Inside Catalyst, June 19: growing governance, bias management and liberatory tech talks
Catalyst life is rich this week. The Next Frontiers conference was our highlight, but there’s lots of good and many challenges!
We’re happy because
Megan: checking our recruitment biases
Due to a health scare I sadly wasn’t able to attend the interviews with our potential new Co-Director. But, with consent, we recorded the interviews so that I could then watch them. That’s been a real privilege and I’m so grateful for the time people put in, and inspired by the work they do currently and the excitement they brought about what Catalyst could achieve in this next phase.
Next week we’ll be convening as a panel to make a decision. Making space in the process for reflection rather than going with an initial gut feeling is really important. It helps us recognise the different strengths people bring, and check against our own biases (which we identified before we shortlisted!).
Abi, one of our collaboration trainers/facilitators, said something similar about her job this week:
“I get to challenge my own thinking and assumptions with people that support me and each other… And it’s my job?!”
Ellie: Attending the Next Frontiers funders conference
Attending Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s brilliant Next Frontiers conference validated the new direction, language and focus of Catalyst. Particular highlights were
- a session on Advanced Technology and Extreme Wealth, which featured the excellent Careful Industries, Whose Knowledge and Mozilla Foundation. They discussed liberatory tech and some markedly non-liberatory (frankly extraordinarily bad!) examples from big tech companies
- a memorable and powerful session from the folks at Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, which actually moved me to tears
- an inspiring tour of organisations across the pond demonstrating Practices of Transition, hosted by Cassie Robinson (who helped shape Catalyst’s early model and narrative work). I appreciated the invitation from some speakers to ‘live into’, rather than just ‘think about’, radically new futures and ways of being/seeing. Because systems change starts with personal transformation. It resonates with the values>principles>behaviours work we give a lot of attention to at Catalyst.
Check out the speakers and programme. The recordings should be up soon.
Megan: Redesigning budgeting processes
I’ve gotten quite a lot of joy from designing our new approach to budgeting and reforecasting. It’s great to have control of this as we’re now our own entity. The first task is to get this working with our fantastic accountants, but with an eye on our aspiration for this to be openly shared, so also considering the needs of the wider network.
Ellie and Abi: the new governance circle grows stronger
We’ve had two in person meetings of our fledgling Governance circle this week — one to reflect on and compost the old, and one to look towards the new. We’ve been figuring out:
- what we know
- what we need to figure out
- the steps to work out who makes what decision
- forming as a proper team.
In doing this we’ve been building the foundations and modelling the ways of working that we think support our mission.
And we’ve also found more clarity on the Governance circle’s scope and how it fits alongside wider Catalyst activity (at least for now).
The Catalyst values formed a cornerstone of how we approached the day. Making those values live and breathe throughout every aspect of Catalyst will be a key focus of our work together and an indicator of our impact as a group of committed people.
Challenges ahoy
Megan: managing capacity but appreciating the team
There are times when you feel equipped to throw yourself into all the messy, difficult and challenging things. And other times when you have to recognise that you don’t have that capacity. It’s been a challenging few weeks for me with a scare (which turned out to be a false alarm) to do with my cancer diagnosis.
I’ve needed to think carefully about my capacity for deep and difficult work, but also the impact on others if I feel unable to do this. I’m really grateful to the team and our partners for supporting me to think this through and for their understanding and support.
Ellie: convening many people to meet for 2 days
We’re struggling to find time to convene our activity lead partners together, given busy diaries.
Rather than waiting for two whole days where everyone is free, which was the original hope, we’ll now be gathering folks online for a session to share what they’ve been up to since we last all met in March, and their plans and progress for this phase of work. Then we’ll still try to hold at least one in person day, as there are a couple of new people joining the group and it helps so much to have face to face time to connect and build trust together.
Abi: finding stability
Good enough for now, safe enough to try
When you are genuinely trying to work differently, all the normal rules are up for grabs — that’s great, but also de-stabilising. What’s the minimum structure and clarity that I need to do good work… Oh wait! Each of us have different minimums… Ahhhh…
I have managed to find more stability by:
- sticking with it
- focussing on clearly defining what we do know right now
- repeating this mantra: good enough for now, safe enough to try.
