Time for a bit of self-reflection.
From one staff member on behalf of a 1,400-person UK organisation (24,000 globally). We’ll need a really big mirror.
Save the Children was founded by Eglantyne Jebb in London in 1919, after World War I. We’re incredibly proud of what Eglantyne achieved. We wouldn’t exist without her boldness, her dream, her hard work. She wrote the world's very first declaration on child rights, which formed the basis of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
We wouldn’t have been able to reach children across the world from our 120 country offices, help protect 166 million children from atrocities like conflict, the very real effects of the climate crisis, and Covid-19.
But take a step back again, a few hundred years before Eglantyne, a Briton, kicked off one of the world’s largest and most successful charities. If we Britons hadn’t already ‘visited’ certain countries in the 16th century and beyond, left our language and taken a few souvenirs, then perhaps we from the UK wouldn’t have needed to return, aid in hand, to help so many children.
Or perhaps it’s not ‘perhaps’. Perhaps it’s fact?
We know extreme political, economic, societal and geographical change, the kind a coloniser might bring (let alone slavery), is obviously a factor in child suffering. These changes propel poverty, hunger, disease and war like mad, to put it lightly. And the effects last centuries.
By 1913, 23% of the world’s population were under colonial rule and by 1920 the British Empire covered 24% of the world’s land. We cannot and should not try to untie Save the Children’s 1919 birth to Britain’s not-so-historical colonial and racist history.
What we should do is look directly at it.
Realise that as an old, UK-founded organisation we are part of both the problem and the solution. We intrinsically have a colonial mindset because we were founded in a country that brought chaos to a quarter of the world. But we can work to make sure it does truly become history one day.
So, after that quick reminder that bad things were done by the British Empire, let’s look at the conversation around decolonisation, a word that we hear a lot these days but that we may each understand differently.
Decolonisation is the act of undoing colonialism – not just when a country physically relieves its power over another country, but also undoing mindsets of racism, sexism, power, control, and the combination of all of these that live in British and European institutions and individuals. Or the idea that white, western people know how to fix another country’s issues more than the inhabitants of those countries do themselves. The ‘othering’. The ‘theys’ and ‘thems’ over there.
At Save the Children UK we have a diversity and inclusion strategy, as many other companies do, and we are regularly talking about white-saviourism and how to rid it from the organisation. We’re beginning to understand that colonial mindsets have infiltrated not only the work we do and the way we interact with the world, but also internally in our organisation’s structure.
We recognise it and we’re acting on it.
But what a deep shame that we – Save the Children UK and most other western organisations – only started driving this conversation further and being more open, more reflective, more active after George Floyd was killed in the US and the world finally realised there was a white supremacy monster within the police? Why was it only then that we, the charity sector, really stepped up?
We know we have a lot of work to do.
Hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth.
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