We're going through data as we do every quarter. We got some great feedback (as ever! – more of which later) but we’ve also been actively seeking out negative feedback to find things we can improve. This was an interesting one on the Digital Champions Network (DCN) course “Essentials for engaging with older people”....
“I sort of resent the suggestion that this course isn’t being done by an older person.”
This made us stop and think.
- We know a good percentage of volunteer Champions are older people.
- We know the best Champions are often those who’ve struggled with digital themselves – who’ve been “on the journey”.
- A good percentage of our team are “older people” in the “over 50s” bracket.
- And we’ve all done the unconscious bias” skills boost on the DCN too!
So we should be looking out for it. Maybe this comes down to the “othering” of digital exclusion – that we see it as something that affects other people not us – while “we” are the people who are helping fix it. But we need to remember it could be any and all of us on either side of the divide.
(Answer: the person in the blue shirt is Brian, Digital Champion par excellence @ClarionFutures. But one of the nice things about this picture is it could be either. And unlike those stock photo “young person points at an older person’s screen as they fix their problems”, there’s no patronising sense of someone taking over someone else’s screen – just people working with each other)