To London this morning, for a meeting of the English Regions Equality Network (EREN). I'm travelling with Dee Martin (Chief Exec of Leicestershire Centre for Integrated Living and first/past Chair of the Regional Equality and Partnership). Dee is currently Co-Chair of EREN.
The meeting is being held at Age UK on Pentonville Road. I'm last to enter the meeting room and make a slightly more memorable entrance than I'd like by forcefully and noisily pulling on a door clearly marked "push".
There are 14 of us here in all. from pan-equalities groups working in different regions: London, East Midlands, West Midlands, North East, North West, South West. Each of us has our own particular area of interest within equalities work. We also have representation from the Equality and Diversity Forum.
The session is facilitated by Ange Jones, from the National Equalities Partnership. She begins by setting us an interesting icebreaker activity, in which we speak with the person sitting next to us, and say what we're like when we're at our best. After ten minutes we have a list of qualities, including the following: action-based; balanced; challenging; charming; creative; debonair; enthusiastic; facilitative; focused; giving constructive criticism; having a vision of the future; honest; hopeful; inclusive; laughing a lot; listening to others; non-judgmental; pragmatic; respectful; seeing links others don't; sensitive. These are the qualities we're asked to draw on throughout the day in our interactions here. (We do, of course, spend the same amount of time talking to the person next to us about we're like when we're at our worst, come up with a list of those qualities and are asked to steer clear of that way of doing things in this meeting.)
Paul Dunn (Co-Chair of EREN and CEO of Equality South West) gave an introduction to the short but fruitful history of EREN and positioned it within the current social, political and economic landscape - what some might describe as "flux", while others might call it "slash and burn". He set the task of the day as our need to discuss how we might sustain the network, how we might move on. The Government Equalities Office (GEO) has funded EREN for the next 12 months, though it is unclear precisely what it wants EREN to do in that time. GEO's own agenda for the regions is not clear. All we can say at present is that funding EREN for a year appears to be their regional agenda (if that sounds a bit circular or confusing, then I have conveyed it accurately). There's a sense of urgency about the meeting. Is it useful to look at what EREN has done in the past, how it has done it? Or should we think of the present as Year Zero, since things around us have changed so much, so quickly?
We start our work proper with the question, "What do we need EREN to be now - and for the future?" After brainstorming some key words for a few minutes, we divide into three groups and spend a quarter of an hour juggling some of those words to come up with a sentence that says what EREN is all about. Our gang of four experiments with diagrams and flow charts before coming up with "The vehicle between policy and practice within and across the regions". Another group has "Promoting equality voices nationally". The third group doesn't come up with one of their own. After lunch we try to blend those two sentences into one - but we don't quite manage it.
In our small groups again, we undertake a SWOT analysis of EREN. For the uninitiated, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Our group is asked to consider opportunities and threats. We come up with a whole lot more of the former than the latter. I can't believe that we're being naive about this or hiding our heads in the sand, but among the challenges that lie ahead, some of us can see a real chance to help set the agenda and push for real progress in the equalities field. Some people and organisations might be able to do no more than lay down and die; others might be deliberately killed off. But some are going to survive - not just that, but thrive. We need to learn to speak a new language, work with the new conditions, rather than against them, to go with the flow rather than try and turn back the tide.
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