I was thinking about this issue a lot in preparing for an upcoming JEDI+ workshop on ‘Cultures of Belonging’ in the workplace. What is a workplace to its people, and what do they need from it? Here I’m talking specifically about social impact, NGOs, and other organisations in our sector.

But the topic came back to me as I planned this training, and I reflected more on the role of privilege and allyship.

Let’s suppose you are working in a relatively political stable climate, where your work and life are not under threat. You just have the ‘normal’ complaints about a workplace – no equity in pay and no salary transparency. You are the only woman in the workplace not in a leadership role, and the only Indian in the workplace, and the constant leering makes you feel threatened and like an outsider. Yes, this is a true story.

I know how hard it is to even voice these feelings of not belonging, fitting in, feeling valued. I remember how much it took to even mention them to colleagues I trusted. However once that happened, I saw how the importance of allyship in a workplace.

To start off with, an ally is not something you can call yourself – it’s a title you are given when you display proper acts of solidarity, support, and care for others.

An ally is someone with relative power in situations. They may not be the most powerful person in a group, but they have relative power over you – they may belong to the dominant caste, language group, or gender of your workplace. This means they are given some level of legitimacy or respect that you are not. And if they are good people and you can trust them, their support can make your experiences be taken seriously, which wouldn’t have happened if you were the only person who spoke out.

They also don’t stand to gain anything directly, besides just doing the right thing and supporting someone.

I had the support of cis-gendered male colleagues and a national union in advocating for an equitable salary at my first job, for example. No one was obliged to support me, beyond their sense of doing the right thing and our relationship, in the case of my colleagues.

It was only after I received financial equity that I realised what had been missing for me to feel like I belonged there – an intangible feeling of respect from the people around me, particularly management and HR.

Once that happened, I felt the confidence to put myself forwards for other things, and the newsroom felt much more like a place of joyful creativity and productivity. I pitched for and was given new ‘beats’, covered important press conferences, went on training courses, and took on more editorial responsibilities.

This happened because I felt heard, respected, seen, valued, all of that.

All of this to say – we can all be allies to someone else. We all have relative privilege and power in any given situation.

With the level of strain many of us face in the sector, an ally can be our most invaluable support, so take the time to think about the circles where your voice could help support another colleague. Are you part of a dominant cultural or gender group?

How could you use that as an ‘in’ to speak to other power holders, and represent your colleagues in spaces they wouldn’t normally access?

I support early career professionals, especially young South Asian women, in their job application and salary negotiation process. Salary is a very personal topic to me, and I want to take my experiences and lessons forward, and hopefully prevent at least one person from feeling as I did at the start of my career. (If that’s you by the way, please reach out and schedule a chat with me here, I’d love to support you!)

How else can we support our colleagues to feel like they belong, or feel valued, respected, included? I would love your thoughts – what opportunities do you have to be a good ally, and what do you need support with?