Failing Slowly and Playing with Color

Six years ago last month, I started my journey into nonprofit management.

I was in the midst of a divorce, unemployed, and the mother of a toddler.  I was scrabbling to sort out the wreckage of my life, and to find a path forward.

I was watching the world change, as a woman and a black man were the front runners for the Democratic nomination for president.  But I was also railing against the ways in which the world was not changing.  I was reading a lot about human trafficking, child marriage, female genital mutilation, and other ways women and girls are denied their humanity for profit or tradition.

One night, I read this article, titled "Shunned from society, widows flock to city to die."  It describes Indian widows, who are forced to shave their heads when their husbands die and are ostracized from society because they are considered to be bad luck.  I was seized by this quote, from a woman who had been sent away from her family when her husband of 50 years passed away:

"My son tells me:  'You have grown old.  Now who is going to feed you?  Go away,'" she says, her eyes filling with tears.  "What do I do?  My pain had no limit."  

I could feel her grief.  I felt shock at the depths of her deprivation--of identity, of respect, of relationships, of the dignity of an old age lived in comfort, surrounded by the family you have worked so hard to raise.

But that isn't how it works when there isn't enough food to go around.

I don't want to live in a world where I have so much, and women like her have so very, very little, and then shake my head sadly and turn a blind eye to that kind of searing injustice.

So I started shaving my head every year.  I did it because I needed to do something.  I did it because I wanted what I did to match in some way the starkness of the lives of the women and girls I wanted to advocate for.  My hair was a part of my identity as a woman that I could give up, in order to speak up for women like her.

And now?

Well, now I've decided I'm going to stop.

I have essentially failed slowly.

Bald Solidarity failed to grow under my leadership to a size where I could make it my full time work.   I have failed to get funding.  I have failed to keep volunteers around long term, which was likely due in part to my failure to manage them well.  I have failed to find people to do the work with me that it would require to make Bald Solidarity what I imagined it could be.  

And I couldn't be more grateful for or more proud of my experience.

I've shaved my head, in public, five times.  I've had the incredible privilege of meeting others who were moved enough to join me and do it too.  My volunteers and board members have been amazing, helping me organize talks in high schools and youth groups, benefit concerts, and our annual head shave.  We've raised thousands of dollars to create educational and economic opportunity for women and girls with fantastic organizations like Equality Now, UNICEF's Maternal Mortality program, Coalition Against Trafficking, Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network (WARN), and the Girl Effect.  We've freaked out crowds of passersby at Westlake Center Park.  We've spurred thought about gender and poverty--in ourselves as well as in others.  

It would be a mistake in writing this blog to pretend that this decision has not been very difficult.

When I started Bald Solidarity, I committed to myself and to my board to keep it going for 5 years.  I also committed to a continual process of asking the question, "Is this the best way to accomplish our goal?  Is there a better way to use money and time to advocate for women and girls?"

None of my reasons for doing it have disappeared.  All of those problems I linked to in the first paragraph still exist.  So, why give up now?  I'm going into a field where I don't necessarily need hair.  I have supportive friends and family who think my crazy head-shaving is pretty great.  I have a boyfriend who was sad when I told him I had decided to wrap it up.

Simply, I have concluded that the answer to the question I asked above "is this the best way...?" is no longer "yes."  I long to work with a team of people, to learn from others, to combine resources rather than being out on my own.  I'll be looking for exactly this kind of environment in a few months, when I am done with school.  

I am also burned out.  For the last four years I have been in grad school, raising a small child, and running a nonprofit.  I mention this because I think it's important to acknowledge weakness and personal need, especially in the context of advocacy and human rights work.  What we are doing feels so urgent, so necessary.  And it is.  But having the greatest impact over the long term requires reassessing what we are capable of doing well, and being willing to go through seasons where we rest, or just do less.

Just do less.  And do those fewer things better.  

Something else happened last month--something far more important than the anniversary of me starting a nonprofit.  

Widows in India--those same widows who are being abandoned by their families and forced into a living non-existence--participated in Holi, the Hindu springtime festival to celebrate color and love.  When they are widowed, they are expected to stop wearing colorful clothes and indulging in earthly pleasures...so no Holi.  But this March, they'd had enough.  

The pictures are incredible.  These women who have worn bland white, who have been hidden from society, danced and laughed while people above doused them with colored water.  They celebrated.  They threw off the shame that widowhood and poverty has cloaked them with.  They celebrated with each other, in a supportive and joyful community, championing equality and breaking society's bonds.  

I wept when I read these stories.  Bald Solidarity may be done, but the movement of empowering women and girls goes on.  There is hope.  There is progress.  There are women who were marginalized, rising up and playing with color.  And I have been honored over these years to participate with them, on the other side of the world.  To throw color around with others who have had enough of injustice.  

This is my challenge, at this phase of my life, to myself and to anyone reading this:

Fail slowly.  Try something big and scary.  And find ways to play with color.