A Trustee Update on our Racial Justice Strategy
Following on from Natasha’s Racial Justice Strategy Update in May, this blog seeks to build upon our commitment to be radically transparent with our Racial Equality journey, and more importantly, sharing our learnings as we go.
My Perspective and Journey with Camden Giving
Before I share an update on the anti-racism work that has been undertaken at Camden Giving, I thought it’d be helpful to share some context on my personal journey with the organisation. I had my first formal introduction to Camden Giving in June 2020, when I was invited to an anti-racism workshop CG were running with BRAP. This workshop was being facilitated shortly after the George Floyd killing and in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it would be fair to say a lot of organisations were doing ‘stuff’ at the time, but what struck me as different about what Camden Giving were doing, was that their focus was more on humbly holding the mirror up to the organisation. I remember thinking “If there was ever an organisation that could possibly get away from taking this action it would be one that’s primary manifesto seeks to end social injustice”, however, here they were seeking to be better than they were before.
Nathan Dyke, Trustee
What struck me as different about what Camden Giving were doing, was that their focus was more on humbly holding the mirror up to the organisation
Specialist Support for Camden Giving Team
Following on from the training that was delivered to our Equality Fund Panelists in helping them to make more equality achieving decisions. We enlisted the support of BRAP to provide support, a safe space, coaching and mentoring in pursuit of allowing our small but strong team to be unrelenting in its pursuit of creating a fair, equitable environment where all can be themselves and flourish. Feedback from the Equality Fund panel has been extremely positive, saying they felt supported to create equality in Camden.
Anti-Racism Monthly Meeting
The commitment to CG’s anti-racism strategy has been supported by the introduction of a monthly anti-racism meeting with myself, Natasha, a couple of the other Trustees, and special guests where appropriate.
We use this time to discuss and update on where we are against our anti-racism strategy and to discuss and build on any new initiatives that support out anti-racist aspirations.
It was from this forum that we launched our Equality in Camden Slack Network back in April. This was our starting point at building an inter-business safe space for sharing best practice and experiences, to create greater social justice and inclusion in our organisations and wider community.
Whilst we had a good number of organisations sign up, suggesting that there was good interest in engaging on this topic, I think it’s fair to say we really struggled to stimulate significant engagement and wider discussion. It may be that the people and organisations that joined were more interested in observing, listening and learning, rather than sharing their own experiences, however, without any analytics it was difficult to not to conclude as low engagement. In reflection, we think we may have needed to do more to build that initial trust and engagement, perhaps via some sort of kick-off call, where people were able to put faces to names and understand better who they were engaging with, especially given the nature of the things we were discussing.
Where we are
As a trustee, I look at the efforts of Camden Giving from two perspectives: one as me being an integral part of the organisation. but the second perspective is one that seeks to objectively challenge the organisation.
I think from both perspectives I can say that there is more that we can and will continue to do, however, I feel incredibly proud of the work that has been done so far and the commitment on the things we will do moving forward.
We still believe that creating a cross-business “safe space” forum for collaborating on these matters is an important thing for us to focus on. A lot of the work around creating a more inclusive society hinges on delivering empathetic education, and raising awareness, of the many ways different groups of people can be excluded from having the same opportunities and experience as others. One of the challenges is that there is no silver bullet with this and no one approach will work for every organisation, however, through sharing learnings, and experiences, organisations can start to adopt elements of strategies that could work for them. We believe this forum would be a huge enabler of this conversation for organisations in the Camden Borough.
Creating a more inclusive society hinges on delivering empathetic education, and raising awareness, of the many ways different groups of people can be excluded from having the same opportunities and experience as others.
One of the areas that we’re still wrestling with is, trying to find the right balance between pragmatism, and meaningful interventions. Whilst the impact of Camden Giving’s work is huge, the operational team is relatively small. Our anti-racist work is incredibly important to us, each of those words just as important as each other; we want to be busy doing stuff (work) that really makes a difference, not just doing stuff for the sake of doing it. We know the old adage of what gets measured gets managed, however, given our small operation, introducing over-burdensome reporting could quite literally stifle our ability to do the things that we feel really makes a difference. This being said, we do think it is important that we have some means of measuring the impact of our efforts over time to ensure that they’re achieving the desired outcomes.
For me Diversity & Inclusion isn’t a destination, it’s a journey, with organisations being very much on their own individual journeys.
