Racial Justice Strategy Update

The Equality Fund Panel, who had support from BRAP

In December 2020 we set-out a 5 year plan to increase Camden Giving’s potential to support racial justice in Camden and beyond. As part of this we want to be transparent and share what we are learning as we go.

This blog shares my perspective on the last 6 months and some of the things that I’ve learnt along the way. This is my honest perspective, but it’s worth noting that it comes from a position of white privilege. Over the coming months, we’ll share other perspectives on the work that we’re doing to tackle racial injustice.

Also, you can read Hafid Ali’s previous blog about the Black Lives Matter movement here.

And, you can read our full Racial Justice plan here.

Specialist Support for Community Panels

Over the last 6 months we’ve worked with BRAP, who are a charity transforming the way people do equality. They’ve helped us with a number of things, in particular supporting the Equality Fund Panel to decide how they can ensure that their grants have a racial justice lens. The Equality Fund Panel (pictured) are a group of Camden residents who are new to funding, but have lived experience of inequality, they are working with us to design and award grants from the Equality Fund, it’s a very difficult task! The pressure on their shoulders is immense.

BRAP worked with the panel over 4 hours to discuss how their personal experiences and data should lead them to the decisions they will make. These sessions proved invaluable in opening up conversations amongst the panel about whether they exclusively wanted to fund “lived experience leaders” and how beneficiaries should be involved in charities seeking the achieve equality. Every single panel member had expressed how well supported they felt to make decisions to achieve equality and a huge amount of that has been down to the specialism of BRAP.

Ensuring our community panels, the majority whom have experience of racism, are able to make confident decisions to fund organisations they think are shining in work tackling racism, is the most valuable thing we can do as an organisation and I’m glad this is something we’ve been able to move forward with quickly.

Moving beyond Fear

6 months ago we felt optimistic that businesses would want to collaborate and talk more about racial justice, this optimism stemmed from the amount of informal conversations we were having with people at businesses in Camden. All over borough, in all different sectors, there are people who are pushing for more equitable recruitment and to open up debate about racial inequality within their businesses. They wanted to know how they could achieve racial justice beyond their own doors, there was much to be optimistic about.

But when we’ve asked businesses to pro-actively come together to collaborate on pushing forward a racial justice agenda, there’s been real nervousness that what they’re doing may not hold up to external scrutiny. I’ve taken the view that it is better to be in the room with these local businesses, supporting them to work more equitably, than to be on the outside shouting at them. So our Trustees have created a Slack channel where people from Camden businesses can talk to each other about equality, including racial equality, and how they are going about achieving it. Individuals from Camden businesses can join to just pick up resources, or they can talk to others about some things they want to work on together. It’s a gentle space that we hope will lead to action, if nothing else I hope we’ll all be better informed thanks to this group.

Making it Fun

I can’t speak for everyone at Camden Giving, but I have a lot of fun at work, even in these long days of working on Zoom, I laugh a lot with my colleagues. I hope that echos out across our partnerships, our work with community panels and the charities we support. But 6 months ago, there was a notable exception to this, our work on racial justice always had a heavy cloud that sat over it. I’m exceptionally grateful to colleagues who have since pointed this out and I’m trying very hard to make sure we feel pride and joy as we work to tackle racial injustice. For us this means more light-hearted conversations where we all learn from each other.

The whole team has had access to a coach from Koreo over the last 6 months, the aim of this was to have some support to unpick our personal roles in tackling inequality in Camden. My biggest lesson form this coaching was that I bogging down our work by being incredibly “heavy” every time we spoke race.

What Next?

We want to develop a better infrastructure to support black and ethnic minority led organisations who haven’t set-up as charities, so that we’re removing as many barriers as possible, be that accessing a bank account or finding a venue to run your project. We can’t do that alone and we hope that we can partner with other to make that happen.