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Mike Chitty

Helping realise development since 1986

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Mike Chitty

The Care Manifesto – A New Reading Group

Mike Chitty · March 5, 2021 · 4 Comments

The Care Manifesto is a short book, less than 100 pages, written by the Care Collective.

It articulates a radical vision that puts care at the very heart of our lives and politics.

I plan to start a new reading group to explore the book and its relevance to management and leadership in health and care.

We will focus on just one section each week covering the whole book in just 6 weeks. It IS less than 100 pages after all!

The book is divided into 6 sections:

  1. Caring Politics – 24 March
  2. Caring Kinships – 31 March
  3. Caring Communities – 7 April
  4. Caring States – 14 April
  5. Caring Economies – 21 April
  6. Caring for the World – 28 April

All sessions will run from 5-6pm.

Fancy joining us? Book here – just 20 places available…

Plans for 2021 – I’d like YOUR help

Mike Chitty · December 22, 2020 · Leave a Comment

2020 started with me reflecting on the sorry state that our leadership (whatever that is) had got us in. Back in January 40% of NHS nurses had taken time of work because of stress in the previous 12 months, with similar figures for other clinical and non clinical staff. The NHS was in crisis.

And then covid seemed to erase history as well as make it, as newer and ‘bigger’ crises meant that historic problems got largely forgotten about as resources were concentrated on tackling this ‘new enemy’. Our leadership seems to always want an enemy for us to fight.

Some 10 years ago I was running three projects in Leeds.

The first, Progress School, provides free group based coaching to anyone that needs it. It provides time and space to think about who, and what, you are becoming and to find ways to manage your personal development.

Progress School will be back in 2021. You can help by coming to it yourself, or by suggesting it to anyone you meet that might benefit from a bit of free coaching.

The second was the Leeds Community Enterprise (Elsie for short). This is an enterprise accelerator.  A source of wisdom, advice and practical support that can be used by anyone in Leeds who is undertaking any kind of enterprise.  It may be a business, a campaign, community group or any other project.  It is for anyone who is looking to make progress, but needs a bit of a hand from the Leeds community.

Elsie provides a service that is confidential, competent and caring.

With the boundaries between business, community and social impact becoming more blurred we need to put together new, low cost and sustainable ways of helping people in our community who are trying to make things happen.  This is my best stab at what that could be like. Elsie is a group of trained volunteers drawn from all walks of Leeds life who meet for 2 hours every month to brainstorm advice, guidance and support for anyone in Leeds who is looking to advance a project. Elsie not only offers practical and technical advice, but will also act as point of contact into other Leeds support networks.

Elsie meetings are designed to be fun, fast moving, practically focussed and above all helpful – and not just for the people who are seeking support.

Elsie ran successfully in Leeds for a couple of years about 10 years ago. I plan to bring it back in 2021. You might want to help by joining Elsie as panel member, or by bringing a project to it. In order to become a panel member you will need to attend a short training session.

The third project that I want to bring back is Disrupting Poverty. This was a community of people who were disturbed by the extent of poverty in our city and wanted to do something about it. The way the city shaped itself into the ‘haves’, the ‘have lots’ and the ‘have nots’.

Disrupting Poverty used large group meetings called “Innovation Labs” or “Results Factories” to bring people together to explore ideas and organise to make the best of them happen. Back then we calculated that the number of children in Leeds who officially lived in ‘poverty’ would more than fill Elland Rd. In the decade since them things seem to have got worse. I stopped Disrupting Poverty when the council set up the Poverty Truth Commission. I wish I hadn’t. I intend to start it up again in 2021.

How Can You Help?

Get in touch to have a natter is probably the best way. You can book a bit of time in with me here

Or sign up for the Elsie Training here…

Progress School dates for 2021 will be published soon.

33 Ways (and counting) that ‘Whiteness’ Works

Mike Chitty · October 23, 2020 · 2 Comments

White in a black frame
Whiteness

I started in anti racism when some of my favourite musicians starting playing gigs in the late 70s for the Anti Nazi League and Rock against Racism and I was ‘just seventeen’, if you know what I mean. It was not long after Bowie had declared that ‘Britain is ready for a Fascist leader’.

In the 80s I trained as a Teacher when the impacts of race, class and gender on educational attainment and child development were taught rather than the mechanics of the national curriculum. It was the time of the miners’ strike and the North/South divide in the UK was wide.

In the 90s I worked in black, village schools in rural West Africa in an old British colony before coming back to Leeds to raise a family and build a career. I had some theory as well as a little practice and experience under my belt.

But no-one had re-framed the challenges of anti-racist practice with the study of ‘whiteness’ and how it operates until Tracie Jolliff introduced it to me at the NHS Leadership Academy perhaps 5 years ago. It has shaped my practice and my observations and reflections ever since.

Now I will ask leadership teams and boards to have a good look at how ‘whiteness’ operates in their culture. Because until we can start to see ‘whiteness’ as an ‘operating system’ and start to re-write some of its code, it will keep being extractive. It will keep producing inequities.

More recently working with Pauline Mayers on ‘Lessons From Henrietta Lacks’ has helped me to see a bit more of how my own whiteness operates as part of the wider system. Heather Nelson at the Black Health Initiative in Leeds too has helped me to look in the mirror. And Whiteness has also had me in its sights. “If you are going to do ant-racist work you will have your baptism of fire”. You will have many baptisms…

By ‘whiteness’ I don’t mean all white people. As Professor Kehinde Andrews has said ‘whiteness is not just for whites’. I mean a system of cultural and historical assumptions about hierarchy, power, objectivity, logical positivism, duality (whiteness is happier with black and white rules not shades of grey, nuance, wisdom and judgement) and patriarchy that are so deeply enmeshed in many ‘white’ cultures that they pass invisibly as ‘how things are’.

I have started to look for clues about how whiteness works. Signs of whiteness at work. In myself. In the organisations I work with, and for. In the communities and societies that I am a part of. That are a part of me. They are clues, not laws, or rules or truths.

  1. Whiteness looks for and at what is wrong with colour
  2. Whiteness commissions or supports people of colour to sort out ‘what is wrong’ (provide special course for people of colour, set up networks, write reports)
  3. When Whiteness experiences dissent or challenge it frames it as a threat and defaults to power and hierarchy over compassion and listening
  4. Whiteness likes to be taught by colour (What should we do?)
  5. Whiteness finds reflecting on itself difficult – it often triggers guilt and shame rather than hope and opportunities to change
  6. Whiteness often blames victims (if we feed the children they will become dependent)
  7. Whiteness polices tone – ‘calm down…’
  8. Whiteness when it feels threatened punishes
  9. Whiteness invites people to learn and when the learning becomes powerful, painful and the Zone of Uncomfortable Debate is entered with accompanying emotion, they close it down or punish the ones expressing their pain
  10. Whiteness values compliance over dissent
  11. Whiteness ‘does to’ rather than stands alongside
  12. Whiteness rarely looks hard at itself
  13. Whiteness learns slowly because it already knows how to look after itself
  14. Whiteness values self development over self sacrifice
  15. Whiteness exercises ‘power over’ in preference to ‘power with’ or ‘power to’
  16. Whiteness holds on to its power
  17. Whiteness sees itself apart from the system rather than as a part of the system
  18. Whiteness prefers domination to collaboration; competition to cooperation
  19. Whiteness is used to ‘winning’; getting its way
  20. Whiteness is trapped in its own miserable, extractive, consumerist nightmare of progress
  21. Whiteness finds it hard to see its paradigm of privilege
  22. Whiteness manipulates through psychological safety and self supporting cliques
  23. Whiteness recognises as intelligence/wisdom the products of white normative educational and developmental processes. It tends not to recognise the product of other non-white developmental norms.
  24. Whiteness claims inclusion and compassion – while presiding over enormous inequalities and violence
  25. Whiteness shies away from complexity and nuance in favour of evidence
  26. Whiteness tends to divide the mind from the body
  27. Whiteness encourages us to privilege certain world views and to dismiss others as unscientific, or not evidenced
  28. whiteness upon learning of the pain/trauma of others will become the emotional ‘victim’ needing comfort thus derailing the conversation and focus back to themselves
  29. Whiteness upon learning of the pain/trauma it causes others will become the emotional ‘victim’ needing comfort and thus derailing the conversation and putting the focus back to themselves
  30. Whiteness starts with white as the default. It then uses categorisation and tick boxes to fragment people, shift them away from default and identify them in more and more ways as Not Normal. To hide intersectionality by counting variables that it can then treat as ‘independent’.
  31. Whiteness prizes ‘knowledge’, but is very clear about the forms that it finds acceptable – fetishising a narrow field of science and turning away from epistemological positions that doesn’t privilege it.
  32. Whiteness sees ‘BAME’ as a ‘background’. In the foreground it sees opportunity.
  33. Whiteness prefers to see racism as an individual, personal act, an event that can be condemned – rather than as a structure of its making for its own convenience and power.

What have I missed?

Protected: Why I am no longer working with the NHS Leadership Academy

Mike Chitty · October 22, 2020 · Leave a Comment

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JT Gatto for Ivor Tymchak

Mike Chitty · October 21, 2020 · Leave a Comment

“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us… I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to *prevent* children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

“It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does…”

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

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