This week I feel inspired we reached a really significant milestone. We launched a King’s-wide staff Race Equality Network (REN). This was great for so many reasons, and it’s led me to reminisce on one of the turning points in my career, back in the dim and distant past, when I worked with three colleagues to start a HMRC BAME women’s network.
It was personally transformative: giving me access to senior people, building my personal credibility and profile, enabling me to exert influence as well as developing and practicing skills. It met many new people from across a huge organisation. I got personal support and nourishment but also provided inspiration, guidance and support through being a role model to others. I will never forget being in a room with a colleague who was relatively early in her career and her wonder that there were women of colour in senior positions (relative to her as to opposed to actually senior)! She actually said “I really didn’t know people like you existed!”
I’ve been at King’s for just over two years, as Director of Diversity & Inclusion (a unique position across the sector). My focus has been supporting an intersectional approach to enable and empower community voice, staff and students. The REN launch completes the first tranche of networks that we needed. I recruited India Jordan and Sarah Mander specifically to support community network development and they have worked tirelessly on their bespoke community network model based on the fabulous Proudly King’s approach.
The creation and success of this new Network is a key part of the delivery of King’s Race Equality Action Plan which supports the Race Equality Chartermark. It also comes along just as we are about to see the start of the newly refreshed college D&I governance structure.
As part of the event, one of the co-chairs, Precious, asked me to share something that had personally inspired me. This allowed me to reveal my TV addiction, which I am currently feeding by re-watching Grey’s Anatomy created by the ground breaking, inspirational Shonda Rhimes.
I got out Year of Yes – How To Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person (a book I have since bought multiple times as a gift). It’s such an eye-opening book. She was the first person ever, and also the first black woman to have three top rated network TV shows in America, at one time, airing back to back on a Thursday evening. Year of Yes very entertainingly exposes her epiphanies in discovering her personal authenticity and beating back her self-limiting beliefs and behaviours.
The breadth of the book is such that I could have used it to make points about gender or race solidarity and allyship, imposter syndrome, career ambitions and success, parenthood, mental health and its impacts on everyday life, being a woman, being a black woman, being a first and the list goes on.
I chose an excerpt about what choosing to be different, choosing to change and choosing to lead feels like:
I thought saying YES would feel good. I thought it would feel freeing. Like Julie Andrews spinning around on that big mountaintop at the beginning of The Sound of Music. Like Angela Bassett when she’s Tina Turner and she walks out of the divorce court and away from Ike with nothing but her name in What’s Love Got to Do with It. Like how you feel when you have just finished baking double-fudge brownies but you have yet to shove one into your mouth, starting the sugar rush roller coaster that won’t end until you are curled up in a ball on the sofa, rocking back and forth while scraping the crumbs of the empty brownie pan into your mouth and trying to talk yourself into believing that maybe the ex-boyfriend you dumped wasn’t so bad after all.
Like that.
This YES does not feel like a post-baked, pre-eaten brownie.
I feel forced into this. I feel like I don’t have a choice. My obligation to my network to my stupid Year of Yes idea has trapped me.
My paw caught in a trap. I can try and chew it off and run away. But if you think I am whining now? Try me when I am down a paw and have just a bloody gnawed stump to deal with.
The tears.
The drama.
The wailing and moaning.
The cross I would be nailing myself to would be so pretty and brightly lit. Oh, my cross wouldn’t be missed by anyone! You’d see my cross from space.
The numbing fear is starting to creep over me. ….
This passage particularly spoke to me for the REN launch, reminding me of my own experiences leading discussions and activity aimed at championing and supporting diversity. Our REN co-chairs Precious Alabi and Whitney Robinson, and sponsors Syreeta Allen and Jonathan Grant, are choosing to step up and that takes courage. Each person that has signed up to the network and attended the launch are also saying signing up to be part of creating the change we want to achieve at King’s and in the world. This in any sphere is hard, but for race, a complex and sensitive topic, that impacts each and every one of us every day – well that is especially challenging or as Shonda might say ‘badass’!
Anyone in a leadership position can tell you that it’s tough work each and every day. It needs you to steel yourself and re-find and renew your motivation repeatedly.
I wanted the room to know that the fear and anxiety they were bound to feel over the time to come was something everyone feels. It is part of being a brave leader. It is something I feel almost daily.
This event filled me with hope and renewed energy and I am just so proud and privileged to have been able to pay a small part in the network’s birth.