Link Loving 13.12.11

• The next Wangari Maathai? Winnie Asiti’s story. Heather Box.
• How secretive thinktanks are crushing our democracy. George Monbiot.
• Interested in organising and work in healthcare? This training looks amazing.
• The British Social Attitudes claims that Britain is becoming more sceptic about climate change is false. Alice Bell.
• How Syrian activists are creative resisting the regime in the face of death. Rafif Jouejati.
• If you goes, freedom is in danger. A wonderful pamphlet by the Citizen Ethics Network.
• The end of internal emails. Thierry Breton.

What Happens When An NGO Admits Failure

• Sponsor an African spreadsheet
• admittingfailure.com

Clarity On UNFCCC

Clarity on the beast that is the UN climate talks from John Broder in the New York Times.

“Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life. It is simply too big a job for those who have gathered for these talks under the 1992 United Nations treaty that began this grinding process.”

“…the question of ‘climate equity’ — the obligations of rich nations to help poor countries cope with a problem they had no part in creating — is more than an “environmental” issue.”

h/t Natalya Sverjensky

Link Loving 12.12.11

• UK Uncut strikes again – this time thanking Dave Hartnett,  retiring head tax chief and HMRC.
• 13 ways to support the Syrian opposition right now. Erica Chenoweth.
• Inequality – what’s the policy narrative? Andy Sumner.
• The Conservative Party: the political wing of the hedge fund industry. Alex Evans.
• Another month, another lobbying scandal – this one leads directly to the PM. Tamasin Cave.
• Bring on EU reforms on financial services. David Boyle.
• Frida Berrigan remembers her father, a peaceful warrior.
• Advice to businesses – how to pick an NGO partner. Brendan May.

Campaign Case Study – The Otesha Project

This post is cross-posted from the Values and Frames website, where this was initially published. Thanks to Liz and Gavin for making it happen.

“We’re not tied to what it looks like, we’re tied to what works.”

The Otesha Project UK mobilises young people to create social and environmental change through their everyday lives. They run cycle tours every summer – helping young people to live low-impact lives and inspire others using workshops and theatre in schools, youth clubs and communities. They also incubate youth-led Change Projects and anchor the East London Green Jobs Alliance.

Otesha has five permanent staff, and three interns who are paid a London living wage.

I spoke to Founder and Project Director Liz McDowell and Communications and Fundraising Director Gavin McGregor about their transition to a flat, shared-responsibility structure.

What did they set out to do differently?

Otesha staff have used consensus decision-making for a number of years, and there is a strong culture of facilitation and anti-oppression work. On paper, however, the charity had a CEO and a clear hierarchy. Because of this, it wasn’t always easy to work truly alongside each other; the CEO was responsible for staff appraisals, for example.

The team decided they wanted to move to a flat structure to bring consensus decision-making and shared responsibility to the core of how Otesha works. This would also be reflected in team wages, meaning a flat salary for the whole team.

They recognise that this is an experiment. They know that they probably won’t get it right the first time and are not tied to what it looks like, but are instead tied to what works. “This feels like it’s the way it should be run” explained Liz.

Why move to a flat structure?

• Share the workload, and thus responsibility: Particularly in the early start-up phase, the workload fell disproportionately on Liz. This additional workload then also meant her voice carried more weight in communal decisions. Now, tasks such as HR, office management, and finance are distributed among the permanent staff, and rotate every two years so that everyone understands and can manage each of the administrative tasks.

• Organisational resilience: As Liz, the founder, is moving back to her native Canada within the next twelve months, there was a clear need for organisational sustainability. From now on, new staff members are explicitly requested to stay for at least four years to ensure deep knowledge transfer.

• Reflect their values in practice: As a youth-led education organisation, it was important to give interns more responsibility in the team – they are now part of the consensus decision-making process. Moreover, Otesha uses consensus when they lead trainings and on their cycle tours, so using it as a core team reflected how they trained other groups to work.

• Focus on impact rather than growth: There is enormous pressure for new enterprises to scale up quickly, with a burst of new employees as fast as possible. A flat model would likely not work on a larger scale, though there are some examples. Otesha sees ‘reaching scale’ as having an impact on the wider sector, not as organisational growth. Their work on green jobs, collaborating with businesses, trade unions, educators and other NGOs is a good example of what this looks like in practice.

What did people think about it?

• Internally: The team was excited and ready for the transition. Trustees have been supportive, though some apprehension remains. What brought a lot of support from the board was the focus on organisational sustainability.

• Externally: There’s been a lot of interest from academics – a group of MBA students created the initial proposal for their new organisational structure, for example. Other social enterprises have questioned the model.
  

What surprised the team most?

For Liz, the transition felt like a huge weight off her shoulders, the job itself became much more enjoyable. Before the change, her leadership role could often become a lonely one, but the team feels much more like a community now. “Everyone is in everything together”.

Another surprise has been that this transition seems to be unique. “These are values that so many charities sign up to – to find out that we’re trailblazing is really surprising.”

What have they learned?

• Involve everyone from the beginning – especially the trustees. People care about what they help to create.
• This process doesn’t work well with freelancers joining for short amounts of time. A stable core team is fundamental.
• Have patience. This is a slow process, and if it is sped up unnaturally, it will fail.

Otesha has embedded its organisational values into the every-day decision making processes, meaning that a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility will endure beyond any individual staff members. By weaving together ways of working that encourage equality and friendship, Otesha is building a network where intrinsic values are prioritised.

What does this mean for us as change-makers?

If we want to work with values, it is clear that Common Cause has implications not just for what we do in the ‘outside world’, but also how we run our organisations internally. Organisational structures in the third sector – including management structures, decision-making processes, pay-structures and incentive schemes – will all have an impact on the values that third sector employees come to hold as important.

When we start to incorporate an awareness of cultural values into our activities, we will need to also begin to examine the values embedded in our own internal processes.

Contact

Gavin McGregor

info@otesha.org.uk

I Was Trapped Inside A Paradigm

Great speech from David Fell, including a couple of very humorous lines. Sounds like someone got radicalised…

Link Loving 11.12.11

• Inequality, my grandparents and my children. Claire Melamed. (Great use of personal story in professional context.)
• Walmart spends big to help anti-environment candidates. Stacy Mitchell.
• How Tories became the party for hedge fund managers. Sunny Hundal.
• How can we create change in the UK? An ‘impossible’ idea and three reactions. Andreas Whittam Smith.
• Do you know how to calculate the turnover of a supermarket? Fiona Ward.
• Five leverage points for systemic change. Smart CSOs.
• I don’t understand what anyone is saying anymore. Dan Pallotta.

Three Words For Leadership In Positive Change

What does change for good really take? What three words say it best for you?

Chris Corrigan & Tuesday Ryan-Hart

Deborah Frieze

Tim Merry

And lots more here.

Link Loving 10.12.11

• Which nations are really responsible for climate change – interactive map from the Guardian. Make sure to look at historic CO2 per person (and Britain’s place on that map).
• Between 2008 and 2010, 30 big corporations spent more lobbying Washington than they paid in income taxes. Zaid Jilani.
• Hilarious send-up of online activism. Behind the Scenes at MoveOn.org. Funny or Die.
• Does this mean tabloid newspapers are changing the way they work? Matthew Norman.
• Wonderful collection of photographs. Gay In America.
• When Mayor of London Boris Johnson got £5 million to spend on fighting air pollution – he decided to buy absorbent glue. Not only that – it was applied to roads (twice a day) next to the air pollution monitoring sights. Painful footage from a London Assembly meeting.
• Occupy the future. Noam Chomsky.

A Public Library Of Human Experience

“But why don’t they stop this, momma?” said the girl.

“It’s a movement, honey. Can’t be stopped. It’s like rain. You can put up an umbrella but you can’t stop it. Just have to wait for it to pass. And then, you see what it washed away.”

“I see,” said the girl.

This mini-story and countless others are part of Jonathan Harris’ awesome new project Cowbird. You’ll remember his previous online/visualisation/humanity projects We Feel Fine etc.

Cowbird explains humanity’s sagas through heartfelt stories. It allows you to keep a multimedia diary of your life, and to collaborate in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are things like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement — things that touch millions of lives and define the human story.

It’s so beautiful, real and participative. Taking all the best things about the web and putting it in one place. Great work.

And just think, what could documenting a campaign look like on this platform?

• Map out the movement relationships
• Capture visual victories
• Share stories of struggle

Etc, etc, etc.