Celebrating Pride month
2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Pride event held in the UK, which took place back in 1972. We’re committed to making sure Good Energy is a welcoming place to work for everyone, and our team of Inclusion Champions have worked hard at putting together some celebrations for LGBT+ Pride month.
Pride picnic
This month’s wind and showers were good news for our renewable generators – but turned our planned Pride picnic in the park into a picnic in Good Energy HQ. From a rainbow baking competition to a delicious lunch, it was a great opportunity to get together while showing support for LGBT+ colleagues and the community.
Supporting GiveOut – the world’s first LGBT+ climate fund
For Pride Month, we’re encouraging people to donate to the GiveOut LGBTQI Climate Fund. This trailblazing fund supports vital research, activism and aid projects that advocate for the rights and safety of LGBT+ people in the climate emergency. For example, they support a project in Tonga that is helping LGBT+ communities safely access emergency aid during cyclone season.
Why climate breakdown is an LGBTQ+ issue
In many countries, people in the LGBT+ community are more likely than the general population to have less secure housing and employment (including in the UK). These conditions, and the risk of discrimination when trying to access support services, makes people more vulnerable during emergencies such as wars, natural disasters, and extreme weather. In parts of the world with limited LGBT+ rights, which are already experiencing increasingly severe weather such as heat waves and storms, the risk to personal safety is even greater.
Read more about GiveOut’s work and donate to the LGBTQI climate fund.
How we’re working to make Good Energy more inclusive
Pride isn’t just a chance to celebrate progress on LGBT+ rights, but a reminder that there’s still work to be done to make the world fairer for everyone. Current LGBT+ issues in the UK include demands for the UK’s recent ban on conversion therapy to also protect trans people.
We understand that diversity and inclusion isn’t just for June. One of our core values is inclusion, and we’re committed to making sure Good Energy is a diverse and welcoming place to work. Some of our projects include:
- Setting up our Inclusion Champions – this working group is made up of volunteers from around Good Energy who are passionate about diversity and inclusion. As well as organising making events like Pride, Black History Month and International Women’s Day, they’re helping drive forward our diversity and inclusion plan, and actions from it such as communicating our projects with teams around the business.
- Improving our diversity data – to know how we can improve, we need to understand where we’re starting from. We encouraged our people to share information related to gender identity, sexuality, ethnicity, religion or belief, disability, neurodiversity, if they feel comfortable to. This information is kept secure and anonymised, so that we can understand more about who makes up Good Energy and develop our policies to support everyone.
- Making changes to our workplace – such as providing a gender-neutral bathroom.
- Promoting learning and development – all our people are supported to develop their careers within Good Energy, with a wide range of learning resources, training and development support – as well as an annual development allowance of £500 per person. We have also provided access to courses run by local colleges, including LGBT+ Inclusion in the Workplace. And we’ll soon be launching an inclusive working course to support us to learn more about unconscious bias and build the awareness, skills and confidence to challenge it.
This is just a small sample of how we’re making Good Energy more inclusive. And we know there are always ways we can improve. To find out more about how we work, read our latest Purpose Report – or even check out our careers page.
