The Global Citizens Initiative hosts an annual Fellowship Summit to cultivate young “global citizens” to become “lifelong leaders of positive change.” In July of 2019, 28 high school students from 15 different countries gathered together for a 10-day experience in Tokyo, Japan. These students are each responsible for the design and development of a service learning project to be carried out over the course of a 10 month period. Their projects are “glocal” – addressing a global problem at a local level. In Tokyo, the students were supported by a group of Teaching Assistants, themselves all alumni of the GCI Fellowship Program. The Good Project has been in consultation with GCI since its formation, and we follow the work of its participants with interest. We recently had the opportunity to catch up with several GCI alums and ask them about their work, their thoughts about Good Work, and reflections about their experiences with GCI.
About Jessica Bannerman Arnold
Jessica is a recent graduate from the University of Cambridge where she specialized in Politics and Social Anthropology. During this time, Jessica was on the Central Committee for a number of charities in the city, predominantly around homelessness. Currently, Jessica is studying at BPP Law School in London to gain her professional legal qualification; here, she is a part of a number of pro bono projects, mostly working in legal advice clinics. Outside of academia, Jessica is a yoga teacher, a keen long-distance runner and spends her spare time either cooking or reading.
What does it mean to do “good work” today?
The interesting thing about this question is that it presupposes that what it means to do ‘good work’ today may be different from what it means to do ‘good work’ yesterday, or tomorrow.
Indeed, from personal experience I have found that what I understand to be ‘good work’ has changed over time. When I was introduced to the concept as defined by the Three E’s: Excellence, Ethics and Engagement, I took the intersection of these three core attributes to solely account for work with the exclusive pursuit of the greater good. In short, I was focused on what was ethical. However, today, I see ‘good work’ as being far broader. My understanding changes as my perception of the definition of each term changes, and as I witness more work undertaken by others and question whether or not it is ‘good work’, and why.
In tandem with this personal timeline also runs a collective narrative. What is ‘good work’ today may be different from yesterday and tomorrow because of the cultural moment we find ourselves in and new information that we receive. The increased data and technology that for instance has proven the existence and devastating impact of climate change means that to do ‘good work’ today is different from years gone by, as we must factor in this knowledge and act in accordance with it.
Taking together my personal conception and the collective moment, my opinion is that to do ‘good work’ today is to work with intention and integrity at every stage towards a goal. To me, the engagement, ethics and excellence need not be the goal itself, though it may be, but must be able to be seen at every point of the journey. A good example in this current moment is the Black Lives Matter movement, where there is a great deal of virtue signaling through online platforms, especially by large multinational corporations that have not backed up their statements with action. Though their statements and their goals may be seen as engaged, ethical and excellent, there needs to be more.
This has been highlighted for me as I have completed my yoga teacher training and started teaching. What I considered to be ‘good work’ as a yoga student was much easier to define: being present. In comparison, being a student and a teacher has challenged this. As a teacher I now feel that ‘good work’ in yoga is much more about connection, more about what happens off the mat, and necessitates consideration about the yogic tradition and philosophy.
I have found that this is mirrored in my legal career. As a student, I have thought that doing ‘good work’ is about respecting the process of learning the law, to equip me to be the best and most effective lawyer I can be. Yet when stepping into the law clinic, I again find that a great deal of being a lawyer is about communication and acting with compassion and understanding beyond the black letters of the law. I expect the importance of communication will only increase when I am in practice.
Tell us about your understanding of community. What are the communities of which you feel a part?
I find the idea of community very interesting. On one hand, community creates opportunities for the forming of bonds and collective identities that allow us to support and uplift one another. On the other hand, community can be divisive, in that to have an identity for a group necessitates an “other “group to define in contrast.
The idea of things being ‘socially constructed’ has almost become a cliché, but to me community is socially constructed whether you consider that to be for better or worse.
In my mind, it is for better as I believe that community at its best can be a safe space for individuals to act as support networks, create change and create a feeling of purpose and something bigger than oneself. An interesting sociological take on this has been presented by Durkheim who terms this feeling “collective effervescence.” It is best to explain this with an example, the most cited of which tends to be a crowd at a football match who in singing the club anthem, feels connected and part of something greater than themselves. This is the formation of community that gives each individual purpose, connection and the ability to both support and be supported.
In experiencing similar moments through singing a school hymn, being matriculated at my college at University, or watching the fireworks where I live for example, I have been made to feel part of my school, University and local community.
Nevertheless, it is the action that comes from these collective feelings that has truly made me feel part of communities. It seems to me that I feel most part of a community when removed from it through proximity. This means that I feel part of the GCI community when an ambassador and I connect when we happen to be in the same place, I meet someone from the same place as me in another country, or attend a class of a yoga teacher I trained with.
This perhaps shows that the unity/division dichotomy I started with may not be such a problematic divide. The fact that I feel part of my University, GCI and sports team’s community most when I am faced with people that are not in that community may show the strength of connection, as long as we are inclusive within these communities.
Is there a particular role model who has helped inspire you to do “good work”, either real or fictional? What is it about this role model that has inspired you?
Seeing my peers pursue studies at the same time as creating incredible networking groups or charities has really inspired me to do ‘good work’. I will spotlight just two of these incredible individuals.
At University, I was involved with May Week Alternative, a student run charity aiming to make giving about celebration. The initiative has gone from strength to strength thanks to the work of the astoundingly dedicated team that were balancing their Cambridge degrees at the same time. The founder himself was a student, and seeing his vision to make a sustainable change through a cultural shift has been a huge source of information.
During this time, I also met a young woman who, on commencing law school after graduation, started a networking platform for women of colour in, or aspiring to be in, the legal industry. Seeing this incredible woman found this movement with consistency, commitment and openness has been an inspiring example of ‘good work’ that I have been lucky enough to witness.
Both of these individuals have worked laboriously for the success of their groups, inspiring me to consider the longevity of each piece of ‘good work’ I set out to do, and how it fits into the wider narrative.
Tell us about your work. What projects are you currently involved with? How might what you are doing now relate to the work you began with GCI?
I am currently at law school having recently graduated, and I am also teaching yoga. Whilst I’m doing this, I have been involved with pro bono work with the law school that is hugely rewarding and I sit on the Ambassadors Advisory Council for GCI.
It is important to me to work with local groups in the community, so I have done work around loneliness where I currently live, and around homelessness where I went to University.
What I am doing now relates to the work I began with GCI through a focus on local solutions. It was here that I was introduced to the notion of ‘glocal’ where global issues are addressed through local solutions. On leaving the GCI Summit in 2015 and returning to the UK, I created a project to increase access to political education for children where I live on the basis of research I had done into voting patterns. This ‘glocal’ approach really drives what I do, and is a very important consideration for me when applying to international law firms to start my career.
How do you feel your current projects are connected or not to this view of “good work”?
There’s a really interesting interview on the Good Project website by John Bliss about teaching ‘good work’ in the law that has made me think about doing ‘good work’ during my legal studies. Combining my studies with pro bono work, I feel that I have been able to connect my work with what I feel to be ‘good work,’ by working with intention. Consistently reminding myself of the Three E’s and using this to navigate the decisions I have to make helps with this, and helps me feel connected to the view of ‘good work’.
I also feel naturally connected to ‘good work’ when working with the Ambassador Advisory Council with GCI as I am surrounded by really inspiring people on the team, discussing the inspiring fellows, and work following these principles.
Yet in sharp contrast to this is my yoga teaching which I feel is a much stickier area for me. Sometimes I feel that the work I am doing is ‘good work’, but I struggle with some of the cultural hangovers of the colonial period in yoga and my role in teaching this as a white woman. It’s a difficult balance, and I have not got the answers for this, which means that I do not always feel that I am doing ‘good work’ despite my best efforts.
How and where do you find meaning in your work?
Presenting myself with a constant reminder of intention is important for me to find meaning in my work. Reminding myself of what my intention is, and how in this moment I am doing that, helps me with this. It can be difficult when for example in my legal studies I am presented with compulsory modules that seem unconnected from my aims, however by considering what the module is trying to teach me both directly through content and indirectly through transferable skills, can help me remember why I am pursuing a legal career and find meaning in what I am doing.
Something that my yoga practice has taught me is the power of now, and value of presence. This helps me, not least by giving me an opportunity to consider things much bigger than myself.
Tell us about your biggest challenges, and how you work to tackle them.
During my GCSE years and into my A Level years, I started to have daily seizures. The cause could not be discovered despite years of testing. This caused me to take my own steps towards a healthier outlook, both mentally and physically, that has really changed things for me. I’ve managed to increase the gap between my episodes up to a year, and feel very positive about it, but it has taken dedication, resilience and self-awareness. This year, an accident led me to consider these three things again, and how I might take them forward to work through less personal and more professional challenges.
Looking for employment currently is a good example of this category of challenge that I am currently facing as my time at law school draws to a close in a global pandemic. The dedication to continue to apply, the resilience in getting up from every rejection, and the self-awareness to realise what I have to do to improve is how I am working to overcome this challenge, and hopefully those I will face in the workplace.
Have you ever faced a dilemma where you weren’t sure what the “right” course of action was? How did you handle this situation?
I have found yoga to be a massive help to me both physically, to complement the running I enjoy, and most importantly, mentally. Because of this, I decided to become a teacher to develop my practice and share the practice with others.
What I did not expect from the teacher training was such a deep dive into the philosophy and ethics of yoga. Acknowledgement of the history from Ancient India to Colonisation has made me deeply question my part in the yogic tradition. Not paying lip service to the trauma of this time, the rich story of yoga, and yoga as a symbol of cultural identity when India was being torn apart at the hands of Colonialists, does the philosophical school of yoga such a disservice. One would not attend mass at a Church, prayers at a Mosque, Holi at a Hindu temple at the same readiness that one steps onto the yoga mat, shuffles a Spotify ‘Yoga Zen’ playlist, and puts their body into shapes, especially without noticing the flaws and cultural context of the texts. To be confronted with this reality is challenging, and I found it hard to know if, on finishing my training, I should teach.
Having conversations with as varied a group as possible has really helped me, as well as acknowledging that the conversation is ongoing, most recently as highlighted through the BLM movement. For now, I continue to teach, attempting to acknowledge the history through my practice, by using the Sanskrit, continuing to educate myself by reading the texts, and making sure the voices I hear in the yoga community are as diverse as possible.
I’m not sure than this situation has been ‘handled’ but is very much part of a longer conversation that I am having with myself and others, trying to stay open to the idea that my opinions will be challenged and may change.