Last night I had the great joy and privilege of attending HelpingACT’s fundraising dinner at Taj Agra in Dickson.
HelpingACT “began” in about 2018 with a conversation between two men, Mohammed Ali and Manar Ahmad, with the simple goal of ensuring that no person in Canberra would sleep hungry. Since then this simple mission has galvanised a whole community of people eager to connect over the mission of helping others.
They received their Registered Charity status only several days ago and so the call was made to host a dinner before the looming end of financial year in order to allow others to take advantage of this little benefit.
In a spirit which I’ve only ever seen Mohammed Ali generate almost everyone in the room had the chance to say something. As the prepared speeches finished Mohammed began to call on people at a moment’s notice to step up and say something while also calling on us all to continue to enjoy ourselves, enjoy the good food, enjoy the music, enjoy the good conversation. Have fun, laugh and love.
By the time he called on me I could think of only one thing to say and it’s something that I have learned through Mohammed over the past two years in which I’ve had the privilege to come into his orbit. That is, love.
Mohammed galvanises people because he loves them and because he has learned how to show them that he loves them. He loves the politicians, the media personalities and managers, the refugees and those he helps all equally. He helps people because he loves them and he also loves to enjoy life, eat and celebrate with the people he loves.
He equally respects and honours everyone’s contribution and everyone’s story and he is genuinely touched by people’s difficulties and is not scared to bring these stories to the light of day, inviting people to share in the safe space he creates.
I remember once that his advice about speaking in public was simply to speak from the heart.
Talking about love is not the corporate thing to do. I’ve been to many awards nights and fundraising dinners where us humans try our darndest to be less human, to bring what we perceive to be ‘our best selves’ into the room. As my cousin said about a new position, “I have to wear a suit and speak funny”, and I laughed because it is true. Being part of the corporate world can be to don a costume and adopt a vernacular which squeezes us humans into the armour of productivity. We can be all too eager to show that we’re worth it, that we’re successful, that we’re like all the other successful, well-put-together people in the room.
But, there is another way and I never saw it until I met Mohammed.
The enemy of love is fear. There is a lot of recentish talk about how safe workplaces are the best workplaces. Employees/staff/team members need to feel like their workplace is a safe space to express their ideas, to have a break and enjoy each others company, as it’s been shown that good relationships within the workplace lead to measurable productivity. Until we manage to measure and value other things such as quality of life, richness of experience, connectedness and actual benefits to our environment we can assume that these things too are improved through the natural sport of human beings congregating, communicating and caring. For a great little video on this see Margaret Heffernan’s TED Talk, Forget the Pecking Order at Work. This video, I’m happy to say, was shown to me through graduate studies in Management – so the culture is changing.
Unfortunately, we have inherited an industrial workplace structure, based on distrust and power (for a great book about this, read the classic book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell). Performing to a set of KPI’s, watching our words in case of accusation, managing our emotions so as to maintain professionality, kurbing your enthusiasm and silliness! To be sure, some of the best workplaces I’ve been in are where the boss – the CEO – is happy to be a little bit silly. It sets an amazing culture of acceptance.
Great is the CEO who strikes a balance between passion, hard work and good humour.
Public speaking especially is often fraught with fear that we will say ‘the wrong thing’ but on the times I’ve opened up about my own story I’ve been surprised by the reactions. It seems we’ve all been there. We’ve all struggled, we’ve all needed a leg up at some point in time. We do carry our personal relationships with us into the workplace. Our mothers and fathers do still loom over us even there. We all still do need reassurance that we are loved. We need to feel valued, we need to feel respected, we need to feel safe.
Mohammed Ali taught me, and is teaching me, how to create these spaces of safety.
We thank people. We show our own hearts. We act a little silly to relax the atmosphere. We lose our own self-consciousness so that others drop theirs. We listen with our whole bodies. We enjoy ourselves and invite others to do the same.
For Mohammed running a charity that feeds people is not about doing good because it’s the right thing to do or because he wants to see change, or because of a religious conviction. Running a fundraiser is not about extracting as much money out of people as possible. It’s about inviting others in to share in the generous experience of life. It’s about enjoying life together, because how can any of us enjoy our own lives fully when we know there are others struggling, sleeping rough or sleeping hungry. We are connected. Our experiences ripple out through time and space and affect one another. If my brother is hungry then I too may as well be hungry. If I am scared then others become more scared.
Mohammed Ali taught me how to love well. He showed me that we can love in the corporate world, that in fact, we must. He showed me that helping is as much about loving myself as it is about loving others.
If we really want to be part of changing the world then we have to love others as if they are ourselves. We have to love our earth as if it is ourself. In a way this does entail some sacrifice in order to ensure there is a fair share among all (which includes a fair share for our planet to continue to regenerate and thrive). This could be illustrated in an alternative Venn diagram below.
Venn diagrams aside, the point is, if we love others and if we love our planet and if we realise that our fullest experience of life is dependent on them also thriving then it’s easy to not take too much. It is easy to consider our own purchases, it is easy to moderate our own wealth in order to share the wealth around because we can not be deeply happy unless our brother or sister is also happy and we can not truly thrive unless our own planet is thriving. If this means we have to cut down on plastic, cut down on travel, cut down on the number of houses we own so that others have a chance at housing security, shrink that “me” circle back to its right size, so that we are not consuming 4.5 planet’s worth of resources while others are consuming mere crumbs, then that’s ok because it’s about all of us together, not one of us alone.
Mohammed Ali taught me that we are better together. We are better when we are deeply connected to our community through love.
What better lesson is there.
Tulitha King 