This is part of an ongoing discussion we’re having about the roles of bigger voluntary organisations and charities using RadHR. It’s something we actually have some differing perspectives on within the team, and wanted to share them so that others could chime in. This is Liam’s view.
After a year of research and development, RadHR.org is launching and we want to celebrate it with you!
A blog by Tanya Hawkes. I’m working class. I was raised on a council estate by a foundry worker and an unpaid carer. I spent my teenage years surviving in the benefits system and for the decade after I left school worked in factories, cleaning jobs and the mental health services. At age thirty I started work in the environmental sector as a fundraiser. For the next twenty I worked in NGOs and social movements and this experience has shown me the difficulties of being working-class in middle class dominated workplaces. But more importantly, it’s shown me that our movements have a great deal to learn from working-class people.
It started with Liam and Rich, somewhere in mid-Wales, going on about how so many different types of progressive organisations they were involved with were trying to do the same thing—figure out how their internal systems could reflect the values they were trying to create in the wider world. And how it felt like a hopeless task, with everyone doing it separately, without the time or resources to really shift all the areas of their work within each of these organisations.
At People Support Co-op we’ve been working with several organisations to introduce a radical approach to policy writing, as developed by our associate member Kiri Langmead. We call this the experience-based policy writing process because it involves identifying positive and negative past experiences of group members to explore how to create a policy that works for everyone and avoids replicating patterns of harm.
