Producer Chronicles: Catalyst Edition: Weeknote 003 | Catalyst Convenings: Autumn Roundtables Series | Some Reflections
Catalyst Convenings: Autumn Roundtables Series | Some Reflections
Anybody who knows me, knows that the late, great bell hooks’ life and work serve as an inspiration and guiding light for much of my approach to my own life and my own work. And one of my favourite quotes from her is this reminder that ‘to be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.’
As someone who considers themselves both an idealist and extremely pragmatic, this resonates strongly. Being grounded in our concrete reality gives us the data we need to know what needs to change. And being able to imagine something else — a different way of doing things, a different way of being with one another — requires us to be courageous enough to trust in our imaginations.
I often play the role of the weaver and builder in the communities I’m part of, connecting the dots, bridging people and ideas, creating and designing spaces for convening — central to my theory of change and movement building practice. I believe deeply in the power of gathering — online or in-person — to exchange ideas, philosophise, explore and ask questions, grapple with the things we’re puzzling over, strategise in service of taking action. Across October and November, I had the pleasure of curating four roundtable events which brought together different stakeholders in the Catalyst universe to explore our vision, mission, values, and next steps, as we continue to build the next version of Catalyst. Working alongside Facilitator, Ellie Osborne, we designed sessions for different stakeholders to help us unpack questions focused on: visioning and realising the future collectively, as we play our individual roles in an ecosystem; operationalising our values, so they aren’t just things we talk about, but things we actually live by; storytelling and sharing impact so we are working in the open and creating opportunities for sharing best practice and learning; transformational governance and challenging power structures.
The groups we convened came under the following stakeholder groupings:
- Ecology Peers: We defined these people as either in the tech and digital space and/ or in the social sector, working on systems change, emphasising social justice at the heart of their practice. These folks were busy experimenting with new ways of working and bending traditional ideas and understandings of governance.
- Charities and Infrastructural organisations: These are folks who are more the ‘bread and butter’ of Catalyst’s work at present; folks working in charity and not-for-profit organisations, tackling issues by providing services for those on the frontlines, in our communities.
- Digital Partners: Another group that are key members of Catalyst’s current work. These folks are working in tech and digital, providing, designing and building services, products and tools — many are increasingly focused on ensuring this work is in service of ‘Good’ (‘Tech for Good’). These are the people we aim to connect — through building this ‘container’ — with more charities, grassroots organisations and social impact entities to help deepen the impact of their work with support from tech and digital.
- Funders: This group is of course the folks with money and resources. They have been a particularly interesting stakeholder to work with in ways that attempt to disrupt the more traditional funder-fundee relationship as a means of shifting power. Representatives in this group come from the Catalyst Funder Ecology primarily, and include our Founding Funders as well as newer relationships.
Across every roundtable session, we invited everyone to imagine the world they want to live in, the type of society they want to be part of, and how the work they are currently doing is contributing to building that. It was clear that this invitation from Ellie, as well as Guppi, who facilitated our Funders-focused event, took some people aback. Circling back to our reminder from bell hooks of the importance of being able to imagine, the reality is that too often our working lives demand that we prioritise the ‘doing’ and the maintaining of the status quo, over the reflecting, the visioning, the imagining of what could be. And it seems for funders especially, being given space — and permission — to imagine was a rarity. It was a real joy to see everyone throw themselves into this ask and rise to the challenge in their own way. We had folks getting creative and drawing, as well as folks brainstorming their ideas down through writing — and the subsequent discussions were rich and illuminating.
Some highlights from our conversations included:
- Hearing about both dystopian and utopian futures, with the majority of folks sharing a hopeful outlook
- Noting that most visions shared the understanding that a period of tumultuous change is needed to get to the future we’re seeking. And as one Ecology Peer put it; “Before we can get to a place of imagining tech utopian stuff, there needs to be a lot of tearing down of the bullshit”
- Understanding that an era of change in infrastructure, governance, communication, and culture is emerging — there was a lot of interest in and curiosity regarding various experiments in transformational governance taking place as a means to shift power
- Exploring how everyone will play a role in the transition itself, as well as maintaining the new future/s we are building
- Asking how Catalyst can support, nourish and steward the nodes in the ecosystem as they navigate the change ahead
Our conversations underlined the definition of what Catalyst needs to be, and the role of Catalyst producers in that:
- Producers = convenors weaving coherence between these different groups/orgs/humans (not ‘at the heart’, but between, alongside and among our other stakeholders)
- Catalyst = the big ‘container’ for its constituent parts to dream and act more ambitiously together
Next Steps
As well as taking some time to reflect on what we’ve learnt from the conversations that took place at this series of events, we will be synthesising learnings alongside what we may glean from several research commissions, which include sector research and research on transformational governance.
I will also be designing a follow-up survey for the wider catalyst network to invite responses from folks who were not able to join us at this roundtable series, so we can have input and reflections from a large sample size. There is also a chance of convening another roundtable in the early new year to build on this work further.
As well as the aforementioned, there is so much interesting information to keep sharing with you all, so I hope to write a follow-up blog to this to dig deeper into the questions we explored, particularly around how we ‘operationalise’ our values and make them tangible — hopefully this can be a source of inspiration for others who may be grappling with similar questions and challenges in their work.
Useful Resources
In the spirit of generosity, I’m sharing the materials we shared as prep for attendees of our Catalyst Convenings:
Blog posts (5–7min reads):
Update on our working group experiments (by Ellie)
On values & co-creating a strategy (by Jo)
On Inclusion & moving from passive allyship to active comradeship (by me, Siana)
What are the enablers of collective working? (by Nick Stanhope)
From Programme to Movement: Redefining funder relationships (by me, Siana)
Slide deck (5–7min read):
