This week we learned from our friends at Brewgooder in Glasgow that they, along with Mondo Brewing Company, are setting up an initiative to try to help make the brewing industry more inclusive. It’s called “Work in Progress” and as soon as I read about it, I knew we had to sign up.
What is it?
‘Work In Progress’ is an open, de-centralised group of breweries that aspire to a more inclusive and representative beer industry, committed to taking action in our businesses and forging links with communities to increase opportunities and promote collaboration between brewers and under-represented groups in our society.
Why sign up?
Since we are already a social enterprise brewery with aims that include helping military veterans into civilian work and supporting educational charities, these ideals fit in with our business values and we want our involvement in this group to help us to think about more ways that we can be inclusive and serve the various communities we operate in.
What are we doing?
To start with, we’ll be doing a lot of thinking and discussing! As a member of Work in Progress, we’ve committed to act on the following core areas of inclusion: Anti-Racism and Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Representation – LGBT+ Representation – Female Representation – Disabled Persons Representation.
However, the group leaves it up to each brewery to develop their own unique approaches to inclusion, put them into action, and then report on them – sharing successes and failures with other members and the wider world. The group doesn’t believe there is a right or wrong way to begin a Work In Progress journey. All that is asked is that we hold ourselves and others to account, and support other members on their own journeys.
We believe that all the core areas listed above are important, but we also realise that we can’t change the world overnight, so over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be developing an inclusion strategy that focuses on what we think are realistic and achievable aims for our (very small) business, along with some aspirational ideas that we’d like to take on some day in the future.
What will we be focusing on?
All of the core areas of representation are important, and we can think of quite a few more that we want to look into as well. However, there are a few things that we’re particularly interested in:
- As our founder and Managing Director, James, is dyslexic, inclusion relating to invisible disabilities is a key focus. We would like to explore the inclusivity of our branding, labelling and marketing in this regard, and we already have a number of ideas we’re mulling over.
- We’ll be thinking about gender representation in a slightly less binary way. While female representation is extremely important, women are not the only underrepresented group in this category.
- As one of our social enterprise aims is to help ex-military personnel to get back into work, we’re also interested in social inclusion and helping people to reach their potential.
- One of the ways in which we’re already proud of being inclusive is that all of our beer and gin is vegan, allowing more people to get involved and enjoy our products.
What are the challenges?
The main challenge is our size – there are only three (soon to be four) of us working in the business and only half of the team is full time. This somewhat limits the amount we can do, and spend, on inclusion initiatives. But we really believe in doing what we can, so our strategy will include lots of little things that individually may have a small impact, but will add up to making a difference.
We’re also limited by the size and layout of our brewery – we’re not in a position, for example, to install a ground floor loo, which limits how disabled-friendly we can be (for now – but not necessarily for ever).
Another thing we’ll need to work through is balancing the different core areas against each other. There may be times when making a decision that benefits one underrepresented group means that another group is relatively disadvantaged or there is a delay to their inclusion – we’ll need to work through that as we go, but I think being conscious of the issue gets us a long way towards addressing it.
How will we stay accountable?
We’re planning to be transparent about this whole process. We’ve committed to reporting at least annually, but I’m going to add a page to this website with details of our inclusion strategy, which I’ll update as we make progress. I’ll also be reporting on the things that haven’t worked so well and looking into ways that we can measure the impact of the inclusion steps we take, so that we can report in a holistic way once a year.
How can you help?
Talk to us! If you have ideas or suggestions for things we could explore, please let us know using our Contact form or via social media. We’ll also solicit feedback after we’ve implemented something, to help us work out whether it’s had a positive inclusion impact.
We’re in this for the long haul – we can’t promise that everything we do will be perfect straight away, and we’re bound to make some mistakes along the way – but we believe that the brewing industry and the beer-drinking community can and will be more inclusive and we want to be a part of that change.
