A Charter for Our Times
How creating a charter can unleash transformational change
Foreword written by Sarah Farrell
Bike-to-work schemes and free fruit in the office are job perks a lot of us are familiar with, but it was a first for me to access professional coaching when I joined the Impatience Earth team. We’re lucky to have this support from Wellbeing Director Heather Salmon, who works with the Impatience Earth team on a part-time basis and has written the first in our new guest blog series. I strongly believe that every organisation would benefit from someone with Heather’s expertise, particularly organisations that focus on accelerating equitable climate action.
This is because doing work that makes a contribution towards a just and equitable world is a privilege but it can take a personal toll. The variety of client work that we do at Impatience Earth requires us to be up to date on the science (such as the latest planetary boundary data), to pay attention to the often heartbreaking headlines and most importantly: to center the voices of people on the frontline of climate change who have been sounding the alarm that lives and livelihoods are under increasing threat.
To do this work well, we must focus on the solutions and not give in to the dreaded climate doom, or risk burnout. We also need a set of values and internal processes in place to help the organisation make the right decisions about the work we take on. This is where Heather’s role comes in. Please enjoy her guest blog which sheds more light on the early days of working at Impatience Earth, developing our Charter, plus advice for People team leads and change management professionals.
P.s. If others are interested in learning more about Heather’s work on team wellbeing, strategy and resilience, you can get in touch at info@impatience.earth – if there’s interest we could host a webinar on the topic.
Guest blog by Heather Salmon, Director of People and Wellbeing Impatience Earth
It was clear right from the very start of my joining Impatience Earth that I was working with an exceptional group of people. I joined the Impatience Earth team in March 2022 on a 0.5 day per week basis initially as our team coach. I offered monthly coaching sessions to all members of the team who wanted this support.Each conversation with my (approx.) 6 coachees revealed a level of passion, commitment, intelligence, and courage that I found inspiring.
It was soon clear, however, that we were not yet working as one body towards a shared, singular, unified goal. As an early stage startup, a lot of work had been done to ensure that our team was building an organisational culture that would deliver on our commitments for the future of the planet.
However, we hadn’t yet done the work to identify where there was agreement and disagreement about how those goals would be achieved. Listening to that passion and seeing some of the energy it created seeping away in exhaustion and frustration, it became clear that we needed a charter.
A charter would help us define for ourselves and for others the work we were committed to doing, how we would deliver it and how it would support wealth holders in creating a cleaner, more equitable planet. There followed months’ worth of engagement to make our charter truly ours, because developing a charter that defines, supports, and guides our aspirations required time, patience, compromise, and the emergence of a shared language that made sense to us all.
Paradoxically, a critical first action was to slow down the process; the temptation was strong to get the charter done and published, at the risk of its not having been embedded across our team. Instinctively we knew that we wanted a charter that would ‘sustain’ for us for the years and, for that, we needed to fully embody each sentence that we were creating.
Why a Charter and why now?
Before we look at ‘why?’ and ‘why now?’, let’s briefly examine what a charter is.
A charter is a series of promises that capture the commitments we want to make, individually and collectively, and that underpin the work we are going to do, the people we are going to do it with and the future that this would create.
Our charter would be our way of anchoring ourselves in our values, our ‘North Star’ as it were, to ensure that we continued moving in the right direction, no matter the challenges we face.
You might be forgiven for thinking that this work is self-indulgent in the face of a climate emergency. But, here’s the thing; without clarity on our individual and collective direction, intentionality on what it is we are trying to achieve, with whom and how, a lot of energy just gets wasted, leading to overwhelm, frustration and (at its worst) despair.
Most importantly, with a strong, embodied charter, we knew that we could break through any internal barriers that might hold us back in ways we could not see. A well-articulated charter could help the team identify quickly and efficiently threats and opportunities, mis-steps and challenges, in the way of our goals, and support us in finding viable and effective solutions to the myriad of climate challenges we would face.
We understood very early on that to create the kind of force that would have the impact we wanted, we would need to avoid disbursing our energies in random and uncoordinated ways. We are a small team; we had to be both strategic and tactical in how we worked together and across our complex ecosystem of multi-dimensional relationships.
If we weren’t, all that energy was unlikely to coalesce into movements for change; more likely, it would produce no more than a ripple in a sector resistant to change.
Our charter was also a tool through which we could become more accountable to the people we serve. People who we define (widely) as those who have, are now, or will in the future be impacted by climate change and the devastation that this brings.
For us, as leaders in the climate space, our experts and wealth holders are our partners and collaborators on this journey. We want to learn with and from them as we support their climate work.
At the heart of our charter sits a clear and unequivocal promise to create a shared way of owning our impact in the areas that we have committed to shifting power in the climate conversation.
The challenge then becomes: how do we know that we are achieving this? How do we give each other – our team, associates and interns – the tools to support each other and the permission to call each other out when we are not fulfilling our stated goals?
How does our Charter work?
Our charter has six sections, each making a clear declaration towards our climate aspirations:
- Our commitment makes clear our statement of intent, sharing what we want the world to know about our work towards a restored planet.
- For ourselves acknowledges that we cannot give what we do not have. So, our charter focuses on the individual attributes we know we need to ‘be the change we want to see in the world’ (Mahatma Ghandi). We distilled this to being ‘caring’ of ourselves, centring our ‘wellness’ and ensuring an inclusivity that promotes ‘belonging’ across our team.
- For our team, we wanted to be clear with each other and others how we work together as a collective. Here, the qualities that resonated most for us were accountability through ‘ownership’, ‘empowering’, and ‘challenging’ performance moving forward.
- For Our organisation, being ‘collaborative’, ‘inspiring’ of the leadership and diverse representation of others, and ‘ambition’ to achieve our climate goals proved most critical for us.
- Sharing and learning as much as possible drove our commitments to Our stakeholders. We want to be as equitable as possible in choosing who to work with, because we know we can’t work with everyone. Those we will work with are ready for ‘action’, open to ‘learning’ from their own practice as well as the practice of others, whilst driving the ‘evolution’ necessary to transform our world.
- We completed our charter with a commitment to the planet itself. For Our world, we want to be part of a movement that shares our objective of creating a planet that is ‘nurtured’, ‘thriving’ and ‘regenerative’, bringing new systems of transformative environmental practice to everywhere part of the world.
Our charter is our ‘touch stone’, particularly in difficult moments or when dealing with thorny issues or natural disagreements across our team. It also helps us to articulate to others what we believe and are committed to in a simple and accessible way.
We hope that it will inspire many others to join us in working towards the healing of our planet.
Inspired to create your own Charter?
Creating your own charter may not be as hard as you might think.
Here’s how:
- Research examples of charters that resonate with your organisation’s values, goals and aspirations, or the charters of organisations you simply admire.
- Share with your team and listen to their feedback, before cracking on with the first draft.
- Share that first draft with a few members of your team from the very start, then show and tell as it evolves, to ensure that your charter becomes a shared experience that all can own.
- Don’t be afraid of getting caught up with the individual meanings of words and phrases, as this is bound to happen. Work through any disagreements until you have consensus across your team. This process is vital and should not be rushed.
- The process of consultation does have to come to an end at some point, however. So, with plenty of notice, set a date for completion, inviting your people to consider whether they can ‘locate’ their aspirations for the charter in the choice of words you have chosen together at that point. Eventually, everyone will want it done so compromise becomes easier to reach.
Moving forward
At Impatience Earth, our charter is a declaration that centres our values of accountability, compassion, courage and radical imagination at the heart of what we do. As we worked together to create our charter commitments, we began to understand the mindset we would need to achieve our goals. Our charter aspirations reflect the work we’ll need to do to support the creation of viable, sustainable, and equitable climate solutions that allow our planet to thrive. It will also help us to complete the journey ahead of us; a journey that will take tenacity, optimism, flexibility, self-belief and (most importantly) hope.
A hope that extends to supporting you in the creation of a charter of your own.