation that promotes social enterprises) and Actis (a private equity investment firm) to match up social entrepreneurs (me and 20 others running small organisations that benefit the community in some way) with business mentors (from Actis).

When I listened to all the other elevator pitches, mine sounded the most like a ‘charity case’…it didn’t feel like a business idea in comparison.  (Paradoxically, setting up Children Unite over the past eighteen months has felt much more like setting up a business than a charity.) And, it took a while for people to realise that I wasn’t talking about children who just do a few chores around their own house.  In the speed networking – by the time I’d got to the fourth person, I was bypassing the description of the conditions in which children work (i.e. living with their employers, their vulnerabilities to abuse by employers, long hours, no pay) and went straight to saying it was a contemporary form of slavery!

So, I committed the ultimate sin for NGO types (in terms of damaging your credibility) of using sensational language.  Forgive me! But when I compared child domestic workers’ lives (thinking in particular of children I met Togo this year) to the other beneficiaries being talked about in the room – I realised child domestic workers do live in slavery-like conditions; trapped and in servitude.  Also, that there is a danger when trying not to be seen as a scare-mongerer – that you down play children’s exploitation too much.  The situations in which I saw children working, in Peru and Togo this year, when I visited two of our partner organisations, were intolerable.  So, I’m going to allow myself to use appropriate language to explain why child domestic workers deserve to be empowered.  To borrow a phrase developed for a cosmetic company – because they’re worth it.

A question of commitment?

An opportunity arose this week that made Jonathan and I re-think our development of Children Unite.  I guess this happens periodically when you’re setting something new up….various opportunities arise and you have to decide whether to take them and change direction slightly, or not and keep on the same path. The opportunity is only a possibility – so I can’t talk about it openly but it would mean Jonathan being away for six months next year.

I’ve been thinking about it non-stop of course.  It’s forced Jonathan and I to look again at our roles and our professional partnership within Children Unite and we’ve come to a few conclusions:

• The set-up stage (this first year) is slower than both of us anticipated;
• My interests lie in the awareness raising and advocacy work we plan to do;
• Jonathan’s interests lie in the consultancy services we plan to offer;
• We don’t need to be equally involved in running the organisation;
• We are both equally committed to Children Unite;

This feels like some big conclusions to me.  And articulating them here helps me to feel that I will put this learning into practice.  So this blog is enabling me to do what I’d hoped…to reflect on and learn from the twisting path Children Unite is on.

When two people are setting up an initiative it is hard for either of them, at some point or another, not to question the commitment of the other. The last two points should really read: ‘we don’t need to be equally involved in running the organisation to prove that we are both equally committed to Children Unite!’

I’ve been surprised at how often we have had to look at these fundamental issues over the past year.  I’d naively assumed that you get an idea for how you want to run an organisation and you stick to it but this hasn’t been the case at all.  I have a picture in my mind of Children Unite as an amoeba-like structure with a very thin and permeable skin. Through osmosis various ideas change the structure of the organisation, some are ‘keepers’ and stay and some get pushed out again.

I think it’s because I was so heavily involved in writing the legal structure of Children Unite (our Memorandum and Articles of Association) and articulating this to the Charity Commission that I have had a bit of an immovable picture of the organisation.  Certainly, the visual image I have of Children Unite as a legal entity (and you’ll have probably noticed I seem to think in a visual way) is of a ladder and it’s very logical step-by-step order.

An amoeba and a ladder are very different images! Hopefully we’ll get somewhere in the middle (and I can’t come up with an example here – not even a joke one – please supply your own!). Visualising our future is something we all do I suppose – whether this is literally a ‘snapshot’ image or some words that sum up where, who or how you want to be.  And it is not wrong to adjust that image but, when it comes to Children Unite, I believe I have a duty to share my updated thoughts with the people closest to the organisation – to Jonathan and to the trustees.

House of the Lord of the Rings!

Looking back over a few of my posts I seem to have spent most of my time trying to motivate myself to keep going. This week, however, I knew I wouldn’t need to as five of our partner organisations are visiting London. Children Unite’s partners are local organisations working directly with child domestic workers. They are: Kivulini in Tanzania, Asociación Grupo de Trabajo Redes in Peru, Defensa de los Niños International Costa Rica, the National Domestic Workers Movement in India and last but by no means least Visayan Forum Foundation in the Philippines. Jonathan and I have been meeting up with them to discuss how our two organisations could work together. It’s always inspiring to listen to everything they have achieved but one of the things that has energized me the most (and is probably what attracts me to this work) is a feeling of solidarity amongst us. Child domestic workers are an invisible group of children, working behind closed doors and the very few organisations that work with these children are pretty invisible too. I feel proud to be associated with their years and years of excellent work and excited by the future possibilities of all different kinds of partnerships between us. And funnily enough the invisibility we are fighting against is a challenge that motivates me too.

Another thing that I’ve learned this week is that small is beautiful. (I know, I know it’s the same old stuff I’m learning every week!) In my panic last week about funding I wanted to rush ahead into a big funding proposal and Jonathan had to reign me in and remind me that we are a tiny organisation and we should take things slowly but surely. So, our first project will not be a multi-country, mega buck, complex programme of activities. It will need to focus on developing a strong relationship between ourselves and our partners, making sure we’re on the right track and that we understand our different roles. Meeting our partners this week has helped me to see that small steps do get you somewhere and that the first of these small steps are the relationships we develop.

And, just for posterity I want to record a scene from last night that makes me smile.

Picture, if you will, me handing my first business card as ‘Director’ of Children Unite to the UN Special Rapporteur on Slavery at the House of Lords. Earlier in the day I had printed off a sheet of the cards and had cut them into ‘card shapes’ whilst watching ‘Dick and Dom’ a children’s TV show.

Jonathan and I attended our first event as Children Unite, at the House of Lords (or the House of the Lord of the Rings as our daughter Maya called it!!). It was a very well attended event, organised by Anti-Slavery International with most of the partner organisations present. Gulnara Shahinian, the UN Special Rapporteur spoke eloquently about domestic slavery. In turn, Aidan McQuade of Anti-Slavery International articulated the issues very well…and I managed to get the guts to ask a question!