We See You
The glue that holds us together: why we so rarely recognise the people doing the holding
There is a particular kind of work that holds a community in place. It is the phone call returned after hours. The grant application finished at the kitchen table once the children are asleep. The quiet conversation with a volunteer who has a family in crisis. The board paper written, the volunteer thanked, the funder reassured, the doors kept open.
Most of this work happens without anyone watching. And much of it is done by people who would never think to put themselves forward for recognition.
In the not-for-profit and community sector, we are very good at noticing need. We are far less practised at noticing each other.
The work that does not announce itself
A great deal of community leadership is steady, undramatic and largely invisible, precisely because it is working. When a community organisation runs smoothly, when a board governs well, when a community feels held, the effort behind it tends to disappear from view.
This is part of what makes the sector so easy to take for granted. The better the work, the less it draws attention to itself. The people who hold things together are often the last to be seen doing it.
Who gets recognised, and who gets overlooked, is rarely a matter of chance. It usually follows the lines of who is most visible, who speaks up, and whose work is easiest to point to. That means some of the most important contributions, the ones made quietly and without fuss, are also the ones most likely to go unnamed.
Why we hesitate to recognise our own
There are reasons this happens, and they are understandable.
We work in a sector built on humility. The focus is meant to be on the mission, the community, the people we serve, not on ourselves. To talk about recognition can feel almost self-indulgent, as though it pulls attention away from where it belongs.
There is also a habit of deflection that runs deep in community leadership. Ask a chief executive or a long-serving volunteer about their work and they will almost always point sideways. It was the team. It was the community. It was never just me. That generosity is real, and it is one of the best things about the sector. But it can also mean that no one ever ends up being thanked at all.
And then there is simple busyness. Recognition takes a moment of pause, and pause is the thing most of us have least of. When the next deadline is always arriving, stopping to say thank you can feel like a luxury we cannot afford.
What goes unrecognised does not go uncosted
The trouble is that recognition is not a soft extra. It does real work.
People who feel valued are more likely to stay. They are more likely to keep giving the commitment and dedication that no contract can require and no funder can purchase. Acknowledgement helps people make sense of hard seasons, reminding them that the work matters even when the outcomes are uncertain.
The reverse is also true. When good work goes unnoticed for long enough, something quietly erodes. Experienced people feel unvalued and drift away. We rarely see this happen in a single moment. We see it later, in the people who are no longer there.
In a sector already stretched by tight funding and rising demand, we cannot afford to lose people to the simple absence of appreciation. Recognition is one of the few things we can offer that costs little and means a great deal.
A small act of seeing
None of this calls for grand gestures. Most of the time, recognition is small. It is being named. It is having your work described accurately, in your own community, by people who understand what it took. It is the experience of being seen by someone who knows what they are looking at.
That is the idea behind a piece of work we have been developing at LEAD, in partnership with Special Gifts. We wanted to find a way to turn the sector's instinct for noticing back towards itself, so that the people who spend their days seeing others might, for once, be seen.
We are inviting you to nominate your favourite not for profit leader to receive a Special Gift. To enter them go onto our Facebook/LinkedIn or Instagram page and comment on any of the We See You posts. Once a month until the end of the year we will be choosing a leader to be acknowledged.
Who is the not for profit leader in your sight who has been holding things together, quietly and well, and could do with a boost of being told they matter?