The Work I Want to Do: The Role of Community Voice in Change

There was once a time when I was known as the keeper of the words at TSM – I ghostwrote blogs before I was even officially on staff and was always ready with a blog! If I’m honest, I don’t think I have written a blog in at least a year (We are each asked to write one blog a month). Something happened…life happened…the world around us…happened. I’ve tried to write blogs – I have even “mostly written” a few blogs – but they all turn out to be content more suitable for a Medium page than for TSM. I have so many things to say, but none of them are appropriate for this platform.

As it is, I am not exactly sure what direction this blog is going to take from here, or if it will end up like the others that nobody sees – too politically charged, too emotional, too combative.  To be fair, when I say nobody has seen the blogs, I mean nobody – it’s not like I’m submitting them and being told I can’t say that. I am not being censored. I am grateful to work for a firm and a boss that gives me great freedom to express my personal views. I just have enough sense to know by the time I’m done writing, that what I had to say was not actually intended for our TSM platform. (That content usually ends up on Twitter.)

There is a sort of blog mantra here at TSM to help guide us and spark ideas – write for the work you want to do.

Since the majority of my work is behind the scenes survey writing, data analysis, interviews, editing for all of our clients – this prompt always feels more complicated than it is helpful to me. However, since I am so beyond past due for a blog, I spent some time really sitting with this idea, hoping it could lead me to put words on a page and this is where I have landed. 

“The work I want to do is to help the people around me - my teammates, our clients, our community…change the world. ”

The work I want to do is to help the people around me - my teammates, our clients, our community…change the world. The work I want to do is to show up every day and feel good about the survey questions I ask, the people I ask them to, and what happens with the information I collect on each project once I pass it along. The work I want to do is real community listening and ideating on behalf of companies and organizations that want to work with their communities, their customers, and the recipients of their services to collaboratively build something great. The work I want to do is work with people that call us because they genuinely want to do that work too.

I know change can be slow and incremental and sometimes it takes time. But personally, I am convinced it doesn’t always have to be slow and incremental! It is possible, when everyone shows up open and ready for it, that change can be immediate and deliberate!

So, I guess, if I am writing a blog for the work I want to do –

I want to work on projects where external stakeholders are valued; where community relationships matter; where the goal is not to do it a little bit better than yesterday, but to do the very best work possible in the very best way possible – regardless of who or what might need to change in order to make that happen.

The work I want to do is to help the people around me change the world…today.