By CCVS Communications Officer, Lorna Gough. June 2024.
We were pleased to recently attend an event that the Barking Owl group hosted for Pride Month.
Barking Owl is the NAVCA national network for all NAVCA members who work in a communications-related role and is organised and run by Emily Lewis, NAVCA’s Communications Officer. Barking Owl sessions often focus on a particular subject, with plenty of time to share thoughts and ideas and ask questions. It’s an invaluable group for peer support, and we always come away from the session feeling reassured that most infrastructure organisations like ours, are facing similar comms challenges. We gain useful ideas and tips to help us in our work, and to share with our own members.
The most recent session was organised as a special event for Pride month and focused on how to support Pride in a non-tokenistic way.
NAVCA invited Lucy Straker to talk to the group. Lucy is the CEO and co-founder of Proud Changemakers, an organisation driving change for LGBTQIA+ people and communities who celebrate and elevate LGBTQIA+ voices across civil society, and advocate for, and support LGBTQIA+ people.
At CCVS we wanted to find out what we can do as an organisation to mark Pride Month in a meaningful way, and to ensure we are as inclusive and welcoming to the LGBTQIA+ community as possible. We already recognised that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of appearing tokenistic. We also knew that:
- It’s not enough to create one post on social media with a rainbow flag in June.
- It’s not enough to only share another organisation’s post, stating that you also support Pride Month.
- It’s not enough to add a rainbow flag to your profile picture and do nothing else.
We wanted to find out what we can practically do, and how to work towards getting it right.
The first point Lucy put to us to consider was – What do you do, share, say, about the LGBTQIA+ community during the months of July, August, September, October, November, December, January, March, April and May?
A very good point and certainly thought provoking.
What can we all do all year round?
Here are Proud Changemaker’s top tips:
- Make sure everyone in your organisation knows the importance of using inclusive language and does so across all channels, internally and externally. Learn about up-to-date language – Stonewall’s LGBTQ+ terms is a comprehensive A to Z guide of definitions.
- Include people from LGBTQIA+ communities in your planning of your comms, events and activities.
- Consider the impact of your activities, events and comms on LGBTQIA+ people.
- Produce and make visible an organisational statement that states not only your commitment to inclusion, but states specifically your support for the LGBTQIA+ community.
- Keep up to date and get involved with other LGBTQIA+ events throughout the year. The SAYiT LGBTQ+ calendar is a good place to find out what’s happening.
- Check your language is not gendered unless it absolutely has to be.
- Ask people what pronouns they would like you to use.
- Educate yourself and those around you. Share what you learn.
- Integrate with LGBTQIA+ people.
- Diversify your reading and podcasts. Proud Changemaker have a growing selection of podcasts.
- LISTEN – and never deny someone’s lived experience.
- Stand up for others – even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.
Don’t let the fear of getting it wrong stop you from making changes. We all get things wrong sometimes. We learn by how we react to our mistake. Use that learning to do better.
We are starting our improvements by sharing what we learned at the event with our local voluntary sector so that we can all improve what we do.
What will you do to make improvements?
There are many ways to engage with Proud Changemakers to find out about their work. Listen to their podcasts, sign up to their newsletters, follow their social channels, reach out to them about LGBTQIA+ topics and find out about the many consultations they are involved in. You can find all this and more here.
Thank you to Emily and Lucy for such an informative session.
ccvsblog 