This month in the life of Recontar in Brazil has been a lesson in the art of letting go:  realizing the limitations of Recontar´s control on the lives of the families we support and of my control on Recontar.    This has been a painful lesson that has left me in tears and kept me awake at night.

One of the families that we have been supporting is that of a young vulnerable mother, aged 18, her 17 year old boyfriend with a drug habit and their beautiful one-year old son.  She is a young woman whose mother died of AIDS, who has been in and out of state care in her teenage years, who suffers from depression and has been taking sleeping tablets since she was 15.    She had been showing great improvements in her life, becoming engaged in the arts and craft work, through our help, moving out of an abandoned squat to live in her first independent apartment and finding a job as a cleaner and a crèche place for her son, which would enable her to maintain her small family and finish her education.   When I spoke to her earlier in the year, there seemed to be so much hope for a new life.   One of our group therapy sessions focused on celebrating the way she was managing to turn her life around.   

Over the last two months however, she started back-tracking on all her advances.   She often did not bring her son to crèche, she had stopped attending the arts and crafts sessions, even though her production was tied to the short-term rent-support that we were providing and in the first week that she started her job, she didn´t go for two days because of a lack of interest.    Finally, she was dishonest by forging one of our pharmacy request-forms for baby´s milk to 10 times the quantity that the nutritionist had prescribed and then forcibly denying any wrong-doing.   She had broken the rules of our contract together, by her dishonesty and by not taking on the responsibility that is an essential part of the Recontar programme.  This responsibility on the part of the family is necessary if there is any hope that the programme truly provides an impetus for life change, rather than mere dependency-inducing charitable support.    On the day before her son´s first birthday, I had to tell her that she was being suspended from the programme for three months.  

She cried and I hugged her.  Internally at the time, and later at home, I cried with her. 

It is clear however that if we are to help her in any meaningful way, we have to suspend her, treating her like an adult in a binding contract with us, not a child whose actions have no repercussions.    The social worker referred her to emergency government support programmes in her area and provided her with bus-fare to go home.   As I was leaving, I spoke again to her and her boyfriend as they sat outside on the step of the NGO, making clear that their continuation in the programme and their responsibility for improving their lives was squarely in their own hands.

In three months, she has the opportunity to come back and discuss with the social worker whether or not she is ready to rejoin the programme.    I hope with all of my heart that the suspension is effective and that it shakes her into taking responsibility for her own life and that of her child and that we can truly, meaningfully help her.   Maybe this suspension will be more helpful in her young life than food baskets and free nutrition and dental advice.  Maybe even more helpful than the money she has earned through doing arts and crafts.   Maybe even more helpful than the genuine affection, psychological support and friendship that the team has shown her and her young son over the last eight months.          

What is clear to me though is that it is not in our hands.    This fills me with a sense of impotence and brought me face-to-face with the limitations of the programme.   It can only truly help those who in some way are prepared to help themselves.        

The limitations on my own control of the smooth development of Recontar were also brought into a clear light this month.

Since the beginning of Recontar in 2008, I made very clear in the social business plan that my executive involvement in the organization would end by the beginning of 2010, though I would continue my supportive role on the Board for a further two years.   The rationale behind this was that I would provide energy and impetus for the organization´s initial beginnings, while engaging as many local people as possible in the first year with the objective of the organization becoming locally-run from year 2 onwards and completely self-sustainable by end of year 3.    This made sense not only for the organization in the long-term, but also for me.   The freedom from an all-consuming executive role within the organization would allow me the necessary time and space to rethink what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, as the dust obscuring my future after Alastair´s death, began to settle. 

All of this had been going to plan.   At the beginning of this year, we hired two co-directors, one of whom is the young, talented woman who has worked with me since the early days of developing the social business plan.   Over the last four months, I have been helping these two co-directors to develop a clear work-plan for the year and have been overseeing the implementation of that work-plan.    So far so good.    My pregnancy, now into its final stages, played a strong role during these months in forcing me to relinquish executive control of the organization.    I was congratulating myself on my own ability to hand over ownership and a sense of responsibility, while maintaining high-level quality control and maintaining ongoing input on how the organization and its work on the ground developed. 

Then out of the blue, at our last pre-baby meeting, this young talented co-director dropped the bombshell that she had an opportunity to study abroad and would be leaving the organization.    Over the next few days, my mind went into a panic and I found myself repeatedly awake at 2 a.m. wondering what on earth I would do.    Not only is the co-director a smart, capable young woman, but she was the only other person, besides myself, who was plugged into the full network of people we had mobilized over the last eighteen months.   She also embodied the embryonic organizational culture that we have developed during this time, focusing on providing an enabling, fun working environment, laced with professionalism, dedication and effective project management.  Her earlier commitment to stay for at least one year as co-director had made me feel secure about the organization´s ongoing development.

With the news of her departure, the question formed in my mind of how I could postpone the birth of the baby to be able to step in, take over and ensure continuity.  The formation of this question made me see that I had not been as effective or quick as I thought at letting go of executive control of the organization.   

The formation of this question made me realize also that in my own mind I was going on maternity leave rather than truly allowing the organization to be more locally run.   

Reluctantly realizing at 2 a.m. that the baby´s birth simply couldn´t be postponed, I began to understand that this challenge gave me an opportunity to step out of the maternity leave mindset and to truly embrace letting go of the tight hold I still had of the organization.   

I realized that this situation was an ideal way of truly allowing space for the Board and the co-directors themselves to resolve the organization´s challenges.   As with the family that we had suspended, I realized that the situation was out of my hands.   I went to speak with the vice-president of the NGO and then called a meeting including him, the co-founder Marisa and the two co-directors.    I involved the whole Recontar board on the issue and it was clear collectively that the responsibility to suggest and implement a solution to the situation rested with the co-director, who had committed to take executive leadership.

The co-director, eager from the beginning to minimize the disruption of her departure on the organization, has now designed a plan and agreed it with the Board, which includes a process of recruiting a replacement and committing to a largely voluntary transition period up until August to guarantee as much continuity as possible.  My role in this will be peripheral, as I concentrate in the next three months on giving birth and surviving the early days and sleepless nights of a new baby.

Since Alastair´s death three years ago, life has pushed me to practice the art of letting go when the power to resolve certain situations is simply out of my hands.   Despite the tears shed and the few sleepless nights, I´m slowly getting better at it.