Last week, THRE ran the second in our regional Hub events for the West of Scotland region in collaboration with Engage Renfrewshire. THRE is a Scotland-wide project and much of our work takes place online. Our Hub events are an opportunity for us to take a closer, in-person look at specific areas of Scotland and zoom in on the specific rights and equalities issues that are relevant to the communities there.
Our first guest speakers were Bernadette and Lynn from Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership (Renfrewshire HSCP) and Scottish Care. The presentation focussed on the anti-racism policy that was being launched by Renfrewshire HSCP to tackle issues of racism and microaggressions experienced by ethnic minority staff.
Some key points from the presentation and the discussion that followed were:
- Lived experience needs to inform policy
- Policy needs to be a ‘living’ thing that grows and evolves rather than just sitting on the shelf
- Gathering information, evidence and data on a policy’s effectiveness should be an ongoing, regular process
Our attendees held discussions around the resources required to take policy into practice effectively with a focus on policy not being a static document but instead a ‘live’ process.
On our second theme, Ingrid from Outside the Box shared the work that the = organisation had been doing to support local community groups and organisations to take a human rights-based approach to a number of projects, initiatives and strategies.
Some challenges around getting communities to engage with human rights were:
- Flexibility around people’s capacity and ability to participate
- Organisations being too stretched around what they can offer
- Getting buy in from those in power
Our groups suggested some solutions to these challenges including:
- Switching up the language that we use and reframing human rights in terms of our everyday rights to make clear how they relate to our day to day
- More focus and discussion on human rights as making business sense to bring otherwise disengaged organisations on board as well as to support buy in from those in power
- Those with the ability and resources to support communities and organisations should be more flexible and agile in this support to allow for solutions to evolve as engagement is carried out
Taking a human rights based approach is worthwhile at a community level but requires conscious effort, directed resources and support in capacity-building/awareness raising to be meaningful and impactful.
While we plan the next in-person THRE event you can always check out what we are running online over at Eventbrite. We have our regular training programme.
