In brief

“Relational work is a practice of presence, and presence requires the willingness to be affected by another person.”

What principles does a busy Jakarta-based CEO return to again and again in order to centre relational approaches? What does it mean to hold the tension and relationship between local wisdom and global standards? What can we learn from the Indonesian value of gotong royong?

Yasmina Hasni explores these questions, and more, below.

A few years into building AKAR Family — our early childhood education social enterprise in Jakarta, Indonesia — I sat in a room full of resources, presenting a framework for “quality early learning.” It was sleek. It was evidence-based. It was, in every visible way, excellent.

And it made me deeply uneasy.

Not because it was wrong. But because somewhere in the glossy slides and global benchmarks, I couldn’t find us. I couldn’t find the grandmother who sits at the edge of the rattan carpet during story time, humming softly. I couldn’t find the phrase gotong royong — our Indonesian value of collective care and mutual cooperation — which isn’t a program we run, but the very air our community breathes. I couldn’t find the children who don’t separate “learning” from “belonging.”

I had a choice to make. And I’ve seen that same choice trip up so many educators and leaders who care deeply: do we adopt the global standard wholesale, perform it fluently, and quietly hollow out what makes our context alive? Or do we retreat into tradition defensively, dismissing anything that comes from elsewhere as irrelevant or threatening?

Neither felt like integrity.

I call these two failure modes colonial mimicry and defensive traditionalism, and they are both forms of fear.

Colonial mimicry says: The credible version of this work exists elsewhere. We just need to translate it here. It mistakes frameworks for wisdom and certificates for understanding.

Defensive traditionalism says: Our way is sacred and complete. Global ideas are a threat. It mistakes protection for rootedness, and nostalgia for truth.

Both cut us off from something real. And both — if I’m honest — live somewhere inside me too, as temptations.

The question I’ve spent a decade working through, imperfectly and out loud, is: Would it be the third way to make it work?

AKAR means roots in Bahasa Indonesia. I chose this name deliberately, not as a metaphor for tradition, but for function.

Roots don’t keep a tree in the past. Roots are what make it possible for a tree to grow upward, outward, toward light, through storms. A tree without roots doesn’t become free; it falls over.

The Indonesian education philosopher Ki Hadjar Dewantara wrote over a century ago about what he called ‘among’: the art of guiding children by walking alongside them, not above them. He described education as ‘ngerti, ngrasa, nglakoni’: to understand, to feel, to act. Long before the neuroscience of co-regulation was published in peer-reviewed journals, this framework held the same truth: that learning happens within a relationship, not despite it.

When I eventually discovered the work of Dan Siegel, Bruce Perry, and the relational neuroscience that underpins so much of modern early childhood research, I didn’t feel like I was learning something new. I felt like I was finally finding the scientific language for something our community had been practicing for generations.

That realization changed how I hold the relationship between local wisdom and global standards.

What I do now — what I try to teach the 50 staff members who are AKAR’s real heartbeat — is something I think of as triangulation, not translation.

Translation says: here is a global idea; let me find the local equivalent.

Triangulation says: here are multiple sources of knowing, let’s put them in conversation with each other and see what emerges that neither alone could produce.

When we were building our quality standards at AKAR, I didn’t start with an international rubric and localize it. I started with a question: What does a child look like when they feel genuinely safe and genuinely seen in this community? We asked parents. We observed children. We listened to staff who had grown up in this neighbourhood. And then — and only then — did we go looking for what global frameworks could add to what we already knew.

Reggio Emilia deepened our thinking about the environment as a third teacher. Te Whāriki strengthened our language around belonging. The science of adverse childhood experiences sharpened our attention to what safety actually costs a nervous system.

But gotong royong remained the organizing principle. Not a decorative value on a wall – the actual structure of how we make decisions, how we show up for one another, how we hold the children when things are hard.

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: you cannot operationalise the relational through a framework alone.

You can build the most beautifully worded philosophy. You can display it on every wall. You can train your team to recite it. And still walk into a room and feel nothing: no warmth, no genuine noticing, no sense that anyone here has been truly witnessed.

The relational is not a method. It’s a practice of presence, and presence requires something that no global standard can mandate: the willingness to be affected by another person.

In our work with families, we call this genuine connection, not performed warmth, not the professional smile that keeps a careful distance, but the real thing, sincere. The moment a teacher kneels at eye level and actually wonders what this particular child is thinking. The moment a parent feels that the person in front of them is genuinely curious about their family’s story, not just collecting intake information.

This is what I mean by ‘Genuine Leadership’, too: the idea that the most important thing a leader can do is stay rooted enough to be truly present with the people they serve. Not to manage from above, but to grow alongside.

So how do we actually do this practically in the daily grind of running a school, a program, or a community?

A few things I keep coming back to:

Start with the relationship, not the standard. Before we adopt any new framework, we ask: Does this deepen our capacity to be in relationship with children and families? If the answer is no — or even not sure — we slow down.

Name your roots explicitly. It took me years to stop apologising for citing Bronfenbrenner in the same breath as gotong royong. Now I do it deliberately. Not defensively, but with curiosity. Because the conversation that happens when you put these frameworks side by side is almost always richer than either alone.

Hold global frameworks as guests, not hosts. International research and standards are valuable visitors. They bring gifts. But in my house, they follow our customs, not the other way around.

Trust your community as a source of knowledge. The parents in our community hold wisdom about childhood, care, and resilience that no curriculum guide will ever fully capture. Our job is to create conditions where that wisdom is visible and valued, not replaced.

I don’t want to pretend I’ve resolved this tension. It lives with me every week, in international applications that ask us to frame our impact in language that doesn’t quite fit, in quality assessments that don’t have a box for gotong royong, in international conversations where I have to decide, in real time, how much to translate and how much to simply stand in.

But I’ve stopped trying to resolve it. I’ve started trying to inhabit it, to live generatively in the space between the local and the global, and to trust that this in-between place is not a compromise.

It’s where the most interesting work happens.

It’s where roots and sky meet.

Read more from Yasmina on Medium.