BY ABI NOKES, inHive’s OUTGOING CEO
This time last year, I decided to throw away the idea of new year resolutions. Instead, I wanted to create a practice of setting core principles for the new year that could act as a guiding star for inHive alongside our vision. Sharing these publicly was a way to hold ourselves to account and navigate the changes and uncertainties of a life under the shadow of a pandemic.
We’re starting the new year with continued uncertainty of COVID variants – changes that are new and yet the same. Changes will continue to shape inHive’s work this year too. There are new partnerships that are on the horizon as well as new leadership, as I step down from the role of the organisation’s CEO after 4 years next month.
So, it seems only appropriate that we start the year by revisiting the anti-resolutions of 2021 and see how we faired against these guiding intentions, while also setting questions that will guide us in 2022.
Be better partners
When we set this intention, our focus was on listening, learning, and adapting. Thanks to our partners’ feedback we learnt where we’ve been doing this really well and where to improve.
We learnt our partners feel consistently able to ask us questions, share their challenges and areas for improvement, as well as their strengths. This is really important to us, as network building itself is so relationship-based. Our partnership with Mastercard Foundation has been a great example of this – we’ve been working iteratively and adaptively by hosting spaces both for staff and young people across their focus countries.
Some partners felt, however, that we did not take critical feedback well. So, we set ourselves a guiding question to enable us to grow and allow everyone we work with to feel able to challenge us, and that their opinions are respected. We ask:
What can we learn from our Nexus community, to help us learn more to become better partners?
Take a progressive and regenerative approach to the environment in our work
It was our intention to challenge ourselves and do better on environmental responsibility. It doesn’t matter that we’re not a ‘climate organisation’; we all have a responsibility. We did not make as much progress as we needed to, and this is one of our bigger failures in 2021.
We took some small steps, especially in our operations. For instance, we reduced our carbon footprint. It was not only because we are travelling a lot less, but also because we are adopting new approaches to our work. For example, our team member Yusra led an experimental hybrid approach to deliver a project with Fabretto in a rural and low-tech context in Nicaragua whereby we were connected virtually, but participants were in the room together.
We’ve also moved to being a totally remote team – we have neither the carbon impact of a partly used office, and with team members across five countries, we will be able to work more on site and travel less.
We also started calculating carbon impact on an annual basis, and have put a price on it. We are seeing this as a carbon cost, and are making an annual donation to Global Greengrants, who invested it last year in their youth-led fund supporting youth climate journalists in Zimbabwe.
Next year we will focus on going beyond operations and so we ask:
How can we bring our experience in network building for young to support different organising initiatives addressing climate change?
Networks are a tool to reduce inequalities, not widen them.
Inclusion has become a lens we now bring to our own day-to day work and our partnerships. We appointed a DEI lead on both the board and the team so we can continue to progress on this agenda, as we recognise that the world is becoming more unequal.
Following brilliant advice from friends at Teach For All and The Social Investment Consultancy, we are intentionally asking questions about inclusion in our partnerships through our bespoke Networks Assessment Matrix (a 30 part tool to assessing network strength). It includes questions like “Does the network have a clearly designated diverse group of individuals to co-lead the network to develop and strengthen it in an inclusive and sustainable way?” – we consider these to be integral to a network’s success and all of our partners – from Pakistan Youth Change Advocates to Ignite Philanthropy have said the same.
We are also hosting conversations about networks and their role in driving fairer societies beyond our partnerships and increase access to resources with best practices. We launched Nexus, a global network for network leaders together with a group of dedicated network experts and practitioners around the world. To some extent, we’re doing well – 70 members have joined over the last 9 months from over 15 countries. Some of these are international household names with hundreds of thousands of members, while others are local, with only a few hundred members. The diversity of the group is what makes it really special, but more can be done to remove barriers to entry (like language), and include voices we know aren’t yet present.
Additionally, we facilitated a Networks Learning Journey for a cohort of 25 funders, network leaders and researchers to look at what we know, and what we need to learn as a sector. This culminated in a co-drafted Social Change Networks Playbook. With further resources we create this year, we ask:
How could we open-source inHive’s tools to be used by anyone, anywhere regardless of resources?
Networks are mechanisms to drive fairer systems.
We’ve been doing lots of reading last year to grasp the challenge that is systems change. This included the recently released ‘Impact Networks’ by David Erhlichman – ones of the best books on networks we’ve read. We have also developed more partnerships to learn with others. For example, we’re working with Ignite Philanthropy, a global network of networks looking to strengthen the sector opposing child-based violence by bringing together advocacy organisations, campaigning organisations, and programmatic organisations to address this global and complex challenge together. We are just scratching the surface, so we ask:
How can collective action between multiple networks pave the way for systems change?
With our eyes on 2023
As the inHive team answers our four learning questions of 2022, we will document and share the learnings along the way. Whilst being kind to ourselves and others in the process, we will hold ourselves to account again in 2023. In 2023, inHive will celebrate a decade from its creation and I’m already looking forward to reading the guiding principles for the organisation’s bright future.