"How to be an Ally" workshop

Contents

You will find the following resources on this page:

• Licensing

• Advice

• Promotional Material

• Template Slides

• Slide-by-Slide Annotations

• Images from the day

• Impact

Licensing

The material found on this page is distributed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). 

This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. CC BY-SA includes the following elements:

BY: credit must be given to the creator.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

Advice

We believe that the session we created could easily be adapted to a variety of setting but should contain a few core elements:

• It’s a good idea to outline the plan for your day early on (in case people need to dip in and out etc.), we found our timings worked pretty well.

• The artist is quite crucial as it means the session produces a physical record of the work done. This can then be used in later sessions and further work in allyship.

• Some data to motivate why you are running the session is useful. We chose to compare the percentage of women at each career stage in our university to English/Scottish universities as a whole. If your institution has completed an Athena swan report you should be able to find that data there (if it hasn’t then you definitely need to be running a session like this). We also included some data from studies however this was pretty old. It depends how much you want to emphasise the idea of the ‘leaky pipeline’ or if you just want people to follow your session because they should be nice people.

• Our first activity focused on getting attendees to think about what allyship was. We found the business insider quote very useful as it stimulated a lot of conversation (because it was bad). 

• The panel discussion was a good way to get ideas and information from more experienced staff. We tried to get a range of staff from different schools within the college of Science and Engineering, at different career stages and with different experience with EDI. Having a bunch of prepared questions is useful here as you can always use them if your audience don’t have many questions or to steer discussion in the right direction if they have too many.

• Try and get funding to include lunch in attendance. People like a free lunch and that time also gives people an opportunity to mingle.

• Our last activity asked the attendees to, in groups, come up with ideas to improve allyship within the college. The goal of this was to try and get something constructive out of the session. After giving groups some time to come up with their own ideas they then went to other tables and put stickers next to their favourite ideas. We then discussed the most popular ideas collectively. Not only was this an efficient way to share all the ideas but it was a bit of fun, people like stickers. 

Impact

[Quotes from the day]

[Quantitative feedback]