IDEA Committee Update
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue27 1–30 April 2022
The IDEA committee is very pleased to welcome our new members: Stefania Barsanti, Sven Buder, Ioana Ciuca, Bella Gerard, Lyla Jung, Trevor Mendel, Jon Nielsen and Arthur Puls. They will help with the current IDEA initiatives and provide their passion and dedication to achieve new results for our RSAA community!
The ANU is reviewing the IDEA Framework to streamline its operations and align them with the ANU 2025 Vision. A new Wellbeing and Equity (WE) framework is being proposed and available here for consultation. The ANU has recently released findings from the National Student Safety Survey ran across the Australian university sector in late 2021. The results show a rate of sexual assault and sexual harassment that is unacceptable, and the ANU is making significant investments to eradicate this problem. Our committee has engaged with the ANU Respectful Relationship Unit to deliver a dedicated session on how to understand and respond to sexual violence. This face-to-face meeting will be held at RSAA on April 7th, 2-4pm in DLT and will be restricted to students only. Future sessions open to all staff will be announced in due course.
We would also like to remind you to sign up for Mental Health First Aid Training: we have some 50 spots available for the e-learning module, with in-person sessions planned later in the year. If you wish to sign up for the e-learning module, please email idea.rsaa@anu.edu.au by April 22nd.
Recently, the RSAA IDEA committee has been involved in a Parental Leave Principles Working Group organised by the School of Engineering, to provide recommendations for appropriate support mechanisms and best practices to empower academic parents to achieve a successful and fulfilling career while also nurturing a healthy family. As part of this working group, a number of students, academics and professional staff members who have recently been on parental leave have been invited to respond to a short questionnaire. We thank those at RSAA who offered their time and shared their experiences. At this stage, recommendations have been targeted for the School of Engineering, but the College of Science, the ANU IDEA Committee, and the ANU Family Friendly Committee have all expressed interest in this work. We will soon share our findings with you, and hope to use this work as a basis to further improve the great parental leave policy we already have at the ANU!
Last but not least, it was great to see many of you attending the Unconscious Bias Training on March 16. We hope you enjoyed the session, and that it helped you to increase awareness towards the many different biases we can be affected by. If you have feedback or comments, please pass them to us and we will convey them to GenderMatters. For those who could not attend, do not despair: there will be more sessions scheduled in the next few months!
Luca Casagrande
