Weeknotes 38
Climbing the fundraising mountain and paying the cost of vulnerability
The last time I wrote a Weeknote was April. It’s the longest I’ve not written. It’s been a tough 4 months. Sorry for no weeknotes!
I’m emerging back from a burnout that was long coming due to the grind of growing Chayn incredibly over the past two years during a pandemic where I lost multiple members of my extended family as well as my cat, and some other difficulties in my personal life. All of this rolled into a ball and got stuck in my heart, weighing it down so much that the words could not rise out of my heart and throat.
But I’m getting back into my regular writing practice as I’ve had time to rest, enrich my life and give myself the time to breathe. I took an actual holiday and got to see 49 members of my family and friends. And I’ve done lots of interesting things at Chayn that I’ve missed talking to you about. I’ve missed this! So, from the whispers of unwritten weeknotes of these months is this particular one.
In my recent travels, I ran into so many strangers, peers and acquaintances who told me they loved reading these weeknotes. This was so motivating. So here we are — my first Sunday after all the travels where I am sitting on my bed next to my sleepy cat, drinking tea, watching TV and finishing up this post.
What I did
Fundraising
I had a deadline of September 2022 to raise 300k and I managed to raise 200 000, which gives me enough time to raise the rest by February.
https://twitter.com/herahussain/status/1544033586478829569
Nurturing team
We held the second retreat of the year and it went so well! I also invested a lot of time in settling new colleagues in and doing exit interviews.
Celebrating wins
We launched three major projects in this time period which are worth mentioning:
- Chayn’s strategy for 2022–25. All of you contributed to it so I hope you like going through it and spot some reflection of it in the documents.
- Less Than 2 Percent podcast. In some ways, this was the most challenging project of my career and I’m so happy to have launched it with such a blast in UsTwo offices in London to an almost full house. The project is now up for 3 Lovie Awards. Find us under Best Co-Hosts, Public Service and Activism, & Crime and Justice Episode! Vote by 6th October.
- Orbits — a global field guide to advance intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed interventions to technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TGBV). We worked on this with End Cyber Abuse and it took 16 months and consultations with dozens of experts across the world to complete it.
p.s. I also continued to do media interviews.
What I learned
Fundraising’s impact on the well-being of executives
This has been perhaps one of the hardest phases of Chayn’s existence. I’ve felt the pit of despair and have not wanted to wake up many mornings. I’ve told my partner that I wished I wasn’t alive because the stress of salaries and the feeling of begging for funding when you’re doing critical work was too much for me to manage. I’m a pretty resilient person and everyone who knows me always says that but this truly broke me.
I’m out the other end now. I feel good, and motivated and I’ve met most of my fundraising target but I did realise that while I like being transparent about my struggles, sharing my anxiety about fundraising in fact made most people in my team absorb that stress. Some took that stress as instability especially if they had never worked in the non-profit sector. Whereas those who are familiar with the charity sector, simply expected it. I don’t think I’ll be sharing my stress around fundraising in that same way again, and will instead create a task and outcome-oriented framing through sharing our Fundraising Trello board and sharing news of when funding bids are submitted, won and lost.
Generosity and cold hands
In this difficult time period, I’ve experienced such generosity from acquaintances, supporters, existing funders, and friends in introducing me to funders and coming up with ideas to raise money. I’ve also experienced some shockingly cold hands and shrugs. It broke my heart, especially when it came from those I’ve been very generous with but I remembered that this too is a life lesson; and instead of feeling bitter about this, I should remember what my culture and spirituality teach me. It teaches me to be open, generous and share, even if those I share with do not do the same for me because I don’t share with the expectation of return. I do it because it’s how I choose to live my life. If I dream of a feminist future and collectivism and shared resources are a cornerstone of that vision, then I need to bring those values into my practice.
A lot of people like transparency in principle but don’t like or understand it when it’s implemented
This is a more difficult one. I’ve got a lot to say about this but I have no conclusions. I’ll munch on this and come back to it in another post.
Vulnerability comes with a cost
This piece of discovery with my amazing leadership coach really hit it home for me. I consider myself a very open and vulnerable leader. The whole organisation has been — but not everyone is comfortable with that.
Everyone wants everything right away but that doesn’t mean I have to provide it
I self-impose a lot of urgencies on myself because someone asks me for something and I don’t push back or ask for space to come back to it. This is something I’m going to change. I give a lot of space to my colleagues but don’t give the same courtesy to myself so I’m going to do that. I’m going to prioritise my well-being — at least, I will try to.
Culture misalignment in the organisation
Another lightbulb moment for me in my sessions with my leadership coach was that there was some cultural misalignment in my team. We grew big so quickly and so many new people joined without having the background and history of being within the Chayn community that they brought into the work ideals of what a charity or tech project should be like. What the pace of such an organisation should be like? What the projects should be set up as? And the list goes on. I struggled with the rigidity of these questions and statements. The binaries. As if is only one right way of doing things. It’s something I’ve learned can be attributed to white supremacy “work” culture. When you start quizzing these “should be” statements, they reveal assumptions that have nothing to do with Chayn. So I’m running a series of cultural values workshops with the team to uncover and reframe these assumptions. It’s a really exciting piece of work and I’ve already got some stuff to share next month.
My team appreciates and adores me.
In our last retreat, I ran a gratitude exercise about people saying something they appreciate about a colleague and so many of the team chose to say something nice to me. It made me well up and given these months have been so hard, it gave me the strength to go for my holiday knowing they had my back.
Something else
It’s been a long post so even though I’ve done so many cool things recently, I’m going to skip on those. I’ve decided to write a blog about all of them together at the end of the month. For now, I’m leaving you with some cool pictures from my holiday!
