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“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”Nelson Mandela’s words were never just words. They were living truths. What better way to celebrate his life than to keep getting back up, and trying again?
Tonight, we’ll try again. To open-up a conversation over a Big Mac, a Fish Sandwich, and a couple of Happy Meals. Saturday night, we piled into Elaine and Amy’s compact living room. (As part of our Starter Project with Kennisland and the Federatie Opvang). For a chat about what life is like living in a woman’s shelter, with the heaviness of what came before, and without really knowing what comes next. Except mounting pressure of finding a house, getting a job, and making ends meet.
We developed some materials to prompt thinking about the past, the present, and the future. Pictures of activities that could fill your week. A wheel representing the different parts of your life. Postcards with values statements. Our goal is to identify the gap between where women are now, and where they want to be. And just as importantly, to learn what shapes their ideas of where they want to be. Professionals? Family? Friends? Books, Films, Media? Religion?
But talking about the future wasn’t easy. It was downright stressful. Elaine got a headache. She was visibly distressed. She’s trying to live one day at a time. To be OK with the present. And here we were surfacing all the uncertainties about what might come a few months from now.
So we’ve revised our approach. We’re going to map people’s time horizons and re-conceptualize aspirations. Not necessarily as the big picture stuff. As a good family, or a good life. But as a pretty good day, week, or month.
We had a pretty good day on Wednesday. That’s when we ran our Sinterklaas Festival at the Shelter, hosting 5 interactive booths. There was the ‘make your own family popcorn brand’ booth; the ‘take a family photo’ booth; the ‘choose your role models’ booth; the ‘construct your ideal house’ booth; and the ‘animated holiday video’ booth. The ‘choose your role models’ booth was a bit of an experiment. Based on a new hunch. That if we could understand women’s reference points, we could figure out how to shape the standards against which they measure their own behaviors and experiences. So we created short stories of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ women. Like Charlotte from the American TV show Sex & the City; Vuslat Dogan who runs a newspaper in Turkey; Katrine from the Danish TV show Borgen. (Surprisingly, Charlotte was a big hit). But our stories were too long, and too flat. Next time, we’d like to try using snippets of film and audio to spark a richer debate, and dig beneath perceptions of what makes a ‘good’ role model.
All of these materials proved useful in getting more and more women to join-in. We’ve got 10 dinners planned over the next 10 days. That’s a lot of french fries. And two staff at the Shelter want to join our team, and try some fresh approaches for engaging the women. We’ve also had 2 ‘thought leaders’ joining-in and contributing to our meta-narrative. About how we position this work, and get on the political agenda. One is a business leader in Canada. Another is a lobbyist in The Netherlands.
And so we’re just starting to poke the current Dutch political paradigm. About the participation society – and its link to the British rhetoric around the big society. A bunch of words that seem to emphasize citizen responsibility, and overlook government’s responsibility as an enabling platform. Instead of a dis-enabling platform. In Amsterdam, after a crisis, women are placed in the first available home. Regardless of community. They have no choice but to accept the placement. And the professional help that comes with the placement. There are no mechanisms for building local connections with neighbors, or catalyzing every day supports. We find it’s pretty difficult to prompt women to take responsibility when they are given so little control.
But for all the poking, prodding, and prattling this week we don’t think we enabled anyone to adopt new behaviors. Sure, some of our activities shifted what women and their children did and said. But we did not develop or prototype any interventions to enable people to sustain the changes. Nor do we really know what ‘good’ change looks and feels like, yet. We hope that will come in future weeks, as we move past the ethnographic phase of work and into the making & building phase of our work.
Adding all of this up, here are our stats this week: