The last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a couple of different projects. I’m scoping three research projects to increase compliance and awareness of cyber security. Another project seeks to improve behaviours on COVID-19 safety. The other big chunk of work is for our disability inclusion steering committee.

Disability inclusion

As you know, I sit on our steering committe overseeing our organisation’s disability inclusion action plan. The plan is in its final draft. It’s with executives for their final comments.

Today, I started off having to brief our executive director on the specific implications of the disability inclusion action plan for our branch. I noted his final comments on the overall draft.

I later had to brief my director on the disability inclusion action plan, because there are four actions for our team. The plan will scale up some of our behavioural interventions from our diversity trials. He needs to approve the actions, and provide input into the plan.

Equity training

We had our team meeting, which he goes for an hour and a half. This included a 45-minute practical learning exercise led by an academic sociologist. They took us through their methodology that is helpful for interviewing vulnerable people. It facilitates participants to tell their own stories about events that have been meaningful in their lives, as well as identifying patterns that lead to risky behaviour, and possible points of impact.

I coordinated the session to pick up on our previous training.

We’re trying to encourage the team to come up with new behavioural interventions that consider how our research directly benefits and contributes to the life goals of vulnerable groups.

Goodbye song

Our team continued our team meeting with an online going away celebration for our director, who is taking 12 months maternity leave. Our new director has been with us for a couple of days. Our executive director also came to the party. Unfortunately for them, this meant they were exposed to our usual shenanigans.

Today we dressed in Easter bonnets because our director loves dressing up in costumes. We gave her presents, had speeches, and sang her ‘Eye of the tiger.’ We have a running gag in our team whenever we have a birthday that we sing happy birthday – except it’s atrocious. Nobody sings on time. It’s painful. Our outgoing director really hates it. So of course we had to sing. (I did try to stop it, but I was outvoted!)

Meetings

I had back to back meetings until the end of the day.

One meeting was on cybersecurity with federal government colleagues about a campaign that they’re running.

We also attended a meeting about one of my projects, which is in scale up. We are discussing the 12 month results, and have very complex data to interpret. We need to plan the next steps, because we’re getting ready to report our findings to our governance group.

We had a planning meeting for our trial on COVID-19. We’re going through the trial design. Very exciting! We’ve got some online field work coming up.

Personal research

Finally, on my personal research, during my lunch break, my colleague and I filmed another interview for our web series. We interviewed Sanmati Verma, an immigration lawyer, and Prof Sujutha Fernandes, a political economist. The video will be out in the coming weeks.