The Sustainability Business, or The Business of Sustainability

This week’s weeknotes are on big, existential questions and the balance between honesty and ambition.

It’s that time again, there’s six months left on the programme that sustains Solidaritech’s core delivery. It pays our rent, it pays for our technician’s time and it pays for our finance, monitoring and reporting person’s time. It’s also EU funding so we’re fairly sure there won’t be more where that came from because we’ve TAKEN BACK CONTROL.

There’s clearly some big questions we need to ask ourselves, which is what I’ve mostly been doing this week. We’re in a really great position because we have some great organisations who want to work with us on joint bids. But these things are variations from our core mission. I worry that by joining up with other organisations, we’ll lose our own independence.

So for me I suppose the really big question is how sustainable are we? We’ve tried to do everything as “sustainably” as possible, and we’re literally a central part of some other people’s sustainability strategies. But Solidaritech has grown to become crucial to a lot of people and even more organisations. How do we capture that “sustainability” and make it into something that’s actually sustainable?

Right now we should be planning big strategies around what we’re going to do over the next five years. But right now our grand five year plan revolves around still being here. We dont have the time, headspace or quite frankly the energy to hold on until the next government arrives and the environment around the refugee and asylum support sector is, to say the least, downbeat.

I have to promise people that their jobs are safe, but I don’t think for a minute that they believe me, and if I’m being honest neither do I. However, our team — and I’m including volunteers and staff in this — are brilliant, they’re adaptable and talented. Venceremos, a Spanish/Portuguese word meaning “we will overcome”. I’m just not sure how yet. We’ve been in this position before and I am too cynical to think we wont be again.

The big question for me is really “How honest can we be? How honest should we be?” We’re living in a hostile environment, so do we be completely honest about this to funders, or do we maintain the impression of this beautiful swan whilst paddling furiously underneath?

Tangentially, but also related to this, our office environment has changed, so can we work in a big premises move into the funding — do funders even help with or understand that? — or do we stay were we are, rootbound, for the time being?

The next six months will be definitive for Solidaritech, I hope that it’s definitive in a positive way. We need to keep the lights on and the bills paid, but we also need space to grow and the nourishment to thrive. We have what it takes to succeed in the first sense. But making it succeed in the second will be the real key to us not being back in exactly the same situation in a year’s time.

Image Credit: A detail of Ricardo Gomez Angel’s Bosco verticale 121 from unsplash