Lived Experience & Diversifying

Agenda

We are seeing more and more organisations use the phrase must have ‘lived experience’, whether that’s in recruitment, or in getting external experts to talk about certain issues. Whilst there are pros and cons to using this as a selection criteria, we look into some of its challenges and pitfalls, such as how do you quantify lived experience and whose lived experience is the narrative which is preferred?

In addition, what does it mean to diversify, whether in board and trustee recruitment or general recruitment. What does it mean to diversify your teams or the curriculum and what is the right way to go about it?

How can you use positive action to hire from minority groups, rather than falling into the trap of using positive discrimination and what are their differences? Are we looking at the full picture and also addressing the pipeline or are potential candidates being set up to fail?

In this training workshop, we will take a deeper look into diversifying, and what the diverse in diversity actually means, in order to avoid tokenistic symbolic gestures and help you to get your decision making right.

Background Reading (Optional but recommended):

• “What’s the Diverse in Diversity?” (2022) PILAA - find it in the EDI Detox Club or email studyevents@oca.ac.uk

Session outline:

• 1.5hr interactive training workshop

Supporting Padlet & discussion space

We have set up a Padlet and space on the OCA Student Association site that repeats the information here and allows discussion even if you cannot make the event. It can also be used for sharing of suggestions, recommendations etc. Find and join the space here https://www.ocasa.org.uk/group/edi-detox/discussion. If you have any questions or concerns please email studyevents@oca.ac.uk