Neighbourhood Forums are committed to equal opportunities. That means taking into account the special needs different members of the community might have and thinking about how everyone can take part as fully as possible in the work of the Forum. Equal opportunities is not about ‘political correctness’, it is about doing the job effectively:
- How likely is it that the best people to be on a committee representing a neighbourhood will all be of the same: gender, or age; faith or ethnicity; employment status or sexuality? If a committee, or a Forum membership, or the people that talk at public meetings, are heavily skewed towards one sort of person, then Forums need to take action to get a better balance.
- Taking action that everyone understands and supports usually starts with agreeing a policy. Forums should have an equal opportunities policy setting out: the kinds of people they serve; what they will do to help ensure that everyone can use the forum equally; how they will monitor equal opportunities.
- You need ways of recording who gets involved in the Forum (by attending, or speaking at, public meetings or serving on the committee etc.) That doesn’t mean you need everyone to fill in a monitoring form giving personal details, like age, ethnicity and whether they are disabled. You could, for example (with permission from participants) take a photograph at each public meeting showing who attended, publish these on your website and, at each AGM, review the pictures whilst you discuss equal opportunities.
- Equal opportunities is not about getting ‘token’ individuals onto the committee to ‘represent’ women, or men, or young people or disabled people etc. Forums should think more widely about what may be stopping certain groups of people from getting involved.
If you are concerned that your Forum isn’t providing equal opportunities to get involved , then perhaps someone from another Forum committee could come and give you an ‘outsider’s view’.
You will need an Equalities Policy if you wish to apply to the Neighbourhood Forum Support Fund. The link below is to a model policy which Forums can add to as needed.
Equalities Policy – a model you could add to and adopt