Institutionalising resistance

Much of the damage in our organising is done by things we never agreed to do. It was 2008 and I’d arrived in Brussels six months earlier, the centre of EU power, fresh from the private sector and ready to use my skills to Make Change Happen. I was leading the comms department at an EU NGO, which consisted of me and half a colleague, who organised events with the rest of her week.Now, every NGO produced an annual report, and it was a big deal. They were like expensive glossy magazines, sometimes 40, 50, 70 pages long. Ostensibly the NGOs made them for their funders. But I soon realised the real reason was that the grey hairs in leadership really loved their annual reports. Unlike the earnest words expressed in meetings and emails, this was a physical artifact, a testament to another year of fighting the good fight, something hefty they could gesture to in meetings. Especially whenever their budgets were being questioned.The staff who had to produce these reports, though, dreaded them.…