<   Back to blog

East Renfrewshire Equalities Open Days

Feedback from our Open Day events 

We have been working with community groups, organisations, and service providers across East Renfrewshire to encourage and support local people to participate in the new Equalities forum. This community-led group will bring people together from diverse communities across East Renfrewshire, sharing their perspectives and bringing their experiences to link in with local decision-making.

We recently held community open days in Clarkston and Barrhead to engage with local people about the new forum, gathering ideas and suggestions on how it could run and what the aims should be.

To summarise the feedback, people told us: 

  • There is a lot of great work going on, events and opportunities across East Renfrewshire by local services and third sector orgs, but people don’t know about it. Unless it’s your area of work, or you’re already involved, you don’t know what’s going on and it can be difficult to find out.  
  • Information on services and opportunities needs to be easily available in a range of formats to reach a wide audience. An Equalities Forum could help co-ordinate efforts to ensure the information is getting out there.  
  • A new Equalities Forum could bring organisations and services together to promote what’s going on and work with communities across East Ren. It should link in with existing decision-making bodies but be less formal and open so that anyone can get involved, not just professionals or elected members. The new forum must be open and accessible for everyone who wants to participate.  
  • Each area in East Ren faces some challenges that are unique to that area, meaning that one forum won’t be able to address everything. A solution could be the creation of local forums covering smaller areas who meet up to address issues. Reps from each forum would then feed into the Equalities Forum, thereby connecting work going on across the whole of East Renfrewshire.  
  • There was concern that a new forum must not be a ‘tick-box’ exercise and acknowledgment that to set up and run an effective forum takes significant time and resources. It would be unrealistic to expect an already stretched third sector to take this on, and any organisation leading on it would cease to be impartial. If the council wants to create an effective community-led Equalities Forum, it must invest in it for the long-term. This must include a member of staff to organise and facilitate meetings, ensure that actions are taken forward and feed into the relevant decision-making processes, and outcomes are fed back to local communities across East Renfrewshire.  

We still have one more event to go on Saturday 2nd December in Clarkston, if you’d like to join us you can sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/east-renfrewshire-open-days If you would like to share your thoughts but cannot make it along in-person please complete our new survey: https://outsidethebox.typeform.com/ 

From January to March 2024, we will hold focused events and training to get the forum set up and make recommendations to East Renfrewshire Council on the way forward. For more info email ingrid@otbds.org.