We hope you’ve had a chance to check out our DE&I blog post from our co-founder Fred, and we thought we’d write out in a bit more detail how we are currently making efforts to become a safe working space and community for everyone Wild.
After a fantastic talk from Sonya Barlow, coming to us from This is YSYS, we had a great springboard for ideas moving forward, and the drive and support within the company was tangible. After working through the discussion we had together, the resources provided, and also setting about doing our own research, we soon had some great projects to be getting on with and getting involved with. Here are a few examples:
Kickstart and 10,000 Black Interns schemes:
We are now signed up to the UK government’s Kickstart scheme, as well as the 10,000 Black Interns scheme. The former is working to help create new 6-month jobs for 16-24 year olds on Universal Credit to help build up work experience and reduce the chances of long-term unemployment.
The latter aims to help boost the prospects of young black people in the UK by offering paid work experience across a wide range of industries, along with other fantastic training and development opportunities. The scheme will launch with these internships in Summer 2022 - it’s a fantastic scheme we feel truly honoured to be getting involved with!
Wild Reads:
It’s not new knowledge that reading is good for you. It’s like broccoli or spinach, only with less iron in it. It was time to hit the books! After setting a date and time for a regular meeting (both in person for those in the office with a video call set up alongside and a shared Google doc for notes and discussion points), we now have a bi-monthly discussion group where we talk about a certain book on our ever-growing “want-to-read” list. Our first book was selected thanks to a recommendation from Sonya: Brown Baby: A memoir of Race, Family and Home, by Nikesh Shukla, which proved to be a very insightful and touching read about the dilemma of introducing your daughter into a world of prejudice, racism, and sexism.
We've also looked at: Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, by Florence Given, which provided a great opportunity to explore feminist thought, the definition and impact of the male gaze, and managing the systematically engineered insecurities we all harbour, and examining where these come from. Our most recent read is The Danish Girl by, David Ebershoff. This will be used as a doorway into exploring and learning about the history and present realities of the transgender community. This has been selected especially as this Wild Read session falls in the month of the release of the Pride case, in partnership with Switchboard LGBT+ Helpline.
Flag Fridays:
This initiative, which you may have seen on our Instagram stories (and you can check them all out from the very first one on our highlights), was developed during Pride month after some initial research by a team member who learned something new: there are 4 iterations of the rainbow Pride flag! This was news to most of us here, and we suspected we weren’t alone in that.
As a result, every week, we now look into the history and meaning of a different Pride flag, for all genders and sexualities, and pop up a summary of what we find on our Instagram story, and it will be a 5-6 month journey according to our content planner! We’ve also invited the whole team to sign off with our pronouns to help make all interactions with Wild feel that little bit more inclusive.
We hope this gives you a good insight into some of our current projects and actions. We are pleased to have some meaningful efforts underway, and we look forward to developing and adding new DE&I projects. We’re all ears, so if you have any recommendations for us, whether that be a book for us to check out, something to look into as a new project, a particular resource you’d recommend, or even if you have some feedback for us in general, we’d love to hear your thoughts.