News: Being bet­ter allies – BAME Café and beyond

Now, more than ever, we all need to lis­ten, learn, and take more action to address any inequal­i­ties that exist. Over the com­ing months, we’ll be high­light­ing some of the ways staff and stu­dents are work­ing togeth­er to achieve this. 

First up, we’re shar­ing a blog post from col­leagues involved in our recent­ly formed BAME Café staff events. 

The BAME Café has been set up by some of our staff togeth­er with our Equal­i­ty, Diver­si­ty, and Inclu­sion (EDI) Com­mit­tee. It’s a reg­u­lar event for black and minor­i­ty eth­nic (BAME) staff to share their expe­ri­ences, views and opin­ions in a warm and pro­gres­sive environment. 

The staff BAME Café here at Not­ting­ham Col­lege was in the plan­ning for a while, but was then accel­er­at­ed as a result of con­ver­sa­tions around recent glob­al events and the sup­port for the Black Lives Mat­ter UK movement. 

It also pro­vides a plat­form for open con­ver­sa­tions and dia­logue across our wider Col­lege com­mu­ni­ty and will be in reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion with our BAME stu­dent voice groups to see how they can sup­port them as well. 

It will help shape future action in the Col­lege. It’s also a way for staff who aren’t from a BAME back­ground to learn more, and to get involved as allies. 

Our main principles/​aims are to cul­ti­vate a change phi­los­o­phy, and more specifically: 

• Data – using data to iden­ti­fy issues, and to inform deci­sion-mak­ing in terms of the impact on BAME staff and students 
• Account­abil­i­ty — pur­su­ing trans­paren­cy and account­abil­i­ty. Work­ing towards a BAME strat­e­gy that can be embed­ded into the Col­lege, in an effort to cre­ate pos­i­tive change and expe­ri­ences for the BAME com­mu­ni­ty as stake­hold­ers with­in the College. 
• Pos­i­tive change – mak­ing con­scious efforts to redress inequal­i­ties and any poten­tial­ly unfair prac­tices that may exist in the Col­lege, which may be reflec­tive of the wider society

Those of us involved in the BAME Café have some big ambi­tions! We want to high­light the BAME agen­da, help shape strat­e­gy, and pro­mote the pos­i­tive action being under­tak­en in our Col­lege community. 

We’ll be work­ing with stu­dents and staff from across the Col­lege, and we are guid­ed by our five main principles:

In the short time the events have been run­ning (over the past few months), the group have already start­ed to put an action plan in place. We’ll share some of these achieve­ments in a future blog post.

Note: our cur­rent stu­dents can find all the infor­ma­tion about how to get their voice heard, (for exam­ple through the stu­dent voice groups men­tioned here) on the Col­lege’s stu­dent Well­be­ing Hub, which they can find through the stu­dent intranet.