Director of Operations for The Alliance To Feed The Earth In Disasters since 2018.
Director of Communications since 2021 (dual management position).
Read more about me here: https://allfed.info/about/team-and-board?view=article&id=16&catid=10
Sonia_Cassidy
Karma: 241
EA resilience to catastrophes & ALLFED’s case study
ALLFED’s 2023 Highlights
And thank you, Nell, for your supportive first comment on my first post.
Thank you, Vasco, for this, and also for the way you went about this.
Transparent discussions around any issue are important to have and generally helpful, especially when motivated by truth-seeking and creating a better world.
It is something to be generally encouraged and not to limit or curtail.
As you have yourself discovered, we are quite willing to engage in such conversations at ALLFED (on both personal and organisational level). You have suffered no repercussions for voicing not-quite-aligned opinions and, indeed, stimulated a whole bunch of healthy debates.
It is good to acknowledge that such conversations are rarely easy and usually uncomfortable. But the ability to gracefully engage in the difficult and the uncomfortable is in itself something to aspire to and in itself something of a measure of personal and organisational maturity.
In such conversations, a lot depends on the organisations’ - and one’s managers’ - willingness and ability to listen and to be disagreed with, and a lot also depends on the manner in which such issues are brought up.
Speaking on behalf of ALLFED and with regard to this particular post, we appreciated the heads-up and not being surprised by it. This simple (?) act of care and courtesy can now, in turn, further facilitate conversations, and help build trust in everyone’s good will, and also in our collective ability and competence to have difficult conversations (on whatever subject).
Personally—and here comes my “personal opinion” piece—I think that periodic shake-ups to any status quo are generally healthy and necessary for growth. I appreciate your courage to pursue your truth, especially taken your awareness that this is not “how things normally are done.”
Thank you for these, Anjan. Yup, staying focused is so very important, and the question “is this in scope or out of scope” common. I will check out your recommendation.
It was only recently that I published a post on here on the recent activation of ALLFED’s response team and the EA movement’s resilience. I am gratified to now read Case for emergency response teams. I reckon we will be seeing more on this and “emergency response teams” would be a useful tag to get going.
Hi Phil, thank you… I understand that you will be seeing Sahil in just a couple of days? He will be happy to talk to you about this.
Dear both, I appreciate your discussion on my proposed tag.
It definitely needs a qualifier, as “Resilience” on its own (as it stood when I last checked) not only does not reflect the intention of the tag but it would also be potentially confusing (as it can also mean a few other things, some of them quite different (e.g. mental or personal resilience).
I welcome trying various descriptors for size… Though I would still vote for the original suggestion of “EA Resilience”, as one that—to me at least—is clearest and to the point.
Could you perhaps elaborate why “Movement resilience” might be preferable?
Hi Yuli,
I appreciate the time you have taken to write this comment.
Ref 1: For sure, it takes thought, design, testing, and a bit of relevant background to produce tools from scratch… It was the Covid-19 pandemic that galvanised us to crack on with it. So, if someone wants to adapt them for their org, that is obviously more efficient and they would be very welcome.
Ref 2: I was indeed considering linking to and/or sharing more info on our triage and decision-making aid when writing this post. The reason I decided against it on this occasion is, quite simply, it is not yet in a sharable state (we are still calibrating how it calculates scores and exact weighting).
Ref 3: No idea if there is an EA temp agency—maybe somebody else here can advise.
Ref. your closing comments, great, and thank you for your support of the EA resilience centre idea, and of a rapid response task force. And yes, ignore your team’s needs at your peril. We are all humans, and if your response team—or indeed any team—crumbles, it’s a downward spiral from there. So hurrah to team well-being (as you can see from the pics, ours includes ALLFED sporks and tardigrades :).
Look forward to connecting with you further.