In my last blog I wrote about how important it is for an
agency to have an identity as a team. This is a team of people who share a
belief in a different future that they believe is possible to bring about. They
share a belief in the best approaches that should be used to bring that future
about. These approaches can also just be cultures, or ways of behaving that
unite a group of people into a team whose whole is greater than the sum of its
parts.
At Xavier Project we are united by our core value, which is
solidarity. I have written about solidarity in the past in this blog http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2015/08/solidarity-xavier-projects-core-value.html.
Our core value permeates all our cultures and approaches but we also focus on
three pillars that summarise our organisational cultures. These are “open”, “cohesive”
and “pioneering”. We chose them because these are words that other people use to describe us, but
we could also be a lot more open, cohesive and pioneering so we focus on them
as cultures we would like to display more fully.
Open
The culture of being open is heavily inspired by our core
value of solidarity, in that we can’t show solidarity with each other, with the
refugees we work with and all other stake holders without being open. We are
known for always having an open door to refugees and being accessible to people
who need our help or want to partner with us. The word “open” also signifies
our belief that societies around the world should be more open to refugees
fleeing conflicts, famines or extreme poverty – the phrase open doors therefore has a twin meaning for us.
However, the culture of being open has implication at other
levels as well. We have been congratulated by donors for the transparency in
our reporting and the accuracy in our financial accounting. We are also keen to
be open-minded to new ideas and ready to listen to anyone’s ideas of how to be
more creative, be they full-time team members or others.
Cohesive
The culture of cohesion is inspired by the ideas in my last
blog about “agency” http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2017/08/on-agency.html
. It is vital that a team should be united in its vision and way of doing
things if it wants to make a change and we foster a culture of focusing on this
cohesion within the team. We have ways
of doing things that we believe are the Xavier Project way, such as leading by
example, communicating clearly and effectively, taking responsibility, and mentoring
others in the team. But cohesion to us does not mean that we all need to be
robots operating on identical lines of code – in fact as part of our culture of
being one team with a shared vision we welcome diversity; diversity of
opinions, diversity of background and diversity of individual ambitions. In
fact more than welcome, we encourage team members to employ their individual
flair in their programmes and urge people to pursue interests that might not
immediately line-up with our work plan, whether during or outside of work
hours.
Pioneering
In the long run this diversity gives us a team that has a
far broader understanding of the core and the peripheries of the context we are
working and a team that can come up with more colourful ways of addressing age-old
problems. To be pioneering in the work we do we need to understand the gaps in
our sector and the things that are being tried elsewhere that could work in our
context. This means we all need to be willing to research and to learn. It
means we have to accept we can be wrong, and ready to be flexible and adapt our
programmes according to the need and to the potential. A great example of this
is our Tamuka department. Tamuka means speak out in Swahili and in 2012 we
opened Tamuka as a platform for refugees to speak out about the realities of
their lives. It was an idea that came from the refugee community, but about a
year after we launched we realised that refugees were more interested in using
Tamuka to learn and to engage in their societies, not necessarily to use it as
a platform to promote their rights. Today Tamuka has evolved into the
department that runs the Community Enterprise Cycle as described here http://odieromondi.blogspot.co.ke/2017/01/xavier-projects-community-enterprise.html
.
Most importantly, to be pioneering in our sector you need to
be resilient knowing you will consistently come against barriers that seem to
be unsurmountable and problems that appear to be infinitely complex. People
have tried to solve these problems before and failed, so if we are to succeed
we need to be radical. Being radical nearly always means you have to be
unpopular with someone and it can be exhausting so you need a lot of energy. At
Xavier Project we have come up with numerous radical ideas, such as our iGCSE
project and our community run hubs, but a challenge with having a culture of
always coming up with new ideas is that we need to be better at completing our
ideas and seeing them all the way through to the
