Survivor Alliance in Core Operations Mode until January 5, 2024
Dear Survivor Alliance Community,
As we approach the end of the calendar year, Survivor Alliance will enter Core Operations Mode between November 13, 2023 - January 5, 2024. Core Operations Mode is a concerted effort and intention to slow down, focus on key priorities, and allow our team to regroup after a full year.
In 2021, we implemented our first Core Operations Mode (COM) to acknowledge the collective impact of Covid-19. We were inspired by the COM of FRIDA | The Young Women’s Fund and their bold declaration that “business as usual” in social impact work is not sustainable. This remains true. Despite the end of lockdowns, vaccine inequity remains, new wars have started, extreme weather events are common, and business as usual in a situation of polycrisis is exhausting and unfeasible.
Additionally, there are heightened operational activities at the end of the year and these are difficult to maintain while still delivering programs. As such, our COM attempts to remind us that we are worthy of rest and we are worthy of a more gentle pace of work. We are no good to our communities if we burn out.
What does this mean on a pragmatic level?
We will continue providing our core programming and serving our current consulting clients. We want to emphasize that our core programming keeps our staff plenty busy. We recognize that some of the team will not get to slow down this year during COM and intend to work on making this more possible next year.
We will not agree to new projects or meetings to discuss new projects. We will reduce the number of internal and external meetings to enable longer blocks of project time. Other than this, we will give attention to tasks such as:
Engaging in reflection and documentation of programmatic lessons.
Planning and forecasting for 2024 and beyond.
Reviewing and documenting internal operations, policies, and systems.
To acknowledge our operations focused staff, who are always on-call to support our program staff, we are enabling them to be “offline” more frequently than at other times of the year. If our response times are more delayed than usual, please consider your patience with us as a contribution to our more sustainable work pace. We appreciate your extra grace during this time.
Yours truly,
The Survivor Alliance Team