*Team photo pre-COVID
Sitting down in early January this year, I’ve tried to resist the urge to write my usual long list of resolutions, or at least not the way I’ve historically done it (“yoga every day!”, “no more caffeine!”) – things eminently sensible, but nonetheless unrealistic.
Perhaps this is the year for the anti-resolution, where we don’t seek to be ‘complete’, but ongoing works of practice. I can’t help but feel that we’ll weather this year better if we don’t try and be too absolute. So in the spirit of this, we’re sharing four areas we’d like to continue working on this year, but not to ‘finish’ (it would be a mistake to think we could).
- Be better partners. We’ve been thinking a lot around how we work in partnerships, but there’s definitely more we can be doing to foster equitable, encouraging and also enjoyable experiences for both the inHive team and the partners we have a chance to work with. We believe this will come from spending time investing in relationships, really listening to each other and creating shared safe spaces around failure and learning.
- How we can embed a progressive and regenerative approach to the environment in our work. We are not climate experts, but we do think we need to be thinking about it much more in relation to our work. We’re seeing first-hand how climate change is affecting people and communities where we’re working: flooding in Freetown, pollution based smog in Lahore and locust infestations across Uganda, that even before COVID were affecting school closures, personal health and wellbeing, and loss of both lives and livelihoods. It’s reductive to say: “we’re not a climate change organisation”, because we all need to be. This year we want to learn how we can do this, and this goes beyond considerations on how we reduce our carbon footprint.
- How networks are a tool to reduce inequalities, rather than widen them. We know networks often serve the elite: the most powerful and most connected become more so through the connections they get access to. It is, of course, a risk that as network building specialists we exacerbate this problem to make the privileged more so. We need to be more intentional about not creating spaces that exclude, but that the networks we support are accessible to groups and individuals sometimes silenced. Again, this will take time and a lot of listening, and self-awareness on our part.
- How networks can drive systems change. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last five years learning a lot about how alumni networks can serve the people in them. This year, we’re also going to be investing a lot more time learning about how networks can serve a collective agenda – whether that be a group of alumni leaders in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan driving localised advocacy campaigns promoting girls’ education, young leaders working in agriculture across sub-Saharan Africa driving technology innovations, or displaced youth raising awareness of the challenges around education and employment.
We’re sharing these thoughts publicly as an invitation to help us learn (together, if it’s a focus for you too), and to hold ourselves account to being an organisation that continues to be ‘in progress’.
Over the coming twelve months, the social sector is unfortunately going to be both needed more, and yet also be less well resourced. This opening blog of the year is meant to be reflective and hopeful; part of the solution is to compete less, and share more. I’m not naïve, I know this is hard, but it is also critical if social change really is at the heart of our work, and not our egos.