To celebrate my 9 year anniversary of being a part of the British Council Active Citizens programme – here are a few lessons I learned along the way!
1) We never really understand the problem – When you work in communities, we constantly think we know best! However, sometimes the problem may be something bigger or even smaller than we think it is. At the beginning of my disability Social Action Project – I always imagined that they just didn’t have the funding or resources. I walked into numerous centres and found out the problem, really, was in the fact that South Asians assume disability is a flaw too shameful to accept. Awareness is what they lacked!
2) We can never create a solution without community – There’s a famous proverb, Give a man a fish, he may feed his family for a day; Teach a man to fish and he may feed them every day. Whatever, the problem you wish to solve, if you don’t bring the community into the fold, it will die its natural death.
3) You don’t have to stick to the same thing! – I always assumed that when you do want to change communities, it’s best to stick to the same line of work but you don’t. Throughout, my nine years I worked on things as diverse as disability, Women empowerment, child education, environment, COP26, Rio+20, Volunteer Empowerment, Language Skills, Cybersafety and of course Rape and Abuse. I think this follows me in my life outside the volunteering bubble – if you’ve known me long enough, you would know my love for new things and my love of saying yes follows me to this day.
4) You learn more by facilitating others. The Sri Lankan education system is a spoonfeed. I absolutely loathed it. This was probably the first time, I learnt through games, activities, and asking questions. Overnight, I learned to listen rather than preach when talking to people. Most people already know the answers and have interesting ideas and maybe sometimes all you need to do is ask the right question.
5) You can’t just wing it When you’ve accepted the responsibility to teach or facilitate, you have to put in the work. Do the prep, make the materials, figure out what they want, use the feedback and adjust based on how your audience takes in everything you are trying to convey.
6) The friends you make are worth it! Life is all about networking but imagine if the people around you just want to make the world a better place. They constantly strive to make that dent in the world and have got your back as you try to make yours. If I am ever in a bind, I know for 9 years straight they’d be a call away. It also helps that some of them are (as we jokingly say) friends with the Queen.
7) Always consider your bias. We’ve all got them, either from the lives we live or the privileges we don’t even realise we have. Don’t assume anything and as we say hold your assumptions lightly not tightly!
8) Use the Feedback. Listen to it, own it, and improve from it. I’ve heard it all: ‘You are amazing, I’d really love to be just like you,’ to ‘I have no idea why you wasted my time’. When you are bringing in change, not everyone is going to agree with you but listen to what they have to say and use it to either tweak your solution or understand their concerns to pitch a solution that might as well be the right fit.
9) You don’t have to be ‘On’ all the time! You are allowed to get out of the loop when you want to and come back to it even years down the line. No one has a gun to your head. We all go a little bust sometimes and it’s fine. Sometimes, you can just work on the small things that create incremental change.