An update from Lab Programme and Communications Officer, Gurjinder Khambay, on the first of this year’s justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (‘JEDI’) working group meetings.
In January we shared a blog about our JEDI strategy and our plans for the upcoming year. As we said at the time, we felt that we needed to move ‘from being an organisation simply engaging with this work to one where JEDI is embedded in everything we do, and where all colleagues are accountable for this’. Of course, that means that it needs to be central to how we function as an organisation, and also to the programmes that we deliver.
Our programme team identified three areas for JEDI focus in 2025 which sit across the three stages of developing new policy areas and campaigns, building diverse and inclusive coalitions around these, and communicating about them to external audiences. Earlier this month, our JEDI working group met to explore the first of these.
The background
The first session explored how we centre justice and equity in the development of our policy positions and campaign strategies, including drawing on a greater diversity of sources of expertise to inform our thinking and decisions.
It is still much too common in policy spaces for the people who are most affected by an issue to be shut out from conversations about how to address it, let alone being supported to shape or lead the work. We want to be better at listening to, making decisions with, and ceding space to, the people and communities most impacted by the issues we’re working on. We want justice and equity to be at the heart of all of our processes and to be built into our structure – and that often means questioning the way we do things.
Our Approach
We started off with each of us sharing what we hoped to get out of the sessions. Many of us referenced the brilliant anti-oppression training which we did earlier this year with Social Justice Collective’s Pari Dhillon. We aimed to listen without judgement, and to remind each other when ‘the system showed up’ – that is, moments when systemic inequalities, biases, or oppressive structures reveal themselves sometimes unintentionally during conversations, decisions, or organisational processes. It was particularly important for us to refresh what frameworks we have laid out in our JEDI work to date, including the nuance in our understanding of equity and justice – which we see as overlapping, but with the latter giving a greater focus on the systemic issues underpinning unequal outcomes and opportunities.
We all came with a sense of curiosity and a commitment to do this work more, better and without judgement. The session was filled with questions and challenges from members of the team who each have different approaches in their work. Some questions that surfaced were: Who are we listening to for advice? What kinds of expertise do we value and lean on? Are the academics and others we listen to from diverse backgrounds? What is our process for coming up with our policies and recommendations? We felt it was important to approach this issue with questions and not statements, and spaces for people to get things wrong.
By the end of our session we’d come up with a number of observations and things to consider. We’re building the learning into a ‘guide to embedding justice and equity into our work’, which we aim to share by the end of the year.
Takeaways
These are complex questions with no straightforward answers: what looks right for the Lab won’t look right for another organisation, what looks right for one programme might not be right for another, and what looks right now might not be right in the future. The point of this was not to give us the ‘answer’, it was for us to figure out what we should be asking and considering when we are working on policy. Already amongst our team I’ve seen some of the questions raised in this session come up in our day-to-day work. These discussions will be continued in our next working group.
If you’re working on something similar – or would be interested in seeing the guide once it’s completed – email us here.