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.