Standing in the Centre of It All

It's hard to believe now that I'm coming up on the halfway marker of my time with Emmaus in East London. Though it's an utter cliche to say it, in many ways it feels like I've just gotten started, I'm still learning so much new each day (though, today it was largely the necessity of bringing a sturdy umbrella when you're heading to a meeting suffiicently far froma tube station), but if I take a more critical look back, I'm actually quite a bit further than I realize. One of the the big keywords you'll hear a lot in any business or, really, any organization you'll ever work in is "stakeholder". It's intensely overused to the point of being bashed into a kind of soup of bureautcratic meaninglessness at this point, but at the end of the day it kind of just means "the people and groups interested in and affected by whatever it is you're doing". It you look at your project as a sort of wheel hub, the stakeholders are all those spokes you need to be making proper connections with to ensure that things go as they're supposed to. It's those connections that can make or break any project, particularly when dealing with complex social problems involving a number of interlocking barriers to success at a variety of levels. You may need to engage one stakeholder group with a certain set of concerns and incenvtives whilst looking at an entirely different, though related, area with another. One of the unique advantages of the placement I'm currently under is that I've been able to work with both Emmaus and Streets of Growth, seeing both sides of the project partnership and how both organizations engage with each other as stakeholders and partners. I've also had the immense privilege of enegaging with a number of other groups, from the local housing association and borough council to grassroots women's support groups about how Emmaus can engage in its relatively new Tower Hamlets environment. What projects and partnerships it can pursue to become a truly integrated fixture of the community, helping to tackle some social problems and benefit community members whilst also raising funds for its core charitable mission. Taking on youth unemployment and skills development, as Emmaus East London is pursuing in the project I'm working on with them, amongst others things, is a deeply stakeholder-based process where that engagement is so critical to productive outcomes. To touch on one point that needs to be critically examined, there needs to be a commitment to having one group at the centre of consideration in all actions the organization takes. Namely, the clients you're looking to engage with themselves: what they need, what they wan, what their existing talents and interts and where your organization can come in to serve them. This aspect, self-evident though it may seem is often overlooked by persons or groups seeking positive social change, occasionally blinded by their own ideas as to how projects should proceed. Personally, I found this out a little bit this week in doing some interviews and engagement with a youth group organized by Streets of Growth for a personal development workshop who graciously agreed to discuss employement barriers in the local area with me. Tp spare an intense amount of detail, though they did express interest in some of the training opporunities Emmaus had envisioned, they also revealed some barriers we hadn't considered and expressed skepticism as to the local usefulness of some areas of training. In essence, there was a desire by Emmaus to apply the model of training it had developed for the long-term unemployed and excluded within an in-house community environment to a very different client base with a very different set of pre-existing skills and barriers. We've had to go a bit back to the drawing board, in other words, but it's entirely necessary; better to find this out now and to dig into possible corrections (as I will be doing in follow-up interviews next week) than to have actually invested time and money into running an ineffectual program later on. Viewing ourselves as the project centre, bouncing off of the different stakholders and partenrs we work with, managing their relationships and expectations, often has the perverse effecto allowing the forgetting of who it is that this work is ultimately done for the benefit of. It's something we do well to keep in mind. ---- When you stand in the aisle of a train in London, it's hard escape the feeling that the whole world and its people are rushing by you. A thousand and one backgrounds, accents, occupations, and personal peculitairites swirl together in a singularly held symphonic note. The sense that you, too, are one in that note to the rest of its inheritors is a sense both overwhelming and comforting. It connects you to a common experience with those around you, even the ones you've never seen before, never will see again; the common experience of rushing through life, trying to get wherever it is you're going at the fastest speed possible. London might be, along with New York and Tokyo, part of that holy troika of cities that never sleep and in doing so make the world spin ever more quickly, but its belied by those moments when you find yourself in along with 50 others in a window reflection against one of those Underground station logos. You reflect on how still you all are in that moment, whether chipper or exhausted, whether in a suit jacket and tie or a t-shirt and shorts, and then the train clatters to life again, and you're part of those wires making everything move.

#cartervance