Inclusivity Committee and Survey

Posted on June 29, 2018 in UK

At London Book Fair our UK Chair, Ain Bensenouci, announced that the Society of Young Publishers would be launching an Inclusivity Committee, whose aim would be to oversee and ensure diversity and inclusivity across everything we do. In the weeks since this announcement, we have been putting together the committee and working on our first project. The committee is made up of one representative from each of our local branches – London, Oxford, the North, Scotland, Ireland – and then co-ordinated by a member from the UK committee.

Our first project, or really our first aim, is to ensure that we know exactly what we may be doing wrong, or just not quite right, in order to be able to grow and ensure a better, more fair experience for all of our members. It’s often hard to know what you’re doing incorrectly when you’re looking from a position of privilege, whatever the matter may be, and we want to be 100% sure that we don’t overlook any detail.

With this in mind, we have created an anonymous survey; the hope of this survey is to enable all of you to have your voices heard. We hope to give you the chance to let us know what we’re doing right, what you think needs changing, and how what we do affects you. This could be anything from making sure more of our venues are wheelchair accessible, to making sure our panels include speakers that you feel represent you and your background.

Below is a link to the survey. It will be live until Friday 27 July 2018, at which point it will be taken offline and its results analysed. By September we will publicly share some of our key findings – this will be entirely anonymous – which will hopefully be used to help each of you have a better experience, not just within the SYP, but publishing as a whole.

The survey should take less than 10 minutes to complete and we will truly appreciate any and all feedback, be it positive or constructive criticism. Thank you very much in advance for taking the time to help us make the SYP experience better for current and future budding publishers.

Click this link to be taken to the survey.

Thank you,

Georgia Goodall (@g_may_g),
Membership Secretary and Inclusivity Officer