Last month, our team decided it was time for a moment of reflection. With several new projects coming up at the end of this year, and a busy 2020 in the works, we knew it was the perfect opportunity to take a step back and take stock of where we have come from, where we are going and make sure that we do not lose sight of our mission as we grow. Rather than a brainstorm, we decided what we needed was a ‘missionstorm’, and this is the task we set ourselves.
As many people working in the social enterprise world will know, new opportunities, connections and projects offer both exciting possibilities and an inevitable challenge. For us, the biggest challenge was this: How do we bring our support services into new contexts without compromising our mission? How do we make sure that we are staying true to our values and putting the needs of those we serve first? How do we make sure our whole team collaborates and contributes to our projects and mission?
Since Kineara was first founded with our Rent Support Programme (RSP), which addresses and prevented evictions of vulnerable families in social housing, our offer has expanded to include mid-term tenancy sustainment programmes, educational wellbeing and support, employment support and our most recently designed intervention, Resettling, which has been created for people who have been homeless or in temporary accommodation to move back into sustainable housing with our support. In amongst that, we’ve still found the time to deliver community cohesion projects and been part of innovative participatory research on issues of housing services and improving pathways through temporary accommodation.
Throughout that time, we’ve kept to Kineara’s ethos: that all our support is 1) holistic, understanding that people’s lives are complex, with often multiple challenges that impact each other; and 2) people-centred and strength-based, so that we always recognise and emphasise the skills, aspirations and strengths that are inherent in everyone.
Nonetheless, as our provision ramps up we knew it was important that, as a team, we were all working towards the same mission, and driving towards the same goal. We looked at how other organisations larger and smaller than ours, both in the charity sector and outside of it, wrote about their mission and what it said about them. And then, we looked again at our own mission and asked ourselves the question, does this still speak to the heart of our work? What really is driving us? What do we really want to see as a result of the work we are creating?
And after some discussion, we refined our thoughts into a new mission statement:
It was then time to take a good look at our values. While it was all very well putting a mission statement together, what good was it if our values weren’t aligned to it? So, we took the opportunity to choose and discuss key values that motivated each of us in our lives and work, to build an understanding of our team’s character and motivations. It was wonderful to see what people felt was most important to them – sincerity, effectiveness, passion, respect, self-awareness, resilience, accountability, justice and collaboration – were all named as key values in their lives and work.
As anyone who works in social impact will understand, it is the passion reflected in the words above that motivates many to commit to serving people and communities in their work. With such a committed team, it was easy to consolidate these shared individual values into a set of principles that will guide Kineara’s approach and work for the next year.
With the revised mission and updated values in mind, we then turned our attention to project mapping. Of course, as a social business with a community focus, project planning is made that bit more challenging because we not only need clear aims, goals, monitoring plans and a valid theory of change, but we also need to make sure each project is also financially viable so that we can be sustainable and continue to grow. This was our jumping point; as a small organisation with multiple projects running together, we felt that honing our processes, roles and expectations would be key for achieving our mission as a team.
So we took the time to envision a life cycle of a typical Kineara project, creating for ourselves a live ‘map’ where we are able to see at what stage each of our team members are needed, what contributions they may make to each phase and how each role intersects with the each other.
This became a really valuable and useful exercise that gave each team member far greater clarity over the important part they play in our project delivery and achievements. We are, clearly, a sum of our parts! In many ways, the exercise was a humbling one which left each of us with a great appreciation for each other’s work, as well as a recognition of how we work together throughout a project to bring it to completion.
