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KCL Race equity and Inclusive Education Fund

CORE-unity

Coalition for Outreach, Reform, and Empowerment

Staff and student coproduction

Staff and students working together at KCL's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) to develop a student-led set of policies to improve racial equity within the department going forward, creating extra-curricular opportunities, and encouraging minoritised students to network.


01.

CORED

Student advisory board

CORED logo

CORED stands for Committee of Racial Equity and Diversity. It also stands for empowering students to be the change they wish to see at King's. It's our student action group, who steer our agenda and, by the end of the academic year, will publish their recommendations to improve the racially minoritised student experience at the IoPPN.


02.

MSC

Racially minoritised student body

Our Minoritised Student Collective. A larger group of students for CORED to consult with, and who constitute the audience for our larger networking events: starting with a day looking at the role medicalisation plays in racialisation, on December 15th.


03.

Faculty Advisory Board

Institutional partners

The staff and former students who began this project remain in facilitative and delivery roles, and will ultimately take the lead in delivering on the recommendations CORED makes. Supporting the student group in making their own decisions, rather than imposing their own.


In-depth

Project context

Our project is interdepartmental, involving faculty from Psychosis Studies and Student Experience, recent alumni, and other colleagues from across the campus. It aims to empower and assist MSc students at the IoPPN in making positive changes to curricula, pedagogical approaches, and the overall climate of the institution, and to encourage them to connect with each other socially and professionally. We hope students will gain confidence in organising against inequity, and take that mindset and these relationships forward into their careers.


We began with two principal objectives: to create a coproductive framework affording our racially minoritised MSc students the opportunity to affect meaningful, forward-looking change in the ways issues of racial equity are handled on campus; and to encourage and facilitate professional and social networking among those same students in the IoPPN.Meeting the first goal demands that the project is a genuine coproduction, avoiding tokenising approaches and ensuring that participating students are truly respected, treated as equal partners, and engaged with fully in the process. As such, our student advisors are both given actual responsibility and fairly recompensed for their work: their CORED group is tasked with producing a set of guidelines promoting racial equity best practice within the IoPPN, organising social events, and setting our agenda.While ‘making friends’ may seem a secondary concern, we see encouraging racially minoritised students to network with each other early in their careers as essential in building the foundations of the support network they'll access throughout their working lives: and the more empowered minoritised professionals feel at work, the more able they’ll feel to challenge structural inequities.


Contact

HUMAN CONNECTION

Project funded by the King's College London Racial Equity and Inclusive Education Fund.