The LIDN Weekly Roundup #56 (Black Lives Matter)

London’s Black Lives Matter protest, 6 June © The Telegraph

If you follow LIDN, there’s a good chance you already spend a lot of time thinking about power imbalances within the international development sector and actively work on ways to rectify these. I know that the events over the last week have profoundly affected all of us, and made us question what we can do to redouble our efforts to address racism within our own sector. The links below provide ways to do just that — learn, listen, and act.

• Start with this brilliant article by Blessing Omakwu where she outlines how to be an ‘intravist’ within the sector. Hint: it starts with pushing for change within your own organisation.
• While we’re on that, only 8.1 percent of senior positions in the largest 100 UK charities are held by ethnic minority leaders. What does it look like in your organisation? Push to recruit from the ‘non-usual suspects’ and ensure burdensome prerequisites don’t mean you miss out on someone great.
• Support people of colour within your own organisation — listen to them, acknowledge their concerns, and fight for better treatment.
• Amplify black voices. Ensure your organisation has a commitment to racial diversity on event panels, turn down speaker invites to all-white panels, and recommend black speakers on all topics.
• If you work in a research organisation, look carefully at who you cite in your reports. Do you fall back on theories that were probably devised by white men? Do you normally cite white researchers? Work harder to read black voices on your topic and cite them.
• Think about how much of international development as a concept rests on racism and racist assumptions. We really should be striving to do ourselves out of a job, but are we really doing that?
• Then go external. Explore what racism looks like within humanitarian aid delivery. Black aid workers are more likely to be put in harm’s way, experience worse housing conditions, fewer promotions, and have their complaints ignored and dismissed.
• Advocate for the localisation of aid spending and response, empowering NGOs who have the knowledge and networks to do a far better job than we can.
• For those that can afford it, consider donating to those causes that speak most to you. Because it’s me, and migration is my thing, I’m going to plug for North East London Migrant Action (NELMA). They have a fund supporting those who have lost their jobs due to COVID, but can’t access social safety nets due to the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ policy (while you’re at it, learn about that, and campaign to scrap it!)
• Follow people and organisations advocating for change — Black Lives Matter UK, Charity So White, the Runnymede Trust, the Healing Solidarity Collective, and many more.
• Join LIDN! I’m proud to be part of a diverse collective supporting and holding ‘hard conversations’ about race, gender, class, and many more. It’s a safe space, but one that will challenge you, and actively workshop ways to make the sector more inclusive and more impactful. So come say hi.

Please do flag any other useful resources you come across, and we’ll see you at the next event!