Lumelang,

Work is continuing at speed for IACT, with Sara completing her report on our conversations. Today we are excited to be releasing that, along with a literature review. Our strategy will be based on this work, and a strong team has been brought together to work on it, led by Tim. We are also moving ahead with our thinking around the constellations, which we will be setting up next year.

Report from the Conversations on Belonging & Inclusion

During 2020, Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono asked people to share with us their feelings of belonging: when they feel like they belong, what stops them from feeling that way and what they’d like to see changed. We are grateful to all the people who told us about their experiences and ideas, whether online or in face to face conversation.

Our data analyst, Sara Hewitson, went through all this material, grouped together common ideas and themes. She has put together a report which shares the results, and we thank her for the high quality of her work. It is from this report that we will be developing our strategy for belonging and inclusion.

Literature review: Diversity, Belonging and Inclusion in Aotearoa New Zealand

So that we could understand the work that had been done before this project, we asked a research team at the University of Waikato to review the research literature for us. The Capturing the Diversity Dividend Aotearoa New Zealand (CaDDANZ) team went through various reports from the last five years. The reports covered what people have said about well-being, belonging, and inclusion in six communities: rainbow, youth, disabilities, elderly, tangata whenua and ethnic. We would particularly like to thank Dr Rogena Stirling and Kyle K. H. Tan for bringing this together. You can read their summary on our website.

Click here to read the Literature Review

Progress on developing the strategy

We’re well underway with thinking through and developing the strategy for belonging and inclusion. Tim and Anjum have been working together to review the research reports and put together a clear framework to help inform how we move forward together.

The strategy is going to be primarily hosted online on a new, accessible website. We’ve engaged a team of experts to help us make sure that the strategy and the website is as accessible as possible.

The team includes Meghan, designer; Trent, developer; and Chandra, accessibility consultant from Access Advisors. We asked them to share a little about themselves below.

Meghan Geliza Jackson – Art Director and Creative Strategist

Meghan is a multi-passionate creative working in the advertising and design industries for 14 years, with skills straddling a few disciplines – art direction, copywriting, creative strategy and project management. Her inherent strength is strategy: wading through complexity to guide the sense-making and execution that follows, always with the needs of the audience in mind. For the past few years she’s enjoyed working with not just commercial clients but also government, not-for-profit, social enterprise, social change and social good projects, some notably becoming finalists or winning the Best Design Awards. Notable projects include support for greater inclusivity of the LGBTQI community, women in leadership, behaviour change campaigns and websites to support diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Find out more about Meghan via LinkedIn.

Trent Morgan – Web Developer & Artist

For the last decade Trent has worked as a front-end web developer on projects across public, private and not-for-profit sectors. With a background in fine arts, he has also completed a number of interactive public artworks. A design-led process is central to his work as both a web developer and an artist. Trent lives in Whangārei with his wife and 2 young children.

Dr Chandra Harrison – Managing Director – Access Advisors

Chandra’s first paying job in digital accessibility, 20 years ago, was an evaluation of a low vision reading aid for people with low tech literacy. Continuing the theme she moved to the UK to do a PhD in emotional web experience while doing accessibility consultancy for an EU funded project. She also lectured at a couple of universities on Human Computer Interaction, worked in digital agencies in London and did some contracting for the likes of Qualcomm, Nokia, Vodafone, Deustch Bank and the BBC, not necessarily all at the same time, but sometimes. Chandra was also the Accessibility representative and President of the UK User Experience Professionals Association for many years. Chandra returned home to NZ in late 2014. Since coming home Chandra has worked with a variety of companies and is now the Managing Director of Digital Accessibility for Access Advisors, a consultancy initiated by BLVZ in 2017, helping organisations understand and implement digital accessibility. Find out more about Access Advisors on their website and about Chandra on LinkedIn.

Thank you to Sara Hewitson

We say a sad farewell to Sara Hewitson. Sara joined the project in January this year and has played an integral role with her expertise in the qualitative and quantitative research for this project. She has tirelessly worked through so much data, analysing lines and lines of text from all the conversations.

She played a key role as our communications contact and worked with a number of media groups around the country.

We absolutely would not have got to this next stage without her, and the IACT team thank her deeply for all her work, while wishing her all the very best in her future endeavours and wonderful life journey.

Women’s Studies Journal interview

Here is an article recently published in the Women’s Studies Journal, based on an interview that Anjum Rahman held last year on issues around feminism and race:

Click here to download a pdf version of the article

Mapping directory underway

We are currently putting together a mapping directory of groups and organisations working in the Belonging and Inclusion space which will be uploaded to our website in due course. If you would like to be included in this directory, please send through your organisation’s contact details to Talie at [email protected] .

Hiring soon

We will be looking to hire more staff, so please keep an eye out for a notice in December when we are ready to provide more information.