The One Thing a Founder Cannot Delegate

I have two fears about Silver Sirens and they are exact opposites, which is how I know they are both worth listening to.

The first is that I hold on too tightly. That I become one of those founders — and we have all met her — who talks endlessly about community while keeping every decision, every password and every welcome speech firmly in her own hands. Who cannot go on holiday. Who says my when she means our. Who has built, without ever meaning to, a room with only one adult in it.

The second is the opposite, and it is the one that wakes me at three in the morning. That in my determination not to be that woman, I hand out so much that the thing itself dissolves. That we grow, and grow, and one day I walk into a Silver Sirens event and it is perfectly nice and entirely unrecognisable — a pleasant social club for women who like each other, with the fire gone out of it, and nobody able to say precisely when that happened.

Silver Sirens is moving from founder-led to community-led. That is the right direction, and I have chosen it deliberately, because anything that depends entirely on one woman in her sixties is not a community; it is a dependency with a logo. But that transition is where most groups like ours quietly die, and this month, which has been about purpose, ends here, because this is what purpose becomes once other people join it.

So let me say what I have arrived at after eight years and more mistakes than I have written about.

You can delegate almost everything. You cannot delegate the vision.

I want to be precise, because people misuse this sentence to justify hoarding. Delegating is not the enemy. I delegate running things: the events, the systems, the newsletter, the money, the website, the day-to-day judgment calls that other women make better than I do. I delegate leadership, actually and not decoratively: our state representatives lead. They make decisions I would not have made, and some of them turn out better than mine would have been, and I have learned to say so out loud. I want other women's ideas in the building, their instincts, their arguments, their improvements. A vision that cannot survive other people's ideas was never a vision; it was a preference.

But the vision itself — what this is fundamentally for, what we will not do, who we exist to serve and what we are refusing to become, that is mine to hold. Not because I am cleverer. Because it is the job.

Here is what I have watched happen when a founder gets this wrong, and it is nearly always a generous woman making a generous mistake. She does not want to be autocratic. So she takes the vision and puts it out to the room. She asks everybody what the organisation should be. She treats the mission like a matter to be voted on, and the loudest table wins, and then the loudest table changes, and so does the mission. Six months later, the thing has been widened to accommodate everyone's enthusiasms, and it now means nothing in particular. A vision held by everyone is a vision held by no one. She thought she was sharing power. What she actually did was leave the centre of the room empty and let the weather in.

The women who came for the original fire feel it go before they can name it. They do not resign in protest. They simply come less. And the founder, watching numbers soften, usually concludes she needs to widen the offer further — which is the very thing that is killing it.

So no. The vision does not go out to the room. It goes out from the room, over and over, in every letter and every event and every awkward no, until everyone in the building could recite it in their sleep. That is not control. That is the opposite of control.

This took me an embarrassingly long time to understand, because I had the two things confused. I thought holding the vision meant holding the reins, and since I did not want to be a woman clutching reins, I kept trying to give away things I should have kept. What changed it for me was a piece of ordinary logic that I now think about constantly.

Other women can only take real risks inside my vision if the walls are still standing when they land.

Think about what we actually ask of the women who step up. Run this event. Speak at that. Represent us in your city. Try the thing that might not work. Every one of those is a risk taken in public, at an age when women are told to be careful. The single thing that makes such a risk survivable is knowing what this is for — knowing that if the event flops, it flopped in service of something clear, and that the clear thing has not moved. Vagueness at the centre does not liberate people. It terrifies them. Every leader I have ever watched flourish did so because somebody above her was boring and unwavering about what mattered, which left her free to be inventive about everything else.

That is what a vision holder does. She is not the most creative person in the building. She stays boring about the fire so everyone else can be inventive around it.

And it is not a power role. I want to be exact about that, because I am writing this as a woman who has spent a month on purpose and thinks this is where purpose finally lands in elderhood. Holding a vision is a service role. It is unglamorous. It is mostly saying no to good ideas — the sponsor whose money would help and whose values would cost us, the partnership that would grow the numbers and shrink the meaning, the direction that is entirely sensible and simply not what we are for. Nobody applauds a no. You do it anyway, and the community never knows what it was spared, which is precisely the point.

Which brings me to the word I have settled on, and the one I will end the month with.

I do not own Silver Sirens. I know that is a strange thing for a founder to write. But ownership is the wrong frame entirely, and it is the frame that traps women like me — because if you own a thing, then letting others in is a loss, and every capable woman who arrives is a threat, and eventually you are seventy-two and cannot let go of a thing you no longer have the energy to carry.

I do not own it. I have custody of it.

Custody is different. Custody means it was here before it had my name on it — it came out of my mother, out of every woman who ever sat in my consulting room and used the word invisible, out of a girl in Nigeria who knew what it was to be left. Custody means my job is to keep it whole, keep it lit, keep it honest, and grow the number of people who can carry it, until there is someone I can hand it to — not diluted, not democratised into mush, but whole and still burning.

Ownership asks what this is worth to me. Custody asks who it belongs to next.

That is where purpose ends up, I think, if you are lucky enough to be given a big one and stubborn enough to keep it. Not a thing you find, not a thing you achieve, not a thing you retire from. A fire somebody handed you, that you are keeping alight, for somebody whose name you may not yet know.

Thank you for spending September with me — the purpose that chose us, the purpose that changes its clothes, the purpose we cannot hand to anybody else.

Next month I want to talk about ageism. Not gently. It is the one prejudice that recruits from every group, and sooner or later it comes for all of us.

What is the one thing in your life you have never been able to hand to anyone else — and is that because no one else can hold it, or because you have never let them try?

With love,

Faith

Namibia soon. So let me begin with the thing I am least proud of: I am an over-packer. Spectacularly, unrepentantly so. I pack for the trip I am taking, and for three trips I am not.

Namibia, in fairness, has the decency to be freezing at dawn and forty degrees by lunch, which I have been using as cover all week.

The ritual is what I have started doing afterwards. Everything comes out onto the bed. I look at it properly. And I take out five things — not the obvious five, the ones I have quietly justified twice.

It is a small, unglamorous practice and it undoes me every time, because of what is underneath it.

I am not packing for the weather. I am packing against being caught out, against needing something and finding no one there to hand it to me.

That is not a suitcase problem. That is an old one, with a new zip.

Each year the bag gets a little lighter. I am learning to pack for the woman I am now, not for the girl who wasn't sure anyone would come back for her.