Values

values!

Pursuing a values-based approach to social change

CLAIMING OUR FUTURE DECEMBER 2016

Intro Claiming Our Future only gradually realised the power and potential in values and a values based approach to social change. This was despite values being central to our work from our inaugural event in October 2010. In prioritising a focus on values, we created, without being fully aware of it, an opportunity.

We developed this opportunity over time as we evolved in our understanding of values and how they operate.

Values motivate people, whether explicitly or implicitly. They shape our decisions, inform our perspectives, and influence our behaviours. Sometimes we can name the values that motivate us, at other times we can operate out of less conscious and maybe more deeply ingrained values. Shared or dominant values are at play within organisations. They determine how an organisation understands its role and the actions it takes to play that role. They inform decision-making and shape the priorities that an organisation pursues. They influence how an organisation operates and inform internal staff relations and external service-user experiences.

Civil society organisations take pride in their values. This is true across the full spectrum of civil society from trade unions to environmental groups to cultural organisations and from global justice groups to local community sector organisations.

Our values distinguish us. They find pride of place in our strategic plans and wherever we set down our markers. However, they can fade into the background under the pressures of the day-to-day and under the influence of a hostile environment.

Values as a link If values distinguish civil society, or at least those parts of civil society that might be interested in the project of social change espoused by Claiming Our Future, it is not surprising that values were a central focus in forming Claiming Our Future. Values would distinguish who we were as a collective just as they did for the individual people and the various individual civil society organisations involved.

One of the two core debates of the inaugural event of Claiming Our Future was on the values that we would prioritise. In the months leading up to Claiming Our Future’s inaugural event we canvassed far and wide for the values that we would put up for deliberation.

This was done through social media and a website for the event and through the many and varied meetings with representatives from civil society organisations to prepare for the event.

In the end a list of over twenty different values were presented for debate and prioritisation. Equality, environmental sustainability, accountability, participation, and solidarity were identified, through a consensus decisionmaking process, as the values to identify and guide Claiming Our Future.

The values were not defined. This was a

subject of debate at the event and in the months after. It was accepted by all that many of these values could hold different meanings for people in prioritising them.

There was, however, an interest to unify people from across different civil society traditions through the event and in forming such a new type of organisation as Claiming Our Future. There was a concern that detailed definition would only serve to divide for little added value.

In retrospect, Claiming Our Future might more readily have harnessed the power of values had we worked to develop shared meaning and understanding of the values over the early days after the inaugural event. Values at the time were focused on primarily for their capacity to establish the boundaries of a shared space for a variety of individuals and civil society organisations. They were the link that bound us together in a context where civil society was weakened by fragmentation and competition.

Values as a lens The five values identified grew in importance for Claiming Our Future beyond this linking and boundary setting function. They served as a mandate for the new movement or network as much as the set of issues agreed at the event as policy priorities for Claiming Our Future did. The issues determined what we

would work on. The values determined how we would analyse and work on these issues.

Equality, environmental sustainability, accountability, participation and solidarity became the lens through which we viewed developments and activities.

They framed and shaped the positions we developed on themes such as an economy at the service of society, income equality, and democratic reform.

They shaped demands we put forward in campaigns on the annual Budget and on issues such as the introduction of a Financial Transaction Tax. They informed perspectives on the future society we wished to see that were expressed in initiatives such as drafting a Declaration for a Future Ireland.

Claiming Our Future had a loose and open structure. Decisions were taken by a central group, largely recruited from among the willing rather than through forms of election. Strategy was shaped by an annual assembly that involved all who were participating in or supporting the various endeavours of Claiming Our Future. The five values became crucial in holding us to a shared mandate established by all at our inaugural event.

In such a context, decisions were taken by the central group and strategy developed by the annual Assembly within debates that were shaped by the lens offered by values of equality, environmental sustainability,

accountability, participation and solidarity. They gave a legitimacy to the work of Claiming Our Future in that they enabled us to remain true to decisions made at the inaugural event.

This approach inevitably came up against the absence of definition for the values. However, in debating strategy and making decisions the meaning for these values held by participants became more explicit. The process of working together gave definition to the values over time. Definition was not actually a source of contention and, therefore, might valuably have been attempted earlier.

The positions and activities developed

by Claiming Our Future began to offer practical expressions for these values over time. They translated intangible values into tangible demands and perspectives. This gave life to the values and began to open up an understanding of greater potential for values in the pursuit of social change.

Values as a motivator The working group on income equality, convened by Paula Clancy, paved the way for a new understanding of values

within Claiming Our Future. The group was working with a range of different civil society organisations in exploring shared messaging and how to most effectively message demand for economic equality, demands that appeared to have little political traction.

Our engagement with particular aspects of our society, such as community groups for example, will strengthen specific values. Media, advertising, public policies and institutions in society that embody certain values cultivate those values and discourage opposing values.

The work of the Common Cause Foundation in Britain was identified as holding potential (www. valuesandframes.org) and the group invited Tom Compton over to provide a workshop on values and how values work for Claiming Our Future. Our understanding of values evolved in better understanding their role as the source of popular motivation for social change.

We were challenged to rethink not only our perspective on values but also on the pursuit of social change.

This set of values can be mapped according to whether they are likely to be prioritised at one time by the same individual or not. Common Cause point out that when a particular value is engaged other distant values on the map are suppressed. When values that prize concern for the wellbeing of others are engaged, for example, values that prize personal status and success are suppressed. They point out that engaging particular values, such as equality for example, can ‘bleed-over’ and strengthen associated or neighbouring values on the map, such as protecting the environment.

This analysis assisted in exploring common messages that would promote a shared value base of economic equality.

Messages that communicate values rooted in a concern for people’s wellbeing should be emphasised. Messages that take up and reflect the dominant values of the powerful, which tend towards personal status and success, as a means of persuading them to change should be avoided.

The Common Cause Foundation have led a rethink on the centrality of values to effective work on environmental, global justice, anti-poverty and other such issues. They identify values as key motivators for people. Values, they point out, are universal and the same set of values occur repeatedly within and across societies. We are all motivated by the same diverse group of values, but to differing degrees as particular sets of values get prioritised in different contexts.

They point out that values are like muscles. If you do not get to engage them on a regular basis they fade into a background and lose priority for you.

This understanding of values began to take root in other areas of Claiming Our Future’s work. We became conscious of the need to engage people with our values of equality, environmental

sustainability, accountability, participation and solidarity and to find innovative ways of doing so. Initiatives engaging artists and activists in this search for new ways to engage in what is essentially a cultural battle of values were pursued.

institutional operations over values of equality, environmental sustainability, accountability, participation and solidarity.

Civil society needs to: •

Learning and legacy The legacy from this work includes organisations linked with Claiming Our Future taking on this approach.

The Values Lab (www.values-lab.ie) was formed to support organisations to consider and define their values, communicate their values, and plan their work on the basis of these values.

The Equality and Rights Alliance (www. eracampaign.org) took up a valuesbased approach in promoting integrated approaches to equality and human rights and supporting implementation of the statutory duty on public bodies to have regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, promote equality and protect human rights.

We recognised that civil society was not effectively communicating its values to the general public and lacked skills in this. A cultural battle was being waged without our effective participation. Little wonder that, ill-equipped and underresourced as we were, values of personal status and consumerism dominated decision-making, popular demands and

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Explore and analyse what is happening around us and what we are doing through a values lens. The values established for Claiming Our Future were adequate in this regard but required further definition for this to happen. This should lead to new and innovative strategies and practices for societal change.

Promote and reinforce our values in our communication work with the general public, with those experiencing inequality and disadvantage, and with those who hold power in various institutions.

All aspects of our work as civil society organisations should reflect and embody our values.

The challenge is not to persuade people to take on new values, but to accord priority to the values we espoused. This requires new skills and strategies that must be further developed.

Contest those institutions that promote a prioritising of values such as wealth, social recognition, power and consumerism. These are a powerful and well-resourced range of actors. They include the advertising industry, the media, the education system, and those who dominate political discourse that

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currently dominate the cultural battle over societal values.

Be wary of prioritising the values of those we seek to challenge as a means of convincing them to engage with us for short-term gain. Long-term institutional and systemic change will only be built on prioritising a new set of values.

Any decision to secure access to the powerful on the basis of an appeal to their values needs consideration of the trade-off involved.

Work in a cross-sectoral way.

Individual civil society organisations will never be adequately equipped to take on this cultural battle on their own. Alliances, networks, and collaboration are required across a range of organisations to secure an adequate, coherent and sustained call to engage with values of equality, environmental sustainability, accountability and participation.

This pamphlet was drafted by Niall Crowley.. The publication of this pamphlet was made possible by support from St Stephen’s Green Trust Fund and Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.