Reflections from Black History Month event

Feeling inspired after a brilliant #BlackHistoryMonth collaboration event that we at Rail Unites for Inclusion (RUI) worked on with Network Rail's Cultural Fusion Network (CFN) and EDI team including Faizza Rumani. Thank you Ibtisam Saeed, Akthar Hussain - Co-Chairs of CFN for this opportunity to collaborate with you and thank you Celebrity Tracee Grenardo for bringing us together and for opening the event on behalf of RUI with Ibti.

Below are some photos from the day. Anit Chandarana did a Sponsor's welcome at the start and was a legend as always! My fellow Industry Inclusion & Belonging Lead and fellow Co-Chair of RUI Odis Palmer then had an 'In conversation' session with the inspirational Seyi Obakin OBE. Such an honour to have him in our midst - Seyi is Chief Executive of Centrepoint, the leading national charity working to end youth homelessness in the UK. He is also Chairman of Youth Futures Foundation, who we collaborated with at our #NIW event on 15 September.

We then heard from Keneefia Parker, an apprentice at Network Rail and she shared a video, which she had featured in too - what a role model for young people! Another role model who joined us was Paulette Simpson CBE - deputy CEO of JN Bank UK, executive director of The Voice, Britain’s leading black newspaper who had such great advice, such knowledge and such passion!

I was so honoured to have had the opportunity to facilitate a break-out session about Action Learning Sets with EDI expert Gamiel Yafai MBE who is always such a pleasure to work with from auditing industry organisations using the Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Benchmarks (GDEIB), which we refer to as the EDI maturity model in the industry, to introducing us to the authors of the model to Odis and I now being certified accrediters ourselves - we have been on a journey together over the last couple of years. This includes collaborating on creating the Next Stop - Your Future development programme for non-managers from underrepresented groups which 30 colleagues completed in June and already a third of the cohort have progressed in their careers. We shared one of the key tools used during the programme which learners have found so helpful - Action Learning Sets. Really enjoyed putting together this session for the event and then hearing how beneficial everyone found it. The positive feedback from the event has been overwhelming already.

Thank you so much to everyone that supported us, CFN- Ibti, Akthar and Tracee and Faizza to make this event a success.