Writers’ Hour #1 @ Enrol Yourself

[UPDATE April 2022: Enrol Yourself has now rebranded to Huddlecraft!]

At Enrol Yourself, we’re all about learning; learning from our experiences, from each other, from similar organisations, from the world around us.

But as a team, we’ve found it hard to find time to share what we’re learning… so we’ve decided to have a regular ‘Writers’ Hour’ 🙆‍♀️

We’re going to do this once a month, write something and try and publish it there and then.

Our first post is a list of the blogs that we’d like to write. We’re hoping this will make us more accountable ;)

Zahra’s Writers List

I’ve been struggling to write about Enrol Yourself since 2017! I’m always in awe of the people who manage to really document and share their learnings as they develop an idea, a project or a company. I tend to be knee deep in the work itself and find it hard to make time to reflect on it afterwards, and as a result I have a stockpile of blog titles (and half finished posts in Medium).

Here are a few that are top of the pile right now:

• Enrol Yourself experiments for 2021–2022. A write up the experiments we’re working on this year, our hypotheses and how we’re testing them.
• So you thought peer learning was fluffy? How 140 women moved >£1 million for the climate. A look at the mechanisms behind OwnIt, a project in collaboration with Friends of the Earth that helps women take climate action through their personal finances.
• Decentralised is wild. The Host Fellowship so far, our learnings and lessons from putting a distributive model into action.
• Scaffolding through time. How to plan for emergence and let your planning emerge.
• Designing Enrol Yourself’s logo. Behind the scenes visual notes, sketches and process.

Sarah’s thoughts

I look after the Enrol Yourself community — which includes the wellbeing of our core team, as well as creating connecting learning experiences for our alumni.

As we’re a tiny business, our role titles don’t cover ALL of the things we actually do (start up lyf 😅), but community is my main focus.

Mapping out what work I’m juggling to figure out how I can do my job with joy and ease (my life is not a squashed sack btw — it’s just there as extra context to bear in mind!)

There’s a lot going on in my brain, and I’m often assessing and processing my various experiences to learn what ‘balance’ looks like for me, right in that moment.

It’s the result of having been very one-sided in the past, being in therapy for years, and trying to figure out how to be a good parent to myself — allowing all parts of me to flourish and be expressed at the appropriate time.

Here are some titles of mythical blog posts I may or may not write in the future:

• An ode to collaborative leadership (← I’ve been writing this blog post in my head for like, 6 months 🙃)
• Communities Are Not For Your Profit (how do you say ‘authentic’ communities without saying ‘authentic communities’?)
• Working through “Employment Trauma” — a diary
• Nurturing a community in a pandemic

Anneka’s Writers’ Hour

Amidst the whirlwind of the day-to-day, it feels tough sometimes to find the headspace to pause and reflect on what I’m learning, and find a way to share that in a narrative that also makes sense to others.

But I love reading, learning, and being inspired by others who “work out loud” in this way.

I used to blog a long time ago, but I stopped writing publicly… I’m not quite sure why. But the longer I’ve left it, the more blank the page has felt, and the harder it’s been to get back into sharing something substancial so visibly. I’m looking forward to our Writers’ Hours as a way to beging taking small steps back into finding my writing voice, and, hopefully, become more comfortable with sharing my words again.

Things I’d like to work out loud on:

• OwnIt. Imagining the next decade for this peer-support network helping women take climate action with their personal finances.
• Anti-oppression, inclusion and equity at Enrol. I’m stewarding the ‘rhythms’ around this at Enrol Yourself, supporting us to take further meaningful steps towards inclusion. (NB: I’m thinking of renaming it, to include the word ‘justice’ instead of, or as well as, ‘anti-oppression’; I’d love thoughts on this.)
• The Unbearable Whiteness of Being the lead of a project at the intersection of climate justice, finance and gender equity.
• Growing Abundancy. What we’ve learned from crowdfunding The Abundancy Fund and bringing together The Abundancy Coalition to help more people access learning throughout their lives.
• How do we apply principles of The Gift Economy in an economy ruled by the dogma of endless growth? Imagining how learnings from Miki Kashtan & Doughnut Economics might be applied within the world of Enrol Yourself.