Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

I spent the day opening the doors to the source of my being in academic world. I cherish describing myself as a researcher passionate about how to sustain evidence based interventions or programs.

I have also read and re-read literature on what this means for the field that sitting in a room full of brilliant scholars to debate this topic made my academic year. I have been on a quest since I returned back to academia in 2013 to understand what is meant by sustainability/sustainment. For a long time, I thought the focus was sustainability but I am learning that it is also sustainment and what that means for different phases of research. Certain elements are constant for me. Sustainment requires planning and understanding how this occurs over time.

But lately and most especially following today’s meeting, I am truly prepared to develop a sense of destiny, or maybe a path towards achieving this for my work. For example, it may seem strange to many that after so many years of studying this, the truth is that many of us will never be able to sustain any research we do, no matter how well planned it may seem. Disruptions make studying sustainment hard, possibilities of harm and even lack of understanding of the costs involved makes attempts to sustain anything futile. It’s for this reason, I have busied myself learning how others last.

The idea of sustaining anything isn’t new to implementation science or any one field and so many people have wondered out loud how to sustain interventions and programs over time. I became a sustainability researcher by chance, liked it and studied how others have made sense of it over time. The possibilities of growth, nourishment, or even wisdom inherent in understanding what it means to last makes the research world seem unattractive at times as we can become stuck at the body of facts currently in fashion.

So I like history and love the early papers of Bossert and Shediac-Rizkallah and Bone and Proctor and the late Maryann, something I truly need to review to always pay homage to them.

I am also open to what makes this work whole such that I have moved into my calling phase, moved in to wisdom or what MC Richard’s describes as the state of total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival, for failure, for imagination, inspiration, intuition are front and center.

It’s not enough to say you do sustainment research if it doesn’t keep you up at night and so today I found myself describing myself as that researcher who stays up at night just imagining and visioning all the ways we last. Sustainment for those who understand what it takes beyond the buzzword, understand that if this is your calling, then you must develop a sense of life around it, maintain a dialogue or convening on what it means, listening, serving, interpreting and perhaps even mastering it, hence why today’s meeting was deeply meaningful to me.

The act of centering sustainment as we did today, clarifying concepts, knowing the value, what explains or predicts it, its mechanisms, dynamics or how to plan for it, is to be awakened to all of its possibilities. It takes a lot to wake up to the potential of sustainment, to become attuned to its possibilities, the way light enters a room and changes everything. We do not become sustainment researchers…Sustainment becomes you, revealing and centering itself within you.

For those coming into their own, know that wherever your attention goes, I hope you follow and make sustainment research a stimulating and serious endeavor for the many eager to understand what this means today and the next 10, 40, or more years to come. There remains so many unspoken hopes, so many untold stories, so many unknown experiences, untapped possibilities and even unfortunate hurdles for this field that I pray you keep centering it your way always.