I was fortunate yesterday to join the launch of an initiative that just might be exactly what the world needs. I can’t describe it better than they do themselves:

RadHR is a space for social change organisations to share the nuts and bolts—the policies, processes, practices and stories—of how to organise ourselves based on our values and challenge oppression within our groups.

Most activist groups, not-for-profit organisations, community groups, workers’ cooperatives and social enterprises are committed to fighting against oppression and inequality in the wider world. But when it comes to how we organise internally, we often end up replicating all sorts of crap—classist, racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic and transphobic norms, as well as the individualistic, competition-based values of the wider systems we oppose.

But things are shifting! In the wake of BLM and #MeToo, social justice organisations have started acknowledging that the ends don’t always justify the means – and that we can’t keep organising in oppressive, top-down ways and expect a better world to emerge. RadHR helps groups to challenge these damaging practices and become more supportive, caring and anti-oppressive organisations.

So great. It’s an incredibly familiar story: organisations who pride themselves on values (or statements of those values) somehow erect an impenetrable wall between those values and their HR processes. It needn’t be that way.