VSNW are pleased to present the opening event in our Festival of North West Thinking 2020 (FoNWT), Covid-19 Recovery: VCSE Leadership Voices Assembly. The event will deal with COVID-19 Recovery with a focus on Inequalities.
The event will take place online from 10am to 12pm on Friday 23rd October.
This event is intended for our colleagues in leadership roles at VCSE sector organisations across the North West. It will give us an opportunity come together and start to coordinate a strategy for using our sector’s Covid-19 recovery as an opportunity to combat inequality.
The central element of this event will be an extended workshop session in which we’ll ask how the sector can best use Covid-19 recovery as an opportunity to address inequality. The particulars of this workshop session will be strongly informed by the results of VSNW’s FoNWT survey, and the issues and priorities we identify throughout the session help shape discussions throughout the remainder of the Festival. Please consider responding to VSNW’s FoNWT survey if you’d like to help shape the scope of our discussions.
As well as participating in this extended workshop session, attendees will have the opportunity to hear presentations on both health inequalities and their wider determinants, and on inequalities which exist as a product of structural racism. Confirmed guest speakers are:
Natalie Creary, Director of Black Thrive, a partnership between statutory organisations, the voluntary sector and local communities who work collaboratively to reduce mental health inequality experienced by African and African-Caribbean communities. Together they work to improve access to, and the quality of mental health services and push conventional boundaries to dismantle the structural barriers that create and sustain inequalities in mental health. Their work emphasises the importance of prevention and seeks to address disparities across the social determinants of health. Prior to joining Black Thrive, Natalie worked on a range of initiatives in the public and voluntary sector and has also spent some time in academia; lecturing in Public Health and Health & Social Care. Her current research explores the impact of the social determinants on the health experiences of Black communities. Her work seeks to share the health narratives of communities; paying attention to how race, age, class, gender and sexuality intersect to shape their lived experience of health and wellbeing.
Natalie will be presenting on the role that structural racism has on impacting the sector’s evidence base around health inequalities and how this in turn reinforces structural racism in our responses.
Website: www.blackthrive.org.uk
Farzana Kahn, a writer, director, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator. Farzana is Executive Director and Co-founder of Healing Justice London (HJL). Her practice works on building community health, repair and self- transformation rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice working with communities of colour and other marginalised and underrepresented groups. HJL cultivates public health provisions for collective liberation and dignifying lives made vulnerable. Farzana has over 10 years of background in Youth and Community work particularly focused on arts-based education projects both in the UK and internationally. Farzana is the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake, bringing together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. She currently is a lead strategist on Climate and Resource justice with Thirty Percy Foundation. She is the co-founder of Resourcing Racial Justice.
Farzana will be presenting on the potential in trauma-informed practice to improve the way the VCSE sector supports community health and combats inequality.
Website: www.healingjusticeldn.org
Additional speakers will be announced shortly.
This event will be hosted on Zoom and a link will be sent out the day before. If you’re unsure how to access meetings via Zoom, please see this quick start guide.
Please note that due to limited numbers, we may limit attendance to one person per organisation. Please coordinate within your organisation if possible, otherwise we may contact you to ask you to nominate the preferred attendee.
The full Festival of North West Thinking 2020 programme
Friday 23rd October – Covid-19 Recovery: VCSE Leadership Voices Assembly with a focus on Inequalities (10am-12pm)
Wednesday 28th October – Covid-19 Recovery: The VCSE Infrastructure Perspective (2pm-3:30pm)
Thursday 12th November – VSNW’s AGM and more TBC (2pm-3pm)
Date TBC – Building Back Better: In Conversation with the North West’s Metro Mayors (time TBC)