Welcome to the very first episode of The Workshop!
Just so you know, the script for this took me three months, half a notebook, countless minutes of blank stares at my screen and a few postponed accountability check ins with my colleague, Ella, to bring to life.
Needless to say, I have found what creating a podcast comes with – that is, the projection of myself as a quote unquote “expert” in the field; exposing my geekiness through a microphone; and the anticipation of starting a new heart project all extremely daunting. And, just so you know, I still don’t consider myself an expert. In fact, I consider myself a learner, and part of why I love my work so much is, indeed, that in many ways, it is a continuous practice of learning and unlearning.
The interplay between ecosystems of collective action and their socioeconomic and political contexts is constantly shapeshifting. Sometimes, our engagement with the world around us can feel like a confrontation. In other times, it feels like a dance. In all times, for us to bring our visions of a feminist future to life, it requires creative intervention that offers alternatives to the conventions of current systems and ways of being.
In the field of change through the lens of the organisational condition, there is something about which I am becoming more and more convinced:
It is learning: learning about each other, learning with each other, learning about where our lives, our identities, our strategies for survival, and our understandings of love and purpose intersect, and also learning about how we are different, that is the soil from which we nurture experiences of liberation.
And I might as well make the confession now that I am hopelessly geeky about communing with organisations: getting under the skin, massaging through the muscle and seeing right to the heart of why and how it is we work together, and what about that incredibly unique constellation – which, by the way, is both a placement and moment in time – can respond to the greatest challenges of our lived realities.
What inspired this podcast?
Well, perhaps this needs to start with a story. I started my career as a wide-eyed twenty-something year-old in African journalism. I worked under the leadership of Black men with the most inspiring visions for narration, story curation, and documentation I’d ever experienced: Tau Tavengwa, Edgar Pieterse, Ntone Edjabe, if you’re listening to this, I want to give a shout out to your brilliance and impact. But my activism was growing ever-stronger roots in feminist organising – campaigns against rape on campus, women-led protests around Cape Town’s housing crisis, and conversations within a student-led university movement called #FeesMustFall about its dire need for intersectionality.
So I was thrilled when I finally got my first job at a local women’s rights organisation. For the first time, I was going to work under a female director. I was going to get do work that was unapologetically feminist. I will never forget the gaslighting experience it was walking into my first day at the office and seeing a group of older white ladies behind their desks – and not the cool radical queer older white women with histories of anti-racist anti-patriarchy activism. I could go into the details, but let’s just say these women were as embedded in white supremacy and sexism as much as they were completely unaware of it. It turned out that my first feminist organisational employer was actually the most racist sexist emotionally abusive environment in which I’d ever worked.
Needless to say, I did not last there very long. By the time I left I was done with working for organisations. But I’m grateful for the experience for two reasons. Firstly, it catapaulted me towards a journey of independent accompaniment of organisations, which is part of the reason I’m speaking here today. And secondly, it taught me that organisations are microcosms of the systems of oppression experienced by their communities of impact. And sometimes, the people within them, while assuming otherwise, truly cannot see how those systems manifest in their ways of working. While this organisation in particular was an extreme case, it would not be the first time – far from it – that I stepped into an organisation whose people are really struggling to liberate themselves from the colonial, white supremacist and patriarchal scaffolding that informs how they construct realities together.
Indeed, organisations are made up of people. As people, we bring our whole selves – our identities, our histories, our movement scars, and our visions – into our work. Organisational work is truly one of the most complex enterprises I’ve come to experience. Working with others towards a shared vision takes nothing less than grit and courage.
It is the perseverance of those who have come to believe with every fiber of their being that the only way forward is together, that collective action is what creates change, those who sit in the fire every day with other human beings building towards feminist realities and futures, you inspired this podcast. This is for you.
This podcast invites us to look at the tools that we’re using to build our organisations and our futures. It is both an invitation to put down the master’s tools, and an offering of frameworks, recipes, blueprints, and spells for making our own. Because we know, that it is only the tools that we forge ourselves using knowledges, skills and principles from our own ancestry, from our own feminist lineages, from our own lived experiences, and from our own understandings of what it means to be in community, that we can truly build the realities and the futures we want.
Okay, so what might you expect from staying tuned?
While there is something so profound about an organisation unfolding into its own liberation, over time in my work, I have observed organisations that – even with the best of intentions – walk into pitfalls that jeopardise their transformation, and even cause harm to their staff or in their ecosystem. But I have also witnessed organisations who are – in different ways – tapping into collective experiences of liberation among their staff and across partnerships, and learning to do so repeatedly.
The Workshop is where we will learn. Learn about the tools that feminists like us – but also unique to us – are using to make their organisations sites of liberation. To kick off this journey, let me let you in on the juicy series we’re going to be delivering to you in the coming weeks and months! We’re going to be learning from the gurus, the witches, and the mischief makers of the organisational world about how technology is uniquely shaping the way we organise.
There are conversations in the pipeline articulating indigenous knowledge systems, from constellations to oratory traditions of storytelling and how they hold capacity as powerful organisational practices. We’ll discuss organisational wellbeing – a term we throw around - but this one’s grounded in a relational politics that you will not want to miss. And let me not forget to mention, we’ve got a whole series about dismantling the colonial structures of monitoring evaluation and learning MEL, through African perspectives on methodologies.
Watch this space.
