850 words
Notes on Inclusion & Inclusivity.
The Argyle Housing ‘Inclusivity’ page text is itself an exercise in Exclusion, and privilege and reads as rather tone-deaf. It is plagiarised without reference or attribution, and excludes more groups than it includes.
INCLUDING most of the original page it was stolen from!
In their place is last year’s promise to have rainbow logos for Pride month, which we are now two-thirds of the way through for 2023 and no logo change.
Yes, I realise there was a re-branding in-between, but still.
It wasn’t done last year, either. There was a link labelled ‘Pride’ to the new (for them, but at least a few years old) Inclusivity page on the homepage, but no logo change.
Inclusion+++ & Fixes
Also, Inclusion is about way more than sexuality & gender! Race, religion, age and disability are just the start of the list.
I try not to criticise without offering solutions, in this case a trifecta of quick fixes:
- Use full text from the VMIAC original, with Attribution
- Apologise publically on the page for plagiarism
- Follow promises, and use logos I created for you last night
- Have someone with an intersection of lived experience rewrite the whole page.
Or, you could do a hasty rewrite,
make some stuff up, and
hope no-one notices.
The fourth is not so quick, but more important.
Even more important is to bring some people onto the board and staff who have a lived experience of these and other areas, say homelessness.
Hey, I have an intersection of more than four areas your board appears to be lacking, as well as risk management + mitigation, a good understanding of Robert’s Rules, and lots of other interesting things too.
Promises Abandoned
Actions
Argyle Housing has been the opposite of inclusive in its actions, or even its words in Ainslie Village.
We’ll look into it, all in good time, and the actual blatant and overt discrimination I and others have experienced is not acceptable and is in violation of the contract with the ACT government.
Logos
The promise to have rainbow logos sounds good, but only if they happen, and it is more of a gay-washing exercise anyhow.
Regardless, I threw together some options for you last night, which will save you a few hundred dollars in design fees.
Use those you prefer, but use at *least* one!
I even fixed the error/artifact in your original logo- the fuzzy light blue line in the middle of the ‘H’.
Colours used are mostly lifted directly from this set of Pantone Pride posters I bought a while back.
Plagiarism
Sure it happens a lot on the web, but that is no excuse for a community organisation doing it!
Almost all of the ‘Inclusivity’ page text is a straight copy of the content from this VMIAC page, with the exception of the title and first three paragraphs.
These original paragraphs were important, and establish lived experience and acknowledge the fluidity of such pages.
The Argyle Housing version does not just cut out these, it drops out many definitions, in fact 61% of the original paragraphs and definitions are excluded (57% by word count). And I’m being generous and not counting headings as separate paragraphs!
Find my spreadsheet analysis here – I’m open to having made errors, and I value transparency. I have also captured the pages as they appear in June 2023 as pdfs.
The words are stolen verbatim, no changes, though they are reordered, which in itself shows bias! Ugh.
94% of the words on the page are plagiarised verbatim.
Inclusion vs Inclusivity
It makes some sense that Argyle Housing uses the word Inclusivity over Inclusion.
Although both words are officially nouns according to dictionaries, Inclusion at the very start of their definitions has “the act” or “the action”.
And that is the most important thing about inclusion.
Action, not pretty (or even mangled) words. Action.
Inclusivity’s “fact” or ‘policy’ is much more passive.
True Inclusion
Inclusion is so much more than words, or policy, it is action.
It is also about a lot more than just Sexuality and Gender!
It means more than rainbow-washing, putting on a show. Changing a graphic. No.
It means NOT:
- leaving homophobic graffiti visible for three months at the Ainslie Village entrance.
- closing down the Rainbow Room, the only safe/queer space in Ainslie VIllage.
- minimising when someone is being verbally abused & discriminated against on a daily basis, has death threats levelled at them.
- saying “They don’t really mean it, they’re not going to really kill you”
- discriminating against any person, for any reason.
It means a hell of a lot MORE, but is anyone at Argyle Housing really listening?
and some boring reference bits…
Definitions, and word popularity by Google
“inclusion noun
the act of including someone or something as part of a group, list, etc., or a person or thing that is included“
About 2,160,000,000 results (Google)
“inclusivity noun
the fact of including all types of people, things or ideas and treating them all fairly and equally“
About 118,000,000 results (Google)
Definitions from Cambridge with reference to Oxford Languages
