Inside Catalyst — 4 November: Abi and Hannah share their joy and challenges
Weekly reflections from the Catalyst team on maintaining values, Slack’s limitations and contracting smoothly.
This week we’re happy because of…
Hannah Turner-Uaandja (Tech Justice Circle): I’m grateful to be in an organisation working hard to live their values and doing it in such a considered way. We are currently working with some really inspiring organisations. It’s great to see the work come to life.
I’m also happy about learning! I’m new to this area and it’s been great to connect and learn from so many amazing organisations that are doing the work.
Abi Handley (Connecting Activity Leads, coaching sociocratic practices): 3 things:
- Having an in person meet-up where we explored barriers to engagement
- Introducing Ray as the newest Activity Lead (leading research into diversity, equity and inclusion within the Agencies for Good community)
- Making progress on how to enable access for activities to the available funding before the end of the financial year.
Challenges ahoy: maintaining values when time is short
Hannah: I’m working to a very short deadline on a piece of work with diverse stakeholders. It’s a challenge to work within our values when we are up against a funding deadline. I’m trying to set in stone as many meetings as I can so that we can make sure the work keeps moving forward. The team is full of inspirational and imaginative people who are thinking really big so I want to make sure that we also have manageable goals for the time frame.
Challenges ahoy: is Slack hindering our openness?
Abi: Slack is the main way to communicate in Catalyst. I think it is a bad substitute for real life communication. Also we have limitations on people only being able to join 1 or 2 channels. This creates or adds to the feeling of silo-ness, being disconnected and not knowing what is going on within Catalyst.
I’m going to raise this as a real barrier/contributor for people to be able to communicate well, openly and transparently.
I’m going to push (propose?) for people to be able to join more than one channel (which will incur more cost)
I’m going to identify a need for clarity around who or what group oversees/looks after/leads on ‘internal’ comms and the principles by which we use Slack. How can it support Catalyst towards its mission rather than hinder? How is this shared and upheld?
Contracting challenges
Abi: Negotiating new contracts is always painful (especially when the last one ran out already), and we (Catalyst) have limited time to be able to make progress. So I’m trying to create a simple and clear proposal to move this forward, and in so doing ask for trust that the work we will do WILL be valuable.
