The Art of Failing Well

After a burst of momentum that has seemed to propel the College's journey since just before our launch in October, I've reached my first real up-hill slog.

There are numerous challenges in starting out on your own to try to create something bigger than you, so I hadn't wandered into this mad escapade expecting smooth sailing! The challenge is that the circle of people on whom you'd rely heavily at times like these within an organisation is very small when the organisation is still in it's infancy.

In the name of transparency, these are some of the challenges we've met with recently:

• We've been working hard to find other organisations to collaborate with and, whilst they're consistently keen, they also have their own ways of working and their own costs and pressures. Twice in the last month have we started hopefully along the path of working together to then find stumbling blocks. These aren't insurmountable, but inevitably take more time.
• Having submitted a sizeable bid to the Oxfordshire County Council Youth Opportunity Fund some time ago, we were disappointed to not be awarded any funds. Whilst this is part and parcel of the funding application process (you really do win some and lose some!) it unfortunately means that we'll be unable to run an open-access pilot for teenagers in Banbury as soon as we'd hoped and we'd also been crossing our fingers to appoint a Coordinator to help drive us forward. In all openness it was doubly disappointing that the fund was so significantly delayed, which has left us hanging for quite some time.
• Whilst we had a truly fantastic time at the Youth In Mind Conference, and achieved our goal of progressing from attendee to stall holder, we were unfortunately missed out of the service guide published jointly by Oxfordshire Youth and Oxfordshire Mind, so were not listed in the annual publication being distributed to all GP surgeries and beyond.

I remind myself that these hurdles have come in a wider landscape of having my first opinion piece published in the Oxford Mail and Oxford Times, launching a fundraising page for my upcoming Coast to Coast challenge (which has already reached 50% of it's target!) and getting to the second stage of the Youth Ambition Fund for a pilot in Oxford. These are successes and regardless of their size they are all progress.

I'm also very conscious that my own resilience is a little low at the moment, having just started a new job whilst trying to fit the Discovery College into unpaid gaps. I received a well-timed Buddy Box part way through the month which contained, amongst a number of simply lovely things, permission slips to be used to give yourself permission to do various self-care activities. I think perhaps I'll use a couple of those this week to give myself permission to let Discovery College take care of itself for a few days and recharge my motivation. We are on track; my greatest responsibility at the moment is to be a forceful reminder of that and to remain, above all, excited!