IDEA Committee Update

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue32 1–30 September 2022

The RSAA Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access committee has been remarkably busy in the last months, and more is yet to come!

The IDEA committee has run two surveys in the School: a culture survey and a demographics survey. More than 65% of the School staff and students have completed our culture survey. The data is being analysed by Leaderskill and will be presented to the School in the near future. The demographics staff survey was part of the Hiring Strategy initiative by the College of Science IDEA committee; each School in the College is drafting a hiring strategy to increase the representation of target groups that will be identified by this demographics survey. RSAA is one of the pioneers of this initiative; we can proudly say we do not have just a draft but have implemented the hiring policies! In October we are expecting to host a mini-retreat to share hiring hints to improve diversity in the workplace. We will send further information on this activity soon as well as ways to contribute. Stay tuned!

Our training calendar has also been filled with interesting events lately: this coming Friday (September 9th) we will be having our next Unconscious Bias training (focus: Individual Bias) at MSO; we are also finalising the details of the Unconscious Bias session to be held at Siding Spring in November. In October-November, we will be organising the in-person session of the Mental Health First Aid training at Stromlo (dates to be confirmed). As a reminder, the Mental Health First Aid training consists of two parts: the e-learning module followed by an in-person session; you are still on time to complete your online module and join the face-to-face activities to receive your MHFA certificate! Please contact the RSAA IDEA committee for further instructions.

On August 26th we celebrated Wear It Purple Day with some amazing baked purple goodies and chocolates! I hope you all had the chance to show your best purple outfits during the Morning Tea and support our LGBTIQA+ community!

Students at RSAA, we are looking for one or two student representative(s) for our committee; if you are interested in knowing a bit more about what to expect when joining the committee, please contact us! It is a wonderful way to help build the RSAA we all want to be part of!

Noelia Martinez-Rey