Stop glorifying resilience: Here’s how the word resilience shows up in the social sector, and why some leaders say it’s problematic
Why It Matters
Words matter. The language changemakers use to describe their work, their organizations and the communities they serve creates narratives that can either support or undermine their objectives.
Resilience.
It’s a word you’ve likely heard one too many times over the past 16 months since the pandemic hit North America. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Speech from the Throne back in Sept. 2020 was even titled A Stronger and More Resilient Canada. It’s certainly been used to describe social purpose organizations and the communities they serve.
We’ve covered resilience at Future of Good, too — from tips for building organizational resilience during turbulent times to how employee ownership might make community businesses more resilient to ways Indigenous philosophy can make for more resilient communities. Given that this word now shows up everywhere, it was time to unpack what resilience actually means for the social impact world.
So this week, Future of Good hosted a digital conversation with changemakers from across Canada on the word itself — resilience — and the six speakers, all leaders in social purpose organizations, agreed: resilience is an overused, co-opted, even harmful word. Here’s how they explained it:
But first, what does resilience actually mean?
Mirriam-Webster defines resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”
But there are two main ways the term is used in the social impact world, the six speakers at Future of Good’s digital conversation agreed: one is to describe social purpose organizations themselves and the other is to describe communities those organizations work with. And both ways perpetuate harmful narratives, and minimize the need for systemic transformation, they said.
‘Resilient’ is not a complimentary way to describe to communities and grassroots groups
Using the word to describe communities can be patronizing, said Sydney Piggott, who leads community engagement at Elevate, a hub for digital solutions to social problems. “As someone who belongs to a community that does experience systemic oppression,” she said, “I’m tired. I don’t really want to be resilient anymore.”
Jess Tomlin agreed. Tomlin is the co-CEO of Equality Fund, a Canadian-based philanthropic fund that grants money to women’s rights organizations globally. “The work that activists in Afghanistan are undertaking right now,” Tomlin said, “to build underground networks to support the safe passage of human rights defenders and activists across the country into neighbouring countries…these women, predominantly, are completely volunteer or entirely underpaid, and yet they ‘persevere.’ And I say that with a little sarcasm intended, because when the ball drops, these women, these activists aren’t going anywhere. So, does that make them resilient? Absolutely. But it also just makes them survivors.”
Justin Wiebe, a Métis citizen and partner at the Mastercard Foundation, said it’s also a patronizing way to describe Indigenous peoples. “Our people have been forced to be resilient out of necessity and out of survival in response to deliberate attempts to eradicate us and our culture and our way of being,” he said.
Bypassing systemic change
“There’s danger in that,” Wiebe added, “where resilience for certain communities becomes so normalized that it takes it out of the minds of policy makers and decision makers and funders — that we no longer have to address those root issues, because those communities have become so used to being resilient that it becomes the normal.”
Doug Pawson, executive director of the advocacy group End Homelessness St. John’s, agreed: It’s about “taking resilience as [overcoming] and celebrating that, to saying, no, surviving isn’t a matter of resilience. People are surviving in the face of oppression, in the face of systemic inequalities.”
Organizational resilience isn’t always cause for pride, either
“Whether [resilience means] operating on shoestring budgets, or not offering competitive packages and salaries, it’s not something that we should be proud of,” Pawson said. He added that this is a symptom of a larger system: “We talk about our sector providing a ton of really important value, but we use a very neoliberal lens to assess that — it’s dollars and cents.”
Katherine Hay, CEO of Kids Help Phone, said normalizing resilience among staff themselves is harmful, too. “There is no sustainability if we expect our people to go through crisis after crisis and keep giving,” she said. “And that has been the mantra of the non-profit and charitable sector.”
The normalization and expectation of resilience means the social impact world lacks a culture of rest and wellbeing, said Rebecca Darwent, a co-founder of the Foundation for Black Communities. “It becomes a new badge of honour, and I think it’s important for us to name that we’re resilient and tired,” she said. “We also need to rest.” She added that one of her personal missions is to create a social purpose sector-wide culture of rest and wellbeing, and have that replace the glorification of resilience as overwork.
Choosing to take on the burden of resilience
Resilience is a privilege, Piggott said. “Larger institutions and larger organizations — organizations that are protected by the charitable and not-for-profit system — have a bit of a privilege to be able to continue to be resilient, but I’d be interested to see: what does that look like for more grassroots and non-traditional actors, and how are we as people who maybe are in institutions with more power, more funding, more resources, how are actually building resilience for those actors who are actually doing this work and much more vulnerable to the shocks that we’re talking about?”
As a funder working with a powerful organization, Wiebe had some ideas: “For funders, oftentimes [resilience] means we need to get out of the way. We need to create the space. We need to be flexible and responsive to folks on the ground to be able to be resilient, to be able to meet the needs.”
Okay, so, is the word ever useful?
Yes, the speakers said — in certain contexts.
When it’s not being used to describe doing more with less, organizational resilience can mean being adaptable and responsive to change — a good goal to work toward, said Piggott, even if perpetuity is not. “Originally, I thought [the word resilience] was also not useful from an organizational level, because we should basically cease to exist, because the world should be perfect — but as we know, that’s not going to happen. So, it’s important to be able to adapt to change, and to be resilient to shocks.” Like those the sector has seen over the last 16 months.
And calling back to Pawson’s critique of the “dollars and cents” of organizational resilience, Tomlin said resilience can be far more than that. “We’re spending a lot less time thinking about our business plan and our strategic plan,” she said, “and really thinking about the institutional competencies we need to navigate complexity, to have really strong and acute power analysis in all that we do, to understand boundary setting, to take and cede space…to how you navigate grief and loss in an organization, particularly one that relates to communities that are really hardest hit.”
Watch the full conversation below:
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