Our Commitment to Tackling Racism

Racism has no place in Scotland. The global Black Lives Matter movement has given us cause to reflect and have some honest conversations on how Social Bite can best help to address systemic racism in Scotland. We understand that we have much work to do in this area. We are not the finished article – we will continue to learn, discuss and evolve. This is a work in progress.  Below you can read about our specific commitments on how we can do more to tackle racism in our society:

Our work 

• Anyone in a situation of homelessness or food poverty is always able to come into our cafes to get food and a hot drink for free. This includes refugees and asylum seekers who are always welcome.
• Refugees, asylum seekers, and people from outside the EU often have “no recourse to public funds” and have restrictions on gaining employment. This will often prevent these individuals from being able to access our employment programs, or accommodation projects as they cannot access housing benefits. We will use our voice to lobby the Government, both UK and Scottish, for solutions to these issues.
• We will reach out to Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) organisations to explore ways we can collaborate to support the people who need our help from all backgrounds
• Last year we launched The World’s Big Sleepout campaign to raise funds for homelessness and child refugee charities all over the world. We will continue to expand our horizons in tackling homelessness in all its forms.
• We will use our platform to stand alongside and amplify positive social movements, including The Black Lives Matter movement

Recruitment

• We will list our values on all job advertisements, with racial equality as an important one. It is important that our people embody Social Bite’s values and our belief in inclusivity.
• As a minimum precaution to our own unconscious biases, we would like to introduce blind recruitment whereby there are no names or ages of candidates given prior to the interview process, to remove the potential for unconscious bias.
• On the basis candidates apply, we will guarantee an interview for ethnic minorities, as a way to encourage ethnic minorities to apply so that we can create a more diverse team reflective of Scotland’s makeup.
• We will work alongside BAME organisations who can help us to find great people to be part of Social Bite and enhance our organisation.

Education 

• We will build into our new employee inductions a diversity and equality training session and ensure the whole team re-takes this on an annual basis
• We will build a platform to help employees do their own learning with resources such as videos, social media pages to follow for information, articles, podcasts etc. This platform can then be shared with our own team but also publicly for our followers.
• We would like to bring in a facilitator with the expertise we do not have, to run a session on how we as individuals, and then as an organisation can unpick our unconscious bias in a real way. Robin Diangelo shows how this can be done in the US (which you can see in this video). This should be offered to every Social Bite location to join at a time they can viably attend.
• We will invite Black and Ethnic Minority groups, including refugees and asylum seekers, to come and tell us about their experiences of racism or homelessness so that we can learn how to best address these issues.
• We have come to understand that it is not enough to simply be “not racist”. We must be proactive in calling out and tackling racism in all its forms.

We have much work to do and we hope you will join us on this journey of creating an inclusive Scotland that we can all be proud of.