Meeting for Sufferings: Staff audit on diversity and inclusion
‘We need to keep moving and move with care.’
As part of BYM trustees’ report, Friends heard about a consultation that BYM had done with staff members over equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
The audit was part of BYM’s commitment to becoming an anti-oppressive employer and supporting employees more widely in their work on anti-racism. Caroline Nursey said: ‘We need to keep moving and move with care.’
The audit had been reported in the Friend and Quake. ‘Some of you may have been concerned about things this has uncovered,’ she said, but many organisations are grappling with these issues as a ‘new consciousness’ has emerged in the last few years.
Danielle Walker Palmer, clerk of the employment committee, said that there had been detailed scrutiny of the EDI audit through the employment committee, and all trustees and staff were given the report to read. BYM had worked with the consultation group Impact Culture, which produced the report. The whole process had involved interviews and focus groups with people with protected characteristics under the Equality Act, as well as a survey.
While the overview is being made public, ‘we want to give staff the ability to have the time and confidence to fully engage in the process and to have difficult conversations in a trusted space’. The next step is to form a working group to develop an action plan. Following this, BYM expects to publish a more detailed overview of the findings in a few months. ‘We don’t feel a discussion in public with what staff say would help that process,’ she said, later adding: ‘We feel confident we have good oversight of the steps taken to address the issues that the EDI audit has identified… grounded in our commitment to love equality and justice.’
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