London Cycling Campaign has published its new Diversity and Inclusion statement.
The lack of a safe cycling network is the biggest barrier to mass cycling in London. We want a city where everyone in London who wants to cycle can. But we know some communities face particular barriers to cycling. We will work harder to understand these and involve people from those communities in our campaigning work. We need to talk to, and listen to, people’s experiences of cycling in London.
We know that many people feel that cycling on the road is unsafe– and calling for safe high quality cycling infrastructure remains one of our main campaigning themes. However there are other barriers people face – and these range from physical barriers that stop disabled people cycling, cultural barriers such as women not being taught to cycle when they are girls and access to a bicycles, which includes having a safe space to store cycles. All these need to be reflected in our campaign work – and should be part of our local campaigning – especially in boroughs where we are seeing lots of cycling infrastructure being installed.
To fully understand these barriers LCC as an organisation is going to more actively engage with Londoners from all the different backgrounds and communities across the city. We will do this at all levels, from the trustees, to the staff team, to our local groups and on the behaviour change projects that our volunteers run. We will also work harder to be a truly inclusive organisation that welcomes everyone and enables everyone to input.
One of the success we have had during the pandemic is getting more women with young children being able to participate in our local groups meetings – we need to make sure we embrace these new ways of working to be inclusive.
Another success has been our Cycle Buddies programme which has help over 100s of Londoners cycle more – especially women and people from ethnic minorities. We want to build on this success and help more people.
We have also started to look at LCC’s relationships with other cycling groups and we want to embrace more partnership working with other organisations. More on this below.
Firstly LCC is working hard to make sure that we do not discriminate against anyone who has a protected characteristic. And we are making sure we have the correct process in place and that our staff and trustees have the knowledge to help make LCC more inclusive. We know the staff and trustee team could be more diverse and we are working on ways to address this. We want to attract more women, people from ethnic minorities, Disabled people and young people to be part of LCC. We have had some success with our new volunteer Climate Safe Streets Champions by advertising vacancies through our community partners, alongside our traditional recruitment methods. There is more we can do to build on this and we are creating an inclusive recruitment plan.
We have set up a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Working Group to drive forward our external and internal work on D&I. The group is responsible for reviewing the D&I statement and monitoring progress on our new D&I strategy.
We will be talking to members and London’s many cycling communities to further shape and improve our D&I strategy. This will be completed by April 2022 and will form the basis of our strategy and actions after that.
The strategy has actions categorised as follows:-
Whilst we shape our strategy for future years we will start projects that focus in the first instance on women, race, disability and the LGBTQ+ community. We will collect data on these groups alongside age and religion data for use in monitoring and evaluation, as well as for widening the scope of future projects and activities.
We already have a Women in Cycling Working Group to help address gender-related issues in cycling. We aim to setup similar groups or events that look at issues relating to race, disability and the LGBTQ+ community – these will be member led and we will need volunteers to attend and run these groups. These group will bring together lived experience and expertise – and will help with practical changes LCC can make alongside feeding into policy development. If you would like to be part of any of these groups please get in touch.
We are also looking to co-opt two Londoners from ethnic minorities to our board of trustees – in the short term we will look to our local groups for volunteers to fill these roles. In the longer term will look at different models to make sure the board is more representative of London. If you are a LCC members and interested in being co-opted to the board please get in touch.
LCC has always worked with partners and community groups across London. Our local group volunteers work with many groups at neighbourhood level. We want to formalise these arrangements and LCC are looking to form community partnerships with organisations across London who work with groups or people currently under represented in cycling. Working in partnerships will mean we can share ideas, projects, volunteers and run joint activities. We will also offer participants of our partners 50% off LCC membership.
We aim to make sure our local a groups are as representative of their local areas as they can be. We recognise not everyone has time to volunteer or be part of meetings but we want to make sure our local groups are talking to all their local communities. And getting them involved when they can.
We are working with our borough groups to make local diversity and engagement plans. We will have at least 8 group plans underway by April 2022. We are also supporting our local group.
If you have any comments on our Diversity & Inclusion work or what to get involved then please contact Stewart Dring, LCC’s lead on Diversity & Inclusion at stewart.dring@lcc.org.uk
Published by Stewart Dring: November 26th, 2021