Meeting in our humanity
Meeting in our humanity
Could it be as easy as that? Could we shed all structures and conventions and simply meet each other in our humanity and engage in exploring each other's questions? Being a mirror to each other?
This week we spent a day with one of our partners, Tamkeen, exploring alternative ways of being in partnership beyond a traditional funder-grantee relationship. In particular, we wanted to explore how reporting could look like if it was not about a grantee reporting their progress to a funder, but about two equal partners coming together with an intent of joint learning.
What happened during the day was, indeed, joint learning, but in a different way than had I expected. And yet, looking back on it, it makes a lot of sense. But let me begin in the beginning.
In a way, Tamkeen was the perfect organisation to explore this with (I have written about Tamkeen before). Fondation Botnar has partnered with Tamkeen due to their work in the education system in Morocco. Tamkeen is, at the same time as being an NGO, an approach to co-create the conditions for societal metamorphosis through co-reflection and co-creation. In their own words:
Tamkeen is referred to in many ways. There is the Tamkeen community foundation for human development, a registered Moroccan NGO with a team of facilitators coming mainly from the neighbourhoods of Tangier. ... They co-create and co-facilitate the Tamkeen practice and approach with the partners of Tamkeen. Together with their partners, they preserve the essence of Tamkeen. Then there is Tamkeen as a societal development approach and practice which can be described as anexperience-based, relationship-oriented, co-created, co-facilitated, process of inquiry, learning, and understanding, embedded in epistemic humility, trusting our human potential and our humanity, realising the existentiality of love. And finally, there is the meaning of the Arabic word Tamkeen. (Emphasis in the original.)
The reporting practices of philanthropic and other funders are often geared towards extracting learning from funded partners and enable one-way accountability towards a board or towards the tax payer. This is not much different when we looked at our own reporting requirements, although we do have more flexibility as for what we expect our partners to submit. At the same time, we have a strong aspiration to evolve from a grant maker to a change maker or, maybe better, change partner. So, we are reflecting on and want to evolve different aspects of our work, including reporting. To that end, we are running various explorations of how we could do things differently.
Tamkeen was due to submit a report to us and so we decided to explore a conversational format of reporting - rather than them submitting a PDF following our usual reporting template. The idea was to start in the morning with co-creating the new reporting process based on a conversation that is then documented and submitted as report. In the afternoon we would then actually implement the newly co-created format immediately for Tamkeen.
I started us off with a list of questions that sound fairly conventional from a funder's perspective: - What have you done? Compared to what you set out to do. - What have you learned? Compared to what you set out to learn. - What have you achieved/what has changed? Compared to what you set out to achieve/change.
And I added these two for good measure: - What have you learned about what being successful means? - What would be appropriate ways to capture this success?
A colleague added a question about the challenges they are facing in their work.
As a colleague who was present later remarked, we expected be challenged on these questions and a negotiation to ensue what questions make sense or not. Instead what happened was that the conversation that ensued was a reflection of each other's perception of both the questions and the situation we find ourselves in. First, one of the members of the Tamkeen team asked why these questions were formulated in the second person rather than the to talk about 'us' - given that we want to be seen as partners?
In the conversation, more and more questions emerged and stories were shared about what happened on the ground in Morocco - but also stories from other projects that added perspectives from different contexts. I'm trying here to reproduce some of these questions in order of their appearance (I have slightly edited them for understanding but am deeply grateful for Karima who wrote them on post-it notes): - Which questions can we (the foundation) ask to incentivise learning? How can we ask partners about their own questions - what questions would you (the partner) like us (the foundation) to ask you? - The changes you (the partner) share in your stories, would they have happened without you? Was it going to happen anyway? Was it your presence that made the change happen? Is your being there doing something? (Theses questions wer specifically asked because of some stories that showed that Tamkeen is a way of being and asking questions rather than of doing certain things in a certain sequence.) - What is the meaning of growth (in the sense of scale)? What is the public recognition of your (the partner's) work (as a way to establish significance of change)? - How do we (the foundation) ask questions in a more humble way? - Why do we (the foundation) need reporting? What do we want to learn about? Conversely, why is it important to move away from reporting to conversations and shared learning? How can we record and transcribe these conversations and upload into our grant management system? Whose responsibility is that? - How can we (the foundation) look for stories that are meaningful to the people rather than for success stories? - How can we (the partners - which includes the foundation on equal level) create a 'flow field' in which a metamorphic transformation unfolds? (Metamorphic transformation is a term that is coming from Tamkeen, "It describes a development practice and approach that is not only constantly referred to as magical in its manifestations yet also transcends the prevalent approaches to systems change." source) - How about reframing reporting as part of the (learning) process itself? - Is there a more meaningful way to learn together? Will we say there is no need for a report because we are in it together? - What is the greatest 'risk' for this way of being in partnership? What are the obstacles for this process to flow? - How much emerges by itself? - What kind of conversation about a 'growing language' does this facilitate? (Growing language in the sense that we can say more things that we weren't able to say before. One colleague remarked that many of our partners would have to learn new language to engage in such a conversation.)
This is a long list of questions and I am not sure how much you can make of it if you were not part of the conversation. What I'm seeing is a pattern that shifts away from a question of reporting towards a question of learning together – and this movement in the pattern was created by learning together. This very process that we can observe emerges here in this conversation is the process we were looking for by setting up this experiment. Rather than to have a neat separation of developing an alternative process in the morning and then applying it in the afternoon, this separation dissolved into a process of joint learning in which the question of how to do reporting and the reporting by Tamkeen were woven together. And all the while we were learning a lot about ourselves and each other. That did indeed feel pretty magical.
As I wrote in the beginning, looking back at the day, this does make a lot of sense. Tamkeen is, after all, an "experience-based, relationship-oriented, co-created, co-facilitated, process of inquiry, learning, and understanding, embedded in epistemic humility, trusting our human potential and our humanity, realising the existentiality of love." What happened was Tamkeen. We learned about ourselves and we learned about our partners and together met in our shared humanity - we were a mirror to each other. No surprise that Tamkeen is seen as it's own meta-process, where recognition and appreciation of what happens in itself becomes a process of joint learning and co-creation, turning the lens back on the observer.
What does that leave us with? In a way, we could just leave it where we arrived at last night. All of my colleagues who were present and the partners agreed that it was a worthwhile exploration and that we learned a lot. However, we still need to have that report submitted - our compliance manager was very clear that she needed that PDF uploaded. I feel that I'm doing part of that right here and now, writing up my own experience of the day. I hope our partners from Tamkeen will add their part to it and then we can submit that as our progress report. Luckily, we do not have to adhere to the reporting template ...
If you made it all the way to here, dear reader, thank you. I'm not sure this post makes any sense for somebody who was not part of the process. I have to admit, Tamkeen really only makes sense to me now, after having had a glimpse of what it means by experiencing it myself.
Also, if you have made it all the way down to here, this means that this stuff grabs your interest, blows your hair back. In this case, you might be excited to know that Fondation Botnar is hiring a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Manager (or human being, really, no need to be a manager … titles ...). Do you want to work closely with me, every day? Geek out about these topics? Are you sure? Ok, if so, find out more on our website. Apply!
The Paper Museum
I have a new favourite podcast: Ologies by Amie Ward. I have listened to a few episode and one I found especially exciting was the episode on Bryology with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. Bryology is the science of mosses. Definitely worth a listen!
Here's the response of Dr. Kimmerer to the question how to mentally bridge Indigenous culture and intuition with Western science?
Yeah, I’m really grateful for that question. I think one of the ways that I try to bridge that, that I work both in my own writing and with my own teaching, is to think about the fact that within Indigenous knowledge systems, we recognize that human people have at least four different ways of understanding the world; certainly with the intellect, absolutely a mental way of processing and generating information. We also have physical knowledge from observation, from measurement, from sensing the world.
If we continue around that... think of it as this Medicine Wheel model, we have the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of the body in two of those quadrants. But then we have the emotional intelligence and we have spiritual knowledge, spiritual ways of knowing. All of those ways of knowing are valid and important. They're like different tools that you deploy for different purposes, for different questions that you might have. It's a very holistic way of thinking about knowledge as embracing all of those ways.
But in Western science, we've truncated that. In Western science, we privileged the knowledge of the intellect, and that which we can measure, and very explicitly set aside emotional and spiritual knowledge and say, “That doesn't count, that doesn't matter, that's not the real ‘valid’ knowledge.” So, the scientific way of knowing is a subset of Indigenous knowledge. That's the way I try to present it, is that one is a subset of the other. Each of them has these powerful ways of knowing, engaging different tools that we as people have.
The real key to navigating that boundary of two worlds, which I experience and understand, is to think about them as different gifts, as different tools. When you have a true/false question, the scientific ways of knowing and hypothesis testing, that's a darn good tool for a true/false question. But what if your question is bigger than that? You need not only what is true, but what is right, and what is meaningful, and what are the implications of it? And then, the holism of Indigenous knowledge can bring you to wisdom rather than just information.
Why have I added this to my Paper Museum? I love the idea of the Medicine Wheel showing different ways of knowing: through the intellect, through the body, through emotions, and through spirituality. I have been exploring some of these ways of knowing more deeply: certainly the intellectual path through studying natural sciences and more recently the body through intensively engaging with embodiment work.