Medway Council: Black Workers’ Forum

We are proud of our long standing relationship with Medway Black Workers’ Forum (BWF), one of the most long lived and successful staff forums in the UK. We have facilitated sessions for them regularly since 2001.

Medway Council has always taken very seriously its commitment to Equality and Diversity. Black people are under-represented in Medway at senior levels, as they are in most local authorities. The BWF was unusual in securing a budget for training and development over which it retains control. They are simultaneously making sure that the Council’s mainstream training also addresses issues of Equality and Diversity.

The BWF spends its training and development budget on areas of particular relevance and importance to them, which are designed to make sure that Black people have good career progression in the Council.

The work we have carried out includes facilitating sessions where the race and gender of the delegates is part of the central focus and where it is important for the facilitators to understand the delegates’ experiences and to see how their social identity plays out in their lives at work.

Our long standing relationship with Medway BWF is a testament to our effective work with them and they always express high levels of satisfaction with our work. The expertise, experience and understanding of our facilitators has been pivotal to the success of these programmes. We have seen the Forum grow in strength and influence over the years and note that they continue to be powerful advocates for equality in Medway.

We worked with BWF to provide an integrated and connected programme of development to strengthen and enhance the career opportunities of Black staff in Medway Council. The programme was underpinned by a clear, consistent and explicit analysis of equalities issues.

One area of concentration in our training concerned Mentoring. An initiative to develop a formal mentoring scheme for Black Workers resulted in a two day mentoring programme. The programme aimed to enable Black staff to act as mentors to colleagues in two adjacent Councils; and examined ways of establishing a systematic programme of mentoring.

The two day programme was extremely well received and by the end participants were able to:

• Understand the distinctive role of the mentor at work;
• Distinguish between the roles of line-manager, supervisor and mentor;
• Describe examples of good practice from other organisations;
• Integrate the issues of race and racism into the mentoring role;
• Plan an initial meeting between mentor and mentee;
• Draw up a contract between mentor and mentee; and
• Proceed with a proposal to managers for a mentoring programme.