On The Mind Of: Stephen Hale, Chief Executive at Refugee Action
Crisis has brought us together to work together but it is an incredible test of every organisation. Find out if you have the cohesion to pivot, adapt and survive.
Opportunity and privilege comes with moral responsibility.
Put a commitment to shift power to refugees and people seeking asylum at the centre of the strategy. Its a journey to go on rather than a state to be reached. We need to centre those people, voices and perspectives because its morally right, will make a better organisation, and is important for the cause.
Debate in the charity sector about lack of diversity, equality and inclusion and how privilege has excluded people from having the opportunities.
White men are in the way, and need to own that and recognise the structural racism that exists across the sector, and more space, confidence and power to people to say things that they want to say that they haven’t been given explicit permission to say.
Recogniding that silence can be complicit. Make way for other voices that have more lived experience. Not dominating platforms that are available for other voices, spending more time listening and learning, but also wanting to contribute.
If you rush to use your voice you risk skipping the listening and reflection but it might not be amplifying voices.
Shifting power to experts by experience. The shifting of power often requires people in senior positions to give away power in order for others to take it forward.
The shifting of power should have three dimensions, 1) the make up of people on the board, 2) increasing the number of refugees employed within the organisation, 3) who makes decisions.
We have a profound moral obligation to think about our cause before we think about our organisation. That is what the people who support our organisation expect. If we are not connecting we are letting down the people who have enough confidence in the organisation.
The role of leaders to figure where their organisation fits in contributing to the cause.
Charities have an obligation to collaborate to achieve more together.
Challenge the idea that there is a conflict between the short term interests of the organisation and whether you are collaborative or not.
Influencing the state to make people’s lives better, but we should not over estimate what the state can do.
Big and complex network of charities around any given issue, their coherence and collective strategy and influence can have a huge impact on the system. What we can do within our sphere of influence?
How tech, innovation, and access to digital ecosystems is showing up in communities
So here’s the thing: if we don’t cover how tech, innovation, and access to digital ecosystems is showing up in communities and among those traditionally overlooked, what we are saying is that their contributions don’t count.
— Sherrell Dorsey (@Sherrell_Dorsey) May 17, 2020
We fail to share complete pictures of society.
Tea and cake with the Girl Guides
I went to a tea and cake party held by the local Girl Guides to fundraise for their activities and for two of them to go to India.
The cakes were very tasty, and all the girls did a wonderful job of greeting their guests, making them cups of tea and serving cakes. But I couldn’t help wonder what this says about how those girls are brought up to think of the role of women. The girls were all aged between 11 and 16, old enough to think for themselves if empowered to do so, and yet most waited for instructions from the group leader. They were all in subservient roles, there as waitresses, servers, tea makers. It concerned me.
If I was working with that group the tea and cake evening would have been a chance to learn how to be entrepreneurial, how to run a business, set goals, understand cost, revenue and profit, how to market to the right customers, how to upsell them future support for the group, how to work in small self-organising teams, how to prioritise workload, etc., etc.
If girls aren’t learning these skills and more importantly how it feels to be empowered to be responsible and in control, and all of this is the result of how other adult women see those girls then it’s no wonder that they struggle when they grow up and go out into patriarchal and male dominated workplaces and systems of society. Equality has to happen on all levels, at all ages, and in every single opportunity.