Throughout June we have been celebrating Pride Month – the annual celebration of people from the LGBTQ+ community, promoting education in LGBTQ+ history and raising awareness of issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community.
Alongside changing our logo across our social media pages, we also celebrated with a Pride tea party in our Exeter office.
The tea party was hosted by our SAGE (Sexuality and Gender Equality) colleague network group and was open to all colleagues to attend.
Charlotte Bond, our SAGE group lead, said: “This month we had a colleague Pride tea party which was really great and lots of colleagues across the business joined in with supporting this.”
The tea party, held at the beginning of the month, gave colleagues the opportunity to meet our SAGE members and to learn more about what the group does. It also allowed colleagues to find out more about our other Pride events, such as our Ask us Anything campaign and our webinar on how LGBTQ+ families can get support.
Our Ask us Anything campaign, which ran throughout June, offered colleagues the opportunity to anonymously ask questions to our SAGE group, to learn more about LGBTQ+ experiences from members of the community, whilst platforming the voices of our LGBTQ+ colleagues.
Jennifer Pulsford, our Inclusion, Wellbeing and Reward Manager, said: “At LiveWest it is important to us that we don’t just celebrate our LGBTQ+ colleagues and acknowledge the discrimination that they have and still are facing in everyday life once a year during Pride month.
“For us, every June, we take the opportunity to showcase our SAGE colleague network group, who represent the views of our LGBQT+ colleagues, and the work that they do to help us be more inclusive.”
We also educated and provided support for colleagues through webinars. On 22 June we were joined by Inclusive Employers, hosting a live webinar about starting a family in the LGBTQ+ community.
People in the LGBTQ+ community often face barriers when it comes to starting and raising a family. Not only societally, but medically, legally and within the workplace.
In our webinar, we looked back at what challenges LGBTQ+ families have overcome historically, the challenges LGBTQ+ families still face, and what we can do in the workplace to be understanding and accommodating.
We also shared information on how to support younger people in the LGBTQ+ community, promoted our paid gender-transitioning leave, and provided resources to support colleagues to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community or access support if they need it.
We are proud to celebrate diversity and hope that by recognising important campaigns such as Pride Month we can continue to grow and make positive change.
To find out more about equality, diversity and inclusion at LiveWest, visit our EDI webpage.