The Serious Matter of Play
Building and Sustaining Feminist Organisational Cultures
Our Co-Leads, supportive and caring, aka in top feminist leadership form, have been gently breathing down our necks to write something about our organisational culture.
While we pride ourselves on our work culture, all words to describe it on paper seem soggy and meh, leaving us wondering — what are we even doing? So, after months of avoidance, procrastination, and hiding behind the see-through veil of ‘limited bandwidth,’ we reflected on what nurturing and sustaining feminist culture and practice looks like for our team, across our specific contexts. UAF A&P’s feminist organisational culture commits to interrogating power and relationships within the organisation so that our feminist values are an intentionally-crafted, contextually-unique praxis around feminist cultures of care. TLDR — walk the talk.
UAF A&P’s feminist organisational culture commits to interrogating power and relationships within the organisation so that our feminist values are an intentionally-crafted, contextually-unique praxis around feminist cultures of care. TLDR — walk the talk.
It is ironic that our ‘feminist’ organisation must exist within, and comply with, the very institutional (read patriarchal) structures that we resist and hope to transform. We accept this dichotomy as fundamental — constitutive even — and look to the limitless agency we have to create a new culture or way of being in community with each other. Our team is made up of artists, parents, chefs, bookworms, activists, pet-lovers, and more. 20 of us across 10 countries — each a moving piece of a collective in constant motion. Individuals form the collective and the collective forms culture. Our iterative and ongoing effort to create a feminist organisational culture, rooted in care, is an exercise in being true to our values and guided by the question: ‘What does the practice of sharing power and audacious care look like in a feminist organisation?’
Our iterative and ongoing effort to create a feminist organisational culture, rooted in care, is an exercise in being true to our values and guided by the question: ‘What does the practice of sharing power and audacious care look like in a feminist organisation?’
In order to stay true to our core value ‘Defenders First, Always,’ we are called on to be present, authentic, empathetic, and agile in our role as rapid-response grantmakers. Our efforts towards our own well-being are both an individual responsibility and an act of collective care. Individual well-being is an organisational resource accessible to everyone on the team through institutional provisions such as counselling and flexible time-off. We also ensure that well-being is collectively attended to, and share with a pinch of aspirational salt, some of our own personal reflections from tools and practices we’ve played with over the last couple of years.
The moment that made us go yikes
In 2021–22, it seemed like the doors of UAF A&P had morphed into the ghastly revolving kind that one might get ungracefully stuck in when two team members left our organisation citing serious complaints about the hierarchical culture of the organisation that had split from its feminist core. At all levels of the organisational structure (Board, Co-leads, Team), we had to reckon with some tough questions — had some voices unfairly overpowered others? In bringing our full selves to work, had we forgotten to care for each other and sidelined people who voiced dissatisfaction? What were the limitations in how we understood and included disability that led them to being sidelined? Did we really know how to shift ‘power over’ to ‘power with’ and ‘power to’?
After the first of the two departures, we found ourselves in a collective ‘we’ve gone and stuffed it up’ moment, and in that instant, we relied on our ecosystem to hold us accountable and push us to evolve. With a facilitated town hall session, we (re)articulated a set of individual and organisational commitments to care. From this dissension rose the commitment to listen, check our biases, name and resist the cultures we come from that influence our choice to speak or stay silent. At the organisational level, there were some clear actions to be taken: we had to revise the team handbook to create better processes for conflict resolution; create brave spaces at orientations where new team members could share their needs and accommodations to thrive; have political conversations towards sharper analyses and strategies; create more spaces for the team– both formal and informal — to consciously build professional camaraderie; consciously engage with inevitable power dynamics within the organisation, and leverage them with trust and confidence.
Unfortunately for us, we didn’t wake up the next day as a new and enlightened team as we’d hoped. We revisited these commitments at the team meetings that followed, and one more person left the team. It was a stark reminder in the form of freshly baked humble pie, that ‘feminism’ is hard to put into practice, and that everything that we take for granted as basic common sense is really quite easy to forget!
Caring for Jellyfish
One of our early experiments of dedicated play time during our internal learning and reflection calls was colourful teetering at the edge of overboard. Play was integrated into our three-day virtual retreat — woven both into the meeting agenda and outside of it. Each person was assigned one other team member (affectionately called their Jellyfish) to anonymously care for, to make sure that they had what they needed to feel safe and included. At the end of the three days, all Jellyfish were revealed with a final gift — poems, words of wisdom, flowers, or wine that people could keep as memories and tokens of care. In addition to this, as part of the agenda, each day ended with half an hour to linger, where we set up a virtual thrift market to exchange items we wanted to give each other. The last day ended in an Ancient Egypt themed murder mystery facilitated by an external game host. It seemed a bit impersonal, but the displays of sincere commitment to the theme by way of costumes and shared time to solve puzzles created a lightness amongst people that affirmed the need for more such virtual community spaces. At each learning call since then, we have deliberately tried to create such opportunities to nurture relationships, trust, spaces for laughter, and professional intimacy.
Silliness is essential
At one point, a staple ingredient of every UAF A&P meeting was the much travelled rubber chicken, a game we learnt from a colleague and theatre maker. There’s something communal about erupting into giggles together, and this one short movement sequence, in its silliness with wobbly arms and legs and much shouting in a circle, is everything rolled into 30 seconds — community, an outlet to scream, and a literal ‘shake it off’…
We experiment with ways to infuse play in our work by testing ideas in virtual sandpits — when we simulated a new grant and tested its reception with the team months before it was released, when we made competitive raps about emergent learning, when we continue to craft workshop questions that generate curiosity and creativity, and when we dance to welcome guests to our events. We propose ‘play to create’ as an alternative to the capitalist notion of ‘work to produce.’ We make joy central to our work and the act of playing together becomes political.
We propose ‘play to create’ as an alternative to the capitalist notion of ‘work to produce.’ We make joy central to our work and the act of playing together becomes political.
Play — be it frivolous or serious — as a means of collective rest or intellectual inquiry is regenerative. Intentional silliness (the likes of rubber chicken) has the magical ability to shed inhibitions and reconnect to each other’s humanity, and when we embrace the spirit of ‘play’ in our approach to building an organisational culture that is truly feminist, we infuse care in our work and our approach to collaboration, and centre abundant creativity.
The imagined architecture of a feminist virtual office
It’s a shared sentiment across a large part of our team that there are few things more stressful than pop culture check-in questions, and please can we never again hold our breath as we excruciatingly count backwards from ten? Instead, how could we recreate the sidle-up-and-ask-your-questions benefits of the physical office in a virtual world?
The first was the creation of the ‘virtual office kitchen table’ where each team member can informally share work and personal stories. Many plans have hatched over these informal talanoa sessions. At UAF A&P, this table takes the form of a chat window from which snippets of our worlds trickle in — the latest TV series are dissected, photos or videos of fur babies and little humans are oo-ed and aah-ed, and we share the horrors of crises unfolding in our surroundings. Despite buzzing Signal chats, communication often slips through gaps in time zones, or unshared documents, and trust is tested on a daily basis. So we fight fire with information — we over communicate with each other and bend schedules to make sure we share time. Monthly team meetings are spaces to share professional, personal, political updates, and co-working blocks within teams become key spaces to strategise and progress decisions. In an office where we can’t roll up our chairs to our neighbour’s desk, and all we have is upper bodies and voices through Zoom boxes, we BLOCK the time to be.
These actions, as we write them, seem commonplace and redundant to name, but we’ve learnt that naming these actions over time has helped the team articulate what putting intention into practice looks like. It helped us see that when we don’t pay attention, we find ourselves in the midst of quite a sticky pickle.
A conclusion, if there can be one
One universal recipe for a feminist organisational culture does not exist. And a tool once successful, confusingly, seems to flop when we try it again at a different time and place. We aren’t always kind or inclusive or articulate — so we often have to have to muster the courage to recognise and own up to mistakes. And we repeatedly look to the question we began this entire journey with — what does the practice of sharing power and audacious care look like in a feminist organisation? — as our Matariki.
The one thing we know for sure is that we have more to learn than we know, and that the consistent attempt to transform our existing ways of working is fundamental to how we remain accountable to each other, our movements, and reshaping a fierce and radical feminist world.
The one thing we know for sure is that we have more to learn than we know, and that the consistent attempt to transform our existing ways of working is fundamental to how we remain accountable to each other, our movements, and reshaping a fierce and radical feminist world.
Glossary
Professional intimacy addresses the quality of collegial relationships with peers, mentors, protégés, junior and senior faculty, supervisors, and students or residents in terms of closeness, affection, trust, and commitment that allow and promote risk-taking and self-disclosure. Relationship quality is central to personal growth and professional vitality, and seems to be essential to the development of mentoring relationships. Professional intimacy is nurtured by mutual intellectual interests, positive messages about professional accomplishments, successful joint academic projects, interactions away from the workplace, and experiences with revealing feelings and being vulnerable. Professionally intimate relationships differ from personal and collegial relationships in the depth of emotional bond and self-disclosure and in the areas of life in which they occur (PsycInfo Database Record © 2022 APA, All Rights Reserved).
Talanoa means dialogue or conversation in Fijian Itaukei language.
Matariki is the Maori new year — a cluster of stars reappearing in our night sky, this is a time to reflect on the past year, celebrate the present, and plan for the year ahead. It is a time for:
- Remembrance — Honouring those we have lost since the last rising of Matariki
- Celebrating the present — Gathering together to give thanks for what we have
- Looking to the future — Looking forward to the promise of a new year
Written by Sunayana Premchander, Creative Learning Facilitator, Urgent Action Fund, Asia and Pacific.
