Living with the unknown

I've only spent one day this week working on Children Unite and it's been a bit frustrating. It's half term so I've spent most of my time looking after my tow daughters - Evi and Maya as Jonathan is working. The irony is that he has to take on all the consultancy projects he can - as Children Unite has no sustainable funding yet. This means I can't spend as much time as I'd like looking for sustainable funding. The Trustees meeting we'd planned for next week looks like it will be postponed as not enough people can make it. We've found out the rent on my office is double what we'd thought so can't afford to stay. Aaarrg - good think I only worked one day!

I suppose I’m experiencing the flip side of exciting – unsettling.  Setting up an organisation sounds exciting and sometimes it is…but there’s a lot of boring stuff you have to force yourself to do and there’s also living with the unknown.  Living with the ‘unknown’ reminds me of a horror movie (and there are a lot of those on at the moment as we’re approaching Halloween), a malevolent force that undermines your self-confidence, questions your decisions and repetitively whispers “You can’t do it”.

So, I’m not going to listen to the ‘You can’t do it’ voice…but equally I’m not going put on my superhero suit and fight it (or ask some of my superhero friends to fight it for me).  I’m just going to ignore it…as it’s a creepy kind of fear rather than a clear and present danger…it’s the kind of creepiness that you can sing away.  Indulge me if you will and imagine someone with their fingers in their ears singing:

 “LA, LA, LA I can’t hear you”

I like that image. It makes me laugh and that’s a very good start.  I will be thinking of it next week as I do all the boring stuff; re-arrange the trustees meeting, research rent prices for a new office etc. etc. etc….

PS Thank you Roland for becoming my 6th follower - I've reached my target YeeeHa!

A superhero crack team of perspective givers

This week I’ve been diving deep into the evaluation of a project called Giving Voice to Child Domestic Workers (of which the film on this blog is part).  As the ‘evaluator’ for the project I was writing the evaluation report for the best part of the week and found that I was getting annoyed by petty things that hadn’t gone as perfectly as I’d have liked.  I organised a meeting to discuss the report with the ‘UK team’ – which consists of Jonathan (my partner in Children Unite), Audrey and Mariela from Anti-Slavery International.  As soon as they walked through the door we were laughing and joking and eager to discuss the nitty-gritty of the report.  And I realised that my petty annoyances were just that – petty, not worth mentioning. 

I finalised the report today in a very different mood. I had been given some perspective on the project by my team mates and just by meeting up with the team again I was reminded of how smooth and successful, inspiring and enjoyable this project has been.  I trust my team's judgement and their views because, all along, we have been honest about how our feelings are affecting our work…and this has allowed us to build our team through trust.

I learned this process through working with Living Lens earlier on in the project. Rose and Keren at Living Lens are not afraid to talk about ‘love’ in the working environment!  Not soppy romantic love (eeuuww as my children would say!) but a ‘loving’ way of working that is honest and open and builds trust.  I’ve been trying to work in the same way ever since (but it’s harder than it sounds!).

So, in a spirit of ‘loving’ this morning I decided to add an ‘acknowledgement’ section to the report where I thanked various people on behalf of the UK team.  However, it was not long before I realised the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction, I was again diving deep but this time into a kind of ‘nostalgia’ for the project - writing reams of flowery acknowledgements to every person involved! 

Just thinking about how my team-mates would laugh at this and take the ‘mickey’ out of me put a stop to it.  I reduced the paragraphs down to a sentence each!   When you’re working on your own it’s all too easy to get carried away and lost in your own world view. I’m sure Jonathan, Audrey and Mariela don’t see themselves as a ‘superhero crack team of perspective givers’ but this week, for me, they have been just that!  (Thanks guys!)

Hunt down the baddies and punish them!

I promised I wouldn’t rant so this is an ‘observation’ that I will endeavour to learn from.  Jonathan went to the launch yesterday of Child Slavery Now – a publication outlining child slavery across the world – as he had written a chapter on child domestic work.  However, the launch was dominated by debate on the trafficking of children to the UK and the existence of complex criminal networks of traffickers.

Jonathan came back from the event frustrated that the focus was on the UK rather than the rest of the world and we discussed the seemingly inexhaustible need to identify a ‘baddy’ to tackle child slavery.  From both mine and Jonathan’s experience the ‘baddy’ is invariably poverty. Or, more accurately, there are a number of baddies that tend to be structural issues such as gender inequality or societal attitudes towards children that can’t be hunted down by a group of burly police officers and punished.

In the near future Children Unite will develop an advocacy campaign of it’s own on child domestic work and, as campaigning is my background, I’m impatient to set it up. Everyone knows that the simplest ideas tend to be the best.  However, I’m conscious of the need to develop a campaign that is not simply ‘raising awareness’ about child domestic work but equally is not just pointing the finger at a ‘baddy’ and saying “punish him”.  Additionally, as Children Unite is an international organisation, any campaign we run will need to be relevant across the globe.

I think I need to remind myself of what a good campaign is…the word is used to mean all sorts of things.  So, without googling it, I reckon that a good advocacy campaign gives ‘normal’ people an opportunity to change the bigger picture.  Of course it has to be well researched, targeted and monitored etc.  But it also has to be engaging and, essentially a positive experience for people....they are, after all, changing the bigger picture for the better.  I feel like I’m rambling now so I’ll stop…before I prove how little I actually know about advocacy campaigns.

This is a bit of a random way to end my post but I find it terribly depressing when people have no hope, when people aren't striving for something better.  A good advocacy campaign locks into that nugget of 'hope' within us all that things can be better.  And reassures us that together we are stronger and can make a difference. 

So, anyone got any ideas!?

Rugs, baklava and food fights over life partnership

Jonathan and I have been on a ‘romantic getaway’ in Istanbul for four days (a 40^th birthday present) and whilst eating our body weight in aubergine (me) and baklava (Jonathan) we spent two days of it discussing whether to buy a gorgeous Kurdish carpet for my office – or his.

Having worked from home for two days a week for most of the last year – setting up Children Unite - I’ve now moved full-time to a small office that I share with Living Lens (who made the film on this blog).  Jonathan works at home in a tiny office at the bottom of our very small garden (it is literally four steps from our back door to his office door!!).  This arrangement seems to be working well – us working separately in our little offices.

But I need a rug for my office. And in discussing alternatives to where this rug could go we ended up talking (over kebabs and falafel) about how Children Unite might grow.  One of our ideas was to turn Jonathan’s office into a cushion (and rug) filled reading room and he move into my office.

This meant we talked a lot about ‘partnership’ (we were on to baklava and coffee by then). When you are working with the person you’re living with and you are both bringing up two daughters – it can all get a bit much!  There are a lot of partnerships in that sentence!!  Our time in Istanbul was about our personal partnership – we never talk about each other as husband and wife to other professionals (and I have to admit to regularly talking about ‘my partner’ and not saying ‘he’ or ‘she’ to people just to create some ambiguity about the relationship!).

Children Unite is a ‘professional’ partnership between Jonathan and myself - although we have realised when you create an organisation it tends to be an extension of yourselves in some way. So, when there are two of you involved in this creation it is much easier if you can agree on how you see it growing and your respective roles in this process.  And I’m pleased to report that we didn’t have a huge food fight on holiday (we were too full!) – we agree on this.  We don’t see Children Unite growing much in size, we’re not interested in creating a huge organisation or even a medium sized organisation because we want to be part of the action at the grassroots level.  Also, I think, we want the organisation to fit with our other partnerships…with our children and with ourselves.  We need separate ‘professional’ roles or our professional partnership will become too ‘blurred’. So, Jonathan is a technical adviser to Children Unite, and I’m the organiser and campaigner.

And, for the moment, we need separate offices (I got the rug)!