SITA is my first name (to the delight to those who check passports in Indian airports) given to me because of my parents’ deep love for the sub-continent and their enjoyment of the stories in the Ramayana in which Sita is abducted and finally rescued by Rama. She is regarded as the epitome of womanhood - devoted, modest, loyal and, of course beautiful. This says more about my parents’ inflated expectations than of my intrinsic characteristics. Needless to say, I fall far short of most of those attributes!

ROSALIND is my second name (always shortened to Ros) – my parents seem to have lost their nerve and adopted my second name for daily use shortly after my birth. I believe they named me after the heroine of Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. As a teenager my first Valentine’s card from an admirer quoted from the play “From the East to Western Ind no jewel is like Rosalind”. I was entirely delighted with this elegant declaration until my father – quick as a flash – retorted with a quote from the same play “Sweetest nut hath sourest rind, so it is with Rosalinde” which brought me rapidly down to earth with a bang. A further indignity was discovering in a Dictionary of Names that Rosalind did not mean ‘a garland of roses’ as I had assumed it did, but actually (in some obscure language) ‘a wreath of snakes’…

My third name is JOANNA – an anglicised version of the German ‘Johanna’ – which was the name of my maternal grandmother whom I never met as she died in a concentration camp, probably in 1944. I have two photos of her: in an early one she is strikingly handsome and dark eyed in the later one – taken just before her arrest and incarceration – she appears strained, unsmiling and rather grim. Having inherited my mother’s colouring and features, I feel a strong connection to that side of my genetic inheritance and – perhaps through sharing a name with her mother – a strong and lasting outrage at any form of religious intolerance and the at the appalling inhumanity of ethnic cleansing.

Last but not least is my surname, TENNYSON, which gets some people really excited… “Are you related to…?” I believe the name was quite a burden to my father – making him feel that at least some originality and talent was expected of him. In my case it brought some surprising but ultimately fairly benign experiences (a trip to the USA in 1969 accompanying my grandfather on a lecture tour; being asked to judge poetry reading competitions; laying wreaths on Tennyson’s tomb in Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death and so on). It is bizarre that people expect something special from you when you have a famous ancestor – even when they only make up 1/16th of your actual DNA! I am not complaining, since it has never been a real burden. And I expect my access to my grandfather’s wonderful library enabling me to read hefty tomes from a very early age (War and Peace in a bad English translation from cover to cover at the age of 13, for example) owes something to the Tennyson connection.

Just in case I ever risk becoming too preoccupied with the significance of my names… I should also record that my family nickname is ‘Midge’ – short for ‘midget’ – awarded by my oldest son with unmitigated delight on the day he discovered that he was taller than I was!

“There was much that could never be named… The realm of the nameless was not shapeless. I had to find my way about within it – like being in a room with solid furniture and sharp objects in pitch darkness. And anyway most of my hunches were nameless, or their names were as long as whole books I had not yet read.”

Extract from HERE IS WHERE WE MEET, John Berger, Bloomsbury Press, 2005

“The precise and the perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static, regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have some room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom”
from: The Unknown Craftsman, 1972, Soetsu Yanagi

work with clay

In recent years my partnership-building work has taken over my life and it has been a pleasure and a relief to be able (very infrequently) to escape into my studio and just work with clay – sometimes listening to music but more often in silence. The pleasure of creating something new and the joy of beginning to know when to work further on a piece and when to just stop is intense and immediate. It is a new kind of training – an experiment in letting go of intention and just seeing what happens.

“First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second, do not treat the object as an object of the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive, passively, without interposing yourself. If you can void your mind of all intellectualisation, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better. This non-conceptualisation – the Zen state of No Mind – may seem to represent a negative attitude but from it springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively”
from: The Unknown Craftsman, 1972, Soetsu Yanagi

The Chinese call this phenomenon ‘Wu Wei’– “Doing by not doing, doing by allowing things to happen”

Go to: http://www.odi.org.uk/pbas

This is a cutting-edge web 2.0 platform developed to support partnership practitioners from all sectors (business, governments, NGOs) and all parts of the world in their professional development. It is designed to fill a gap and to provide a sense of ‘family’ for those individuals – wherever they are – who lead their organizations, sectors or communities in developing cross-sector partnerships.

The Partnership Forum will provide access to:

• A bank of partnership resources
• Peer-to-peer exchange and practical learning opportunities and
• Interactive networking.

Promoting cross-sectoral and cross-cultural collaboration around topics of interest, the platform works at multiple levels, allowing more focused connections - whether geographic, (eg The Partnership Forum South Africa) or thematic (eg Partnerships for the Environment) or communities of practice (eg Building Tools for Partnership Evaluation).

In May 2008 the site will be open to associates to begin to further populate the Resource Bank leading to a full launch in June.

Go to: PartnershipForum.org

The next in the series of Toolbooks (see PUBLICATIONS) is entitled FIT FOR PURPOSE: Building Institutional Capacity for Partnership. It is being written with my colleague Rafal Serafin and a number of other practitioners with whom we have worked over many years in different parts of the world.

Partnership practitioners regularly report that one of the most challenging aspects of cross-sector partnering (perhaps, surprisingly) is that of engaging their own organisations as genuine and enthusiastic partners. But this is not the only ‘institutional’ challenge of partnership as a sustainable development paradigm – sometimes it becomes necessary to create a new ‘institution’ to implement programmes medium to long term. This tookbook will address both these issues and more in a practical, user-friendly way.

The book will be published by the International Business Leaders Forum in December 2008… and we welcome ideas or possible collaboration. Please contact: emily.wood@iblf.org if you would like to know more.