I was listening to a New York correspondent reflecting on his feelings during the week following the attack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. It was a powerful 15 minutes that caught my ear in one particular respect.
The journalist reminded the audience that anyone entering the USA who holds a passport from elsewhere and is not an American is given the status ‘legal alien’.
He was stunned as the tragedy unfolded and was deeply involved in the soul searching that followed. He concluded that in the eight years before September 11, 2011 he was a participant in the New York experience - living it, breathing it and committed to it. But in the aftermath he had gone further and developed a sense of belonging.
I did start to wonder about the difference between fully participating in what a charity like CRI does and going further to develop a sense of belonging to a movement of like minded people who happen to work for the same organisation.
In the first group people work hard to meet their professional obligations; in the second group people will often unite and go a little further beyond their obligation. They have no contractual reason to do so and they probably will not be paid for it. Why then does this happen so often in my experience?
There is for me a personal connection to the spirit of volunteering. Volunteers have no obligation to give of their time and energy and yet do so willingly and with great enthusiasm. So it is for staff that belong to that movement.
I don’t know to what extent this is universal in the charity sector. It may well be. My experience is of CRI and a significant majority of staff working for CRI do share this sense of belonging, which then feeds itself and, in time, becomes more widespread.
Nevertheless, that somewhat organic process doesn’t necessarily touch everyone and the challenge for me is to explain this phenomenon to colleagues new to CRI and hope that they too can move from participation to belonging.
