Our Race Awareness Journey: core principles for learning and change
blog | Words Amber Barrow | 22 Oct 2024
In September, IU’s Race Action Team hosted a full day, in-person workshop as part of our Race Awareness Journey. Hosted in Manchester, the workshop was a wonderful opportunity for our staff to come together, as well as providing a space to critically engage with anti-racist practice and what this can look like at IU. Reflecting on the training day, we are drawing out the core principles underscoring our approach to anti-racism and sharing these so that we can hold ourselves accountable to them and help others do the same.
To foster effective anti-racist practice, it’s essential to create spaces that prioritise psychological safety, acknowledge complex identities, and critically examine systemic racism. We embedded these core principles into our internal anti-racist training, ensuring that our Race Awareness Journey serves not just as a learning opportunity but as a platform for real, actionable change.
Psychological safety as a foundation for anti-racist work
Anti-racist practice cannot thrive without a foundation of psychological safety. Ensuring that everyone in a space feels safe to express their thoughts and engage with challenging topics is crucial to dismantling the harmful, exclusionary norms that are often perpetuated by silence. One of the ways we incorporate this into our training is by starting each session with exercises that invite participants to reflect on what they are bringing to the space. For example, we ask questions like, “What am I feeling arriving here today?” and “What is my intention for today?” These exercises not only set a collaborative tone but also establish ground rules that participants co-create.
By allowing everyone to share their thoughts openly and acknowledge the different knowledge levels in the room, we create a space that feels democratised and inclusive. This attention to psychological safety is vital in fostering trust and making room for honest, transformative dialogue. Particularly when having difficult or complex conversations, it’s important to acknowledge the tensions that can emerge between giving participants space to ‘try things out’ and ensuring that unintentional harm is not caused to others in doing so. Co-defining the parameters of a discussion and naming ground rules explicitly, is central to fostering the psychological safety that enables people to not only contribute, but also engage with any assumptions being made – especially ones that may cause harm.
Acknowledging complex identities to deepen understanding
Recognising that identity is not static is fundamental to anti-racist practice. Identity categories such as race, nationality, and religion are often treated as fixed, but the reality is far more nuanced. In our training, we ask participants to reflect on different aspects of their identity and how they personally experience them. Paired discussions allow for sharing as much or as little as one feels comfortable, and reveals the rich diversity of experiences within nominally similar identity categories.
These discussions remind us that while demographic data is important, it does not capture the full complexity of individuals. Recognising the multifaceted nature of identity pushes us to move beyond simple representation and delve into lived experiences. This more complex understanding of identity enables us to be more inclusive in our design processes and portfolio delivery, ensuring that the work we do reflects the diverse realities of the people we aim to serve.
Systemic racism: understanding and uprooting inequalities
At the heart of anti-racist practice is a critical examination of systemic racism. In our anti-racist training, we devote significant time to exploring the historical roots of racism and how these histories continue to shape modern-day inequalities. For example, we look at how Britain’s colonial past and the legacies of enslavement have led to present-day disparities – such as the fact that 46% of Black families in the UK live in poverty compared to 19% of white families.
Understanding these systemic issues is crucial because it moves the conversation beyond individual actions and highlights the structural forces that perpetuate inequality. Effective anti-racist practice involves more than just addressing surface-level biases; it requires reimagining and transforming the systems that uphold racial inequality. This is core to our work at IU, where we focus on creating and scaling innovative solutions that address long-standing inequalities and drive meaningful, lasting change. Recognising the systemic roots of racism allows us to approach anti-racism as an actionable process of sustained, long-term transformation.
Embedding anti-racist practice in our work
By embedding these elements into our anti-racist training, we aim to ensure that anti-racist practice is a lived experience at IU, not just a theoretical commitment. Our Race Awareness Journey emphasises the importance of psychological safety, acknowledges the complexity of identity, and interrogates systemic racism – all in a practical, grounded way that can be applied to our everyday work. This approach not only builds our internal capacity to challenge racism but also ensures that anti-racist principles are at the core of our innovation and delivery.
The training day ended with all participants making anonymous commitments to bringing anti-racist practice into our everyday work. Viewed together, these commitments remind us of the power of collective action, and how our individual efforts are all necessary to contribute to real change.
Our commitment to anti-racist practice is ongoing, requiring continuous learning, reflection, and systemic inquiry. Through our anti-racist training and practical exercises, we strive to create a culture that fosters openness, acknowledges the diverse experiences of our colleagues, and critically examines the structures of oppression that we are collectively working to dismantle.
What you can do next
Learn more about our anti-racist journey here.
Make your own commitment to anti-racist practice by completing a version of our individual contribution cards.
Create your own shared learning experience, by coming together with others to work through Layla Saad’s ‘Me and White Supremacy,’ a 28-day guide to uncovering the impact of white supremacy in our lives. Members of our team have found this to be a powerful process.
To find out more about our Race Awareness Journey, please get in touch with a member of our Race Action Team: