visualising what we hope to achieve
There’s a specific British slang statement I grew up using and it is called ‘lost in the sauce’. A rough definition of being ‘lost in the sauce’ is that a person is so deep into whatever activity they’re doing that they end up losing a sense of their bearing. The reason I decided to focus on this particular theme for this month’s reflection is because this experience is something that happens to me quite regularly when working on this project. As I’ve mentioned historically, it’s seldom rare in the way capitalism functions that we are provided adequate time, care and space to be deeply immersed into our work or hobbies for that matter. Given the working relationship I have with Shuranjeet, we’ve cultivated this project and it’s working rhythm in a way that allows for deep focus on the detail. While it is a great joy and a privilege to work in such a human centered way, it is also a radically new experience for me. As such, quite frequently I can end up losing track of my bearing for the project.
In order to navigate the journey of constantly zooming in and more importantly zooming out, I’ve created a simple visualisation below . The visualisation below serves as an anchor to guide me when I’ve lost my bearings because I’ve been so focussed on the most granular of details.
The visualisation below is, hopefully, a simple and accessible representation of what we’re trying to achieve. In this visualisation, what I’m trying to convey to folks is the mechanism of change we’re hoping to achieve. Let me break this down a bit more.
On the left, you have the host organisation, Taraki, from which there is an input flow to a partner organisation. The input flow is us delivering a 6 month curriculum on how to create safe spaces for Punjabi men. Once we have delivered our input, the output from the partner organisation is having the capacity, knowledge and skills to create safe spaces for Punjabi men to combat social isolation and loneliness. Now, while there is significant amount of details being created and polished on our end to manage this input/output flow, in essence this is what we are trying to achieve, especially as we approach year 2 of the project where we start to deliver the curriculum to partner organisations starting in August 2022.
