Why I applied

I applied to join the board of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust late last year, and I was officially appointed at their quarterly board meeting last Friday.

If you don't know JRCT, it's a Quaker grant making trust, founded by Joseph Rowntree back in 1904. He believed that the way to remedy the injustices of the world was not to relieve their ill-effects, but to strike at their very roots. Tackling the structural causes of injustice remain at the heart of its work today. It funds organisations which are working to address the causes of conflict and injustice, guided by the Quaker values of equality, truth, peace, and simplicity.

In the world we are living in all these years later, working on these issues seems more urgent that ever and this cause drew me in before I'd even finished reading the application pack.

But, I was also attracted to the way they do business - and intrigued by it too. Quaker governance runs on discernment rather than debate. Decisions are reached by sitting with a question together until clarity emerges, not by who argues most persuasively or who speaks the most or the loudest. There's no vote. There's a sense of the meeting, and if that sense isn't there yet, the decision waits. You don't force it through because the agenda says you should. This is extraordinarily refreshing after a decade in and around politics!

We are so used to votes as the mark of a fair process that we don't interrogate whether it's a good process. A vote settles a disagreement but doesn't necessarily resolve it. There are winners and losers. Whoever has the numbers wins, and the other side complies or grumbles. The room moves on having never actually had to reckon with why people saw things differently in the first place. Watch any vote-driven institution for long enough, parliament being the obvious example, and you see positions are set before the debate even starts, persuasion aimed at winning rather than understanding, and no one really listening to each other. Discernment asks something harder. It requires you to stay in the room until you can see what the other person sees, and it assumes that's possible, that the truth of a decision isn't already fixed.

Having spent a lot of years in rooms that ran on the opposite logic, joining a board that starts from a different place, where the right answer can be found rather than fought for, feels very refreshing and worth sharing with you here.

If you're on a board, of any kind, it might be worth asking which logic yours runs on. Are you persuading each other, or are you discerning together? They produce very different rooms, and very different decisions.

Useful links 🔗

Interested in Quaker methods for decision making? Here is some information.

Day of the Week 📆

It was Windrush Day on Monday and I saw this campaign to recover the ship's anchor from the Mediterranean seabed to create a permanent national memorial in London to symbolise "courage, hope, resilience and the contribution of the Windrush Generation to modern Britain".

What am I reading? 📚

You can read Joseph Rowntree's memo, marked "Exceedingly Private", in which he outlines the formation of three trusts in his name here.

What am I watching? 👀

The new Cape Fear is pretty frightening. We're going to go back and watch the old ones.

What am I listening to?👂

I listened to the first episode of Anita Rani's fabulous new podcast, Sisters of defiance, featuring Meera Syal. Meera shares her story of her growing up in a small village near Wolverhampton and going to Manchester University to study English and Drama, and what drives and motivates her to such amazing global success and acclaim. Now Dame Meera Syal, btw.

Joy-giving things 😍

It's record-breakingly hot here in the UK at the moment. I'm so lucky that we have a shady nature reserve, playing fields and the canal just down the road so it's not too hard to escape the heat. Hope this shady picture helps you feel a bit cooler through the screen.

Have a great weekend, everyone

Lucy

ChangeOut is created by Lucy Caldicott. You can find more about my work at ChangeOut.org.

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