Emerge Blog

Mission: The Language of Our Goals

I'm excited to announce that we have a mission!


Emerge Global is a community that empowers women who have survived abuse to
rediscover and celebrate their personal beauty, develop their self-sufficiency, and become leaders within their own communities.

Building off of my last blog about our mission, let me explain the wording and thought process of our word choice:



"Emerge Global is a community that...":

We envision Emerge Global as a community that brings about collective change, rather than an organization that implements change from the top. It is through our collective effort as partners, sisters, and friends that will not only sustain our mission, but carry it forward.

"...empowers women who have survived abuse...":
While we want to avoid labels, we also want to acknowledge the strength of the women we work with. They truly are survivors of different types of abuse. Violence, marginalization, poverty, and discrimination are all forms of such abuse- from oneself, others, or society.

"... to rediscover and celebrate their sense of personal beauty...":
We hope our community will provide a space of beauty and joy where there in the past has been tremendous darkness and pain. That space is created through the self-discovery of the women themselves. Before they can have self-confidence and the tools needed to attain their own visions of the future, they need to love themselves. We see Emerge as a way to not only help women identify their inner beauty but to embody it fully, celebrating it with every step forward.

"...develop their self-sufficiency...":
We aim to help women become self-reliant, so that they can provide for themselves and their children. To achieve this goal, every Emerge woman should have the tools to be independent, to be mobile in various work environments, and to start their own business if they choose.

"...and become leaders within their own communities":
At Emerge, we dream of a day when women around the world who have been denied economic opportunity due to social marginalization will not only be self-sufficient but will be leaders in their own communities who create truly sustainable, grassroots solutions to some of our most pressing problems. Through our community, every Emerge woman will carry her newly developed tools forward to impact the lives of others.

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Emerge in the Journal and Courier

Dear Friends,

I hope each of you is having a great summer! I'd like to share two pieces of news with you:


Emerge is in the news today!

The Journal and Courier (West Lafayette's local paper) ran a story on Emerge today! You can read the article online at: http://www.jconline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080723/NEWS/807230310 The story highlights Ellen Sojka's work with Emerge. Ellen is a recent MIT graduate who will be traveling to Sri Lanka this August to develop our programs. Another volunteer, April Wachtel, will be joining her in Sri Lanka in October. We are so excited to be working with both Ellen and April!

Ellen Sojka wearing Emerge bracelets
Photo courtesy of Jamie Chevillet



Upcoming Fundraisers for Emerge
Emerge is wrapping up the summer with two fundraising events:

(1) August 7th, 2008 West Lafayette, Indiana
(2) August 29th, 2008 Houston, Texas

If you would like to learn more about either of these events, please email me at alia@emergeglobal.org so that we can send you an invitation. Read more »

 

Emerge Global's Essence: What Goes Into a Mission?

I sit on my bed. Papers are strewn everywhere, devoured with doodles, scribbled writing, and colorful boxes. I can’t fit enough on any page. I have a whole pack of markers in front of me, a highlighter, and of course, ample sticky notes. As I jot down my thoughts, I continually ask myself "but what is the essence of what we are doing?" and "why?". I know Emerge through my gut. That is what I love so much about it. True, some parts of my knowledge have been intellectualized. But, Emerge has grown organically, evolving as I get to know one girl at a time. How, then, do I formalize and articulate my feelings and motivations, the hopes I have always had for the girls and women with whom we work, to the rest of the world?

I am facing the challenge that has loomed over me for months: How do we adequately develop a mission that is not only focused but ambitious, that guides our future direction, and that clearly captivates the essence of what we aspire to do? And, how do we make it a succinct sentence? The task feels impossible to me.

Another paper full of ideas complete. I tape it to my wall, next to the other papers. Who do we help? Why do we help them? What do we see? I keep going back to our existing programs. But no… A mission is not about where we are, it's about where we want to be. What reality do we want to build?

I’m writing this blog not to claim that I a mission-forming guru, but rather to show some of the thinking that consumed much of my summer.

Inevitably, when I first explain my work in developing Emerge Global, people always begin by asking me about the “who.” Who do we work with? What problems have they endured? Somehow, the “tear-jerking factor” seems to be an ingrained necessity for non-profits. But, the more I write about “who,” the more uncomfortable I become with both labels and looking for problems. Here are some of the thoughts I have had in developing our mission:

  1. How can we use labels to celebrate and propel our community forward, rather than simply confining our target group? By specifying and labeling our target group too specifically we trap them in a reality of their past and pain, rather than focusing on the place they want to be. While we should acknowledge intensity, I want our mission to be uplifting and to push our community forward, to make our partners, beneficiaries, and participants proud. How do we all want to be identified? If we need labels in some capacity, they should be empowering and uplifting to all involved: to the women we work with and to those who support us.
  2. Let’s focus on the reality we want to build, not only the reality that we want to fix. It seems to me that many nonprofits often have an invested interest in finding problems. What kind of world depends on problems? I think one of the biggest challenges facing nonprofits today is the fact that their very existence is dependent on the painful realities we face in our world. Of course these problems wont just disappear, but there seems to be something a little odd about having an invested interest in preserving enough problems to have a thriving organization. Somehow, in my opinion, it distorts the truth without celebrating the beauty of all situations. Rather than focusing on problems, I want to focus on the reality we want to construct.
  3. Rather than solely focusing on people of one background, engaging a diversity of backgrounds and experiences will make for a more empowering program. Even if our focus was only girls who'd survived sexual abuse, to really nurture them and accomplish our goals, we should build a more inclusive community of support, where women of different backgrounds come together to begin to appreciate one another. Isolating a population does very little to serve them long-term.
So, what is the essence of Emerge Global? In my mind, it is captured in one word: “emerging.” (Ever wonder where our name came from?) Emerge Global is about the process of opening and being able to craft your own life and help inspire others. But, I want this “emergence” to be strong, powerful, and full of life. Our mission should embody this energy.

I go back to a vision statement that we drafted last year:

We envision a world where all women can actively shape the course of their own life, free from the violence and discrimination of their own minds and others; where the human spirit is free to surround itself with the meaningful self-discovery, expression, and interaction that constitutes beauty; and where women can easily join together to actively build a more healthy and sustainable world for all.

And, through brainstorming with Melodie, our 2008 summer intern, who has a natural brilliance for articulating gut intuition into fluid language, we finally began to come up with wording for our mission… Read more »

 

2008 Summer Intern

By Melodie Kao, MIT 2010

This summer, I am interning full-time with Emerge, sponsored by MIT’s Program for Human Rights and Justice. A rising junior at MIT, I am a rower majoring in Physics and concentrating in Architecture. My passion for all types of design led me to Alia this past February, who asked me to join Emerge’s Bead Committee after noticing that I had made my own earrings. I distinctly remember the night that she talked to me and the rest of the students whom she had recruited. The ten of us were huddled around a table in a small, darkening corner of MIT. And there was Alia, eyes wide and filling the small space with the stories of the girls at Emerge, with the barely restrained energy of her own ideas, with the incredible potential that we could all add to Emerge. As I listened to Alia speak, I knew that we were more than just a group of college girls hoping to help part of the world. I could feel myself becoming a part of something much greater and filled with so much beauty that I could barely breathe: I was becoming part of all of the hope, all of the lives, and all of the strength of Emerge. In that instant, I knew that I would do much more than develop new jewelry designs. So here I am for the summer, working day and night with one of the most inspirational people I know, doing all that I can to help Emerge grow and making a great friend in the process.

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