The British Ukrainian Society

I know it probably doesn't make sense to throw in a post about the British Ukrainian Society in the middle of my Ibiza musings but I'm going to anyway. This was meant to have been written two months ago, as I was coming to the end of my year at the Society. But things were hectic, the post never got written - until now. I don't want to leave it any longer as I might forget things and I certainly want to write about the Society, to get it down somewhere - so I never forget that unforgettable year.

This is how it came about, how I ended up as the Head of Secretariat for the British Ukrainian Society, how I came to have something called a "portfolio career". It came out of the blue, completely unexpectedly. I got a call in December 2006 from Anthony Fisher, a consultant I'd worked with at Bell Pottinger Consultants. He'd left Bell Pottinger and was working for a small group of strategic consultants, heavily involved with Ukraine. They'd had the idea to set up a bilateral society between the two countries, talk had been replaced with action, a Chairman had been appointed, a date had been discussed for the London launch and they just needed to find someone to actually set up and run the Society. My name was recommended following the work I'd done to organise the inaugural weekend for the Global Leadership Foundation and I got the call.

The timing was perfect. After three years physically working on site for my interiors company, I'd gotten tired and wanted to stop toiling in the dirt and dust. It's hardly glamourous being covered in paint all the time and the feel of that fine construction dust that gets everywhere was starting to make my skin crawl. But decorating had been how I'd earned most of my money so I needed to find an alternative way of generating an income. At the same time, I was also feeling pangs of missing my old world, the excitement and thrill of being right in the centre of something political and international. I love interiors, it is my calling in life but there were some things it couldn't give me, just due to the nature of the work. It could be very solitary. I would work all day on site with my wonderful Polish builders who spoke very little English. I'd then come home to an empty flat, exhausted from working eight or ten hours on site. There was no social life on a school night, I'd rarely even have the energy to speak to friends on the phone. At times it was a very lonely existence but you make that sacrifice when you're on that road, getting to wherever you're trying to get to. 

I got the call at around the same time that I checked my bank balance and found it heavily in the red. This was not good obviously but after a few years of making myself ill when stressed and worried, I decided not to worry about it and trust that something would come my way to help my financial predicament. That something was the call from Anthony about the Society. He briefed me on the Society, asked if I'd be interested in getting involved and asked for my CV for the Directors and the Chairman. I smiled to myself when asked for a CV - I'd been running my interiors business for four years and it'd been a long while since I'd even looked at my CV, let alone updated it. I quickly put something together, added in my work for the GLF and my interiors experience and sent it to over to him. As I glanced over at my updated CV, I thought "yep, quite impressive on paper" - I hadn't paid much attention to the work I'd done in my previous life as a Consultant but seeing it all on paper in front of me was a good feeling. 

Soon after welcoming in 2007, I heard from Anthony. The Chairman and Directors had seen my CV and wanted to see me. First was a meeting with the Chairman, Richard Spring, a senior Tory politician. We met, had a chat and got on. Technically this was an interview but ever since being made redundant, I've found that formal recruitment procedure doesn't exist for me. The international projects I've been involved in since moving into interiors have been some of the most high-level, exciting things I could have hoped to work on. I get a call, there's a meeting to discuss the project and I've ended up being responsible for something quite special. It's funny how things turn out after something like redundancy.  

After that meeting, I came away with the feeling that I could work with Richard and that's something that is very important to me. When you're your own boss, you choose who you work with quite carefully, particularly if you've had any experience of working with people where the whole process has been a complete nightmare. At this meeting, it also transpired that they were looking for someone to launch and run the Society. I thought I'd been approached just to launch it but it was more than that. After explaining that I could only do it if I could still run my interiors business, I was given the assurance that the role would be flexible and not full-time so I decided to accept the challenge. I told them my fee as a freelance consultant - this was agreed and I started the following week, following a meeting with some of the founding Directors. 

The first few months at the Society were certainly a challenge. People had the idea for a Society but no-one (including me) knew what that actually involved. I always feel uncomfortable when I find myself somewhere new, doing something different and not entirely sure what I'm doing or how I'm meant to be doing it. There were definitely some moments in the first few weeks where I found myself thinking "I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know if I can do this........" I had to work out what exactly my role was. I'd given myself the lofty title of Head of Secretariat but we had a very strong Board of Directors and I didn't know how much they wanted to do, how much they wanted to drive things forward, particularly those whose idea the Society it was in the first place. I also found myself sharing an office with someone who had wanted my role but had never put herself forward for it in the wrong assumption that you'd need to speak Ukrainian for the position. I think it galled her up that the job had gone to someone who spoke no Ukrainian, had little knowledge of the country, it's history, it's culture, it's society and it's politics. I found her difficult and unhelpful, although I think she was meant to be my admin support. On a number of occasions I was at the receiving end of a verbal assault from her. One time as I sat there listening in disbelief to her tirade, she said "Do you really think you should be doing this job if you can't speak the language?" - I was about two seconds away from walking out of the job but decided against it as I felt it would be letting Richard and the other Directors down. 

Difficult personalities aside, we had a Society to launch and a fairly tight timescale to work to. Things were going well and the Minister for Europe had agreed to be our Guest of Honour at the launch of the Society. I liaised directly with his office, comfortable being in contact with my former place of work, the Foreign Office. A couple of weeks later when talking to his office, I was told that due to diary commitments, the Minister wouldn't be able to fulfill the engagement. I immediately relayed this information to Richard and the other Directors. Talks took place between both sides to see what was going on. It was a strange time for me, it felt like the Foreign Office wanted nothing to do with us even before we'd launched and being ex-Foreign Office, it was weird to feel like a pariah. As the talks went back and forth, I carried on making preparations for the launch, even though we weren't sure what was going on. There came a point where there was no more that I could do without having some confirmed details so I took myself off home to await some decisions that I couldn't make. As I left the office that afternoon, I felt like I'd been sacked and the next few days were quite miserable for me. 

At the end of that week, I got a call from Richard to say that we were going to launch on the designated date, without the Minister. We were less than a month away from the launch date, there was still a huge amount to do and if the decision had been left to me, I would have said we didn't have enough time to do it properly and would have postponed it. But Richard didn't want any further delay, we needed to launch in London as soon as possible so we could launch in Kyiv before the summer break. This was one of the wonderful things about working with Richard - he wouldn't let setbacks stop him moving forwards or even slowing down and if there's one thing I learnt from him, it was that.  

I was back in the office the following Monday and picked up where I'd left off. As it got closer to the launch date, I was concerned that we wouldn't have many people attending and our 200-person capacity venue would feel decidedly empty. Due to the earlier stall in the proceedings, the invitations hadn't gone out when I wanted to send them out. Instead they went out just before Easter so most people received them while they were away from the office for Easter. But a chance suggestion from Anthony to speak to Adam Smith Conferences proved a success. They organise an annual investment conference on Ukraine in London and therefore have an extensive database of contacts who have an interest in Ukraine. I asked if they could invite their contacts to our launch and they agreed. The only problem was that I didn't give them an allocated number of places and as soon as their email went out inviting key contacts to the launch, I started receiving numerous emails from people interested in attending.

In the space of twenty four hours, I went from worrying that we wouldn't have enough people attending the launch to worrying that we'd have too many! There were a number of frantic phone calls to the venue to see how we could increase the space available as I watched the number of attendees continue upwards. Richard was overseas while this was happening and he called to see how I was getting on. I think his exact words were "So, are the numbers flooding in?" and I squeaked "yes, I think we may have too many people..." and he told me not to worry.

I continued to worry about the numbers until the day before the launch when I did a final count. I'd been avoiding totting up the numbers as I didn't want to start turning people away if they wanted to attend. In the end, I think we had about 280 names on the guest list for the launch. A very respectable number and I decided that if at any point it did get too crowded, I'd have to deal with that dilemma when it happened. The venue were fully briefed on our numbers and we would just have to see how things were on the night.

The launch of the Society turned out to be a wonderful success. We had a fantastic turnout and a very diverse crowd that included politicians, media, business people, artists, musicians and academics. Unfortunately the Ukrainian Ambassader was unable to attend as he was in Cardiff with the President awaiting the announcement on who would host the World Cup in 2012. Ukraine got it, jointly with Poland so it was a double celebration that night. It was difficult for me to gauge how well the night was going, it was certainly busy and it seemed like people were enjoying themselves. But as I've never been involved with a bilateral Society or even organised this kind of event, I had little to compare with. The next morning when I went back into the office and checked my emails, the messages I got congratulating us on the resounding success of the launch told me that it had been a success!

It wasn't all easy though. There are a number of Ukrainian organisations that already exist in the UK. We needed to have a good rapport with all of them and it largely fell to me to build up these relationships. Sometimes in the early days I came across suspicion and hostility from people or organisations I needed to be talking to. There were lots of questions raised on why we existed, where the funding came from, what we were really about. Although it's tempting just to avoid any people or places that don't welcome you with open arms, I knew this wasn't an option for me. I had to get out there and make friends, even if people didn't want to be friends in the first place. I had to get past any feelings of discomfort and find common ground, to build bridges not walls. It was something I invested a lot of time and effort in but it turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding. I found myself meeting some of the key people in the Ukrainian community in the UK and finding out more about their history, culture and society and in particular how the country had suffered at the hands of Stalin. 

It may have looked a little strange having a British Pakistani person running the Society but if anyone had anything to say about it, I never heard it. I found an immense level of warmth and hospitality towards me from the people I met and ultimately this created pure joy for me in the job. Working with Richard was an absolute delight. It turned out that although our backgrounds are vastly different, we seemed to operate on a similar level when it came to delivering and that made us work really well together as a team. 

Although things were starting to go well, having launched in London and getting ready to launch in Kyiv, there were still wobbles. Possibly the worst one being when "Private Eye" decided to write a piece on the Society, dragging the names of the two MPs involved with the Society through the dirt. The journalist had been sniffing around for a couple of weeks so we knew that something might get written. The day the piece came out, I had a call from one of my friend's at Bell Pottinger saying "Have you seen this week's Private Eye?". I'd already seen the article so knew what she was talking about. There was nothing that damaging and it wasn't going to ruin anyone's career but it really drove home the point that the Society had to do what it said it was going to do and it had to do it really well! By the time of the article, we had a fairly good idea of who was going to drive the Society forwards and that came down to Richard and me. 

We launched the Society in Kyiv in July, once again with very little time to make the arrangements. The launch was set for a Thursday, I flew in on the Tuesday and from the moment I arrived to the moment I left, it was hectic. We needed to set up high level meetings for Richard while he was in Kyiv. When I arrived on the Tuesday, we had no confirmed meetings in his diary. By the time he left on the Friday afternoon, he'd had a number of key high-level meetings including the Foreign Minister and the British Ambassador. The launch itself was another success with a number of VIPs that included the current and former Foreign Minister, the British Ambassador, the EU Ambassador to Ukraine and various key people from Kyiv society. The photos at the top of this post are from the Kyiv launch. Our official photographer had arrived early and started discreetly snapping away while we made the final arrangements. We were engaged in a minor disagreement about the positioning of the lectern and mike for the speeches. I wanted it in one place, everyone else wanted it positioned on the opposite side of the stage. I stood firm on this one, even though I had five people trying to make me change my mind but I think ultimately I got it right. The photographer captured the moments perfectly in his pictures and I think they're the only photos I've seen of me at work, in action!

After launching in London and Kyiv, I carried on doing as much as I could to raise the profile of the Society and started preparing for our first big event. Ukraine saw elections to nominate a Prime Minister at the end of September and we were organising a panel discussion just after the elections to discuss the future of the country. Working in collaboration with Oxford University, the LSE and UCL, we compiled a panel of Ukraine experts from the worlds of government/politics, media and academia. We had Labour MP Stephen Byers as the Chairman. The whole event came together really well and we had an excellent turnout. We also secured a sponsor a couple of weeks before which was an added coup. As this was the first event that the Society was organising, I wanted to make sure that it was excellent. Both our launches had been very successful. On the one hand that's great as you have a very good start in life. On the other hand, it raises people's expectations and you always have to deliver to that same level, or more. 

In the run-up to the event, I put in an enormous amount of time and effort but it meant that in the days immediately before the event, I was calm and collected. I knew I'd done as much as I could do, we had a very respectable number of people attending and if anything was to go wrong at this point, I'd have to deal with it when it happened. Things did happen - our panel attendant flying in from Kyiv didn't get his visa for the UK and we found out the day before the event. We literally had a couple of hours to get that fixed, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to get on the plane the morning of the event. There were a serious of frantic phone calls between London and Kyiv but in the end, it all came good. Our panel member from the Financial Times had to pull out at the last minute due to work commitments. There wasn't enough time to find a replacement but we went ahead with our panel one short but still made up of key Ukraine commentators. 

I organised a few more events for the Society before I left to move to Ibiza. The last big event was a speech in the House of Commons, delivered by Nicholas Soames MP, grandson of Winston Churchill. Once again, our event went really well and at the reception afterwards, I received some very positive feedback. By this time, I'd announced to everyone that I'd be leaving at the end of my year at the Society so it was a good time to glance over what we'd done and what we'd achieved over the year. It had always been difficult for me to gauge how we were doing in comparison to other similar organisations. But people attending our events filled this in for me. Apparently we were doing really well, our events were fun and well-attended, always with a diverse group of people. From our difficult beginnings where we had been viewed with suspicion and mistrust, we'd turned things around and people were genuinely happy that we were in existence. The Ukrainian Embassy in London was thrilled with the work we were doing in helping to raise the profile of Ukraine in the UK so all the hard work certainly paid off. 

In my last few months at the Society, I had the chance to look over the experience and try and make some sense of it. Something happened to me while I was working there, difficult to explain but it felt like I had fallen in love with my work. I absolutely loved what I did there and the sense of achievement was greater than I'd ever experienced before. Yes, at times it was very difficult and in the early days, I found myself wondering why I was doing this, it all seemed like such a struggle. It felt like guiding a ship through very choppy waters, going forwards, always going forwards regardless of what was happening around us. I found myself wondering if I loved that work more than I loved interiors but I realised the difference. Interiors brings me joy but that joy is to do with space and light and making something truly beautiful. The Society also brought me immense joy but that joy was from the people I met and worked with that year. I realised that both things are important to me, I need to have both in my life and had I have stayed in London, I would have continued with my portfolio career, juggling the Society with interiors projects.

My year at the Society had me pull together all my working experience and deploy it in one go. At times it was as if I stepped out of myself and watched myself in action. When I started there, I had no idea what I could achieve. At the end of the year, I realised I'd achieved more than I ever imagined I could. I got thrown in to the deep end on a project and had to make it succeed, even if I had little idea about what I was doing. Always the perfectionist, I set high standards for the Society and then made sure we achieved them. I knew that if we didn't succeed, I would take it very personally. Looking back over what I've just written, it makes it sound as if I did everything but that wasn't the case. Richard drove the Society and pushed things forward at the highest level, a level where I wouldn't carry any clout. We also had a very strong Board of Directors but they tended to be less hands-on, letting Richard and I get on with the task in hand. 

I saw what could be achieved in a year if you remain focussed and driven and determined. Perhaps it felt like I'd achieved more here than I had with my interiors business but I know that's not the case. The achievements have been equal and I just have to look at my website to see how much I've achieved there. My whole adult life has been driven to get me to a particular place. I didn't really know what that place was but knew that when I got there, I'd know. With the Society, I reached that place - the potential I always knew I had was fulfilled. The Society gave me a confidence I hadn't had before - deep in my heart, I will always know that I can do something, even if things are very wobbly at times. As I've said before, working with Richard was an absolute delight and it showed me how well a 2-person team can work, if your vision is the same. I also felt like an honorary Ukrainian, so warmly was I welcomed into the community. It made me realise that yes, London is a melting pot of people and cultures but often they never mix. And that is very sad. I met some truly wonderful, amazing people through my work with the Society but even though we all live in the same city, if it hadn't of been for the Society, our paths would never have crossed. 

In some ways, I'm glad that the beginning was a little difficult, life always seems to be like that. If things had been smooth and easy from the onset, I wouldn't have appreciated how much we achieved. I threw everything I had into this project to make it succeed and in return, it gave me more than I imagined something could. I saw how much I'd evolved in my decade working in London and I reached a place where frankly, if I never go any higher, I don't mind. I also felt comfortable saying the things I'm not so good at - admin for a start! Before, I felt that I should be a good all-rounder, now I know that the things I'm good at, I'm really good at. The things I'm not so good at (all the "back of house boring stuff"), well someone else should do that, it's a waste of resources getting me to do it!

The Society was wonderful for me and in return, I hope I played my part in setting up an organisation that has strong foundations and continues to grow and flourish in the years to come. I will never forget my year there and whenever I have a wobble (it's normal, it's a part of life), I'll think back to 2007 and remember what we did, what we achieved. I've had people ask me if I have any regrets leaving the Society when I obviously feel so strongly for it. And no, I don't have any regrets. I left on an amazing high with what we'd achieved, who knows how I would have been feeling if I'd stayed on longer. It came to me out of the blue, I was open to it and it allowed me to throw everything I had in to it! I know I put my heart and soul in to it and in return I have memories I will cherish forever!