This isn’t the most fruitful time in the tech industry to aspire to be a technical manager, with companies looking to increase the number of direct reports per manager and decrease the layers of management in their company. See for example:
Meta Platforms Inc. is asking many of its managers and directors to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as it tries to become more efficient[…] The process is known internally as a “flattening”
However, the managers with newly larger teams, and even their managers, often don’t agree with upper management that their load is reasonable. And there are still pockets of growth within flat or shrinking companies and the management of those pockets still may not be allowed to add managers to accommodate it.
With lower formal demand for managers but continued informal demand for them comes increased opportunities to exploit would-be managers, or former managers, by making them “shadow managers”. Here’s how it looks:
the team has a line manager, known to the HR system as the manager of the team;
the team also has shadow managers: team members who are told they are “basically managers” or who step in to fill gaps they see; they might be aspiring to management, or they might be ex-managers who were moved out of formal management roles in a flattening process; and then were asked to continue most of their previous management tasks anyway;
the shadow managers take on a significant amount of management overhead in their work: they might be doing the bulk of coaching teammates, assessing their teammates’ performance, doing their teammates’ performance assessment paperwork, preparing their teammates’ promotion cases, giving their teammates feedback, and deciding if they have addressed it.
This can seem to everyone involved like a win-win. The line manager is overworked. The team needs help. And the shadow manager wants to be a manager, and this gives them a chance to try before they buy, and to get some skills while they do it.
But when shadow management goes on indefinitely, here’s how it works out badly for the shadow manager’s career:
Even with locally supportive management, this isn’t the shadow manager’s core job and so can easily end up being many hours on top of their daily workload rather than offsetting any of it.
Due to changes above or around them — a change in the line manager, or the hierarchy above finding out about and shutting down an undocumented shadow arrangement, or the team shrinking — the shadow management work isn’t needed any more. Due to the switch of focus, the shadow manager’s individual contributor skills are rusty and their recent contributions are low, and so their performance is suddenly at risk.
The shadow manager applies for a management job outside the company or even in another team, citing their shadow management experience. Since the never had formal direct reports, they are assessed as having zero experience in management and are incredibly unlikely to get the job.
If they do enter formal management, their management years of experience are counted only from when they began formally managing, their time spent shadow managing isn’t considered when they want to progress to senior management positions.
There’s certainly good reasons to give people interested in management exposure to it before they lock in a career change, but it shouldn’t be viewed as a favour to the potential manager to have them do the job indefinitely without documented responsibility. Quite the reverse.
The more ethical ways to develop future managers are:
Create junior managers rather than shadow managers. Give an inexperienced manager a small number of official direct reports and close supervision and coaching as a stepping stone to managing a full team. This starts the clock on their years of experience as a manager, and if your organisation gates manager tooling and training on having direct reports, this will give them access to those as well.
Shadow management should be linked to a position and time-boxed. If asking someone to manage without the lines of reporting, it should be linked to a written dated plan to change to managing those staff, with success criteria and an exit plan from the shadow management responsibilities if it’s not working out or if no position becomes available. Six months is reasonable; this gives sufficient exposure to the team’s planning and career cycles without knocking years of experience off their management career.
Time spent on leadership tasks should be planned for andrewarded. If an aspiring manager is mentoring, hosting interns, or assisting in reviewing or assessing their colleagues’ work, this should be recognised in their individual performance, and in their role description if it’s a regular task. Their individual contributor expectations should be reduced to allow for this workload. Their work should be documented in a way that at least assists internal job applications, even if it’s not likely to be recognised as management experience on the job market should they want to search for management jobs.
If required to flatten your organisation, actually do so. Don’t flatten it on paper but sneakily leave all your excess managers in place as shadow managers. Instead, transfer their manager-specific leadership tasks to a line manager, and invest in developing their individual contributor career or finding them transfer opportunities as a line manager to a team that needs them.
When you hit a certain stage of your corporate career — like being a woman of a certain age, but better paid — you may end up in a lot of development training for various reasons, or pointed at coaching, or both. I learned, in one of these, a very useful distinction, what people development curriculum designers call adaptive challenges vs technical challenges.
Technical challenges are skills gaps, basically. You don’t know Australian tax law. You don’t know C++. You’re not a very polished public speaker. You aren’t well networked enough with senior leaders.
Adaptive challenges are when you’re getting in your own way. You learned C++ but you can’t bring yourself to apply for the job. You’ve practiced your public speaking but you turn down opportunities to do it. You know lots of people and they think highly of you, but you never ask them for help.
It’s possible to have both challenges at the same time, and for difficulties in one to inhibit the other; say, your dislike of attention (adaptive) is getting in the way of you investing in your public speaking skills (technical). But there’s also a huge tendency in corporate people development to spend a lot of time on adaptive challenges, particularly for underrepresented groups and in equity programs, relative to the investment in technical challenges.
My belief about why this is is that addressing adaptive challenges simply scales better. Whether someone is in finance or activism or programming or real estate or medicine, the techniques you teach them to get them OK with asking other people for help more, or asserting their opinions more, or for assessing their own work fairly, are similar. You don’t need to find someone with an overlapping professional background or from the same field to address adaptive challenges, and you can draw on an entire community of teaching and coaching practice. And on the provider side, you can position yourself as a coach who teaches assertiveness in a wide variety of fields, rather than someone who trains assertiveness for non-profit accountants!
It may also be a comforting story to tell yourself about your equity practices: probably the reason that underrepresented people aren’t succeeding in our organisation is that they’ve internalised messages from somewhere else, probably some large and uncontrollable force outside, that they aren’t worthy! Fortunately, they are now on a level playing field in your organisation and all you need to do is help them out of the mindset that other forces taught them.
Whatever the cause though, the result is a similar pattern to vague feedback holding women back. If what is stopping someone progressing in their career is that they don’t know enough about Australian tax law, at some point they just need to learn more about Australian tax law, and assertiveness training doesn’t have a lot to add. And they or their employer are going to have to do something not as scalable as assertiveness training to address it.
For employers: don’t leap to adaptive challenges as the answer for your equity problems. If there’s technical challenges, you are going to have to drill in to individual or small group teaching, or invest in external programs that require considerable time and money investment. (Their adaptive coach might encourage them to take an hour every week to reflect on their goals, but their taxation law professor is going to flat-out require that they pass exams.)
Managers: track investment in someone’s development over time: if an employee did Overcoming Impostor Syndome and Unlocking the Big You last year, you should question whether The Light Within is the course for this year, relative to the entrance requirements for a masters degree or a rotation into a team that writes more C++. Work with people to ensure that there’s investment in the actual skills they need to progress as well as into their mindset. In the worst case, you are really selling someone very short if you help them be big and bold and proud and self-actuating, and then you don’t listen to them now that they know enough about themselves to know that they really need to learn more C++.
I was there, not for the drone show but trying to get out after a Vivid harbour cruise that finished at 8, which meant walking upstream to Wynyard against the flow of people trying to get to Circular Quay for the show, in a group of seven adults and six children all under 10. It’s the second time in my life I’ve worried about being hurt in a crowd crush.
The first time was also at Circular Quay, it was the closing night of the 2000 Olympics and fireworks were scheduled. We knew to get there early for 10pm fireworks and so sat grumpily on the footpath in the sun with others, including families, from the afternoon onwards. And it filled, and it filled, and after a while there was no sitting room, and after a while children were crying and crying, and after a while the crowd swayed back and forth in waves while people shouted “stop pushing, stop pushing”, and after a while people having panic attacks were being crowd-surfed backwards to paramedics who couldn’t get into the crowd.
It was sunny and there wasn’t really a plan, other than to wander the streets and enjoy ourselves. Towards the end of the day, we came to a crossroads flooded with thousands of people[…] A few police were stationed behind crash barriers at the side shouting helpful things like, “Keep moving, please!” At one point I remember asking one of them how much longer this would last, only to be yelled at angrily[…] The idea that I was in danger seemed silly, and indeed some people were laughing. We were outside. There was no urgency. How could anybody die from lack of space beneath this empty sky?
Crowd crushes are often created a long way away from the disaster, by people who can still move relatively freely and are trying to get somewhere, or even being yelled at to keep moving keep moving. They aren’t aware that somewhere ahead where they can’t see, they’re pressing people into each other, or into a dead end, and if they become aware they can’t stop because of the crowd behind them.
If there had been a crowd crush last night, it might have been created by our group, trying to walk south on George St against the crowds moving north and trying to stay together despite the best efforts of children who are small enough to dart clusters of adults, or it might have been created by the sheer volume of people flowing flowing flowing out of Wynyard and heading north even when Circular Quay was already swaying body-to-body. Past a point, crowd control at events like Vivid is specialized and can be counter-intuitive (for example, you can place strategic barriers to achieve certain effects on the crowd’s movement). But there were several basics that really would have helped:
Information for the crowds beyond “check social media” as the organisers are telling the public to do today ahead of the second drone show. Social media isn’t an emergency communications channel; both Twitter and Facebook are actively hostile to logged out site visitors. No one is going to create a Twitter account to find out how whether Wynyard is open. There needs to be easy to find up-to-date safety updates on Vivid’s own website, on the Transport NSW website, on the City of Sydney’s website, at the train stations, and on crowd control signs in the actual area.
Some (sign-posted! discoverable!) side streets or paths held aside for people trying to go upstream. There were many people who were trying to leave either because they saw the lights earlier or because the crowd was too much for them. In particular, there were loads of prams with infants last night, that’s not going to go well for anyone if the density reaches the swaying phase. Give people a safe way to get out while there’s still the possibility.
I like to share my giving in order to give folks who don’t know where to give, or who might be inspired to do their own research and start giving, even if not to the same organisations.
I have three of tiers of 2023 recurring giving. The largest level is organisations I have a longer history of giving to and more insight into their strategy. The next level is newer causes I am interested in or exploring. The final one is a “hat tip” level of donations supporting not-for-profit technology organisations whose technology I use a lot.
Larger donations
The Haymarket Foundation is a secular organisation focussed on people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage in Sydney. They specialise in complex homelessness (eg, people with mental health, drug use, or trauma), and we particularly value that they are trans-inclusive. My family has supported them in the past (eg at the start of the pandemic, and as their winter 2022 matching donors).
GiveDirectly Refugees which gives unconditional cash transfers to long-term refugees in Uganda. Unconditional cash transfers give people in poverty the power to decide what they need to spend money on in order to address their own situation. Australian donors can donate via Effective Altruism Australia to receive a tax deduction.
Farmers for Climate Action, influencing Australia to adopt strong economy-wide climate policies with opportunity for farmers and farming communities, via a Giving Green recommendation.
We’ve continued supporting them since, and this winter we are matching your donations to the Haymarket Foundation, supporting residents like Deo Nuyu, a refugee from Burundi, who cannot access income support without a protection visa, to remain housed. Volunteer Vic, who recovered from drug abuse with the help of the Haymarket Foundation, credits their case workers with the difference in his life.
My family and I are matching donations to the Haymarket Foundation up until June 30, give today to support homeless and disadvantaged people in Sydney!
Some employers are beginning to announce transitions to remote-friendly or all-remote workforces even after office work is judged safe again. This has a lot of potential upsides in reducing commutes, in increasing job opportunities outside of established tech centres, in giving people access to their preferred working styles.
But there’s also a lot of potential downsides where employees personally pay to recreate the parts of the office experience they need and nevertheless find that their career tops out early or that they’re summoned or semi-summoned back to a tech centre just as they’ve started to realise the benefits of remote work.
Thus, just as I’ve written before about questions you should ask when hired into an existing remote position, you should ask a similar set for a company or position transitioning to remote work, to make sure that it is invested for the long term and is clear about any career or financial sacrifices you will be required to make to be remote.
Are there limits on where employees can be located? It’s quite common for remote employees to be required to be based in certain timezones, countries, or states/provinces where the employer already has some kind of established presence.
Is this transition in fact permanent, or is there a review date? Moving away from a city is a very large investment, often in direct costs but definitely in opportunity costs. Best to make such a decision on a strong commitment from an employer to a long time frame.
Will compensation be adjusted downwards for employers who relocate to an area with lower cost of living (or lower market salaries)? There are some remote-first or remote-friendly employers who pay the same salary no matter where employees are located, but also many which pay against local cost of living or local market conditions.
Will all remote compensation be adjusted downwards on the assumption that everyone will leave high cost of living areas? Hopefully not! Because some people have substantial investments in their current area of residence, eg commitments to their partner’s career or to their local family or friends, or to the cultural scene or their hobbies, or to retaining the option to leave their current employer for another that will require them to be office-based.
Will employees who move to an area with less generous minimum benefits have their benefits cut? Eg, will they lose days of vacation or carer’s leave? Will their insurance be revised in line with their new residence’s minumums?
Will there be formal limits on which positions are available remotely?
Even in the software, creative, and research positions that can be done remotely, it’s common for companies to not allow all positions to be remote. Here’s some possibilities for what this might look like:
you can’t become an executive if you’re remote
you can’t become a people manager at all if you’re remote
you can’t do security-sensitive or personnel-sensitive work if you’re remote
you can’t achieve a certain job level if you’re remote
Best to know!
If the company is indeed open to all positions being remote, how are they going to ensure equality of opportunity?
If there are going to still be offices, it may in theory be possible to become an executive or a high level staff member while remote… but it eventually emerges that no one is actually doing those jobs remotely, that those folks are all office-based.
What does the employers plan for developing remote staff careers look like and how will they audit its success?
Will there be training and resources for workers transitioning to remote, for managers who are remote or managing remote workers, etc?
There are specific skills required to manage and be part of both all-remote teams and mixed-remote-office teams. Will these be taught to employees? Will there be trained support for specific situations that may arise (eg, it may be more difficult to reach remote employees in a suspected emergency)?
Will there be financial support for the costs of remote working?
Remote working passes the office maintenance costs onto employees, eg substantial extra energy costs (particularly in areas with very cold winters or very hot summers), additional space, need for office furnishings, higher Internet bills and larger mobile plans, IT equipment, etc. Will the employer reimburse these costs and to what extent?
Ideally this support isn’t too specific. Eg, “we’ll pay for a co-working space”: co-working spaces usually have open office plans and quite a few involve hotdesking (especially if you’re part-time). They’re thus generally not suitable for people who have a lot of sensitive meetings (ie most managers or HR staff), some people who need physical accommodations, or people who are unable to work well in open plan offices.
Conversely, “we’ll pay to fit out your home office”: establishing a home office requires that people have or can afford to move to a place with an extra room, and usually that there are only one or at most two people in the home who need a home office.
Flexibility is better.
Will business travel be mandatory or strongly encouraged?
Quite a lot of remote teams rely on an mandatory or near-mandatory all-hands in-person get together once or twice a year for team building purposes. This may be an easy trade for some to get the benefits of remote work, but it may not be for others, especially for primary carers.
This question may be especially relevant for people who are going to be one of the few remotes on their team and may be expected to travel to the office regularly; and also for managers, who are occasionally expected to travel out to each of their remote reports periodically.
Will there be allowed to be children/dependants in the house during working hours and are there restrictions on their care arrangements? At least when schools and daycares are open, it’s common for employers to insist that if there are children/dependants living with a remote worker, they must have a carer who isn’t the worker. It’s possible (jurisdiction dependent) for them to insist that the house must not have dependants present in work hours at all.
my guess is that if you are experiencing the sort of emergency or unique circumstances where the only solution involves leaving your home or interacting with others, you wouldn’t be asking for permission.
Every time I say [not to call the police on neighbours if it’s avoidable] somewhere publicly, someone tells me about how they had to call 911 b/c of a fire or accident or some emergency, which goes back to the original point: If you needed to, then you needed to, it was an emergency, so why are you telling me about it, Edge-Case Bob?
Here’s the thing: Miller is wrong to guess that everyone knows what emergencies and unique circumstances trump public health right now. We know this, both because people are not seeking hospital care for life-threatening emergencies and because abusers are successfully telling their victims that one of them for sure has the virus, or that they will surely die if they go outside, etc.
I have a bunch of experience with being conscientious to a degree that is sometimes dysfunctional. (Hot tip by the way: never phrase something this way to your boss, because while you may think you’re helping them understand you better, they are thinking “wow, ‘conscientious to a degree that is sometimes dysfunctional’ is such a neat way of phrasing things in a performance review!”)
I’m fine making rules. I’m fine following rules.
What I’m not good at is breaking rules. I definitely do not personally come equipped with good intuitions about which emergencies or unique circumstances should cause me to break rules and if someone finally talks me into following their intuitions I have a huge struggle with it.
Chidi Anagonye is having a really hard time right now.
I have a specific and dramatic illustration of this. One day several years ago, in fact the 1st September 2012, I was starting to feel “fluey” while trying to fit my toddler son for shoes (he kept running away screaming and I was soooo tired). I asked my husband to walk home, I admired the new baby spring leaves on the trees in the park as I walked past them and said suddenly “you know, I think I’m about to get really sick, let’s get home now.”
Reader, I did indeed get really sick. I spent the next week in bed drinking apple juice and watching the shadows of leaves dance on my windows. I didn’t bathe because I was too tired and sore. I cried all the time because my all muscles hurt so much.
And there was this spot on my inner left thigh that was especially painful to the touch, like a really bad bruise. Weird.
We didn’t have a thermometer, but if we had, we probably would have found that my temperature was stable at around 40°C for much of that week.
I get ill fairly often, and had a kid in daycare so it was especially true at that time. The preceding year, I’d gone to the doctor to report that I’d been dry coughing until I vomited and that I couldn’t breathe for coughing.
It’s interesting that COVID survivors often call this out as a really abnormal and alarming thing, because my GP told me that day that “it’s just a widdle viwwwwwus, Mama!” and that it was really normal and I should wait it out. (Doctors often address mothers accompanied by young children as “Mum”, or “Mama”, and often baby talk to them.) After that, I inferred that, among my many existing rules about not bothering people, that “coughing until you’re choking” and any symptoms of similar severity are not a sufficient reason to bother doctors.
So, I wasn’t coughing, but I was similarly uncomfortable. Every day on the phone, my mother begged me to see a doctor. Every few hours, my husband begged me, increasingly in tears, to see a doctor. But I didn’t, because that was my rule: doctors don’t like viruses and don’t want to hear about them (Mama).
To be clear I’m not normally remotely that dysfunctional about rules. I assume being in terrible pain and running a fever that was much higher than we realised had pushed me to my absolutely most irrational degree of rule following. But these are the emergencies and unique situations that people will need to navigate.
Finally I reluctantly agreed to call a triage line, and they told me that high fevers and muscle aches are non-specific signs of severe illness, are not specific to viral infections, and also that having a really tender spot on my leg did not suggest influenza. They very strongly recommended I find out more specifically what severe illness it was that I had.
And so I went to the GP at around the point where the spot on my leg became so painful I couldn’t stand to walk far. I had an ultrasound that showed that it was a massively swollen lymph node, and also that my entire left leg was filled with other swollen lymph nodes. I went to another GP the following day to review the results, I asked if I could maybe lie down to talk to her, and she told me to immediately go to hospital. By that point my leg hurt so much I needed a wheelchair and I was so dehydrated that they ran an IV immediately.
I spent 6 days in hospital running a fever that was closer to 41°C while a couple of layers of skin peeled off my entire inner thigh due to the incredibly aggressive bacterial skin infection that it turned out I had. (It was never cultured, they assumed it was staph.) I refused to eat for almost all that time and for several days I also refused to drink at all and needed IV fluids and painkillers (along with antibiotics).
When my temperature finally went down, the infectious diseases specialist, who tended to address me at all times as a rather dim medical student, dropped by (on a Sunday, in his civvies) and said conversationally “it’s cases like this that really remind us that, even with antibiotics, these things can be very serious, and sometimes even fatal!”
So, it’s indeed safe to say that I’m in the group of people who need to do some work around identifying the emergencies and unique situations where we should take care of ourselves! It is not safe to rely on me recognising my needs and not asking for permission.
But I do have some tips for being slightly safer about this.
Are you a conscientious person? The first step is know this about yourself. Do you:
tend to reduce ambiguity or make yourself or others feel secure by making rules or otherwise systematising things?
prefer to be led by rules?
prefer to lead other people with rules?
have at least one dramatic story in your personal history that goes something like “and that’s why I didn’t call a doctor for a week” or “and so I was the one who ended up pleading guilty” or “and then I paid back her debt for her” where you’re still sort of slightly proud that you followed the rules right into hell?
You might be a conscientious person! And it might not always be an entirely helpful way to be.
Understand that not everyone is like you. Quite a lot of people don’t like doing what they’re told, don’t believe that rules are generally a good idea or that rules are usually abusive, believe that they are a smart person who does the right thing naturally and that rules are only for those other losers, or use rules as means of having power over other people.
Many of those folks have their own excellent reasons for being that way; if you’ve been abused by rule-making a lot, you likely won’t end up in the “rules make me safer” camp, for example. (I think it’s also worth noting that conscientious types aren’t all good people either.)
Rules are often written to allow for all these responses. Rules are thus often very absolute and strict, because the framers assume that everyone will do 50% more than the rules allow (often recursively so). Rules are backed by the power of the state both because some people won’t respond to anything less, and because the state loves power. Etc.
And so if you’re highly conscientious, statements along the lines of “you wouldn’t be asking for permission [if this was actually bad]” may not apply to you. Those statements are aimed at another group of people. If you always need to ask for permission to take care of yourself, that won’t have suddenly changed since February.
Reflect on the purpose of rules. Pandemic rules are a tool for public health and safety. Know that there are other serious threats to health and safety and they may also happen to you.
If you’re a conscientious type, it could be a good time to engage with civil liberties organisations to make sure framing of the rules is proportionate to risk, and makes clear exemptions for, eg, escaping abuse, seeking treatment for other medical conditions, and getting fed. Help your community out against the abusive or unimaginative conscientious or power-hungry types!
Make a plan. Depending on your relationship with anxiety, extensive worst-case scenarios can be a bit risky to play with. But you can cover the major bases and use your affinity for rules to save yourself some decisions later on:
if you’re in an endemic COVID area, familiarise yourself with
the typical onset symptoms
the current testing criteria in your area, and where you would go for a test if eligible
the difference between “care at home” and “go to hospital” symptoms
have a plan for spending 14 days entirely inside your front door, eg an appropriate stock of food and painkillers, in Australia learn about Woolworths Priority Assistance and Basics Box etc
if you have a known health condition (including mental health!), have a guide to when you are sick enough that you need medical attention for it, and know where you would get such medical attention
find an authority you trust (in the best case some level of your government, but perhaps your personal doctor, a different country with a better government, etc) and follow their public health guidelines, not the strictest intersection of every guideline posited by every single epidemiologist, infectious disease physician, and random individual on Twitter
if you’re required to work outside the house, see previous point for specific precautions and also remember that physical distancing is a societal measure to slow disease spread that does not require the same thing of every individual person
consider #StayAtHome an excellent rule for most people for current circumstances (hopefully eventually in specific regions, very widespread at present!), not the new official way to be a good person forever
Be generous to others. You can’t save the entire world by calling the cops on folks’ parties. Captain Awkward’s post, for all that I’m using it as a jumping off point for “it’s not about you”, has some great tips for more sustainable interventions.
There’s plenty of stories about of people screaming “I see you out there every day! Stay at home! Murderer!” out their windows to people who are on their way to work, at a hospital, because they are a nurse, in a COVID ward. Make a rule to not be that person!
Do something good. Many conscientious people struggle with beliefs they are a bad person. Some of the policing is because people want to actively be good and the only way they can think of is to yell out their window at nurses.
Do some real good: donate some money, or become a civil liberties activist, or let nurses stay in your AirBnb for free, or start working on your plan to go to med school, or send a thank you postcard to hospitals, or join a mutual aid group, or phone a friend.
Work on your dysfunctions. Some of these patterns revolve around overfunctioning and anxiety disorders. Consider therapy or other management techniques.
Manage your own conscience. This is some of where Captain Awkward’s “why are you telling me about it, Edge-Case Bob?” comes from. Some Bobs: “haha, I trumped you in an argument, alleged Internet expert, gotcha!” Other Bobs: “please please, apparent authority figure, reassure me that I’m a good person even though I did a bad thing that was against the rules.”
You have to have better boundaries than this, and a more functional conscience. The rules can’t tell you if you’re a good person or did a good thing, and neither can advice columnists. (I guess I just outed myself as not a deontologist, huh?)
You need to figure it out case by case, and stand by it, and manage your own guilt. Much rule-following is about outsourcing your conscience and self-esteem and you need to stop doing that.
I spoke to several more 5×2 organisations about what they’re working on (several of them, by waiting to call me, had the advantage of discovering the blog series):
The Haymarket Foundation (day 2) have worked to move many people who were sleeping rough in Sydney into hotels. They’ve also secured PPE so that they can visit these folks rather than have them staying all alone in hotel rooms indefinitely and have been able to distribute some to other agencies too. They’re working on supplying devices too so that people can access telehealth services. They’re not accustomed to donor outreach or publicity and are working on a way to connect with donors without compromising the privacy and safety of their community.
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and ACON (both day 5) are both working to transition a very in-person based and community-centred service model to a one-on-one, low contact model, while working with community members who have previous traumatic experiences of confinement (asylum seekers) and pandemics (LGBTQ people).
The ASRC writes:
People seeking asylum are often denied the right to work and simultaneously denied the right to safety nets such as Centrelink and Medicare. Right now this means that thousands of people seeking asylum in Australia are being left stranded and forgotten by cruel Government policies. It is clear that people seeking asylum will be among the hardest hit by the impacts of COVID-19.
If you have the capacity to support your community by finding frontline organisations working with Indigenous people, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, homeless people, people without food, disabled people, chronically ill people, children, elderly people, and other vulnerable and at-risk groups, please support them today.
losing your job in the middle of an enormous economic crash
losing your home or your possessions likewise
shutting down your business you sunk all your savings and time and dreams into
having all your savings evaporate
living in another country from your loved ones in a time of closed borders
planning labour, delivery, and early parenting without the guarenteed access to pain relief, Caesearean sections, midwives, or home support you’d been relying on
not being able to care for close friends or relatives in need of help
cancelling or postponing your wedding
getting uncomfortably ill, particularly if you don’t have good access to sick leave and medical care
living alone and dealing with the prospect of not seeing anyone face to face for weeks and weeks
not being able to see close friends or relatives for an indefinite period
needing to lay other people off and knowing that they face long-term poverty
listening to a bunch of people you trusted opine about how “only” sick people (like you) or elderly people (like you) are at serious risk
watching news reports about people who were happy and prosperous weeks ago dying alone in hospital corridors
being cooped up in your teeny, dark, noisy house for months
not being able to fix up problems with your house because handypeople aren’t essential services
cancelling your holidays, and telling your kids you cancelled your holidays
explaining to your kids that the new normal is that most days there will be bad news about schools, jobs, friends, holidays and you don’t know when the news will stop getting worse
cancelling your birthday party or regular board games night
liking Milan, or Rome, or New York, and not being sure whether or when you’ll be able to visit them again or what you’ll find if you do
liking cruising, and not being sure it is a thing that will exist in the world after this year
being subjected to people on social media wanting to take whips to “juveniles” seen outside their houses, or wondering why you even bothered to have children if you aren’t thrilled to be locked in a house with them for a few months at a time at short notice
But, at the same time, they’re all sad. You have the right to acknowledge if only to yourself and hopefully to fellow less affected friends that it sucks that your holiday is canceled and that you liked your regular board game night a whole lot actually.
This is important for two reasons, one is simply for peace of mind, insofar as such a thing exists right now. A whole lot has changed in the world in the last four weeks. You’re struggling to keep up and you’re grieving. It benefits no one, especially you, for you to pretend to yourself you’re suddenly all cool with anything short of imminent death.
The other reason is that eventually we want it all back. We want to be mostly free of the looming threat of infectious disease, and for hospitals to be safe, and to be allowed to leave our houses whenever we damn well please, and to have jobs (even if we have children!), and to be able to retire, and to see our friends, and to have new sex partners, and for people on social media to stop hating children so much.
Being deprived of all this is a really serious imposition on civil liberties and while we’re certainly called upon to go along with it for the sake of our communities, and it’s useless to be angry or sad about it non-stop or to heap stress on politicians and public health officials in difficult times, it’s also not a good idea to convince ourselves that we like it this way.
We don’t like it this way, and we’re not supposed to. It’s really really really sad.
