Why is Race Equality Week important?
“We are committed to race equality and want to use Race Equality Week to achieve greater visibility of what we are doing to promote this. We work with our ethnic minority staff network, Diverse, to achieve this.
It is an opportunity to share with our colleagues and our local community that we are serious about race equality, to engage with people to learn about their lived experience, and to set ourselves new challenges to progress matters further.”
Rob Thomas, Managing Director
What are Vale of Glamorgan’s plans for Race Equality Week 2022?
We intend to use the resources of Race Equality Matters to provide a framework for our activity in Race Equality Week.
We are particularly interested in using the Safe Space tool as this encourages having those challenging conversations that might otherwise be avoided in a safe space. Having such a discussion between our senior managers and our ethnic minority colleagues will help us to identify the priorities for our organisation.
From this conversation, we would hope to agree measurable actions that we can commit to as our Big Promise.
What do you hope to achieve as a result?
We would hope to achieve a number of outcomes from our activities during Race Awareness Week:
- to feel confident that we are focussing on the right priorities to progress race equality;
- to strengthen relationships between colleagues and management;
- to send a strong message of our commitment to promoting race equality to colleagues and our local community;
- to further develop the culture of our organisation to be more inclusive of ethnic minority colleagues; and
- to attract more ethnic minority people to work in our organisation.
Why this year’s theme #ActionNotJustWords is so important?
Recent events have brought race equality issues to the fore. We need to celebrate the contribution of ethnic minority people and tackle discrimination. To achieve this, we need to move beyond words and act – #actionnotwords encourages us to do this. We want to be an organisation that makes a positive and tangible difference.
We will be working with Diverse, our ethnic minority staff network, to help us identify the key issues that we need to act on and achieve the actions we commit to as a result.