Self-Understanding
ESSET was born of the institutional churches and is mandated to enable and challenge the church to work for socio-economic justice. ESSET therefore sees the church as a site of struggle in which the cause of social justice may be suppressed or marginalised but never lost. It seeks to build leadership for social change at all levels in the church and to enable dialogue through which the poor church can challenge the rich church.
ESSET acknowledges that, as an organisation, it too is endowed with power. This derives both from its location in society, including its access to power holders and to information, its relationship with the church and the resources that it has at its disposal. Recognising this, ESSET is always confronted by the ethical question of how to use its power in the interests of justice. Access to power also means that power holders have access to ESSET. Thus the established church leadership may wish to use ESSET as a surrogate for the church’s own responsibility and an alibi for its own inaction
Enabling people to articulate their own struggles for economic and social justice is the primary aim of ESSET’s approach to advocacy. This means supporting people in deciding their own advocacy agenda and strategies. ESSET facilitates, but does not own, the process and has no control over the outcomes. Wherever possible, ESSET will seek to enable people to speak in their own name and will accompany them, and be accompanied by them, into the fora to which it has access. ESSET offers support in response to requests from groups of people. Such requests may be made by people approaching ESSET or they may result from ESSET initiating a dialogue with people.
ESSET favours immersion in people’s struggles and in the perspectives of the poor. As this implies, ESSET does not take a ‘balanced’ view that seeks to reconcile the interests of rich and poor. It is frankly biased to the poor. It also works to be present in the spaces of the poor, to find ways of working on their own ground rather than expect that the poor should always meet it in the formal and well resourced spaces to which it has access.
ESSET and its staff do not live the conditions of the poor. It therefore strictly honour the boundaries between itself and groups of the poor. As occasion warrants, a Memorandum of Understanding may be used as an instrument to clarify ESSET’s relationship and practice with specific groups and so to hold proper boundaries. Holding this boundary, even as it identifies with the aspirations of the poor, implies a constant need for reflection within ESSET on what it does when it engages with groups of poor people.
Questions for reflection include:
- Does ESSET assume responsibilities that belong to the people concerned?
- Does ESSET’s own practice encourage people to ask it to take responsibility for them or does it help people take responsibility for themselves?
- Does ESSET use people’s struggles for its own purposes and interests?
- Does ESSET make itself the centre of learning and knowledge creation or support and affirm people’s capacity to learn and create knowledge from their struggles?
- Is ESSET truly transparent about the source of its own power, about what it can and cannot do and what it will and will not do?
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