An Offer of Presence

If you are in a leadership position, being called toward accountability, and gathering your team to navigate change...

If you interested in the gaps (and how to resource them) between the experience and aspirations of your work...

If you are feeling overwhelmed by urgency, experiencing burn-out culture and want to shift the pattern...

You are not alone.

Leadership can feel isolating when we don't have networks of connection, a practice of feedback, or tools for orienting and grounding within change. Aspirational statements can get in the way of listening to everyday experiences if they are not conversational, if they do not deeply listen. And this mix of isolation and disillusionment can and does lead to burn out.

After 20years of working in the BC Non-Profit Sector, I know this because I have experienced it.

I want to support your organization to be more effective at delivering on its mission of change and support your workplace culture to be an enriching, validating, inclusive and equitable environment to work in.

We are on this long arc of justice together. And we can design and iterate our work, to uphold our commitments to:

1) Deeply listen to the voices of those most directly impacted;

2) Deliver and redistribute resources in the communities we support;

3) Value the health and experience of the people who make up our teams.

So many of us in the non-profit and social justice fields are existing in overstretched and liminal spaces.

We are between healing and inter-generational trauma, in the impact of oppressive systems. We are between institutions that allow us to access funding and grassroots organising that builds mutual aid and is the groundtruth for needed change. We are between government, funders and the people we seek to support and empower the liberation of. We are caught between work from within to make change, and burn it down. We want to stay in the struggle, we need rest. These inbetweens, these contradictions, can be a frustrating place to exist.

We can expand this binary, however, and find that there is a role for all of us: a place(s) on the wheel of social change. There is a spectrum of possibility in the liminal, and an ecotone for each of us to thrive in. We can assess, learn, and practice tools, to sustain that place, and we can also move as we, and the conditions we are in, inevitably change.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex upholds the very systems which the organisations within seek to change. Vision, desire, passion, empathy. Disconnection, over-extraction, the funding chase, the grind. Looking at this pattern, facing our complicity, means we can make visible a pathway for change.

Small shifts. Practice. Deep Listening. Transparency.

Understanding who we are, both as people in leadership positions and as organisations, is key to navigating change.

I deliver a process of grounding into values, developing shared language, and designing process and protocol to support ongoing conversation:

Mapping where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to be, so that these threads of past, present and future may weave together in your presence.

Connecting actual policy and procedure to aspirational values and systems, through ongoing practice.

We are, collectively, in times of massive change that ask us to know ourselves, listen deeply, and slow down.

To be active commitments to:

>> Making visible the systems of power;

>> Unlearning frameworks of extraction;

>> Resisting the re-creation of violence;

>> Dismantling systems of oppression.

We can do this within the ecosystems of change and movement work we are a part of:

>> Surfacing, holding with care, and validating the experiences of our team and community;

>> Developing shared language and protocols that resonate and align with held values;

>> Increasing transparency of organisational structures and systems;

>> Identifying governance systems accessibility;

>> Practicing accountability.

Navigating change is complex. It is an ongoing practice. It requires us to face our fears, name tensions and build alternatives. I believe it is something we must ultimately do together, not alone.

My offer of presence, is to:

1. Deliver a process, informed by your needs and goals, and by the frameworks I hold of Liberation, Equity, Solidarity with Indigenous, Black and People of Colour, and Healing Justice;
   
2. Hold space for inherent tensions, without shying away from (and in practice to be interrupting) harmful impact;
   
3. Bring my own experiences, across many non-profit settings, of working towards change, away from burn-out;
   
4. Be present and share my full and vulnerable self, in the practice that you may do the same.

To engage in this offer:

1. Send me a note, share what you know about your needs, goals, timeline and resources. I'm available by email: haddoncommon@gmail.com
   
2. If it sounds like a possible fit, and with capacity, we'll connect to learn more about each other.
   
3. Together we'll determine whether a consultation package, a workshop/series, or a grant writing package, might be a fit for you.
   
4. If it's a consultation package, we'll create a bundle: from 3 months to 12 months, we'll find a fit that allows us to work at the pace of relationship, to build trust, to practice, and to return.

all photos by haddon common, time and times.