Fly like a butterfly sting like a bee

Children Unite is re-structuring even though we don't have much of a structure in the first place?! Maybe it’s re-thinking I mean?  To be honest, it feels more like soul searching to me.

Over the past two months I’ve been developing a plan for this year’s activities – a plan that will ensure our sustainability.  Or do I mean viability (?) as sometimes it’s felt like a survival plan. That’s when the soul searching has come in.  It’s forced me to ‘let go’ of the idea (dream) of Children Unite – the charity that started from nothing and is now having such a big impact you wouldn’t believe it!  It’s been hard but important to realise that, actually, I’m an activist not a manager so setting up a big impressive organisation that can co-ordinate large, multi-country projects is not something I’d enjoy or be particularly good at. 

I like the idea of being a light, flexible and creative organisation that can take up opportunities.  ‘Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ – I don’t know where that phrase is from (a boxer I think) but I like to think if you're an activist based organisation you're like this.  That you’re small and flexible enough to move around but when you take action - people notice!  So, how does this fit with Children Unite?  Well, we’re scaling down our ideas for big multi-country projects (as above) and instead we're setting up a ‘technical advice service’ that will offer our expertise on how to work with child domestic workers to other charities.  Ultimately, we want more child domestic workers to receive the support they need and we know we can’t actually do this ourselves, we’re much too small.  But we can encourage (advise) other organisations to work with this hidden group of children.

Maybe I should change our strapline to ‘fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee’?  

Maybe not, I might get a powerful right hook from an angry (famous) boxer!!