A Dog Called Diversity
A Dog Called Diversity
Making change happen….with Tidge Backhouse
Sometimes the only way to get help for yourself is to act and help others too. Tidge Backhouse grew up in a small town in Country New South Wales, Australia where acceptance and support for gay people was thin on the ground.
In high school Tidge took matters into their own hands to create safe spaces for them and others leaving a legacy for future queer students. Tidge is now making a difference in health care for the queer community, paving the way for others to feel seen and accepted.
Listen in to Tidge’s introduction to hear how they model inclusion and acceptance.
Tidge learnt so much from attending 6 Weeks to Get Started in Diversity & Inclusion and we loved having them as part of the course.
If you want to work in Diversity & Inclusion join the waitlist now for 6 Weeks to Get Started in Diversity & Inclusion. Enrolments open on 10 March and the course kicks off on 21 March.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
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Welcome to A Dog Called Diversity, a podcast from the Culture Ministry where we explore the themes of diversity, equity and inclusion through sharing stories of personal and powerful lived experiences, including how people have found their feet and developed their career in diversity and inclusion. We're so glad you're listening in and if you need some help or support with your diversity and inclusion work, go to wwwthecultureministrycom for more information. Sometimes the only way to get help for yourself is to act and help others too. Tidge grew up in a small town in country New South Wales, australia, where acceptance and support for gay people was thin on the ground. In high school, tidge took matters into their own hands to create safe spaces for them and others, leaving a legacy for future queer students. Tidge is now making a difference in healthcare for the queer community, paving the way for others to feel seen and accepted. Listen in to Tidge's introduction to hear how they model inclusion and acceptance. Here's your host, lisa Mulligan.
Speaker 2:On today's episode of A Dog Called Diversity, I have a fantastic guest. Welcome to the podcast Tidge Backhouse. Would you like to?
Speaker 3:introduce yourself Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on, lisa. So my name is Tidge. I use the pronouns they, them. I am a LGBTQI plus person. I'm a fabulous non-binary human that identifies as queer, so please feel comfortable to use those words when you speak to me and about me. I know they're not always the safest words to use, but I invite you to use them. I, for accessibility, explanations and because we're in an audio medium. I am a person that presents with both male and female aspects, which is confusing for some people. I wear makeup, I have acrylic nails, I have pink hair, I have a lovely rainbow lanyard, but I also have a beard and I have a quite a masculine, structured face because of that damn biology. But I really like to give people the understanding that I identify as non-binary and that invites you to maybe not put your expectations of what you think how I should behave based on that gender expectation on me, because I'm here to just be myself and offer what I can well, and you do have so much to offer.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to pick up on you, you know, giving permission to refer to you as queer, because when I first started working in diversity and inclusion, the employee network group for the LGBTIQ plus community in my organisation had said to me you don't have to say all the letters, lisa, you can just say queer, and it's taken me a while to be confident to use a word that you know in the past would be more derogatory in my experience. Yeah, so thank you for explaining that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's actually really an interesting thing, particularly for those who work in D&IB spaces, because it's a word that can take with it a lot of weight, like particularly for older people within the lgbtqi plus community. It feels closer to home and connected to more derogatory things, whereas younger people and people like myself, which my gender identity and gender journey have led me to places where my sexual identity then becomes confusing. Because if I don't identify as a male and previously, when I was the uncomfortable boy, identified as a male and was attracted to men, and that was easy I could go great, I'm gay, you know. But then, when I became out as non-binary, I thought, well, how do I then summarize my sexual identity? I know it's not one that particularly falls into a heteronormative, straight, cis identity, and so for me it felt comfortable to use the word queer and because queer became an umbrella term socially at works, but I do know people who don't use those words and it's a real point of call to us to then go great, well, we have the ability to ask people what words they use and what feels safe for them.
Speaker 3:So let's ask, let's encourage people to identify that at the beginning of conversations if we are going to talk about that community. The other way to safely summarize the community that isn't just using letters and worrying about dropping a letter is to just say the sexuality, gender and sex characteristics to diverse community, because it then summarizes and gives you all that ability to look at those spectrums that those letters fall into. But it means that you can avoid using the alphabet soup, as some people call it.
Speaker 2:I like that, and I just wanted to point out a couple of other things you did which I think are really inclusive, and they help other people also be inclusive, and so you always share your pronouns, which I love, and so by that I mean either she, her or he, him, or they, them, and it's a fantastic show of respect to others in the community about how you like to be referred to and lets others do the same, and I love how you described your appearance, and that is so inclusive for people who are vision impaired or or have no vision, and I think in the audio medium it makes such a big difference. So so I just wanted to point those out yeah, thank you for that.
Speaker 3:I think um one thing other things I didn't mention, um in my introduction that sometimes I do and other times I don't is I have experience of being a neurodiverse. I have ADHD, I have. I operate in circles which contain a lot of autistic people or people who don't think the same way. That is considered normal, and so it's a really great way to get people on the same page is by saying this is a bit of a structure about how we're going to formally introduce ourselves, position what we're going, and it actually invites people in to engage with what you're talking about. It gives that trigger about oh, we're talking about ourselves, and you know, most brains, whether neurotypical or neurodiverse, like an opportunity to bring themselves into the discussion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's a great connection point because, as you're talking, I'm thinking about how so many of my friends are neurodiverse and how I really connect with, I guess, the quirkiness of neurodiverse people and yeah, so it's really helpful I think. So thank you for sharing that. So, thank you for sharing that. Would you like to share a little bit about, I guess, growing up and when maybe you realise that you're a bit different in the world, maybe to other people around you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. Another great opportunity to talk about me. So I actually grew up in country New South Wales, which is an area which is around Orange for those who live in Australia, for those who don't, it's sort of a rural area with agricultural ties, so it has vineyards, some fruit industry and there's also a bit of a mining industry out there. I grew up in a very small town that actually only had 3,000 people in it. For the first sort of 12 years of my life I went to a very small school. That was a school of about 48 people from K to year six, which is the first seven years of schooling in Australia, and I was immediately a little bit different, which is very easy to pick out when there's, you know, only a few people there. So my school had three people who presented as male or were, you know, assumed male at that time, and six you know people that are presented or appeared female at that time. So we had a very clear line of sort of gender in the class. It was one third boys, two thirds girls and the way that we had our learning was particularly always gendered or it had like yes, the boys will do the netball games with the girls if the girls do the soccer games with the boys and there was things and behaviours which were particularly associated with both of those genders. But because we were in a small group, we often had to, you know, at least experience or get exposed to those to allow those other people to do them. So there was when it was art time or those kind of things. Those activities were seen as female activities, but the boys did them. And then when the boys were like really interested in going and doing the learning to use a compass or orienteering or survival based skills or like what is seen as traditionally male activities in the country, we all got dragged on, including the girls. And so for me, I was exposed to both those things, but I could definitely see that they were given a gender which my brain at the time couldn't understand.
Speaker 3:And then, as I got older, I realized, wow, I'm in this place where I don't fit the normal. I realized I wasn't going to be attracted to girls and fit that heteronormative structure that I would, you know, grow up, meet a girl, get married, have children and live that life that was at the time presented in movies and books and things, and instead I would have this life that I was getting little whispers of in the background of my life. That was the gay life. You know, it was like, oh, it's a bit sad, it's. There's these risks, but we all of a sudden have these big parties with glitter and Mardi Gras and those kind of things.
Speaker 3:It was really interesting growing up in the country, thinking I might be gay and what that meant, because I wasn't exposed to those stories that potentially youth of today get exposed to about what queerness is. But it actually made me kind of fear that life. So then I kind of just hugged into this. I'm just an uncomfortable boy. Kind of just hugged into this. I'm just an uncomfortable boy. Maybe if I keep at it I'll be the person that society wants me to be, or that the structures that existed in the country were there. So I didn't actually come out as gay until I was in high school and my experience there was actually quite wild. So I went to a high school in Orange. So all these small towns generally fed either to one of the high schools in Orange or Molong or Blaney, which were quite big. So the hub that I went to was, I think, around 1,000 to 1,200 kids from year seven to 12, which is a big difference from 48.
Speaker 2:So much bigger.
Speaker 3:My year was around 150 or 100 or so kids and for the first year I actually didn't make a lot of friends because I'd come from a very small pond to a very big pond and I remember reading a book in the inner quad or playground of our school every lunchtime. So I got really good at reading, particularly fantasy books or books where I could do an escapism in there, and it actually meant that my English class went up. So I went from like a standard English class to an advanced English class and when I moved into that class someone asked me if I was new and I wasn't actually new, but I went along with it because this is a great vehicle to make a new friend and I said, yeah, yeah, I'm new, new to this class and actually made some friends and actually was able to get a footing and start to understand what more people meant in terms of adjusting into society and how my ADD as I was growing up then, was starting to interact with the way I built relationships. And for me I learned as an unmedicated person with attention deficit disorder at the time, because that was before we sort of now define it as ADHD. Back then it was either ADD or ADHD, and my experience was my parents and I decided we didn't want to be medicated but we'd look at behavioral and strategy to way to navigate that.
Speaker 3:And so I discovered that I had two options.
Speaker 3:One was I could do what's known as masking in that community, which is where you basically try and anticipate what someone expects of you and meet that expectation.
Speaker 3:So if you're in a social situation, you know what's appropriate because you've sort of observed and you've seen what worked and what didn't in the past and you do that. So that's one strategy I had. The other one was throw caution to the wind and just give myself over and do what I thought you know was me and express myself. And I actually ended up going further into the side of just doing what I felt natural to me and things, because I ended up in a place where I was masking too often. I wasn't developing strong friendships or relationships because I was too busy trying to anticipate what people wanted me to do or how I should behave, and so I didn't get the opportunity to actually share myself. And so when it came time to invite the one friend they could to the movies on the weekend, I wasn't that one friend, you know or when they could do things which were, you know, reduced activities, I wasn't allowed to do those or invited to do those.
Speaker 3:Instead, I was oh, having a birthday party can come to that. So I had peripheral friends, but none that I felt were really strong, and so out of that I built an understanding that, hey, I'm actually going to have to let someone get to know the weird and wacky me. And as I started to do that, I shared some secrets about myself with a human that I thought I might be gay, and that person at the time didn't know what to do with that and didn't know the value of that secret and what to do with it, and actually shared it with some other people. So I was actually outed to my whole sort of year at school and then the school whispers around. So I had a pretty negative time from about year nine to about year 11 where I couldn't walk through my playground without fruit thrown at me because it's fun to throw fruit at the fruit, which was a derogatory term for queer people in Australia.
Speaker 3:I was bullied. I was, you know, assumed to be quite sexually active and sleeping with, you know, all the boys in the boys school down the road and just that kind of stuff which made it really hard to sort of figure out where I belonged anymore. The boys I had sat with because I'd made that friend in English all of a sudden didn't feel super comfortable and actually sort of strongly encouraged me to go sit elsewhere. So I sat with their girlfriends for a while, but then that felt weird because you know they were still involved with the way they lived. I then went and sat with art kids and then I found home with the drama kids, because you know everyone in drama is just a little bit camp, whether queer or not.
Speaker 3:And in year 11, I just sort of had enough. I said to my high school school counsellor after a number of instances where they'd sort of been involved and it's like we really want to support you but we're not sure how to do it. Like the classroom bullying was getting in the way of learning, the playground bullying was being reported by my friends, but I was not necessarily coming forward myself and at the time time I'd read a lot of youth fiction. So I went into that and was like, oh great, they have these things in this youth fiction which is called Gay Street Student Alliances, and so we tried to start one of them at my high school. It was very slow to start. It never got overly big, particularly because we had such a big school. It was about, I think, 10 people at most.
Speaker 3:But one of the things we did was provide a safe place for me and my friends and the teacher to support that, to have conversations about safe sex and things that maybe weren't part of the PE curriculum. At the time we talked about what we could do to maybe influence things for someone who followed in our footprints. So I had problems with people making comments in the classroom and then the teacher, not being able to know what to do with it, engaged. So we then made sure that we raised some money, doing some dress-up days and some pizza days and fairy bread days. That actually went into paying for someone to come into the teacher's development day and say this is how you deal with that classroom bullying, this is how you make that child feel seen and respected and not make it seem like it's not appropriate to bring up in the classroom and just dismiss it because that doesn't actually deal with the behaviour and those sort of things. And so that sort of went from year 11 to right. When I left school On the last sort of month of school I actually got a note from my principal that sort of said thank you for all that you've done. Here's a little um nomination I've put in for you I hope you get it which was for an Australian Defence Force Leadership and Teamwork Award. Um, and I actually got it. That gave me the money that I needed to be able to move to Sydney um and have a lovely time moving down here and going to an acting school and living what I thought was my path at that time.
Speaker 3:But yeah, so I think that was the first point. I think my life looking back I go I felt different. I had a struggle with that and I thought how can I make it better for myself but also other people like me? After that my life went all over the shop. A couple of things, I did some acting school. I then went back to uni. I went to work in childcare. I worked at an adult store for a while, which was really interesting and taught me a lot about other people and particularly people who maybe felt disenfranchised in a lot of ways. And then I ended back into the corporate world where I worked for a finance company for a while and was involved in our charity and the way that we had philanthropy come out of that. That was a company called Vida that then was bought by another company and turned into Equifax.
Speaker 3:And then COVID happened. And just before COVID happened I had been made redundant and so I was left in this place where I thought I'd have all the time in the world to find my next job. And then, all of a sudden, covid was happening and I didn't know where I was going to work and I didn't know how long that savings and the redundancy package I kind of got given was going to let me survive to. So I started frantically looking at like the internet and seek and just was like I don't want to be caught in a place where I've run out of money and don't know what to do. And I saw a couple of opportunities come up of money and don't know what to do. And I saw a couple of opportunities come up and one was one to join NSW Health.
Speaker 3:As a queer person that lives in Australia, I had a complex relationship with um the. You know the idea of working in the public sector because queer people have always been left out of. You know the decisions they're not seen as part of the dominant culture and the way that we are taught to think about how we change. That is, by advocating and lobbying that and not necessarily going and working for them and that kind of thing. So I kind of put it on the back burner, applied for some other jobs and then I went. You know what I actually really like the sound of this job and I think to get an understanding of what it's like inside that industry might actually help me understand how I can make change happen, and so I applied for the job. I got accepted.
Speaker 3:When I applied, though, because it was the public sector and because the recruitment system only allowed me to identify as male and female, it only allowed me to look up into their policies that existed publicly, and none of those were around diversity, inclusion or LGBTQ or anything like that. I went in male presenting. I went in what I thought was safe, so a suit, jacket, tie, all that kind of thing and it wasn't until a month into that job when they launched the diversity inclusion belonging strategy, which had a key component of it, which was for the LGBTQ staff and how they wanted to improve outcomes for the way they move through the business and feel supported. That I was like all right, if they're serious about this, I'm going to start to show them the me that's outside of work, which was to wear a little bit of makeup to work, to dye my hair, to be a little bit more effeminate and to be a bit more passionate in the way that I advocated for change, and they, as part of that strategy, they launched some employee resource groups, and I put my hand up to co-chair the LGBTQ one, and that has led me to where I sort of am today, in that it's involved.
Speaker 3:Let me be involved in some initiatives here in the the work we do in health for both staff and to see how we can positively affect the outcomes for LGBTQ communities, but also in in being a proud person that actually is ready to stand up and say my lived experience gives me expertise to be able to talk about this, to engage with this and actually hopefully build empathy.
Speaker 3:Because at the end of the day, if you understand my experience and the some of the hurdles and the way that I've had to shift and change to fit the systems that exist instead of the systems allowing me to participate, then that gives you an idea that maybe those systems need to be changed. We'll need to provide those doors, in the same way that if we notice people are in wheelchairs, we put a ramp in so they can get up there. An LGBTQ person or a particularly gender diverse person may have those distresses that come in of going oh great, your system has assumed I'm a male or a female and left no room for me to actually be seen in. Your company doesn't even want me. There is such like an interesting conversation to have with people who never even thought about it that way, because an arbitrary system was set up with a binary option at the start yeah, I wanted to.
Speaker 2:I want to. I guess your, your day job is I don't want to say nothing to do with diversity and inclusion, but but but day job is your. You know your day job and a lot of this, a lot of your advocacy work that you do is you know it's part of your work day, but you do a lot of work on top of your day job as well, don't you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. My substantive or day job position is an executive officer, which is basically just a very important EA. I work for the director of finance for Northern Sydney Local Health District, so that's quite a big area of Sydney which is capital Sydney of New South Wales, and it's a busy job. Like EAs run around and organise meetings and do papers and do the minutes for meeting, so there's not always a chunk of time left in the workday to do what we do in diversity inclusion here in the employee resource group. But I think the way that I sort of stumbled into it and the way that I've reasoned or found the energy to do the work in this space is I've seen pretty fast the impacts of just little amounts of effort.
Speaker 3:So when we first launched the network, it was one meeting, maybe once a month, where we could talk about some things that we'd noticed in the system that didn't work. So one of the first things that was reported in one of those meetings was around how a system didn't allow us to capture data around a patient if they were gender diverse. Like there's no way to say in the system you know, this person is non-binary because it just sort of has their biological sex. And so it's like well, what workarounds can we have? How do we engage with the teams which we know those people are probably going to have more likely touch points at, so that when they're putting notes in there for the next person to take that patient on, you know, and they can hand that over without that person having to reinforce with the next person themselves? Oh, before you assume, because I sit here with a beard, that I'm a man, maybe just refer to me by name or they, if that's okay.
Speaker 3:And so we, you know we were able to see from that. It led to discussions and it led to us reaching to the Ministry of Health, which looks after all of the sort of branches of health, to sort of go hey, what are we doing about this? And then, in 2022, which was last year, new South Wales launched a huge strategy called the New South Wales LGBTQ Health Strategy, the first of its kind for New South Wales, and that actually came out with a strategic priority, which was we want to start capturing data around the know lgbtqi plus people, their gender diversity, their sexual diversity, their intersex variation at the point of care and for the community, and to do that, we obviously need to update those systems which you know were health-wide systems and things like that. So we can see that you know small conversations possibly field larger conversations which now make it part of a five-year strategy to see real change within a whole of the you know, the public sector of health in New South Wales and hopefully contribute to the expectation across Australia.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is so incredible and I think there's, like a few things, I think, a great example of how you can make progress and be inclusive. You've just got to keep the faith and keep chipping away, which is what you've done. And I think if there's any part of the community that needs to be inclusive, it's healthcare services. You know across the board, because you're dealing with individuals with individual needs, so you need to be able to cater to all of those different needs.
Speaker 2:So you know, at the start you said, oh, I didn't know if I wanted to work for a public agency or like a government agency. You know, I think we probably all have some stereotypes about what they could be. How has your your, I guess view of governments shifted since you've been at new south wales health?
Speaker 3:yeah, I, I mean, you know, at the risk of sounding, you know, stereotypical in in that you know, oh, you're a minority, you've, you've entered into the to the to being part of the system. Um, you know, it's it's not so much as as being part of the vehicle which harms other people, but being someone in the system which says, hey, let's slow down, let's try and consider other people. It's actually really interesting to see how many people from within the system are actually trying to make the difference from within the system because they realise that potentially, that outward lobbying, or that public facing lobbying, whilst it's really good for making sure people are aware of the issues which happening, it's really easy to tune those out. As decision makers in businesses, in fact, when you work for organisations which are local government or state government or even federal government, you almost have a requirement to leave the politics outside. And so it's, if you're in the system, you're not actually actively saying I'm doing this because I'm being lobbied to do this. You're doing it because you can't operate in that system without doing it, and so it becomes less political, less personal, but more about that system being the best system it can be and providing that space within it for consultation or collaboration.
Speaker 3:One of the things I really love about the New South Wales Health and particularly Northern Sydney Local Health District, is we're very, very keen on reminding people about these core values that we have, that when you start the job, you hear about you Even in the application for the job you might even hear about them and go how do you think you reach these core values? And they are collaboration, openness, respect and empowerment. I think those four values scream like we need to do D&I work. It needs to become an ingrained part of how we operate, because if we want to collaborate with people, we need to be able to work with them on a fundamental level and actually involve all different types of people. Openness is being open to those differences or ideas of opinion, of understanding that you know why that person's opinion is maybe different to yours, or giving them space to justify and explain that. Respect is really about you know, giving them that time and opportunity to do so and even if it's different, okay, I'll step back and let them have their moment, so then we can do that critical evaluament. That's part of any particular employment or project role.
Speaker 3:And then E is empowerment, which is seeing that someone's different or maybe that their voice isn't as heard and that may be something that's said is really important on that task, but maybe it's going to get swept under the rug and saying, well, actually, let's listen more closely to that or let's see how that could influence this project or the outcomes of this project and all those really lead into. Well, all those fundamentals are actually asking us to deal with people as they come, to deal with what they've presented or engaged with and to walk out the other side with, hopefully, a product which everybody can see themselves as being part of and the decision that's made helps as many people as possible and maybe for those people it doesn't help see, at least establishes a pathway about how they may access it. You know, or be encouraged to access it and influence it from. You know those feedback channels available.
Speaker 3:You know, particularly in health, we have a very important part of health is trying to get information or data from people as they leave the system. You know you have your patient experience surveys, you have your patient reported measures and things like that. If we have people who haven't enjoyed the system, you know we hope that they tell us at the end that they didn't enjoy it, but we need to make those systems accessible. We need to make sure those systems are encouraged for even people who have been disenfranchised. The whole system, because we don't want just good feedback, we want bad feedback. We want the mediocre feedback so that we can make the decisions that will help the whole system moving forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is so much there. It's amazing. But one thing that really resonates with me and the work that you're doing is that you can make a difference in something, no matter where you're sitting in an organization. You don't need to be in a specially anointed role to make a big difference, right, um?
Speaker 3:yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of the things that I do in my work, and I want to do more of in my work, is encourage more people to do things that you're doing, you know to, wherever you're sitting in an organisation, to know that you can make a difference. And we also need people working in the official diversity and inclusion roles and they're really hard and people burn out from them. But we need more. We need more people doing all this good work. We need more people with lived experience to to be able to articulate all the challenges that you're having.
Speaker 2:So now you came along to my course that I ran late last year, and the course is called six weeks to get started in diversity and inclusion, and I really designed it not so much to talk about, I guess, the lived experiences of people although that is a really important part of working in diversity and inclusion but I wanted to create something that gave people a structure to work with, because when I started in my diversity and inclusion role, it was like, oh my God, where do I start? What do I do? And so I wanted to give people a structure so that they would be successful in their roles. So you came to the course, which was incredible and you were a great participant, but I wondered if you could talk a bit about what made you sign up and attend.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I think it largely touched you. The point you just brought up with is that if we actually look at a business and we see that, um, all levels of the business contain all different kinds of people and that, like employer resource groups in intention, invite people from all across the business to be involved so that they can get you know opinions from the low level, the mid-level and senior leadership, all in the same space, and actually do programs that help support all of those levels. But it also then becomes a dance with the fact that resourcing for D&I is still quite low within a lot of corporations. And so I was looking at that and going we have all these really great invigorated people from bringing them together, providing a passion space with an employee resource group, and then we get these initiatives that then we don't have the capacity to necessarily start because we go well, I can't do that in my workday. I'm already doing one of these working groups. I'm on or this task or project already, and if I were to choose to take on more, I'm not going to be able to do that. So I sort of thought, well, maybe I need to look at what opportunities become available within my workplace so that I can move away from that substantive job and worrying about getting my day job done and actually go. Well, if my job was to do this, we would potentially have more capacity.
Speaker 3:And so I looked at what opportunities were available and there wasn't a lot within my district. There was some outside my district and some across the public sector that I thought great, this looks like a great opportunity for me. I applied for a few and I just fell a little short. And the way that I fell short was not in the way I expressed myself or articulated myself. It was that my resume and the way that people felt they had to look at people applying for those jobs was that you, you know, I need to understand that. They know more than lived experience or what it's like to be different or what it's like to engage and look at getting everybody's opinions and and projects on the table. And so I had a big conversation with some of the team here and a person who actually knew yourself, lisa Leanne, and I had a big chat and she was like, oh look, there's nothing in my team at the moment, but I think you know if you want to work on some professional development or get more experience of looking at the structured side of it. There's certainly options.
Speaker 3:And they received, I think, a thing off your LinkedIn which had mentioned the course and said, look, have a look at this If this appeals to you. I think, a thing off your LinkedIn which had mentioned the course and said, look, have a look at this, if this appeals to you. I strongly encourage maybe reaching out and seeing if, like, it'll cover areas that can help you or whatever. And I looked at it and I immediately thought this is the stuff which I know people don't think I know, which is you know how it needs to work within the business. It can't just be passion, it can't just be empathy building. It has to be linked with data, it has to be linked with policy, it has to have the structural and things. So I thought, great, I want to go along to that and see how to express better that. I understand that, that it ticks in the right places with me, but also look to see if it gives me those tools and skills to then be confident to do so.
Speaker 3:And so I came along and I think we've been within the first week. I realized that you know, like we all do at times in our life we don't know everything we think we know and we can engage with it and go great. All right, that's that next level of that, or that's the the way that someone else has maybe got that conversation started. That didn't seem like it was just jumping up and down and running out of breath. You know it was no, this is why we have to do it. It's justified, the data is backing it, you know, and the way you negotiate with different people, you know, particularly negotiating with senior leaders or policy makers and decision makers, is, of course, going to be different to the way you engage with a workforce or the way you engage with, you know, a medical professional or a clinician and those kind of things.
Speaker 3:And yeah, so I was very thrilled that, from generally, week one, week two, I was starting to get more insight from people who, like yourself, who'd worked in the industry for 20 years, who were bringing in people that you'd worked with from across, you know, the Asia Pacific, that had some experience, but wanted to elevate themselves and wanted to use that space to talk to other people who maybe don't have a background going and studying HR or going and studying these really important structures, but wanted to understand enough of that to be able to have conversations with those people and to engage them in ways that made them feel trusted. Um, I think was a big piece for me is, you know to. To build capability or confidence is one thing, but to build the ability to communicate, um, in a way that you know they're going to understand frees you to then go, yes, I can do this, not in a oh, I think I can do it or I hope I can do it, but to actually go yes, yeah, this is going to be, if I stick to these ideas and the ways of getting people on board, that kind of were, given those tools within the course, I think is going to be so empowering for me. So, thank you for that opportunity. And also, yeah, I think I think for me I'd come across your podcast as well, and that's why, for me, it was this weird, weird tick over where Leanne had sort of said, oh yeah, I've this person, they've got this great course.
Speaker 3:And then I was like, why does that name sound familiar? And then, when I looked at the Cultura Ministry website, it was like the dog called diversity. I'm like I've listened to that podcast, you know, and I put two and two together and there's a couple of people that you'd spoken to on your podcast about how they hadn't began in a HR space or they hadn't began in a position in a company where they thought they'd end up in a paid position or a resourced position, and I thought, great, this means that there's a door that I see or a window that I can see that I can crawl through at some point. And, yeah, I think that's so important for anyone like myself who has realised that the passion they have or the drive or the way that they've been able to accomplish things maybe is something that's more than just standing up for yourself or wanting to see things better for your community, but something that a business needs to engage with or has a real space for.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I wanted to ask you have you used anything that you learned on the course in the work that you're doing at New South Wales Health?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So you know, I think some of it was pretty easy to translate straight away into a big project that I was working on. So part of that New South Wales LGBTQ health strategy that I mentioned that was launched in 2022, which is a five-year plan to look at improving health outcomes for LGBT communities, to look at data collection, to look at how we understand and build capability within that system, to look at how we understand and build capability within that system, part of that was this commitment by the Ministry of Health for New South Wales that they'd fund some initiatives and things like that, and a part of that is a bit of a funding pool that you had the ability to apply to get some funding for, and so I was able to take some of the skills of the course into the way I was writing the application, the way I was trying to justify why my project or initiative should be funded potentially over others, and that was around. You know the way you use data or the way you. If you are required to do something within a 200 word limit, what is maybe the more important points to make and I know we talked about looking for those things that you can say is this is the win. You know this is the quick win, or the thing that you can change tomorrow versus the thing which is the goal to change in a year or five years, and those little signposts around what measures can you say you'll put in and what's achievable versus what is.
Speaker 3:You know, the ideal really helped me structure that application and which, you know, the ideal really helped me structure that application and which, you know, fingers crossed about to submit. Have a lovely time and hopefully get it. But without that, I think I would have fumbled through this application with much more stress and with much more frustration, because I wouldn't have had the idea to step back and go. Well, what do I know they're possibly looking for? You know what? Do I know that a business or a decision maker is going to go? Well, why should I fund this project?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm so excited to hear how you go. All the best you must let us know, yeah, if your proposal is successful. I'm really excited, yeah, to hear how that goes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's one of those lovely things where you know the bureaucracy machine will take it after I apply and we won't probably hear back for about two or three months on that. So that'll be a fun time to let you sit with crossed fingers and get cramps in my knuckles. But I think you know I'm quite confident in that we've done the best we could do in terms of applying and I know, whilst funding and all that stuff is quite finite, it gives us the position to, even if we don't get this funding, to then look at that application and how we can change that for further opportunities in the future. I feel good about it which, as I said, I don't think I would have felt if I'd fumbled through it and wasn't able to go. Well, I just spent some money and some time on a course.
Speaker 3:What did that course actually teach me? And as an ADHD person, I'm a terrible student. So I was so glad in the format that the course was delivered with one that actually allowed discussion. It allowed that moment where I wasn't necessarily chasing show me that you've done your homework, it was let's talk about it, and then that it showed that we've done the homework because we could talk about it. You know we could engage with all the topics of discussion, even if maybe your worksheet wasn't filled in, you know, to the completeness, and I think you know it's so refreshing to have that because I was terrible at university because they have that very structured learning and it's, you know, the learning designed for 60 to 70% of the population, but it's maybe not designed for someone with a different brain or a different approach.
Speaker 2:No, and I wouldn't have said you were a bad student at all, and I firmly believe that we have to learn from each other and learn together. Um, so, some of those aspects of the course that were a bit more structured, the worksheets and those kinds of things, you know, for people who who need that and want that structure, great. But you know, we're all adults and we all choose to learn the way we want to learn. Um, we we ended up with a great community of people who did that course together and helped each other, which I'm so proud of.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was just such a little cohort that I think even in it had its own little diversities and its own ways that we could just even expose each other to a different approach or methodology or way of thinking. That then went back to you, got out of the particular lesson or week that you got out of it. But then you also, upon finishing the course and going back through some of the resources that you then got for life, like those worksheets whilst I probably finished, two thirds of them, you know, were there in my folder that I could go bam, I'll open this up. I want to look at those conversations we had about data and how to best present data or pick the data which makes you know things seem more impactful or, you know, more justifiable. I can go and look at that sheet and I can look at the resources that were part of that week course and I can go and look at the community that you've established and see if anyone's ever talked about it on that Facebook page or that LinkedIn sort of space, and feel confident that there's other people working in the same space, the same timeline, the same energies, same struggles, high risk, burnout or fatigue, probably at high percentages that other industries or other jobs that can be combated by understanding that you're part of a community that you know.
Speaker 3:Whilst you may not be able to speak about the specifics of the frustrations you're having or the struggles you're having, you can talk to someone and go hey, what's the self-care thing that you do? I'm having trouble, you know, with what I'm currently doing. Doesn't seem to be enough at the moment. Or does anybody have any suggestions about how you engage with this populace to get feedback or that kind of thing? Yeah, and it's definitely something that I've mentioned it to other people that are starting work in this space.
Speaker 3:I'm on a couple of little professional networks, but it's one that I'd recommend for anyone who is looking for that step to feel empowered and to really start thinking professionally about diversity and inclusion, as opposed to seeing it as you know, if I had. This is how I do it. This is if I want to skill myself up so that I can present it on a resume to say I really deserve this job, that's in my future. Or I want to be able to say that when this business takes the opportunity to have D&I, that there's people ready to step up and do it. You know, yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for sharing Tidge. I wanted to finish off with, I guess, a bit of a full circle question. So you know you're talking about your experience in primary school and high school and how it took some time, I guess, to find your people and your community, and I mean it sounded like you almost had to create it. I mean it sounded like you almost had to create it. You're now in Sydney. You seem very comfortable in yourself. From where I'm sitting, I wonder you know, have you found that community? Have you found your people?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's a combination of two things, right? So I'm a big believer in the energy that you put out into the world eventually has to go somewhere, right? And so I spent a lot of my adolescence and a lot of my time when I should have been finding out who I was or safely exploring that, either protecting that or shielding that, or trying to look at the ways I could carve a little bit of a space out for myself, right? And so then when I finally got to move to Sydney and was in a space where there was more diversity because there was more people and there was more opportunity to maybe have conversations about myself and what I thought and felt that was when I could really explore who I was. So I mentioned in that little spiel about my life before you know, here and now, that I was always the uncomfortable boy, like I was the person that would show up to a party and someone would go oh, thanks for coming, the boys are all outside and I'd kind of fumble out there and kind of sit there and they'd be talking about the football and I'd be like I, like I have tries I might never been able to to be involved or engaged by the football. I dated a footballer. He got more attractive every weekend. You know, it was something that I was like this is a heinous thing for me, you know. Um, you know, and that's mainly in jest, football is great sport and athletics if it's your thing, go for it.
Speaker 3:But for me, it really ingrained with me that I just wasn't quite fitting in that space and that, no matter how hard I tried, there was always an external pressure or what I perceived as external pressure to go and try and fit that mold. And it was during my time of being able to talk about myself with people and hear about other people, because we were talking about ourselves as opposed to quick, let's fill a gap of silence with. You know, oh, this is cool because that's what I expected them to want me to say that I met other people who had gone on gender journeys or were maybe of diverse gender or sexuality, and I was able to kind of look at that and go, oh, you're talking about how you were uncomfortable with how society always perceived you as a girl. I am uncomfortable with how society and people have always assumed I was a boy, like let's talk about this some more and and we like explored these notions which relatively are pretty like early in their socialization around, like gender, non-binary and, and gender diversity and and the what complicates things is you know how we see transgender versus non-binary versus cisgender and you know all of those different ways people define themselves and all of a sudden I was like, wait, if I can have this conversation with other people, then I can maybe have a conversation with my family or the structures that I exist in. And instead of pretending to fit the mold and just doing what I can to get through in those spaces because I didn't want to waste the spoons or energy, I could go.
Speaker 3:Maybe I can do what I did as a kid and carve a little bit of space and then see if it crumbles behind it to make space for me and then maybe other people behind me. You know, one of the biggest things that I think informs what I do today is the success of that Gay Straight Student Alliance in high school. You know, whilst it never felt big, my little sister went through the same school after I left and had two out gay friends who could walk through the playground without fruit throwing at them, and that will always bring me so much joy because I made someone else's experience more positive by sharing my own and acting upon that because I had the capacity to Like. It's so sad that so many people don't have the opportunity maybe because of safety, and particularly in third world countries or Middle Eastern countries and that, like standing up for gay people may result in violence. Western world, and particularly areas like Australia, me standing up and saying, hey, can we think about how this would affect other people has never come with the amount of risk that it may in other countries, and so that's allowed me the privilege of sort of going.
Speaker 3:I can be the person that I always wished was running ahead of me when I was a kid. Right, I can be the person I always wanted to see in the world, because if we want to try and strive for something, we need to have role models. We need to have people who exist and are happy, like if you can only fathom a queer existence as being negative or having consequences, it's so hard to bring positive mental health outcomes out of that, whereas if you can see someone who is thriving and not just surviving or those kind of things, it gives you so much more incentive to go. I can do that as well. It's that old adage of you can't be what you can't see.
Speaker 3:So I've taken all those lessons and those inspirations from a kid and I've gone. Well, I can still carve my way and create spaces and I can hopefully, as I'm sort of carving away, find those pockets where people have already existed and go yes, I'm welcome here, great, I feel safe, I can recharge, and then I can say, hey, we're all here together, but have we ever thought about how this system currently doesn't serve us? How would we change that and actually look at that from that angle? I think is where I am. So, yes, I can say I found my space, but I'm so determined to connect my space with the other people who need to find that space and to maybe look at how we positively change and affect and impact the world, to actually be more open to diversity, because we are all the better for it.
Speaker 2:Completely, and that was so well said. Thank you so much for sharing your journey and your achievements, and I can't wait to see what you do next.
Speaker 3:I'm sure we'll stay in touch and, as I said, you know to you outside of this podcast, I'm so looking forward to the chance we actually can connect and use the coaching session which comes as a part of the course that you run. You get a little bit of a free coaching session and I'm ready to take that and run with that when I've had the more capacity to do so, and I'm sure that I will be one of those people who follows avidly the little community you've established on Facebook and LinkedIn, because I've already enjoyed just being part of that.
Speaker 2:So Thank you, and I'm here for you whenever you're ready. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thanks, lisa, and you know good luck with editing, because I'm a vivose human and I've been talked around and around and around.
Speaker 2:It's all good.
Speaker 1:Tidge learnt so much from attending six weeks to get started in diversity and inclusion. Tidge learnt so much from attending six weeks to get started in diversity and inclusion and we loved having them as part of the course. If you want to work in diversity and inclusion, join the waitlist now for six weeks to get started in diversity and inclusion. Enrolments open on 10th of March and the course kicks off on 21st of March. Go to the show notes for all the links. At the Culture Ministry we know how challenging and lonely it can be working in diversity and inclusion and how progress is often slow. You might be just getting started in diversity and inclusion or you might be on your way. The Culture Ministry is here to help you with your diversity and inclusion progress. Go to wwwthecultureministrycom to learn more. If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something, please share with your friends on social media. Give a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity makes it easier for others to find a dog called diversity.