This blog post was written by Megan Henderson, our Senior Communications & Events Officer.
Main road to Tanga, Tanzania.
A year ago, we promised that we would report on what Five Talents is doing to shift power and become more anti-racist. We’re grateful that you are joining Five Talents on this journey. We know that this journey will never really be finished, but we’d like to share what we accomplished last year, and our next steps.
Recently, we announced that we have added six new trustees to our board (if you haven’t met them please do click here to learn a bit more about them and their backgrounds!). Their recruitment was part of our process to identify the power and privilege within Five Talents and begin to address imbalances and biases. They each have unique perspectives, and we hope they will enrich our board with new knowledge and experiences.
Over the last year we’ve continued to discover, listen and learn. The whole team has been reading books like Black and British a Forgotten History and “But Where are You Really From?” We also completed an audit of our language.
Last year, I spent time on a course on ethical content collection with BOND and developed a Communications Policy which puts more focus on the rights and voices of programme participants. This year, alongside safeguarding training for partners which also focuses on recognises where power lies in different contexts, our team hopes to develop an even more robust informed consent policy so Savings Group members and our partners hold and maintain power and control over their own stories.
We’ve also updated our Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with programme partners to make all of its clauses mutual, moving away from the colonial structure of Five Talents (as the provider of funding) setting all the conditions which the partner must agree to. Instead, our updated MoU recognises that both parties to the MoU need one another, and we’ve made many of the requirements mutual. These might seem like small changes but they are an important step toward making our partnerships more equal.
Sue Johns, Chairperson of the Five Talents International Board, created a Study Group for all board members where they could discuss issues of power, privilege and unconscious bias. Sue is also growing the international board with more members from countries in eastern Africa that bring unique perspectives to Five Talents. Our Programme Quality Committee has also introduced new members from eastern Africa which we hope will continue the journey of ensuring our governance structures are more representative. Similarly, in our own events in the UK we have consciously included more voices from the countries where we work; our climate justice event, for example.
We are continuing to revisit the 20 actions points we created to better understand shifting the power and we know we’re not finished yet. But perhaps one of the biggest changes is that throughout the Five Talents family, from Board to staff to partners, we talk about power and privilege as a matter of course now. It is on everyone’s radar.
As for next steps, we recently asked our Board to vote on two areas they would like some training on; the topics chosen were unconscious bias and decolonising development / mission. We’ll be booking these sessions soon, as well as continuing our programme of ‘Learning Afternoons’ within the staff team.
We are working together to hold ourselves accountable, but as we said last year, please call us out if you see areas where we could improve. We want to continue to learn and grow together to address systemic injustice and to better serve our partners and the communities that they support.