Weeknotes: 16th — 27th Jan: The Equality Act, team time and non-Wellcome activities
I’m sharing two weeks’ worth of notes as I didn’t manage to squeeze one in before. 2023 is feeling good so far — a new energy and optimism in the air which feels refreshing as it doesn’t always feel like this in January! Key things over the last two weeks included:
The Equality act and positive action
Wellcome’s Employment Counsel spent some time with the CEDI team providing a refresher on The Equality Act, with a detailed look at positive action — how it’s applied, nuances and what learning we have from recent public examples.
The time together to reflect on this with the expert advice and guidance from our Employment Counsel was incredibly valuable and has set us up well to explore this further as we develop initiatives to drive goals to make Wellcome an inclusive employer and funder.
CEDI Leadership Time
The CEDI leadership team spent some chunky slots of time together to explore how we can make the best of our collective energy, continuing to develop and strengthen team culture, our own practice, as well as create more space for reflection, strategic thinking and planning. This felt particularly timely now that Lauren Couch, our Associate Director of CEDI is settling back from maternity leave and recognising that we will come towards the end of our 2023 goals.
There was a lot of energy across the leadership team in these sessions, which was rewarding to be part of, given than we are all busy working across many projects — it’s clear that we all recognise how valuable this time together will be for forming the foundations we need to guide us going forward.
Insights and Learning Team
Along with continuing to promote the Open Call, Kasifa presented an overview to the CEDI team on the recruitment and selection process over the next two months, ensuring everyone is clear on the commitments, what’s required and could share what they need from us to do this well.
Joey is settling in and continuing to connect and understand the needs of the CEDI team members. He has begun scoping a project to look at the framing of disability questions, learning how other organisations have defined question and feeding in that learning to inform what iterations we might make to our existing approach.
With Joey now onboard, the Insights and Learning team has grown to three members, and so we had our first I&L team meeting where we shared our work and began discussing priorities for the next quarter, committing to regularly check in on wellbeing — both from a workload and individual perspective.
Non-Wellcome priorities
Shomari and I were able to find some time together to develop a six-month plan for New Fables, reflecting on 2022 and agreeing what to take forward. We are hoping we both have the headspace to prioritise the members a bit more and publish regular updates.
I also took part in a meeting with the RESULTS UK Leadership team and Trustee Board on developing a new sub-committee to focus on our anti-oppression work. I’ve been working with a small group of board members to further develop our anti-oppression work at board level, and now we have our new CEO, Kitty Arie and more clarity on our board priorities, a new Anti-Oppression sub-committee feels like the right time and right direction to take to ensure our anti-oppression work has the governance support it needs.
I also met with a couple of the new members of The Relationship Collective which was announced this week — the collective is a group of nine individuals who will support efforts to grow and nurture the field of relationship-centred practice. I’m thrilled to be part of this group and looking forward to listening, learning, sharing my own reflections and taking my relationship-centred practice further.
Some reading… and watching
I finished In the distance by Hernan Diaz — what a journey across the United States and the protagonist’s lifetime — such a breath-taking story of loneliness, relationships and struggle.
Now onto In the midst of winter by Isabel Allende after thoroughly enjoying Violeta last year. Trying not to rush through this one — I have slightly less time because my partner has finally started watching Homeland — a favourite series of mine. I’ve been trying to convince him for years to watch it. Now he’s started, I’m hooked again.
One piece of reading I did enjoy was this Washington Post article on kid-edited journals which reminded me of some of the conversations we used to have back in the Public Engagement team. I was pleased to see this resonated with many of the CEDI team members too.
Next week comes the start of February, with those ever so slightly lighter days. I’m looking forward to it.
