The ski resort of Borovets in Bulgaria several years ago was the scene for me of a very powerful experience in my work trying to support people to campaign for change. I had been in this beautiful location for several days doing some work supporting Roma communities across the country; sadly, it was summer time and there was no opportunity for any winter sports.
We had covered all of the basics around campaigning and had developed some real momentum around the issue on health care that the group particularly wanted to focus on. All seem to be going really well until we moved onto the penultimate session for the workshop, where we were focusing on what I would call the future story or the chain of events that you will make happen that will help bring about change on your issue.
I sensed that there was a real nervousness in the room, and at the coffee break I was keen to explore why people had suddenly become quite anxious.
It became apparent that the key reason was that a representative of their key funder was in the room. There had been the dawning realisation amongst some of the participants that in essence I was encouraging them to think about the future to say that they would do things not fully confident that those things would actually happen.
Some of them expressed their anxiety that they would be incredibly reluctant to say anything to a funder, without a cast-iron guarantee that they could actually make it happen. In essence they were incredibly nervous and scared about anything that might even begin to look like failure, thinking that such a statement would be used against them.
I thought this was a really interesting and helpful insight. One really important element of campaigning is, I think, a readiness to accept that you will do some things that will fail – that certainly has happened to me in my career! But it is only by doing things and sometimes failing that you learn and are able to do things differently. Failure can be very important as long, as you don’t keep repeating it, but look to learn lessons from your experience.
I discussed this feedback with the representative of the funder. She very graciously offered to stand up at the beginning of the next session and explicitly say to the group that she was looking for them to be ready to fail, to tell her why they had failed, but most importantly to tell her what they had learnt and what they would do differently. She did just as she had promised and placed huge value on having the courage to do things, being prepared to fail but then reflecting on the learning.
There seemed to be a collective sigh across the whole of the room. Her words certainly didn’t reassure everybody in the group, but enough people took heart from what she had said, and there was a sense of being able to report in a very different way on their campaigning.
I think working in the NGO sector, but it is not exclusive to that sector, that there is a real nervousness about failure. And sometimes this nervousness can actually hold people back from trying things which could potentially move them on. For me it was so powerful to hear a funder talk about failure, embrace it, attach a value to it, but also say how keen she was to be able to see the learning from this experience.
How do you embrace failure in your campaigning? Are you ready to embrace it and reflect on the learning or do you feel sometimes it holds you back? It would be great to know what you think.
To find out more about Jonathan’s work, do visit his website: https://jonathanelliscampaigns.com