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Black History Month: A Flock Summary

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This Black History Month at Flock we wanted to join in with the theme of a “Festival of Celebration” and shine a light on the achievements of past and present influential black people within the community. Whilst we wanted to keep a positive stance for the month, we also wanted to highlight struggles still experienced by black individuals. With this in mind, we commissioned Jason Clue, a behavioural specialist and author, to run a Cognitive Bias Workshop with Flock. Along with running insightful workshops such as this, Jason has written books including The Traveller Project and most recently, 21 Rules of Blackness.

The workshop covered implicit bias, where the team were able to participate in several activities to test our own biases and think about the ways in which it can influence our decisions, thoughts, and perceptions. Moreover, the workshop was incredibly invaluable providing a safe space for necessary discussions, constructive advice on how to actively address our bias and reflect of the micro and macros effects.

“What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.”

― Duncan J. Watts

We appreciate how far society has come in recent years, but this month has also reminded us of how much more work still needs to be done. Moving forward we at Flock would like to continue learning and developing internally and using that knowledge to invest in our black employees and the black community.

We would also like to highlight black employees at Flock and the amazing work they continue to do.

Aysha Haynes – Head of Operations, who is constantly supporting the well-being of the team, helping Flock grow and who also co-wrote both of our guides on authentic representation. 

Norah Opara – New Business and Marketing Manager, who has joined the team and hit the ground running taking on a huge workload and who has already had a great impact on our internal and external processes. 

Estigia Cruz – Client Account Manager, project managing all projects that span across the US, she has been doing quant analysis for the Flock tools and helping onboard and mentor the US execs.

Mahad Hassan – Marketing Data Analyst, who has been doing great work automating custom benchmarking of FAST tool projects using Python and automating the calculation of agency cost savings using Python. 

Nicole Afflick – Senior Marketing Executive, who has worked hard supporting Flock with all their client work, mentored interns and helped them successfully enter the working environment and Nicole also co-wrote our guides on authentic representation.

Khia Pryce – Marketing Intern, who has joined flock and made an impact organising and participating in Flocks cultural days, analysing data, helping with the project management of client work and designing our guide on authentic representation.

Resources

Unconscious Bias Examples

Microaggressions Examples

Harvard Implicit Bias Test

Starbucks Showed This Short Film to its Employees to Teach Them About Racial Bias

Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity by Brenda J.Allen

Black History Month in Marketing

Being Black in the UK by Bakita Kasadha – Sainsburys

The Black Plaque Project – Nubian Jak Community Trust x Havas London

Black Voices – Mind UK

#ThisisBlack – TikTok

Black to Front – Channel 4 (all year round)

In collaboration with ISBA, Flock has previously published a guide on Authentic Representation that highlights the need for diversity and inclusion and ways on how businesses can ACT to achieve and measure this.

If you would like to discuss this further or any of the topics mentioned, please contact us.

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