Been involving myself in the so-called advocacy campaign for roughly one year and 4 months. Learned a lot, saw a lot and opened my eyes a lot. Of course there are more awaiting me to explore, which I'm always anticipating.
My crude intention joining such campaign was that I felt the calling to do something for the society and our future. Social interest always comes first. Yup, that's always true when we're to serve the society. But as time goes by, especially when you are holding the steer of an organization, I realized that overemphasizing social interest (or neglecting self interest) will create an unbalanced phenomenon in the long run- sustainability problem. Let me explain this.
For most of the NGOs or voluntary organizations like us, we are much dependent on external funding. Every time when we are to initiate a program or activity, we would scratch our ass so hard figuring out where to look for the money. Money money money~always the root of troubles. But is this the only model that we could survive on? Showing our palm and waiting for good mood?
Idealism is good but unrealistic. If you don't take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of the rest. Let's take a very simple example. When you're aboard, during the safety demo, you are advised to put on the oxygen mask first before your kids. The reason I think you know very well.
I'm not saying going to extreme, but finding a pivot between self interest and social interest. To name one f**king bad example. Once in a circumstance, I found out that the top management officials had misappropriated the profit while each department were only given a very tight budget to work on. I don't want to say more. One word, shit! That's definitely not the "self interest" I'm talking about. Transparency rules.
What I mean is do not take other people's time for granted. Let's say, a voluntary work. Volunteers volunteer themselves to help out, yet somehow sometimes we need to show our gratitude in a tangible way, not just "thank you". This is the self interest of the volunteers.
Next the self interest of the committee members. Passion is passion. But if you want to sustain an organization, passion is not bread. Please do buy their time. Or else you are worse than any capitalist.
To a bigger picture, the self interest of the organization. Most of the time, they like to claim themselves as non-PROFIT organizations. C'mon, how are you going to survive without money? Unless you find yourself a big pipe which channels in the money forever, then you can be Mother Teresa. Mind you, not many Mother Teresa in this world. Only one. Still one day the petroleum will go drought too. So how to make your organization's activities profitable is extremely important to support its survival, to the least extent the management still could operate optimally. Therefore revenue stream should be included in the strategic planning. If not, you are not strategic enough.
Cut short, for advocates, if you want to keep your social impact alive, please balance yourself between self interest and social interest or in other words, idealism and reality. Period.
