Does organisational resilience in the social sector need more investment?
Let me add a bit of context. I've been quite ill the past few days. More generally January and Christmas has been a pretty stressful time personally and throughout 2018 I worked as hard as I could to ride a positive momentum I'd built in my job. However, right now, try as I might (and I am trying), I'm really not well enough to function properly. Don't worry! It's nothing serious, just normal man-flu I'm sure, but definitely enough to have had me laid up in bed at my worst, and staring in a vegetative state at my screen failing to complete a funding application at my best. Put simply, if I'm not firing, nothing is happening.
Man it is stressing me out, and it has suddenly made me very very paranoid about the weak link in my current role - me. I work for a growing and relatively successful social enterprise (more social than enterprise, but that's for another post) and while things are going well, they never ever stop being tough.
As far as I am concerned everyone in my organisation performs miracles to make sure every week a nation-wide network of GoodGym members are out there safely getting fit and making a difference to someone in their community. We know resources out there are scarce so when not using technology to make the whole thing as efficient as possible, we're always challenging ourselves on what we actually need. No wastage!!! We are very much a lean mean machine. Grrrr!
What's that saying, one person's junk is another person's treasure? I've started to think about resiliency and recovery again in terms of organisations, particularly charities. If we were all being honest with ourselves, all of us need some slack in our professional lives. This could be periods during the year when things go quiet. I prefer it manifesting in those colleagues you look at now and again and think "what do they do again?" Funnily enough that used to be me! Corporate Strategy teams are great repositories of organisational resilience - most of the time these people are not needed BUT when things go south and core functions are under pressure, wow do these people come into their own. They provide organisational resilience, whether it is to deal with a crisis or more simply to create a bit of breathing and thinking space.
Most small to medium charities do not have this luxury. Luxury. Even my use of the word betrays how it is seen in a sector that has grown accustomed to making ends meet and thriving on fumes!
I wonder however if our mindset needs to change in order to meet the increasing social demands many of us are seeing. It feels counter-intuitive, but I believe we need to be more courageous in our strategic business and resource planning to build in the need for more resource than we need. Greedy? I think not. By building in only the minimum costs/resources one is basically saying one expects everything to go exactly according to plan. This never happens. Ever. What does invariably happen is that organisations, no scratch that, people within organisations, absorb the unexpected. I actually think the social sector is pretty good at this, because it attracts people with reserves of passion and depth. However those reserves are not limitless, nor is really fair to assume those reserves are game to be mined. How often has that personal toll come at the cost of an employees relationship, or friendship circle, or family? Far too often I'd hazard to guess.
There is often a conversation about funders being more responsible, building in core costs or full cost recovery etc. I wonder if the next step is for funders to be even more challenging and to expect applicants to cost up a "contingency" section as well either in funding applications or business plans. Fine larger investments mean less funding for other things, but surely a worthy trade-off if what is achieved is of a higher quality and doesn't leave a path of emotional and spiritual husks along the way?
One final thought - community resilience comes in to play too. I've been down and stressed this past few weeks but I'm still fighting. Work has obviously been supportive, but there are limits to what my colleagues can do. However the strength I've been drawing down on has come from the wider GoodGym community I am part of. I might be worried about letting them down but I'm never worried about them letting me down. Whether in person, or more likely through Twitter, sharing my challenges and having people all over the place chip in with words of wisdom, comfort or utter hilarity has made such a difference to me and continues to inspire me to try and work my own miracles.
Maybe I'm wrong to think there needs to be more investment in resiliency within social sector organisations. Maybe we just need to be braver to accept the resilience from the communities we build and nurture around us day in, day out.