Tackling racial inequality
We can confidently say as a whole team, including our Board of Trustees, that we most definitely do have a role to play and a responsibility to fulfil our commitment to become an anti-racist organisation and proactively tackle the racial inequalities that prevent or discourage people from leading active lives and enjoying the benefits of sport, physical activity and movement. This is an area of work we are fully committed to and it is high on everyone’s agenda here at Wesport.
This confidence and clarity does not mean we have all the answers, in fact, we can openly admit to being very early on in our journey.
We have established a Race Equality Action plan, this will be a continually evolving tool, but an important one to ensure we maintain momentum and achieve what we have committed to. The action plan is made up of ‘opportunity statements’ and ‘success factors’ to ensure we have true accountability.
Race Equality has been added to our operational planning so that the whole team can continually feed in the work they are doing that contributes to our commitment to being an anti-racist organisation. This is an important way to ensure a shared ownership and commitment is achieved and maintained.
The image to the left shows our reporting method to ensure we are held accountable for team and individual actions linked to the plan. This different segments are focus areas we highlighted during team away days and meetings.
All Wesport staff, including trustees have attended two ‘How to be an ally’ training sessions. In February 2022, Open Minds Active delivered a session for us focussing on two topics, breaking barriers around diversity and engaging women of colour in community sport and activity.
Wesport are fully committed to providing further learning opportunities for our team and the networks we work with, this is central to our new partnership with SARI which we are very excited about.
Wesport are very excited to share that we have committed to a two-year partnership with local hate crime charity SARI. This work will create a number of learning, development and networking opportunities for our whole team and the networks we work with to engage in meaningful conversations around race and race equality. In addition, we will also use the expertise of SARI to work with us in terms of promoting awareness and confidence in recognizing and responding to hate crime and discrimination within the sport and physical activity sector.
Alex Raikes MBE DL, Strategic Director of SARI and High Sheriff of Bristol 2022 said:
“SARI are so happy to be working in partnership with Wesport to tackle racism and race hate crime in sports. We deal regularly with reports of incidents in a whole range of sporting arenas. Such abuse ruins lives and prevents the teamwork that is so crucial to sporting success. Working hand in hand with the sector’s infrastructure organisations as well as delivery organisations is key to achieving positive change. We look forward to putting our ideas into action!”
As we continue to engage and work with culturally diverse audiences, it is really important that our language reflects our commitment to proactively tackle the racial inequalities that prevent or discourage people from leading active lives and enjoying the benefits of sport, physical activity and movement. Here at Wesport we are fully committed to using inclusive language and having consistency with this across the whole team. Through our different learning experiences we know that the language we use can be very powerful and important, in terms of making people feel safe, welcomed and valued, so we want to ensure we are getting this right. We recognise that if we get this wrong, we can in fact be contributing to a widening of the inequalities we are working to break down.
In terms of inclusive language, we are striving towards the following:
- As a team we are all using the same agreed terminology.
- We are comfortable and consistent with using that terminology.
- We are comfortable to challenge when hearing terminology that isn’t appropriate.
- We are constantly reviewing the terminology we use and do not use.
We have used the following documents as a framework to shape our commitment to inclusive language, this is by no means final and these will evolve and develop as preferences around language change and we will adapt our commitment in accordance with such changes. We know we don’t have all the answers and we will continue to ask questions when we don’t have the answer. We are very open to feedback and suggestions to help us develop this area of work further, so please do feel free to get in touch with us.
