For several years, we have experimented with shifts in team culture - initially through relationships with facilitator Laura Miller and the Resourcing Racial Justice collective, and subsequently with several other consultants and practitioners. These relationships provided some insight into our individual and collective ways of working, but didn’t amount to a more concerted decolonisation and anti-racism programme for the Thirty Percy team.
In June 2024 - and prompted to some extent by questions from partners about an organisational stance on the genocide in Palestine and the Occupied Territories - we committed as a team to a dedicated anti-racism and decolonisation journey, aimed ultimately at embedding decolonised and anti-racist practices and principles into the team and organisation.
Although we have been funding racial and wider social justice work almost since our inception, we felt we lacked some of the capacities and capabilities in the team to navigate certain issues appropriately, and without replicating harm. We therefore looked to partner with one or more consultants, who could guide us on a collective and individual journey.
Following recommendations from trusted partners, we spoke to a number of fabulous humans about what we were looking to do (here’s the brief we sent to them at the time). We are incredibly grateful for their generosity - their time, advice, and guidance. In truth, we could have easily seen ourselves working with any of them!
Through these discussions in summer 2024, we ultimately chose to work with Martha Awojobi and Natalie Armitage of JMB Consulting. Martha and Natalie are now our guides and facilitators on a holistic anti-racist and decolonisation journey, aimed at transforming Thirty Percy and the team on a personal, interpersonal, and organisational level.
We are aiming to shift towards practice and organisational culture that is truly decolonised: from a foundation of racial literacy and a felt understanding of the ongoing harms of colonial-capitalism and white supremacy culture, through critical reflection of our current practice, and towards collective transformation. Our decolonisation work with JMB is a step into a new ‘possible’ for us as an organisation, team, and culture. Together, we have consciously contracted around JMB’s core values of bravery, joy, creativity, curiosity, solidarity, and regeneration.
The first phase of work with Martha and Natalie - from September 2024 to April 2025 - focused on ensuring foundational conditions for deeper exploration, unlearning, dreaming, and action were in place. As a team, we all approach this work with our own patterning, positionalities, and perspectives; getting us to a collective baseline understanding around the multiple interlocking violences of colonial-capitalism, White Supremacy Culture, and extractivism.
As of May 2025, the second phase of work will see us dive deeper into the charity industrial complex, reflect on and feel into the origins of the wealth Thirty Percy distributes, and drift intentionally into a dreaming space around the cultures and practices we want to embody at the individual, collective, and organisational level.
Alongside our work with Martha and Natalie, we also embarked on a journey with a shorter time horizon with somatics expert Cami Barton, who guided the team through somatics and embodiment work over the autumn and winter of 2024/5. The somatics work was deeply complementary - perhaps even foundational - to our journey with Martha and Natalie. Cami - by guiding us through the Resilience Toolkit - has equipped us with useful tools for identifying and navigating stress, conflict, and embodied activation.
The practices we explored through the Resilience Toolkit are now a daily (or near-daily - we’re getting there…!) feature of life in Thirty Percy. Team meetings often begin with an invitation to ground ourselves through a resourcing practice, mindful breathwork, activated tremoring, foot-peddling, or arm-stroking. We are more mindful of artificial and arbitrary deadlines we set ourselves. It is an ongoing exploration to embed this somatic practice holistically.
Our work with Cami has inspired us to build additional decolonial practice/training into our team culture, alongside the multi-year work with JMB.
Whilst we have paused to reflect with deep gratitude and appreciation for our work with Cami, we will soon begin a skills development programme on graphic sensemaking and recording, in collaboration with visual harvester Abdul Dube. As part of our early sessions with Martha and Natalie, we recognised how “primacy of the written word” - a tenet of White Supremacy Culture - is ripe for disruption.
Our work with Abdul will, we hope, unleash the bubbling creative potential in the Thirty Percy team, and shift us towards visual sensemaking through all of our work… Watch this space!