The other day, we hosted an aperitif to introduce people to what we do. Without vomiting everything we said to you here, I thought it would make more sense to reflect on the reactions of the people that came. So, in a nutshell, they were…
Amazed at how many activities we’ve got going on. Understandably, as we ourselves often lose count of what we’ve got planned over the next few months in London, let alone across the other cities.
Surprised at being welcomed with food and drinks. It’s a trick we had up our sleeve that you need to get the wine flowing to get the conversation going. The regular appearances of the chef bringing up plates of pizza and bowls of dips always provided welcome interludes!
Enthusiastic to look at how they could contribute with the skills they had and eager to explore with us opening up research with and beyond universities, understanding the differences between transnational and local activism and debating the impact of riots across different cities, as well as demographic changes, press freedom and the role of religion and politics in Europe.
These are all “hot potato” topics…which could be the tagline for our next meetup when it gets colder!
What did we learn?
1. Embrace the mess, you need rules for radicals not for robots
The start of anything new is inevitably uncomfortable and confusing. Allow for this, as people move closer to getting involved in your activities. If you try to move too quickly to rigidly planning everything, they won’t feel a sense of ownership in it, or at least that’s our excuse…
That’s why we introduced what we do and why we do it in a very informal way, while at the same time encouraging them to help shape our future local meetups.
2. Don’t take them for granted, value them as people you couldn’t do without
When people do decide to get involved and give freely of their time and energy, recognise and value their efforts. This can be as simple as thanking them regularly, buying a round of drinks or getting them to lead parts of your activity.
It’s a tricky tightrope to let people discover what they want to do and to galvanise their energies to get involved. Different people have different motivations and skills, which are shaped not just by their lives but also by their moods. What they might be interested one day, they might not the other, or vice versa.
This is even more important to consider when you have a network like ours which is partly run by volunteers. Some prefer running the workshops, others coordinating the work and others putting forward ideas. These are all interdependent , you need a variety of people picking up the baton and sharing between each other, knowing that if they need to pass on the baton for whatever reason, someone else is always there to catch it.
3. Start with your personal story
Test it out after this session down the pub, talk about what the spark was that got you involved and quickly you’ll find that people will get excited about the values you stand for. We used this, describing the moment we first met the concept of the Network and the journey we’ve been on. One of the big challenges is that our relationship with the Network was much more visceral as we helped found the Network in the first place, along with our fellow founding members, so the stories and symbols of the Network were shaped by our experiences of it and of each other.
The new structures subconsciously institutionalise the emotional bonds and instinctive behaviours forged between us as ways to adapt and shape what we were building, perhaps more than any idealised form of governance.
But these behaviours were products of working out how to share, how to negotiate and how to cope between people’s personalities and motivations.
