Tony Willetts sets out Raleigh International Trust’s approach to risk in its day-to-day work across the globe, illustrating the company’s belief that risk enhances the learning experience.
How much risk is too much? This is a question that I, my colleagues and, I’m sure, many practitioners, constantly ponder. It pervades the conscious and unconscious – it is in our culture. This is not to suggest we are anxious about risk – far from it. We actively seek out (what many would consider) hazardous and risky situations, as they are the bedrock of what we do.
Raleigh International is a youth and sustainable-development charity with more than 28 years of experience taking volunteers aged between 17 and 75 into remote and hostile environments. Over that time, more than 36,000 people have been on expedition with us in 43 different countries – everywhere from Alaska to Zimbabwe.
Originally the brainchild of HRH Prince Charles and Colonel John Blashford Snell, back in 1984, Raleigh’s aim was to bring together people of different cultures and backgrounds and give them meaningful tasks in remote places, and to push them to succeed. And succeed they did, despite the odds to the contrary.
Even today, through this dual-benefit approach encompassing both individual and community focus, we present the younger volunteers with a challenge-based programme of activity. This includes integrating into a group of international volunteers from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Together with the older mentors (25-75 years of age) they undertake environmental and community-development projects in rural settings, as well as an adventure phase in developing countries, for up to ten weeks.
These groups of volunteers are tasked with supporting local partners (e.g. non-governmental organisations, parks authorities, cooperatives, etc.) to deliver tangible outcomes for the host community. Examples include building schools, bringing low-cost sustainable technologies into remote communities, and living for extended periods in remote rainforests in support of scientific research.
This is achieved with limited or no technical experience, disparate levels of maturity and life skills, with only local resources and methods at hand, and in an alien and testing situation. This is the environment we try to create: one full of physical and emotional risk to the individual, young or old. This is the recipe for experiential learning and success – and one which, through lenses of classic perceptions of health and safety at work, is an organisational nightmare! The key elements and process that make up this learning environment are shown in Figure 1 overleaf.
The last 28 years have taught us how to lead people so that they can manage risk to achieve success, even in these relative extremes. What our volunteers achieve occurs because of our approach to risk; we provide consistently positive, lifelong learning for all those involved while maintaining the health and safety of our volunteers and the communities and environment in which they work.
The approach
Central to the safety management system at Raleigh is a ‘risk-benefit’ analysis of our methodologies and day-to-day work in the field. There has been a growing debate in the outdoor education sector in the UK and elsewhere over recent years about this balancing act: the conscious analysis at every level of activity to measure the level of risk to be faced, balanced against the benefit, or potential losses of facing, or avoiding the risk itself. So, what makes this work? We take a three-tier approach to safety management:
1 Be honest. Risk assessments take place as part of the planning cycle, from country director on the macro, country-wide scale to the micro level, by the young volunteers on their projects. Volunteer mentors are trained to use their own personal and professional experience to identify the hazards they will face – both before the team comes together and then again within the team. This is done through sharing our experiences and local knowledge and guiding them through their initial experiences of this alien environment.
This is obviously daunting, and many doubt their ability to take on the full breadth of the challenge ahead. The tangible experience and support we provide gives them the insights and a sense of professional responsibility to continuously assess and work with risk to achieve success. We are honest with them about their moral and legal responsibilities, our responsibility and commitments to them, and, as a result, we build their trust in us and themselves from the early stages of expedition.
2 Building a culture of responsibility (a big carrot and small stick). From the very moment a volunteer joins an expedition they sign up to the Raleigh Code of Conduct. This sets out the collective contract for the expedition members and lays out our expectations of them as our representatives overseas. It is a voluntary code but one that everyone must demonstrate they can follow during expedition because, without it, the organisation fails and they fail. And if they fail no one wins – neither their peers, the community, nor the environment.
What is central to this ‘moral code’ working is training and building a culture of peer-to-peer support – all with the guidance of the mentors and our staff. Linked to this is the consistent approach to its application and progressive exposure to managing the consequences of failure. Responsibility for implementation and consequences of failure are lived and owned by the volunteers individually and as a collective, so we progressively subvert the traditional roles and aim to shift responsibility to the team, not to the older (traditionally parental-figure) mentors.
3 Be prepared. Part of what gives our staff and volunteers of all ages the confidence to face the real and ever-present risks to themselves and each other is knowing that the ‘safety net is in place’. They are our first responders in the event of an incident. They feel the consequences if something occurs but they have been trained and tested in how to respond. They have seen and understand the challenges of reaching specialist emergency support in their area of operation. And they know that almost every situation has been faced before by their predecessors, and that every contingency has been put in place, and tried and tested on multiple and frequent occasions should it be needed.
It is through this approach that volunteer mentors come to calibrate their own measure of how much risk is too much in any one given situation – be it the tenth river crossing of the day in the Borneo jungle, or dealing with conflict between two 18-year-olds who have been pushed to the edge of their ability to cope with the challenges of the day.
They do this through progressive and conscious transferring of responsibility, decision-making and project delivery, while demanding of the young volunteers that they take personal and collective responsibility for their own safety, each other’s, and (to some extent) the wider community in which they are living.
Our experiences have shown us that all volunteers of all ages can rise to this challenge – physically and emotionally. They are able, and become increasingly willing, to be responsible. To see the benefits of being aware of the risks by working with risk, by pushing themselves and testing their own individual, or collective boundaries they understand how much is too much day by day, hour by hour.
It is in this way that they learn to manage themselves, each other and the project safely. This helps focus their efforts to deliver the much-needed school, gravity-feed water system, bio-gas digester, or scientific research building, etc. – the impact of which has far-reaching consequences for the host and for the wider learning of the volunteer.
The learning impact
Feedback from volunteers of all ages about their experiences overseas is consistently positive. The learning outcomes they report include increased self-awareness, greater tolerance, an increased ability to lead and work collaboratively when things get tough, and increased personal aspirations. Moreover, in the context of our safety culture, we consistently receive a 99-per-cent positive response that people think we take safety seriously, with 86 per cent saying they have a greater sense of personal responsibility at the end of the experience and have gained lifelong skills and attitude towards risk.
There is, of course, no room for complacency on our part, and incidents do occur. Raleigh seeks to be a learning organisation itself and not just the provider of a vehicle for learning. As such, rigorous monitoring and evaluation and reporting systems, combined with a large dose of open and honest debate around incidents that do occur, help shape the learning agenda. They inform our processes, our training, and our preparedness.
Not least of all, our ability and consistency in doing this and our approach to safety has been recognised over the last 28 years and several consecutive years of achieving externally audited Corporate Compliance to British Standard 8848 (2009) – (Specification for the provision of visits, fieldwork, expeditions, and adventurous activities, outside the United Kingdom).
Tony Willetts is head of operations at Raleigh International Trust and will be presenting on this subject at the IOSH Conference on Wednesday, 7 March.
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