Black History Month 2024: How data can help us to make sure your voices are heard.

The theme of this year’s Black History Month is ‘Reclaiming Narratives.’ As an organisation that was set up to give the people of Wales a stronger voice in their health and social care services, we understand how important it is for people to be able to tell their stories and share their experiences, in their own words. 

Back in August of this year, many of our staff and volunteers were impacted by the violence and anti-immigration rhetoric that was spread by the riots across England, and in some parts of Wales. 

At the time we knew that we must reach out to our people, to support them, reaffirm our shared values and to enable them to provide further support to our service users who also may have been impacted by those events. 

Alongside many other organisations across the public, private and third sectors, Llais supported the Wales statement of solidarity and togetherness released by the Welsh Centre for International Affairs. 

Recently, we told you about some of the work that we had been doing over the last 6 months to look at how we could make an impact, as individuals, to promote inclusion as much as we could for our people and the people who use our services. This included looking at our own narratives, language and words. 

Part of this work includes continuing to develop as an anti-racist organisation. 

In our Strategic Equality Plan we said that we need to look at how we capture and use the data we hold about our people and our services users, to find gaps in what we know and who we are speaking to. This would help us to develop our services and hopefully encourage new ways of working that improve equity of opportunity for all.

This supports the actions that Welsh Government set out for us in their Anti-racist (Wales) Action Plan.

We thought it would be a good time for us to share a bit more with you about what we are doing to achieve that. 

We have spoken to a range of experts about the best way to capture equality monitoring data. There are lots of ways to do it and there is no one ‘right’ way. We also know that to dismantle barriers and address systemic racism we must work collaboratively. 

Our approach needs to continue to be one that includes different voices and experiences. We are setting up a dedicated group to do this, one that involves key internal stakeholders across the organisation as well as partners from other public sector organisations who want to take a joined-up approach, sharing learning, knowledge and good practice. 

But why does this matter? 

Internally, it helps us to understand who we are as an organisation, whether we are reflecting the diverse communities of Wales, helps us when we make decisions that may positively or negatively impact our people and means we can make sure that our policies and procedures support our people in the right ways, including ensuring they are anti-racist. 

For the people of Wales, this matters because it helps us to better understand who we are (and are not) reaching. This data helps us, to help make sure that decision-makers can plan and deliver better health and social care services, that cater to a range of different needs. 

Some of our work focuses on specific communities within our regions, because we recognise that there are voices that are undiscovered to us. We know this from the data that we collect. 

As an independent body we want to make sure that the representations that we make are representative of everyone in Wales. We know that there are some voices that are not always heard, and we want to change that. 

Would you like to make sure that you and your community’s voices are heard? 

Read more about how you can become part of the change here.