One liner. Elevator pitch. Mission.
Whatever you want to call it, the simple statement that describes why you exist is the most important thing for any organisation. It really is the main thing, and at Equal Community Foundation it has taken us five years to learn what our main thing is. We used to think that our main thing was that we ran lots of clever programmes that change men’s behaviours towards women, and wrote research for policymakers and funders. It was sometimes difficult to link our day to day work to the people we worked for. And if we realised one of our activities was not working as well as we hoped, we lacked a framework, a simple mission, within which we could assess how to improve it.
And then one day, sometime over the summer of 2014, it became crystal clear. Equal Community Foundation raises men to respect women. That’s it. That’s all. It’s nice and simple and it’s what we do. We work with community leaders, parents and teachers to make sure young men grow up to respect women. Today we work with them in India, but tomorrow we want to be leading this work across the globe.
I guess in some respects we have known it all along: our mission statements, in their different forms over the years have reflected this. And all of our work in terms of programme development, team building, networking and evidence building has been to this end. But it is only in the last 12 months, as so many of our challenges have been solved one by one that the path became clear, and we were again able to see our mission. This time, clearer than any other time in our short history.
Equal Community Foundation raises men to respect women.
We think that’s pretty cool, and we’re pretty good at it too. But we need your help…. Will you join us?
– Will Muir