7.2 Putting passion back into our mission statements

What’s your relationship to your mission?

I remember once years ago an ED asked me to rewrite her mission statement because she felt it was too casual and she wanted something classy, something dressed to impress.

So I went at it. I constructed chains of compound-complex sentences jamming in every aspect of their work, leaving nothing out. Then I translated all the short, punchy words into multisyllabic Latinate substitutions.

When I finished, I sat back, took a breath, and looked at my handiwork, a dense jawbreaker of a paragraph—and my stomach rolled over. What had I done?

I was now looking at a mission that had been shot, stuffed, and mounted.

And I vowed never to do that again.

I understand that we do have to dress our missions up in their Sunday best when we apply for a grant from a foundation which we know likes that kind of thing.

But what is it that we need personally from our mission statements, those of us actually doing the work?

In our sector we put so much attention on the end point, the formal statement of the mission. But what if you go back to the beginning? What if you ask yourself the really rich questions, like…

What was my mission in the moment when it was born?

What was it before I had words for it?

What’s the primal passion inside my mission?

Now of course there are excellent nonprofit leaders who are not interested in passion. Give them some good services to deliver and they’re happy.

But there are those of us who need to reach deeper to sustain ourselves. Passion feeds us. It’s where we feel at home.

And to illustrate what I want to say, I’m going to talk about the mission I dedicated myself to for many years—child abuse prevention. And about our organization, CAP, which stood for Child Assault Prevention.

There were two ways I remember our mission…

Primal NO
Child abuse has to stop. It just has to.

Primal YES
Children have to be safe. They have to be cared for and loved.

Such simple, emotional words captured the essential power of my work and mobilized me.

And…

Really, what else needs to be said?

Of course, we had lots more to say in our appeal letters. But for me personally, this primal relationship to my mission was sustaining.

And yet these words, as true as they were, did not begin to capture my feeling about the mission. They pointed to something still deeper in my heart.

Now compare that primal mission to a statement of the kind we sometimes wrote up for grant proposals…

CAP is dedicated to providing prevention education and self-defense training to children in public and private schools, classroom by classroom, from preschool through 12th grade, with age-appropriate curriculum, to teach them how to deal with peer bullies, how to get away from kidnappers and molesters, and how to get help if they are being abused by a familiar person at home.

Nothing wrong with this. It’s good stuff. I’ll sign up for it. But the original passion is missing.

In our sector, we talk about mission drift, meaning that we chase money by accepting a grant that takes us away from our core.

But there’s also mission deflation, which means that in forcing our mission into dressed-up language which might seem more respectable, we lose the inspiring presence of its soul.

The truth about our social change missions is that in the moment when they’re born, they might not be pretty and presentable.

Though we pack our mission statements chock full of happy words, the truth is that a mission can come to us not only in lovely, upbeat phrases, but might be born rough, unruly, and rude in the language of hate…

I hate racism. I hate the destruction it does even to little children. I hate the arrogance of it. I hate the relentless bitterness of it.

I hate war. I hate the terror and the death of it. I hate the utter hopelessness of it.

I hate poverty. I hate how it grinds on and on down through the centuries. I hate how it makes every single thing about the life of a family so much harder. I hate that humankind has the knowledge to stop it but not the will.

If we’re doing our work in the real world, then don’t we want a real, full-blooded relationship with our mission? And why would we expect this relationship to be anything less than messy, challenging, passionate, and sometimes perhaps upsetting—and thus very, very rich?

Of course, we can always take a negative statement of hate and turn it into a positive statement of love…

We love building bridges across racial divisions so that peace and brotherhood will lead the way into our future.

We love creating the kind of universal justice that will lead to a lasting global peace.

We love creating comprehensive changes in our economy to that everyone will be able to have decent work at a living wage, and where our democracy will flourish free of the influence of undue wealth in the hands of the privileged few.

But still it’s good to remember that our deepest motivating passions are not always tame. And sometimes hate has a purer way of telling the truth that in fact needs to be told.

Now just because you’re connected in to the primal dimension of your mission doesn’t mean it can’t have a touch of poetry to it.

At my old organization, years into our work, we came up with a new mission statement…

CAP…So every child will know what to do when it really matters.

This statement tested so well we decided to keep it. But what surprised us most was that it didn’t even have the words “child abuse prevention” in it.

Instead it takes you right into the moment of decision, into the moment of danger, and then implicitly calls the question: Don’t you want your child to know what to do?

When parents heard our new statement their immediate responses was…

Yes, I want that for my child!

And isn’t that a key thing we as social change activists want from a mission statement? That it draws people? That it’s easy for them to remember and then pass on to their friends rallying them in turn…

Don’t we want our mission statements to have an organizing impact?

Even though this revised statement was written in more eloquent language than my original primal impulses, it still touched me in that deep place. It still gave me a shiver. I could feel my fire for my work every time I used it in a public talk or said it in a conversation with a potential donor.

Now what about the kids we worked with? They created their own relationship with the mission and their own statement of it. For example, in the elementary school program we started off each session with a discussion of the three special rights we believe every child has—to be safe, strong, and free!

Then we’d work with them on things they could do if someone tried to hurt them, if someone tried to take away one or more of their rights. The kids were eager to learn. They wanted answers to their fears.

Later, even long after we had left a school, we’d hear back from teachers that the kids were still talking about the…

“Safe, Strong, and Free program.”

That was their name for it, not CAP, not Child Assault Prevention. And it served as a perfectly good, eminently practical mission statement. The kids were using that phrase to keep the spirit of the program alive in their classrooms and on the playground.

Now back to this issue of passion, because I want to make sure that I emphasize that it can be very different for different people. By no means does it have to be dramatic and florid. For some of us it has a quieter way about it…

One time I was up in the Sierra foothills doing a consultation for a combination rape crisis and domestic violence center. I was meeting with the staff and Board together, a dozen people. I asked them to go around and say in turn what they considered the mission to be.

The staff each had a well-rehearsed rap of course. The brand-new Board member, Rose, spoke briefly and shyly.

She said, “My daughter was being battered and she came here and without you I don’t know what would have become of her. I’ll never forget what you did for her. And I decided I wanted to make sure that this Center is here for every woman who needs it.”

Then she apologized that her statement wasn’t very good. But the staff immediately jumped in…

“Oh, no, you’ve said the mission as it needs to be said.”

“When you say it that way, it sounds fresh.”

“I’ve repeated my version of the mission so often it’s now like pushing a button on the tape recorder. It’s automatic. I miss being able to talk like you’re talking.”

“I can feel your heart in your words.”

Rose had not used fancy terms, she was soft-spoken, yet her simple authenticity put across how deeply she felt this mission. That was twenty-five years ago and I still remember her voice.

So what blocks our passion? Lots of things might. Maybe we feel pressure to sound more professional and grown up, and passion doesn’t seem quite acceptable.

Or consider this…

Our sector has a bad habit of taking dynamic, vibrant leaders full of passion, and burying them in administrative work so they end up becoming nonprofit drudges. Which is one effective way to put the brakes on social-change. But that also breaks their relationship with their passion.

If our missions matter to us deeply, don’t we want the public to witness our passion?

The radical right is so good at speaking to emotions. They offer reactionary programs, self-defeating strategies, action plans that hurt people, but they tap into deep, rebellious, powerful feelings, which is one reason they have power far beyond their numbers.

And in response, how often do we see liberals and progressives using pure information without emotion? How often do we see them being restrained and super reasonable rather than showing their passion about meeting basic human needs?

It seems to me that doing social-change or social-justice work means that…

We go into the worst of being human to bring out the best.

This means, whatever our own particular issue, whatever our daily tasks, at the deepest level of our work we are…

Tending the very soul of humanity.