Three and a half years ago, I was sat on my back doorstep in the autumn sunshine, dreaming up the concept for my new consultancy practice, Pragmatic Radicals. Now I’m sharing a further shift in how I’m choosing to invest my time and energies.
Sitting on that doorstep, I had just stepped away from leading a global social enterprise working at the health-migration nexus. I had thought it was my dream job, I had a brilliant team and we worked hard! I was laser focused on shifting power. Whilst partnering with UN agencies, and even advising the World Health Organisation during the pandemic, we were also trying to reimagine “global health consultancy”. We radically transformed the organisation, from top to bottom, investing in the leadership of people with lived experience of the health systems we were working in. I am really proud of that work. And yet there is only so much ‘transforming’ of the international development sector that I could do, given its roots in colonialism and white saviourism. So I decided it was time to step away, handing the reins to leaders with roots in the Global South.
I was determined that as I stepped into freelancing, I would work on projects closer to home. And back then, when Twitter was still a thing, I started following someone called Imandeep Kaur. Her organisation, CIVIC SQUARE, was hosting an event in nearby Birmingham the following week. It was half-term, so off I trotted, with my (then) 8-year old daughter in tow as a most excellent wing-woman, ready to meet Kate Raworth and learn about doughnut economics, having read her book earlier that year.
I immediately knew that this was the kind of organisation to get excited about. Not just campaigning against injustices but actively imagining and tangibly building alternative futures with their neighbours. Inch wide, mile deep.
I began freelancing with them, a bit of copy editing at first, then writing up a report, synthesising layers of research, until last year I was stewarding projects and co-authoring business cases and funding proposals for their bold, ambitious Neighbourhood Public Square.
As a freelancer, I always took pride in my long and varied experience working inside organisations before going solo. I knew the value that ‘front-line’ leadership experience – holding the huge stress and uncertainty of balancing scarce resource with team energies and hostile operating environments – would bring to other organisations. It would mean that if I facilitated difficult conversations, introduced frameworks or shared methodologies, this would come alongside my lived experience reminding me that running organisations is hard, staying accountable to your community harder still, and radically altering social and ecological trajectories within current systemic constraints a collective feat of heroic proportions. I’d bring that empathy and I’d resist pretending like I had all the answers.
But the longer I spent in freelance mode, the more distant this embodied knowing was becoming. With this, I realised, I have felt an increasing sense of discomfort, in taking on short-term projects where the enabling conditions were not in place to really do justice to the work I was hired for.
So when the opportunity arose to join the CIVIC SQUARE team in-house, rather than working with them as a freelancer, at arm’s length, it felt impossible to say no! Working more deeply with the team, and being a part of bringing the incredible, ambitious, Neighbourhood Public Square vision off the page and into reality, will be a real privilege as well as a huge learning experience.
This doesn’t mean hanging up my freelance boots entirely – I have reserved a small amount of capacity across my working week to offer support to organisations in facilitation, emergent strategy, governance, mentoring and organisational change.
But I’ll bring a renewed energy to that craft, an honesty and integrity that have always been core to who I am, but which become harder to hold onto the longer you have been away from those organisational front-lines, too often swapping deep long-term relationships for transactional day rates. I’ll bring a rootedness that comes from knowing that I am contributing as deeply as I can to reimagining and building regenerative futures. Making a longer-term commitment to relationships and places as a critical response to the times we’re living in.
If this feels like your kind of vibe, I can’t promise immediate availability to work together, but I can promise my practice will be rooted in the real world – pragmatic whilst daring to reimagine the systems we’re swimming in!