Connect generously: Building collaboration and trust
“If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating an opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression.” – adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
I am writing this having set up and run a frontline charity, Little Village, for the last five years. This quote from Adrienne Maree Brown really matters: I do not believe we could have had the impact or reach we’ve achieved in that time unless our work had been guided very explicitly by love, rather than by winning. Love is one of our values (the others are solidarity, sustainability and thriving) and it reaches into every part of our work. It guides how we interact with families coming for help and we train our volunteers into what love in action looks like.
Love has always guided more than that for us though. It shapes how we connect with the beautiful world beyond our ‘formal’ organisational boundaries — our volunteers, donors, supporters and collaborators. As I describe in this post, by connecting generously, and with love, everyone grows together. It’s meant we’ve been able to meet in a place of possibility and dreams, not defensiveness, and build the work from there.
The warrior and the lover
At Little Village, we teach our volunteers about two of Jung’s classic archetypes, the warrior and the lover. First, try standing as the warrior: put your hands on your hips, clench your jaw and look to the distance, poised and ready for the battle. Really connect with what it feels to be in this position. Next, shift your position to that of the lover: relax your jaw, stand tall, and hold your hands out in front of you, palms turned upwards and fists unclenched. Imagine looking a person opposite you directly in the eye — really seeing them and appreciating them as a lover would. Notice the contrast and what becomes possible in this second position.
We train our volunteers to stand as the lover. This is how they welcome families visiting Little Village for support. It is incredible to see people’s shoulders drop as they enter the room and realise they don’t need to fight for help. It is moving to see the conversation and trust emerge as people — volunteers and families we’re supporting alike — realise that they are just talking to another parent who sitting opposite them, sharing stories about kids that won’t sleep, or swapping tips about how to distract them when they’re grumpy.
As leaders, we also need to stand as lovers, not warriors, if we want to tap into the rich, fertile abundance that exists beyond our organisations. Hold your hands out in front of you; look outwards with hope and love. Trust me, you will see more from here than you ever will if you stand as the warrior. With the lover, you contain the expansiveness of a possibility for connection, rather than the warrior’s fixed position or belief. You bring curiosity, not fear.
The challenge is that all too often, the systems and infrastructure around our sector drive us to stand as warriors. Burn out, funding insecurity, anger about injustice: all these things can make you defensive, unstable, exhausted (I’ve written more about this). They can make you feel the need to shore up your organisation, to promote it on broadcast. But the lover’s energy is less noisy, less shouty. It is a quieter, more curious energy: a question, an invitation to connect, not an answer. That’s what we need to cultivate.
Knock down your walls
One of the biggest transformations in the civil society sector over the last generation has been the growth in public sector commissioning and outsourcing. It has transformed many frontline charities from ‘voluntary organisations’ to ‘service delivery organisations’. This change has seeped into every corner of the sector. This language of professionalised service delivery provides the context for all our work, even those of us who aren’t delivering commissioned services. The semiotics we’re familiar with is all about delivery, about beneficiaries, about inputs, outputs and outcomes.
This might be an effective way to secure funding, but my concern (well, one of my many concerns…) is that it fails miserably when it comes to building an energised, connected movement for change around your mission. Let me use Little Village as an example here. One way we could describe our work is as a service. We provide a service to families who are struggling, by delivering clothes and other essentials to them. We help councils to mitigate the worst effects of poverty in their area.
When we say we provide a service like this, we draw a sharp line between ‘us’ and the rest of the world. We build boundaries. It suggests we have trained, employed professionals doing a job, and users, or beneficiaries who gratefully receive our services. Where do our 1000 volunteers fit in this story? Basically, they’re 12,000 hours of free labour every year. That is so far from the reality that it makes me feel uncomfortable to even write it.
Because the truth is, our work isn’t a service at all. That’s someone else’s language, and I don’t want it. Our founding vision was to make it as easy as possible for families to help one another when times are tough. That means that in practice, we provide the infrastructure to enable families to donate items. We create structured opportunities for families who want to make a difference through helping other families.
Do you see the difference? I don’t think our work even exists without the community of families we’re working with. The relationship isn’t between Little Village and the so-called beneficiary families. Rather, it’s between all the families who make up our community. Our organisation’s role is to facilitate, develop and deepen those relationships. Our invitation is clear and simple: if you want to make a difference, we can help you. If you believe child poverty is wrong, here’s something you can do to take action.
So go on — knock down those walls. Where are your organisational boundaries really? I would say if you think the line is drawn around your staff team alone, then you probably need to look again at how you’re framing the invitation for others beyond your organisation to get involved. If they have to climb over a wall, or even knock at a door, you’re unlikely to benefit from the enormous abundance and beauty they can offer you.
Bring gifts
It’s a simple one, this. Gifts are given in the spirit of generosity: payment or negotiation is not required. There’s a whole field of anthropology dedicated to the study of gift giving. It has been shown to be an ancient and time-honoured way of building relationships, reciprocity and trust. Giving gifts creates abundance as recipients feel more inspired to also act generously towards others, having benefited from such behaviour themselves.
But what does that look like in practice as a civil society organisation? I think there are many ways you can put this into action. At the most basic level, offer the gift of gratitude however and whenever you can. People who gift you their time: make sure you thank them for it and show them what a difference it has made. Organisations who do something for you: recognise what they’ve done, and tell others about it too.
But you can do much more than that. Offer your thinking and learning openly. For example, Little Village has now grown to be one of the largest baby banks in the UK. We share our learning with anyone who approaches us to set up their own baby bank (without trying to take them over). We run webinars on lessons we’ve learnt. We always share the research work we’re doing with other baby banks and frontline family charities, and encourage them to use it with their own audiences.
It can sometimes be tempting to keep all this work secret. It’s our IP, after all isn’t it? If this is how you think, you will not be able to tap into the rich world out there. Think about it: are you more likely to share your last Rolo with someone who shared theirs with you once, or with the person who keeps their stash secret? Give, and you’ll get so much more than you ever asked for. New possibilities will appear — possibilities that are good for everyone, not just you.
When in fog, hold hands
I’ve spent five years running a charity whose dream is that every child has the best possible start in life. Like many others, we are fighting a rising tide of child poverty. 1 in 3 children in the UK live in poverty — rising to more than 1 in 2 children in some of the inner London boroughs where Little Village works. The figures are rising — heartbreakingly so.
Many civil society organisations have been working on this agenda for decades. The uncomfortable truth is that whatever we’re doing isn’t working. Child poverty is going up, not down. I don’t say this to criticise, but rather to acknowledge where we are. We don’t have a clear simple answer that just needs to be ‘implemented’ to solve poverty — as with many complex social challenges, there is no silver bullet.
In times when we don’t know what to do, we need to advance together: to hold hands in the fog. In most of the biggest social challenges of today, we need to make time to work together to define the questions as well as the answers. To explore where the possibilities may lie, who might hold different parts of the puzzle. Because let’s face it, if we knew what the questions were, finding the answers would be easy.
Working like this demands new levels of collaboration and trust between our organisations. It won’t be easy, especially when so many of the norms of our fragile funding infrastructure incentivise a singular organisational mindset. But unless we see ourselves as working collectively to build towards a better future, shaped by social justice and shared prosperity, then there’s a real risk that all we do is sustain and extend the very systems and structures we know need to change.
Sophia Parker is the founder of Little Village, the London-based child poverty. She was its CEO until February 2021, and from Septebmer 2021 she’ll be taking up a new role as the Director of Innovation at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
