OK I admit it I’ve been cheating on the blog posting
front….since May I’ve written posts but they were all from a diary I kept
during a four day trek in May in Nepal. My excuse? Simply that I’ve been
inundated with work – not all of it for Children Unite.
So I’ll do a long blog post to make up for it….I wanted to
share some of the thinking I’ve been doing during this time. Over the
past year I’ve been part of an Action Learning Set – a forum where six leaders
of children’s rights NGOs have been gathering for a day each month to share our
leadership issues. Action Learning seems to be about peer support and
learning – all of us are running small children’s rights charities and have
bumped into each other over our careers (in my youth I volunteered for two of
the organisations in the set!) We are dealing with similar issues –
funding crises, management issues, dealing with partner organisations or boards
of trustees so it is useful to talk through our concerns with other people who
can understand and may well have been in the same place a couple of months
ago.
Children Unite is the smallest organisation in the set but one
of the surprising things I’ve learned over the year is that I no longer see us
as following the same trajectory as all the other organisations.
Originally I had imagined I would learn much from my fellow Action
Learning Set colleagues that would help me to develop Children Unite and,
essentially, follow in their footsteps. However, late in 2012 we didn’t
get a grant we were rather dependent on and this forced us to think a bit
differently about how we would ‘survive’ and indeed, whether we should
survive. This situation, together with some of the issues raised by my
colleagues, has made me re-think Children Unite’s development. A phrase I
particularly remember from the learning sets was ‘funding treadmill’ – to be
honest, it sends shivers down my spine as it conjures up dull as ditchwater
work that never ends – slaves to the funders demands! We are all doing
similar work and there is very little funding out there so we end up all
applying to the same funding agencies for grants to continue our work and we’re
on a kind of treadmill…application deadlines, assessments, evaluations,
audits…and so it goes on.
I have to admit that, being a campaigner, I don’t actually like
the public image of ‘a charity’ – it makes me cringe a little bit (give money
to a charity = ease your conscience = nothing actually changes). Of
course all the organisations in the learning set are doing excellent work that changes
children’s lives – it’s more about the public perception of what ‘a charity’
does that makes me uncomfortable. So, if Children Unite is to move away
from this image it is OK with me…it’s just that, of course, there’s even less
funding for organisations that focus on advocacy work! So, this is the
challenge ahead. How to continue doing
what we set out to do (give child domestic workers a voice). In June we launched our Technical Advice
Service – which is essentially for other charities, encouraging them to work
with child domestic workers. This is
definitely not in the realm of the public image of ‘a charity’ but it does
recognise that, as a very small organisation, perhaps our best role is to
influence bigger organisations to work with this group children that we care so
passionately about. I am reminded and
will end my post with a quote that has been attributed to Anita Roddick (who
set up the Body Shop and has certainly inspired me):
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