A balance of all Aussies

This week my blog might be seen as contentious, I hope not, It’s not meant to be, I just want to be honest and focus my energy on opportunities for learning or to shine a light in an area that may have been misunderstood or misrepresented.
For the last couple of years, I have been frustrated with my own view into our Women with Altitude or the Mens Altitude Network marketing. That is doesn’t accurately reflect the diversity of our country. Australia is a beautiful wide land abundant with a population that has swelled to 25,000 000 people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. There are Indigenous Australians who called this land home long before us and families whose elders migrated here throughout the century. People with different tones of skin, different religions and backgrounds. Whilst we are spreading wide and far, in our little part of Australia, The Blue Mountains, where I live, we have a huge population of European Aussies, Anglo Saxon, fair-skinned humans. I never really paid any attention to it until one day, when my kids were in primary school went for a school excursion to a public school in Westmead for a ‘cultural day’.  It made me realise that we didn’t have a lot of diversity in our region.
Women with Altitude started in this area and I love to involve our members in our marketing, always inviting members to be part of our photo shoots. I realised a couple of years ago that the members who jumped at the chance to be with us in our photos were from the region where we have the majority of members, and that they were all mostly white women.  I remember having discussions with our photographer and member Kirsten Flavell photography about this and how we wanted to change it. Time marches forward and whilst I had wanted to use authentic imagery rather than stock footage, we had not had the opportunity to replace all of our images. The other side of this observation is the viewpoint of other members or potential visitors to our community and how they may feel when they come along to our events.

We are about to have a photo shoot and this time I want to work harder to accurately represent all members of our community. I had a new challenge when I started the process. My conflict existed in wanting to ask members, Australians of different ethnic backgrounds to be part of our photo shoot but I didn’t want people to feel uncomfortable or it to be a bigger issue.

One thing that would make me sad is if anyone felt uncomfortable at our events, if there was an imbalance of a cross-section of ethnicities from our community.  It goes against the very existence of our culture and principals, Im asking myself this question How can we make it better for our fellow sisters and brothers?

As a privileged white woman, I know that I will never understand or know the prejudices faced by people of colour or who look different or are part of a minority and what they face in their life by ignorant humans. What I do know for sure is that I want our community to continue to walk its talk. To welcome all members of the community with open arms exactly as our intention states. People with disability, different ethnicities and cultures. I will do my best to be more mindful of how we can do this better. As businesses, I think its something we should all be thinking about. Am I being inclusive? do I welcome and make allowance for people who are in wheelchairs? or other minorities?  In the age of political correctness bashing, which I don’t even understand what that means anymore, and I don’t believe I participate in, I want to be clear that we are extending our hand of welcome out to all sectors of the community because everyone is worth it.  Everyone is important, we are all in this human experience together. I want to make a promise to our community that we will do our best to ensure that our programs, services and networks reach out to all sectors of our communities.

Until next week
Love and hugs
Andy x