Racism Awareness, Hate Crime & Discrimination Training
Since our last equality, diversity and equality update, all of our staff, as well as members of our board, have attended a four-hour training session put on by Race Equality First: an organisation which aims to tackle discrimination and hate crime, and promote “the message that Race Equality is a human right”.
The training was very comprehensive, covering:
- What causes and fuels prejudice
- Our rights in the UK
- What hate crime and discrimination are, and the difference between them
- Understanding the impact hate has on people
- How to report if you are a witness or victim of hate crime or discrimination
- Good practice in the workplace
All members of the team found the session really informative, with lots of practical information about how we can bring forward what we’ve learned into the running of SVC and within our day to day lives.
From this, we can not only make sure that we’re doing all we can to prevent discrimination as best we can, but also have appropriate measures in place to deal with its effects. We hope that as a result, SVC is and will be an inclusive organisation that helps to promote a positive working environment and support system for anyone that we work with or support.
We’re even hoping to use what we’ve learned to build up our own training information for us to use with those we work with in future. A huge thank you to Race Equality First for putting on such an engaging session for us!
Following on from this training session, we’ve also organised ‘First Steps to LGBT Inclusion’ training through Stonewall - a charity which campaigns for the equality of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people - for the board, taking place in November.
Website Updates
You may have noticed that under the ‘Our Values’ section of our website we’ve made some updates. We wanted to not only document our equality, diversity and inclusion goals (as we outlined in our initial response to Black Lives Matter), but also include plenty of useful information for our beneficiaries, volunteers and partners to develop their knowledge around equality and diversity and the nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.
Our staff have been doing some research, and have added the following sections to the website:
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Statement and Commitments
- Equality Act 2010
- Types of Discrimination
- Protected Characteristics
- Discrimination Support
These join our ‘Protecting the Planet’ section we added in January, which explains all of our sustainability goals.
If you want more information around these topics or want to know what you should do if you’re affected by discrimination, then we recommend you take a look at the information we’ve provided or get in touch with us if you have anything you want to discuss.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group
Since our initial response to Black Lives Matter, three of our board members have taken on the responsibility of looking after and overseeing our equality, diversity and inclusion work, making sure that we achieve our goals. This addresses one of our key objectives in our equality, diversity and inclusion statement and commitments.
These board members, Henry Morris; Nina Di Cara and Karen Harvey-Cooke, have been meeting regularly with staff member Eleri to form the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, discussing how we can improve and move forward with our goals.
We’ve started discussing equality, diversity and inclusion at every board meeting once a fortnight, again addressing one of our key goals we outlined, with the working group reporting back what they’ve discussed and the board also further contributing to ideas.
If you have any suggestions for the working group or any ideas as to how we can improve, feel free to email any member of the working group or email info@svcymru.org.
