Yesterday my workplace paid for me to be part of a Stonewall bi role model day. I heard about it since my workplace are doing to the equality index thing. I was pleasantly surprised to get it funded.
Coming into it I knew a collegue who had been to their LGBT role model day and found it inspiring. I’d also read Hannah’s blog and apart from the feel of having a different group of bisexuals so a different group dynamic I concur with pretty much everything she says.
I wanted to go because while I have both appreciation and criticism for Stonewall they do things in a lobbying fashion and style really quite different from me and pretty much any organisation I’m part of. I wanted to see how they approach bi activism, consider building that into my own or at least how to interface with their style and also get some more bi people in front of them so they might think of the B more.
I’d travelled down to London the night before so had a shorter trip across town and didn’t need to get up too early. We were given some links to role models publications Stonewall had produced before as pre-reading. I liked their general publication style, connected much more with the ones with pictures of people and really liked the disabled woman talking about being ordinary rather than trying to be a superhero inspiration. I also found much of them a bit London corporate and people with “City” looking jobs and I’m very much not a London person and not a corporate finance law sort of person in my work.
We met in some big office conference room in the financial bit of London. Not sure who the company who owns the office are or what they do – I’m guessing some law thing. There were two Stonewall facilitators, one observer from Scotland who also covered the north of England, and twenty-off of us. I spotted a gender and gender expression mix though we never declared our genders apart from one woman introducing herself as trans. Much of the language was “men and women” I was immediately struck by everyone being white and when I later mentioned this one person declared they were a person of colour. Thinking of some of my friends I noticed the very stripy carpet and background aircon noise. At the end I left feedback that they should run a bi BAME event.
We introduced ourselves very briefly. We had some other Higher Education people, a number from bits of the civil service and a few corporate types (two from the same company who didn’t know before that anyone in ther large organisation was bi apart from themselves so were pleased to meet) I’d say most were younger than me. As we discovered during the day, few had ever been in a room with more than two other bi people. I had a moment of sadness having found such a home in bi community and meeting people doing bi stuff who had never had such experiences. Difficult to tell if they had been looking for them. Finding other bi people for companionship and solidarity wasn’t a thing we much talked about though we were doing it as we went along. Unusually for me I didnt know anyone in the room.
We wrote what we wanted, what we offered. We did some scene setting and got into what being bi at work was like and crucially what we thought about the ideas of role models. We quietly mapped out a couple of our role models and why and talked about them in a small group. This was quite emotional and revealing for me (and not something I want to blog about right now)
Most of the day went like this – facilitators providing structure and giving their own answers to open questions as examples before we chose our own answers and spoke about them with others (changing groups most times between sections) This worked really well for me and I was pleased we weren’t being told what to do – they said they were “empowering” rather than “training” and as much as words are overused this seemed to me to be true.
I’ll definitely be taking a slightly different tack at work and do feel enthused to do so. Again, perhaps another blog post. I liked the work focus because most bi activisty things don’t focus that way.
We noted bi visibility day was coming up and people wondered where they can get a bi pin or something (again – having no idea of current makers such as Biscuit) I’m told Stonewall have a database of groups / events etc. and I’d like to see how much bi stuff they are aware of. I hung around for a quick drink afterwards, as did most attendees then headed off for a play-date.
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