Who:The West Midlands Environmental Leadership Programme, which is run by Shropshire Wildlife Trust and the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. It is a free 9-month long programme for 16-25 year olds based in the West Midlands, who want to get connected with people and nature in their local community, and help tackle environmental issues in their area (and beyond).
The brief: I was invited to develop and deliver a 90-minute learning session online on “power, privilege and identity”. A different session in the programme would cover “equality and justice in the climate movement”, so I focused on self-reflection around the themes of equity, diversity, inclusion, identity, power and privilege, and linking these understandings of self with taking a collaborative, co-creative or co-productive approach with people in their communities.
What I did: I wrote session content and slides to present the key concepts and support reflection activities. Before the session I invited the participants to complete a privilege wheel as a self-reflection exercise, and during the session we discussed:
- how a person’s identity shapes their experience,
- what is social justice, and environmental justice,
- working with communities (doing to / for / with / without).
What they said:
“Thank you so much for last night! It was a great session and (…) fed perfectly into the existing programme content we have and, crucially, gave the participants the tools they need to really consider their own privilege and power when working with different communities.
From the feedback we’ve already received, participants told us that they really valued hearing about how power structures can be dismantled and that they loved the smaller breakout rooms in order to be able to have more intimate discussions with their peers.”
Photo from ELP2 website