Q&A for the ‘Mapping Racism at Amnesty Platform’

The platform provides a space for all staff who have experienced or witnessed racism within their working life at Amnesty’s International Secretariat to anonymously share the emotional, physical and professional impact that it had or continues to have on them. We recognize that sharing an experience or pattern of racism may prompt staff to recount or relive challenging experiences and be upsetting, but hope each experience shared to the platform is a stepping stone towards creating a more equitable and inclusive work environment for all staff, guided by the current experience of racialized colleagues.

The platform also provides staff who witness racism with a space to act in solidarity with racialized colleagues. People may worry about disclosing an incident involving a colleague who has perpetrated racism. The emphasis and objective of the platform is not to punish, create tension or division. The objective is to build our collective knowledge and understanding of how racism continues to manifest at the IS and to design more effective collective solutions and corrective policies. 

Completing the form to make a submission will take approximately 15-30 minutes. depending on the level of detail you wish to provide.

The platform is open to people currently working for or on IS premises, including operations, security and cleaning staff. There are three different options to make a submission:

1. As a ‘direct target of racism’: you have directly experienced racism or racial discrimination.

2. As a ‘witness’: you have observed or encountered someone else experiencing racism or racial discrimination. When making your submission about the incident, you do not need to guess how the target of racism was impacted or feeling. You will be asked about the impact on yourself in witnessing the incident. Not only does sharing what you saw and how it made you feel help to show the consequences of racism across the Amnesty community, but it helps to build a collective culture where anyone can stand up to racism. You can disclose an incident you observed without the consent of the persons involved, even if you were not asked to do so. 

3. On ‘someone else’s behalf’: you may also relay the concerns of someone who has been the direct target of racism on their behalf. The direct target of racism may be current or former staff of the IS. This option provides a way to capture the experiences of someone who may find it upsetting to fill in the form or staff who have left the IS and do not have access to the platform. Making a submission on behalf of someone else requires obtaining their informed consent and collating the details of the incident directly from them.

Collectively, the stories shared through the platform will help the IS recognize the structural and systemic aspects of racism which exist within working life and support internal change sensitive to the impact that it is having on the communal experience at Amnesty.  

Periodically, a report will be produced by a small team of analysts. It will identify and summarize trends and patterns that emerge from the data and provide a series of recommendations. The anonymity of people sharing their stories will be very carefully protected. This means that no identifying information will be included in the final report. All names and/or any identifying mentions – including of those accused of racist behaviours – will be discarded and edited out by the analysts. 

For an example of how data captured through similar platforms has been anonymised and summarized, please see the End Everyday Racism at Cambridge University reports. The current aim is to release three reports over roughly three years.

The final reports will be available for all staff to view and can be used for advocacy and to inform internal discussions on necessary institutional change.  

Submissions will only be viewed by a small pool of analysts who will have signed a code of practice stipulating how they will protect the data and anonymity of people sharing their experiences. This will include agreeing not to discuss any of the specific individual entries with anyone besides each other. The names of the analysts for each submission cycle will be added to the ‘Project Team’ article found on the platform homepage. 

The platform will be available in the IS’ core languages in the first phase of the project. Where data submitted in a core language is not understood within the analyst team, the translation of the relevant data will be centralized by colleagues from the Language Resource Centre (LRC). LRC colleagues will be guided by the same code of practice as the analysts. 

 

Staff across the organization, including in People and Organizational Development (POD), will not have access to the raw data at any point. Please note that once you submit your experience to the platform, as it is anonymous, we cannot retrieve your data for you. Once the final reports have already been disseminated, these cannot be withdrawn, however, these will only contain anonymised or aggregated data.

You can share a wide range of racist incidents (both actions and omissions) or patterns that you have experienced or witnessed at the IS, including but not limited to interpersonal experiences, cultural practises and beliefs, policies or procedures that have a discriminatory effect and other structural or institutional issues that perpetuate racism. You can disclose one or multiple incidents in a single submission. 

No experience of racism should be considered too small, insignificant, or too big to submit. If someone else’s behaviour has left you with negative emotions, and you suspect racism played a role, we encourage you to share your experience with authenticity and transparency. 

It’s important to remember that there will be no individual follow up to your submission. Based on your experience, you may want to explore additional avenues available at the IS through which to  seek redress or support. Please have a look at the support articles on this site to see what’s right for you.

For more information, please refer to the guidance on Recognizing Racism and its Impact.

No. You can share incidents that occurred at any point in time, i.e., during or prior to the platform’s submission cycle. This recognizes that the consequences of racism can continue beyond the immediate occurrence, particularly if it is unaddressed or part of a wider pattern. It also provides an opportunity for people to share incidents which were resolved and what helped in that situation.  Entries recounting past incidents will be essential to contextualize ongoing institutional failures and improvements. 

The platform is not an internal grievance mechanism that will lead to individual disciplinary processes. Instead, it is designed to inform cultural and policy shifts at the IS through telling the collective story of how racism is occurring and impacting staff. At the end of each submission period, the analysts will formulate a series of recommendations, that can serve as a roadmap for institutional accountability and systemic change.

Based on your experience, you may want to explore additional options available at the IS through which you can  seek redress or support. This includes but is not limited to mediation and individual grievances. Please have a look at the support articles on this site to see what’s right for you.

The platform is an initiative crafted by the Forum for Radical Work on Anti-Racism and Decolonization (FORWARD) a staff led working group advancing anti-racism and cultural shifts for the IS to become a more inclusive space for racialized staff. Following the launch of the Howlett Brown report and its recommendations in October 2020, different parts of the organization began to think about what they could do in response to the insightful and difficult testimony shared by staff. FORWARD identified the development of an experience-sharing platform as something they could contribute toward Amnesty’s anti-racism journey. It is inspired by the methodology of solidarity developed by Dr Ella McPherson and Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa as part of the End Everyday Racism project introduced at Cambridge University in the UK.

The aim of the platform is therefore to inform the design of ambitious anti-racist policies, adopting a bottom-up approach, rooted in the experiences of racialized and minoritized staff. We encourage users to share and highlight identities they wish to disclose, that may have contributed to the incident or patterns of exclusion submitted to the platform. 

In the first phase of the project, the platform will be available in the IS core languages: English, French and Spanish. As the platform develops and the Internal Language Policy Review being developed by the Language Resource Centre concludes, other languages may be added. 

The platform is provided by the company Culture Shift, which supports a range of organizations and educational institutions to capture reporting on a variety of topics. Culture Shift use serverless architecture and have designed their platforms so that they have no direct access to the data collected by their clients. They run regular tests to identify any risks to the security of the data. Amnesty International is the data controller. This means that the project team and IT will work together to limit who has access to the data and instruct how the data is handled. Those with access to the data will be required to sign in using their Amnesty email credentials. Data held on the platform is GDPR compliant and further information about how data is collected and stored is outlined in the Privacy Statement.