Camino trail and Digital Campus recruiting

I was recently asked to support with the process of shortlisting applications and interviewing potential applicants for the Refugee Action Explore Adapt Renew (EAR) Digital Campus Programme. The EAR Digital Campus is a new programme, designed by CAST and bringing together existing elements of our work, including the Digital Skills Framework, Design Hops, Masterclasses and our growing network for digital leads in the charity sector. Our work with Refugee Action is an opportunity to test this programme, including to understand how to adapt the Digital Skills Framework so that it is useful, relevant, inclusive and accessible to refugee and asylum support sector organisations, their staff and volunteers.

The programme is designed and led by my colleague Tori, Head of Digital Practice, and for the shortlisting week she was on holidays walking the beautiful Camino de Santiago trail, starting out in St Jean Pied de Port in France, crossing the Pyrenees and all the way to Burgos in Spain (this is just a small chunk of the Camino, though!).

Shortlisting — how we got started

I came in at the stage where we were reviewing the expressions of interest submitted by the applicants in response to this advert. I was impressed that we hadn’t asked for reams of information and were instead basing our decision on answers to a few carefully crafted questions. This meant that it didn’t take up a lot of CAST and Refugee Action time to review them, wasn’t a chore to read and left us with a good flavour of what to expect and the gaps we needed filling. We hope that the process was similarly not too onerous for the applicants.

Interviews — some observations and things I learned

Thanks Calendly — setting up the interviews was also particularly easy as we set aside 3 mornings and let Calendly do all the scheduling for us, which it did beautifully.

Collaborative process — the interview process was chaired by Refugee Action in an open, sharing and collaborative way. It didn’t feel like a test but a sharing of ideas and seeing where the fit was to work together.

Lived experience at the heart of it — part of the criteria for taking part in the programme was that organisations must have people with lived experience of the refugee and asylum system participating. This is part of wider work within Refugee Action and would help CAST to learn how to make the framework more inclusive, accessible and relevant to refugee and asylum support organisations.

This interview process brought to life for me how important it was to have these diverse voices participating. It was clear from the interviews that those with lived experience brought quite a degree of passion, urgency, pragmatism, and willingness to collaborate to help solve the issues they were involved with.

Appetite for learning and digital is huge — people were excited about the programme, by and large ‘got’ what we are doing with it and were excited to participate. It was also clear from the process that the appetite for digital, for learning, for basic skills, for embedding strategies, for using data more effectively and for finding out about more tools that could help with collaboration was very strong.

Extra support — From the interviews, we realised that it would be beneficial to provide support for the participants to explore other areas of digital that didn’t necessarily fall within the scope of Digital Campus — and so we’ve built in an initial needs assessment and will be providing regular coaching sessions throughout the duration of the project.

Some final thoughts

We hope that this funded programme will be of great value to the participants — from embedding skills through their organisation, understanding the design process so they can better address the challenges of their volunteers and service users, attending masterclasses so they can build on their experience, and — for those who it fits — become a longer term part of the CAST Digital Leaders Network. We also hope to see huge benefits from digital experts, sector specialists and people with lived experience working together on the programme.

It was a great experience to be involved with this and as I hand back to my colleague Tori to do her magic with the programme alongside Refugee Action, I can’t help thinking there are some parallels with the Camino walk. I have read that an adventurous spirit is the guiding force for many of the walkers along the Camino. Perhaps getting started and growing in digital is similar. It’s an exciting journey, with like-minded individuals, that takes resilience, curiosity and an adventurous spirit to make the most of it!

Here’s a list of the eight participating organisations that will be embarking on their own Camino with Digital Campus:

• Karmabank
• Refugee Support Group
• Access Migrant Support
• Destitute Asylum Seekers Huddersfield (D.A.S.H)
• Action Foundation
• Revive CIO
• North East Solidarity and Teaching (N.E.S.T)
• Refugee Action

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay