Our work to develop Manchester’s Equality Impact Assessment Champions

In 2019 Result CIC has worked on two projects which centre on policy. This was a new area for the organisation, but not for one of our Directors, Jane, for whom this was a focus in her central Government work. One project was through Salford CCG, bringing together diversity and inclusion leads to develop an effective team - working approach. The other was through Manchester Health & Care Commissioning (MHCC) with 12 neighbourhood health leads in Manchester to support them to get to grips with a new, radically simpler Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) policy and process.

Are you still reading this?!

So OK, we know that EIAs and policies generally may not light many people’s fires, but they can form an effective backbone for a consistent approach to equality and inclusion in organisations, so they make a difference. The challenge for us was to ensure each person in the workshop found the best way for them to approach equality. In other words, it had to get personal.

Being clear
MHCC practised what it preached by drastically reducing what had been a 32 page Assessment document and making it 8 pages, with simple, clear examples in an accessible format. We were given one day to work with the 12 health leads on this. So we took our cue from MHCC, stripping back our plan and looked at what we really wanted to achieve:

• a personal, emotional understanding of equality and the impact of inequality
• power for the individuals involved to decide how they wanted to approach the issue
• support for each person to develop their own tangible project to implement the policy in their neighbourhood
• encouragement to share ideas across the city’s neighbourhoods and support each other in a network
• live, personal feedback to help participants inspire others in their neighbourhood and beyond to adopt the EIAs.

Innovating
We realised that each participant would need the chance to make the Equality Impact Assessment policy personal. So we decided to use 4 coach-facilitators on the day who worked intensively with small groups and who provided a 1:1 coaching session to each member of the group in the afternoon. We were delighted that the group spontaneously organised itself so they could have their own informal meeting between coaching sessions.

Here is how we organised the day:

• A chance to state their own purpose – make EIAs ‘real’ for their neighbourhood and explain this to others in their group.
• Test their gut reaction, in an open but safe environment, to diverse experience and characteristics – and discuss this in their group, and what it meant for their future practice.
• Have coaching to develop a specific action plan or project to put EIA into practice in their neighbourhood.
• Share ideas and agree how to support each other as a network of EIA Champions.
• Be filmed live describing responses to the work.

What next?
We really enjoyed working with this group of committed and experienced managers. The feedback from the initial day was so positive that the group requested a follow-up event to check – and further support – their progress. And several of the participants are interested in organising regular coaching for themselves as a way to ensure they are on the best track.

The film of the responses to the training will be available shortly.

If you are interested in bringing your diversity and inclusion policy work alive, why not contact us?