Strengthening our community through understanding and belonging

We believe that understanding the lived experiences of all members of our college community is really important to enable us to understand the world our students are navigating.

This is one of the reasons that Coleg Sir Gâr and Coleg Ceredigion is providing inclusive training for all its staff with a specialist focus on anti-racism, across all of its seven campuses.

It’s about creating a sense of belonging for everyone and creating cultural confidence within the workplace that challenges negative behaviour.

Everyone deserves to feel safe and valued at college, work and within our community and we all have a role to play in ensuring that happens.” Georgia Theodoulou, Lecturer and anti-racism lead practitioner. 

This Welsh Government-funded training is provided by Apex Education, an organisation founded by Rachel Clarke (pictured) who delivered the sessions herself.

Sessions include anti-racism within the curriculum, having the confidence to facilitate difficult conversations, micro-aggression and how we can check in with our students who might have experienced some of these behaviours.

We are often told that we are a very welcoming and nurturing college and we see that as a strength and we feel that this training will help us protect and value this strength and help us embed anti-racism more confidently into leadership, culture and practice.

The training is an investment in our culture that ensures our ‘family’ values stay relevant and robust as our community becomes more diverse. 

Georgia Theodoulou, Coleg Sir Gâr lecturer and anti-racism lead practitioner said: “The sessions with Rachel Clarke have been really valuable for staff at the college. 

“At a time where we are seeing an increase in harmful discourse around immigration, racism and who “belongs” where, it was of real benefit for staff to have an open, non-judgemental space to ask questions, learn and discuss how best to deal with that. 

“Rachel is such an excellent practitioner, her sessions were informative, thoughtful, emotional yet hopeful and the feedback from them has been very positive. 

“The fact that we had two sessions over a few weeks gave us time to process and feedback what we felt we needed most for the next session and this whole-staff training is a key part of the college’s commitment and action plan to becoming an anti-racist organisation. 

“Everyone deserves to feel safe and valued at college, work and within our community and we all have a role to play in ensuring that happens.”