Strategic Plan 2020 – 2024
Introduction
Who we are: Cultúr is a community work organization working across Co. Meath with ethnic minorities including immigrants, migrant workers, asylum seekers and refugees.
Vision: We envision a community where all people are welcome, and our diversity is celebrated as a strength.
Mission: To empower members of ethnic minorities who are at risk of poverty, racism and exclusion, to participate in a community work approach to bring about social change for the benefit of the whole community.
We are inspired by our Core Principles and Values
- An openness to creativity and innovation in how we work and engage.
- An emphasis on a community work approach to our work.
- A commitment to the empowerment and participation of ethnic minorities.
- A commitment to working towards an anti-racist and intercultural society.
- A focus on an equality framework which is anti-racist, anti-sexist, has a class analysis and promotes the social inclusion of ethnic minorities.
- A capacity and willingness to working in solidarity with others seeking to promote the rights of ethnic minorities through a shared vision and ethos.
Strategic Priorities and Areas of Work
Priorities that have emerged for the new strategic plan (2020 – 2024), through consultation with board and staff, a review of our work and the findings and themes emerging from reports on ethnic minorities, we have identified the following priority themes:
- Racism: promoting an anti-racist agenda including the reporting of racism and as a cross cutting theme in all areas of our work.
- Dialogue: Enabling greater dialogue between migrants and the Irish-born population to support integration and inclusion.
- Workplace Rights on a case by case basis in key industries namely care work, domestic work and agri-food and building meaningful working strategies with key players including Trade Unions to address these issues through direct work, campaigning and developing innovative models to address workplace exploitation.
- Ethnic Minority Women: Building Leadership among ethnic minority women in the first instance and as a cross cutting issue across all thematic areas and promoting a feminist analysis of the experience of ethnic minority women.
- Using a Human Rights Approach: this will include working with ethnic minorities as right holders and working with agencies who have roles as duty bearers to support the realization of rights across all thematic areas
- Direct Provision: working directly with those in Direct Provision, asylum seekers in the community and refugees.
- Growing our Policy Work Agenda: across all thematic areas including broader social and economic policy issues that also affect ethnic minorities.
- Representational Work: Building Leadership among Ethnic Minorities to represent the issues that affect their lives across all areas of our work and representing Cultúr in a wide range of fora.
All thematic areas have three dimensions: community work, human rights
framework and policy work.
Strategic Goals
This strategic plan will focus on achieving the following strategic goals:
GOAL 1: To encourage dialogue between migrants and host communities on issues of diversity and integration to support inclusion.
GOAL 2: To ensure that ethnic minority members can exercise their human rights.
GOAL 3: To develop ethnic minority leaders and agents of social change and to do this through a Community Work approach.
GOAL 4: To ensure government policies support the full and equal participation of ethnic minorities. We do this by promoting policy change through advocacy work.
GOAL 5: To ensure Cultúr continues as a community resource, that can achieve its aim and is accountable to all its stakeholders.
While the goals are similar to those in the previous plan, Goal 1 is additional and is based on the need for a specific focus on dialogue with the Irish-born population as evidenced by those working with migrants and wider communities. This is also supported by findings from the Irish Human Rights and Equality that “social contact for the most part promotes less negative attitudes to immigration and immigrants, suggests that enhancing opportunities for meaningful and positive interactions between the Irish-born population and immigrants will reduce antimigrant sentiment. Such interaction would also have positive implications for the social integration of migrants and their children.[i]
Evaluation and Implementation Framework
An evaluation framework will be developed in the context of this plan facilitating continuous assessment of our impact and progress towards meeting our goals over the lifetime of the strategy.
This will include the mapping out of an evaluation framework at board level and monitoring and evaluation processes taking place at regular intervals to benchmark the implementation process for the plan over its lifetime.
https://www.ihrec.ie/app/uploads/2018/03/Attitudes-to-diversity-in-Ireland.pdf