Allyship

During the expert session, Taz Latif encourages audience participation through a Q&A session, live demonstrations using the Mentimeter app, and reflective exercises on topics such as allyship, privilege, and identity. Attendees engage in conversations about promoting inclusivity, understanding diverse experiences, and addressing systemic inequality. Taz shares her personal experiences and insights as a DEI consultant, emphasizing the importance of self-reflection, empathy, and active listening. The Mentimeter app is used to gather audience opinions on topics like building trust in communities and becoming effective allies.

• Understanding Your Identity and Privilege: Reflecting on your unique identities and their associated privileges or lack thereof is essential for effective allyship. Use resources like the Wheel of Power and Privilege to gain a deeper understanding of your experiences.
• Building Trust and Empathy: Creating trust within communities and practicing empathy are key components of successful allyship. Listen deeply, notice differences and similarities, and invest time in building relationships.
• Taking Action Against Discrimination: Becoming an active ally requires taking action to challenge systems of oppression and dismantle harmful beliefs. Hold colleagues accountable for their actions and encourage unity among team members.

In this expert session, Taz Latif, a renowned DEI consultant, leads a thought-provoking conversation on the topic of allyship during the second installment of an organization's "Inspired" series. The session, dedicated to fostering diversity and inclusion, welcomes attendees and sets the stage for exploring the significance of being an ally in today's world.

Taz begins by sharing her personal background and experiences that have shaped her focus on allyship as a means to create a more inclusive environment. She invites participants to engage in a discussion about their own interpretations of the term "ally" and encourages open dialogue around themes like trust, cooperation, understanding differences, and shared goals.

The session delves deeper into the concept of privilege as ability, urging attendees to reflect on their unique identities using the Wheel of Power and Privilege resource. Taz emphasizes the importance of empathy and self-awareness in becoming an effective ally and encourages everyone to examine their personal experiences and associated privileges or lack thereof.

The conversation touches upon the challenges of discussing sensitive topics like race and gender, urging listeners to prioritize self-care during these conversations. Taz highlights racial disparities in career progression and the significance of empathy and understanding between diverse communities. She encourages everyone to reach out to their colleagues, friends, and neighbors for support and guidance as allies.

Taz shares her experiences with facing discrimination and feeling excluded, despite having a rich family history, and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and addressing unconscious bias. She encourages participants to take action in preventing discrimination, even as bystanders, and suggests tools like the Harvard Implicit Association Test for gaining insight into this issue.

The session explores case studies from diverse communities around the world, illustrating the importance of understanding and catering to unique needs in order to create truly inclusive environments. Taz discusses the potential negative impacts poor allyship can have on a business, including low morale, disjointed teams, and increased recruitment costs.

The expert session concludes with Taz sharing tips for becoming an effective ally, including deep listening, understanding privilege, building relationships, and taking action. She encourages attendees to read 'Invisible Women' by Caroline Criado Perez to gain a deeper understanding of gender data bias in society.

Throughout the session, Taz emphasizes the significance of empathy, communication, and active listening in fostering inclusive environments and reducing discrimination. She encourages courage and fearlessness in standing up for what is right while acknowledging the importance of unity among team members and holding colleagues accountable for their actions. The opportunity for participants to ask questions and engage in deeper conversations about allyship remains open at the end of the session.

Unconscious Bias

During Taz's session ‘inclusive thinking’ you’ll learn to understand the impact of unconscious bias. You’ll learn about the benefits of stereotyping, how it actually helps you survive in daily life and how you can try to limit its side-effects. Because your brain constantly links new images to existing information. It does so to shape order in the world around you. However, such information categorisation is often rather short-sighted and that causes all sorts of problems and challenges. In this interactive session, Taz discloses how our brains work and what we can do to improve our judgement.

 

Privilege

Having white privilege and recognising it is not racist. But white privilege exists because of historic, enduring racism and biases. White privilege is not the assumption that everything a white person has accomplished is unearned; most white people who have reached a high level of success worked extremely hard to get there. Instead, white privilege should be viewed as a built-in advantage, separate from one’s level of income or effort. In this interactive session Taz shows her audience how white privilege plays an important role in all of our lives. You can test your own role, learn about various biases and most importantly, how you can become an ally.

• Excellent thank you.
• It was an awesome experience attending this new innovative program.
• This was truly inspiring & brilliant to participate in. Thank you.
• Very interesting and motivating.
• An excellent session thoroughly enjoyed it, very inspiring.
• Very positive initiative. Thanks.
• That was a great session. Thank You.
• Great session, great engagement, I really think we are hitting the right spot with these InspireD sessions! Thank you for this initiative!
• Really loved the session! It’s super inspirational and I’m already thinking about how to implement the learning into daily work and our team.
• I would definitely recommend this!! Taz is great.
• Absolutely great speaker and storyteller. Please bring her back!
• Super nice, thank you!!
• The speaker was fantastic and very engaging. The topic brings awareness to everyone.
• This was by far the best Leqture session I've attended. The energy was incredible and the tone was perfect! It was well considered and the perfect balance on every level. Thank you, Taz!
• This was a great introduction with lots of good information about different ways to realize how privilege and affects different people and how we can become better allies! I hope this is repeated and more people from the company join.
• Awesome, eye-opening, well delivered.
• 10/10 Very enlightening.
• Great session led by a great communicator thank you Taz.
• Thank you to our management for holding this session for employees!