An ally is someone who is not a member of an underrepresented group but who takes action to support that group to help make their workplace more diverse and inclusive for all.
For workplaces to become truly inclusive it is up to people who hold positions of privilege to be active allies and to take responsibility for making changes that will help others be successful.
Allies at all levels can take action with simple, everyday efforts that make a real difference and in this series, we highlight some things that you can do to be an ally and to support your colleagues from underrepresented groups.
Use the Law Society Reasonable Adjustments and Easy Wins Guidance
As it is disability history month, we wanted to shine a light on some of the resources from the Law Society that you can use to improve disability inclusion in your workplace. It isn’t just the responsibility of disabled staff and network leaders – everyone should take responsibility for disability inclusion in the workplace.
The Law Society and the Lay Society’s Disabled Solicitors Network (DSN) working with Cardiff University have produced a best practice guide: Reasonable adjustments in organisations – best practice for disability inclusion to help organisations understand what they’re legally obliged to do in terms of reasonable adjustments, and how to implement them and an easy wins and action points for disability inclusion document – which sets out some easy wins, questions to get discussions going or starting points for further work, with separate recommendations for larger and smaller organisations.
If you are not already using these we recommend that you use these resources to get you started.
Read the full “How to be an Ally” series here.
Further Reading:
- Law Society: Easy wins and action points for disability inclusion
- Law Society: Reasonable adjustments – best practice guidance
