WUNRN
Jane
Barry
and Jelena Dordevic met with activists around the world to discuss the culture
of the women’s movement and uncovered a disturbing trend: We’re deeply
unsettled in our work, and it’s affecting our progress. It’s time to change that.
"Sustainability
is about being able to do the work we love, while still feeling full and happy
in every part of our lives."
Oxana
Alistratova is an intense, driven activist running an anti-trafficking center
in Moldova. When we first meet in Dublin, at a Front Line Human Rights
Defenders meeting, we talk for hours about her work, her life, and her safety.
Every day she works directly with survivors while managing a staff of 15. It’s
difficult and dangerous work.
I finally
ask her how she manages to juggle it all. She pauses.
“Well, I
don’t sleep,” she says.
Oxana’s
answer sums up the experience of most activists in the women’s movement. Across
the world—from Rwandan peace activists to US domestic violence advocates—we are
looking for more time. We are constantly trying to balance too much work with
too few resources and never enough rest. We’re making choices every day about
well-being—our own and everyone else’s. With so much to be done, and so many
wrongs in the world to right, we almost always choose to serve others first. We
don’t feel we have a right to rest.
I know
because, with my colleague Jelena Dordevic, I’ve talked with more than 100
female human rights activists from 45 countries about this topic, and they all
said the same thing: We’ve created a culture of self-sacrifice. And we’re
tired. We’re fearful, exhausted, even traumatized.
When we sat
down and talked with women about their hopes and challenges, what we learned
was both disturbing and surprising.
What’s
disturbing is that as activists, we manage high levels of chronic stress,
exposure to trauma, and enormous workloads. We’re deeply stressed about the
amount of work we have to do, and yet we almost universally accept this level
of work as an inevitable fact of activism.
What’s
surprising is that despite it all, we seem to keep going.
Susan Wells,
the founder of Montana’s Windcall Ranch—an all-expense paid retreat for
activists—said it best. She talked of “a damaging work ethic,” in which we are
encouraged to override our own needs in order to reach our end goal. She
explained that there is a damaging perception that a truly committed activist
should be willing to tackle the Goliath of social injustice regardless of the
personal cost. She pointed out the irony in the fact that when she first
established her home as a free retreat for overworked activists nearly 20 years
ago, she sent out 3,000 invitations, but only 30 people applied. Most felt that
they—and their organizations—just couldn’t afford the indulgence.
Our work is
messy, complicated, and personal. We’re fighting against warlords, mercenaries,
and weapon-manufacturing nations. We’re up against state-sponsored terrorism,
transnational corporations, and the factory down the hill that’s polluting our
water supplies. We’re exposing our neighbor who just trafficked his daughter.
We’re up against the world, and it’s taking its toll.
And yet when
Jelena and I first started interviewing women activists about how they cope
with the enormous pressure, most reacted with confusion and even frustration.
During one
group interview in Sri Lanka, after we had discussed how they were coping with
stress, one activist stopped me and said, “Look, I don’t get it—what does this
have to do with our work?”
I heard this
comment over and over again. As activists we can talk for hours about funding
crunches, fundamentalisms, ending war, and violence against women. But
discussing our own fears is much harder. Our stress, exhaustion, and personal
safety are private matters.
Once
activists got past the initial shock of speaking about themselves, issues of
burnout inevitably came up. Sarala Emmanuel in Sri Lanka described it as an
overwhelming feeling that you can never stem the tide of violence.
“When you
hear about another rape or another killing, it makes you depressed,” she said.
“In a way it does seem too much—we can’t respond to it all.”
It’s time we
start talking. Sooner or later, the stress of the work gets absorbed into our
hearts, minds, bodies, and into the movement as a whole. Without the time and
space to reflect and recover, it stays there. Eventually it takes form as
breakdowns, strokes, heart disease, cancer, suicide.
“I felt that
I couldn’t cope with one more minute of handling responsibilities,” said Anissa
Helie, a human rights activist in Algeria. “I spent five weeks in bed, only
getting up to go to the toilet, not even able to make myself a cup of tea.”
The time has
come to make our own personal well-being a priority. Because without physical
and emotional health, how can we do the important work that we have set out to
do?
Activist
Pramada Menon coined the phrase “activist sustainability.”
“We never
think of our own sustainability,” she said. “I am not talking about funding.
The question is how do we sustain our own lives, get our own energy, and bring
that change elsewhere?” . . .
When we are
living under constant pressure, the stress and anxiety of staying alert gets to
be too much. When we are this tired, we have no time to strategize, to analyze
threats, to do our jobs well. Worries about feeding our families or retiring
without a pension are as important as concerns about funding our organizations
and combating violence. These are part of the same sustainability equation.
Sustainability
is about being able to do the work we love, while still feeling full and happy
in every part of our lives. It’s about feeling safe, feeling connected, feeling
recognized, respected, and valued—for who
we are, as much as for what we do.
But how do
we sustain ourselves? How do we maintain the energy needed to create the change
we so desperately seek?
As a
movement, I know that we are resilient. We get knocked down. And we get back up
again. Here’s how.
As
activists, we are each other’s families. We create peace by joining forces, by
gathering, talking, and listening.
For many,
the first time we come together with other activists is one of the first times
that we find safety—not just in numbers but also in common experience.
Sometimes, these spaces aren’t available in our own communities and we must
seek them out by attending conferences, joining forums, and finding friends
that can become our families and our pillars.
Let’s start
talking. Not on the edges of conferences or in rushed e-mails. Not during
tearful, exhausted calls from the office to another time zone at three in the
morning. This has to be deliberate. We have to put talking, listening, and
responding to our own needs at the top of our agendas.
Crying has
universal resonance among activists.
Hope
Chigudu, a Zimbabwean activist, pointed out that one group who works on
HIV/AIDS issues has a “crying room” to help its members deal with the tragedy
and horrors they view every day. And, in our work, we see a lot of tragedy.
I am
reminded of Barbara Bangura, a Sierra Leonean activist who worked with women
who had been captured and enslaved by rebel soldiers during the decade-long
civil war. When we met in her crowded offices, I was struck by her composure.
What did it take to maintain serenity when surrounded by so much pain and
sadness?
Barbara told
me that usually she manages, but that there are stories that she just can’t
shake. Every activist has these stories—those that seep, unexpectedly, into
every aspect of our lives, haunting our dreams. These are the stories that
drive us to the brink of despair, that leave us asking, “Why is this
happening?”
We need to
feel these stories, to take time to reflect on the gravity of the situations we
are facing. These are the times when we allow ourselves to feel and release, to
share in the sorrow.
Spirituality,
in its many forms, sustains many of us. Let’s get the “S” word out of the
closet and talk openly about how to embrace what works and how to put aside the
rest. For some, there is no name for this form of renewal; it is simply as
natural as embracing the elements or digging bare hands into the earth to help
create life. Spirituality takes us back to our deepest beliefs and values, to
the source of our passion and commitment. For many, it can be the key to
sustaining ourselves as activists. Because, as Margaret Schink, a US-based
activist and one of the founders of Urgent Action Fund, says, “We’ll never have
peace unless people have peace within themselves. To really bring about
significant change, people have to go within themselves and find peace.”
It’s controversial,
and deeply personal, and that can make it difficult to talk about. But the
majority of the activists I interviewed practiced some kind of spirituality
that kept them going—from walking in the woods to Buddhist meditation.
Spiritual practices can help us make sense of the things going on around us.
They can help us return to loving the world and loving ourselves. Making a
practice of validating and affirming our spirituality can rejuvenate our
work. . . .
As a network
of organizations working for the world’s women, we must begin to dedicate real
time in our own work environments to sitting down and talking about well-being
together. We must begin to shift our culture radically by incorporating
self-sustainability, activist safety, and well-being into our everyday
routines.
Zawadi
Nyong’o, an activist from Kenya, put together the following list of ways her
organization can begin this shift. Let’s add to it.
Ask yourself
what well-being means to you. What would it take for you to live in balance?
Take the time to listen to your answer. It means change—and change can be
scary. Let the process of exploring inner sustainability transform your own
activism. Challenge your beliefs about what it means to be a part of this
movement. It starts with ourselves as individual activists and permeates
outward.
What does it
mean if the way we’ve been active for generations isn’t working for us anymore?
I’ve often wondered if embracing a different way of working negates all of the
progress we’ve made until now.
Of course,
it means exactly the opposite. Embracing activist sustainability is about
celebrating where we’ve been and what we’ve accomplished. It’s about embracing
the good and recognizing the bad. It’s time we start doing less and engage in
“the extreme sport of stopping,” as one activist calls it.
We have to
change the culture of activism and heal ourselves, so that we can begin to heal
others. When this cultural shift takes hold, our movement will become truly
unstoppable.
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