The past two weeks have brought about a significant reflection of systemic racism in the U.K., the U.S., and abroad. We believe that the education and publishing industries have an opportunity to facilitate better education on racism and broader access to education for Black and other ethnic minority students.
This week at BibliU we have held a number of discussions with all members of our team on what we can do to support the Black Lives Matter movement. As a company BibliU believes in the importance of action, namely action that can have a lasting positive impact on society.
Our action plan is separated into two categories; Community and Internal. We’re sharing both publicly because we want to establish an expectation within the industry that companies can and should do more to build a progressive and equal society.
We will aim to offer this collection for free, subject to publisher approval and support.
The core purpose will be to provide resources that educate university students on the effects of systematic racism on Black people, their resistance, and resistance, white privilege and amplify Black and ethnic minority authors/scholars.
This collection will be offered to all of our university partners. If you are interested in contributing to this collection as a publisher, or just staying up to date on our progress with this collection, please contact impact@bibliu.com.
We will aim to offer this collections for free, subject to publisher approval and support.
The core purpose will be to provide resources that support the process of decolonization of study materials at university. Making it easier for academics to teach the proper context of colonialism and its legacies.
If you are interested in contributing to this collection as a publisher, or just staying up to date on our progress with this collection, please contact impact@bibliu.com.
We will offer this collection for free to all of our university partners.
OER will make it easier for universities to adopt resources that make education more accessible. This is especially important because Black and other ethnic minority students are disproportionately impacted by the cost of education.
We want to reduce the complexity of distributing OER and make it easier for universities to make the switch.
If you are interested in contributing to this collection as a publisher, or just staying up to date on our progress with this collection, please contact impact@bibliu.com.
BibliU’s employees have carefully curated and contributed to an anti-racism resource pack. We’re sharing it publicly with you via this link, to help you be actively anti-racist.
We invite you to share it with your employees too.
BibliU’s Anti-Racism Resources Pack
We will be introducing a referral system for existing university partners to refer BibliU to their peers and at the same time, donate to worthwhile causes, including those that contribute to a better society.
A more detailed description of this system will be shared soon, once we have clarified the organisations and process.
If you’re interested in hearing more about it and keeping up to date, please contact impact@bibliu.com.
We’re introducing a number of key changes and investment in areas we consider important to building a culture that our employees love and are proud of.
We’re fortunate to have a team of wonderful people who are driven to educate themselves and do what they can to contribute to this movement. We’re using the anti-racism resource pack to drive conversation on the topic internally and supporting our employees by allotting time so they can make use of those resources.
We’re introducing unconscious bias training to ensure our employees understand how they might be unknowingly biased toward or against their peers, or our customers, in day to day interactions. This will be implemented on an ongoing basis in three stages:
Have you implemented unconscious bias training at your business, if so, we would appreciate your suggestions and can be reached at impact@bibliu.com.
We’re introducing changes to our recruitment approach, which includes more targeted investment to improve the diversity of our candidates, and removing bias where possible from our existing recruitment strategy.
We’re also going to be reaching out to community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), specifically with regard to our internship opportunities.
If you would like to discuss our approach to diversity and inclusion during recruitment, please reach out to impact@bibliu.com.
These changes at BibliU, and our actions aren’t exhaustive, but we hope it spurs change in other organizations and education more broadly. We also hope it displays our commitment to building a progressive and equal society. We’ll follow up in 6 months time to see how we’ve gone, on delivering these changes internally, and these avenues for change to the community.
If you have comments, or suggestions on our action plan, you can reach us at impact@bibliu.com and we would be happy to discuss it with you.
Finally, thank you to all of our employees at BibliU for their contributions to this response. It would not be possible without you.
.avif)
To thank our team for their outstanding contributions and to encourage them to take time to rest, prioritize their well-being, and do what makes them happy, we want to give time back.
.avif)
More Than 150 Higher Education Institutions Rely on BibliU’s Learning Enablement Platform for Digital Content
.avif)
BibliU is a digital textbook platform that offers over 30,000 digital textbooks to students and faculty at Coventry University.
