Why is Race Equality Week important?
Race Equality Week gives a focus for us to signal to our volunteers and our partners our collective commitment to race equality. This is important to us as we are looking to influence our volunteers to more actively promote race equality in their day-to-day activity and engage organisations locally and nationally that can assist them with this. The activities provide a simple way that our volunteers can get involved, help us to expand our reach and achieve greater race equality in what we do.
It also provides our charity and our leaders with a means to promote our commitment to race equality and give structure to our work going forward by signing up to the Big Promises and putting plans in place to deliver on them. Making our promises public gives greater impetus to this work and a level of external accountability on us to continue with this focus.
Why is this year’s Race Equality Week theme #ActionNotJustWords so important?
The theme of our Neighbourhood Watch Week last year (2021) was Listen, Talk. Do! We provided ideas and simple guides to enable our volunteers to become more active in their communities. This year it is the 40th anniversary of Neighbourhood Watch and we are promoting 40 actions that our volunteers can take to support their communities. #ActionnNotJustWords is important as it aligns with the approach we have been taking more generally and will enables us to seamlessly integrate this message into our current work and in particular, to include activities to achieve greater race equality into our 40 actions.
What are the Neighbourhood Watch's plans for Race Equality Week?
For the week we will be launching our Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement. We will be promoting the week in our newsletter, at events and through e-mail marketing to our volunteers. We will invite our CEO, staff, Board members and supporters to make a Big Promise and be sharing the CEO’s promise with our supporters. We will be encouraging our volunteers to expand and diversify their network with people from other backgrounds and get involved. Our Team will be using the resources, including the Social Media Badge and the Virtual Background, and sharing them with our volunteers on our Knowledge Hub.
What do you hope to achieve as a result?
Our aim is to ensure that more people from minority ethnic backgrounds have the information and support necessary to keep themselves and their communities safe from crime. Race Equality Week will enable us to promote the role of Neighbourhood Watch in this and the variety of ways that we can help.
We would like more people from minority ethnic backgrounds to volunteer with us. Race Equality Week will enable us to get this message out and start the engagement that we need to involve people in how we can adapt to meet different needs and encourage greater involvement.