By: Kacie Lyn Martinez
At the close of 2019, the Torchlight Collective faced a pivotal moment in our growth as innovators in international development, human rights, and global health consulting. We knew we had to reckon with a central question in order to realize our mandate: What would it mean to live and work our values at scale?
In the past five years, our global members have worked on over 45 cross-cutting projects working with foundations, UN agencies, INGOs, academic institutions, and community-based organizations. Our interdisciplinary teams are expert and well-sought after. More than that, we were founded on the belief that we could build a platform for the individual sparks of leading technical experts, researchers, and advocates from around the world to work on visionary, interdisciplinary projects. At our core, this collective is an experiment on alternatives to neocolonial consulting practices through redefining how and with whom we wield collective power. The Torchlight Collective has the promise of redesigning how to collaborate on locally-based and community-driven solutions that don’t assume historic power disparities and exploitative dynamics as a natural part of the process.
Yet, to harness our collective power and work in lofty field-changing ways, we needed visionary infrastructure and strategies to carry us forward. Whether an individual, community, or organization, growth is both a painful and powerful process. In 2020, the Collective began introspecting and building through visioning exercises, restructuring to take on larger scale projects, and redesigning the organization around membership experience. It’s been a bold and vulnerable year.
What we did and why we did it
Our members are not alone in critically analyzing and testing alternatives that decolonize public health and international development. However, the process of uprooting the internalized dogma of white supremacy colonialism is like all healing processes -- it begins with the self. In 2020, and continuing throughout 2021, Torchlight and our members have begun using key tools that help us reflect, reconcile, and recenter. We often pull from best practices in human-centered organizational design, Non-Violence Communications, equitable stakeholder engagement frameworks, and trauma-informed power analyses. Internally, we’re realigning on the Collective as a collaborative practice of learning, joy, equity, and safety.
More concretely, we’ve begun to look at and address insipid inequities in our organizational systems that show up in things like decision-making, pay, and participation. We’ve enacted a transparent tiered structure for day rates, which honors the skills and experience of Torchlight members regardless of their cost of living. We’ve redesigned our onboarding and recruitment processes to center the experience of those we recruit in a way that’s lean, orienting, and enthusiastic. This year, our leadership has also streamlined our project management and business development frameworks to be intentional about how we value different working styles, proactively engage with problematic parts of the sector, and realize care for our members, clients, and partners in our projects. Many of us have internalized professional survival modes of overworking and unhealthy boundaries, so at Torchlight we’re refining support systems for our teams to work in smarter, balanced ways on the impact we care about.
What’s next
Although we’ve established many of these systems throughout 2020, our work and active attention persist. Through participatory design, curious humility, and collaborative learning, our collective is in a process somewhat similar to scrubbing the insides clean. We know that the biggest threats to equity, human rights, and shared dignity thrive on the micro level in the seemingly mundane. How we run meetings, structure teams, and engage with partners all require an assessment and a realignment with whom we aspire to be.
As we do this, Torchlight is growing our membership. In 2020, the Collective welcomed four new members who bring a combined 50+ years of experience across SRHR, reproductive justice, capacity building, young engagement, and participatory research. We’re recruiting seasoned and emerging consultants who are skilled at monitoring and evaluation, diverse research methodologies, data analysis, advocacy campaigns, database development, and data visualization. We particularly encourage those from the Global South, POC, and LGBTQ+ individuals as well as Arabic and French speakers to apply to our next cohort. Applications close Friday, February 12.
It's not just our portfolio of impactful projects, but how we work together that will define the broader legacy of Torchlight. Our commitment to organizational growth is a commitment to improve our work with members, clients, and collaborators - and it’s a major reason why our community continues to expand. More than having their expectations surpassed within project scopes, our clients and partners work with us because they want to explore how we can better work, align, and learn. The Torchlight community supports what Torchlight reflects in the field - an innovative experiment in collectivism brought on by the best and brightest.
We welcome you on our journey.
Photo via Flickr