Summary
Frigga and Jens talk with Sarah from PF UK about inclusivity in organizations, specifically in PF UK
Episode 24
00:00:10
Jens: Welcome to the Wyrd Thing podcast, episode 24. This is our second episode in our small series about inclusivity in organizations. I’m Jens. I’m joined today by our guest Sarah.
00:00:22
Sarah: Hi there.
00:00:23
Jens: And my co-host today is Frigga. Frigga I think you would like to say some introduction words to this episode.
00:00:32
Frigga: Yes, please.
With every discussion on inclusivity and diversity, I realized how much more I still have to learn. I become more aware of my own biases and how a lack of safe space affects me personally. As a neurodivergent with fibromyalgia, a disabling chronic illness. In the previous episode, inclusivity 101, our guest, Berkeley Wilde, said: Social change takes time. Something to be aware of and I’m not always that patient. Inclusivity and diversity requires ongoing commitment and calls for exploring one’s own biases, preferences and assumptions, and how they have an impact on everyday behavior on a personal level and within an organization or community. It may be that you feel offended or uncomfortable about things people from marginalized groups want to bring to attention, no matter how annoying. For whatever reason you may find it to hear, that is no reason not to listen to what someone actually says. Listening, deep listening shows empathy and gives a chance to learn. One of my mottos is from the community, for the community. That applies as well for inclusivity. Within heathen communities, there is a lot of expertise from people with a disability, from LGBTQIA+ people, people with neurodiversity and all others. As Berkeley Wilde put it: Nothing about us without us. What could the role of heathen and pagan organizations bein becoming inclusive and becoming even more inclusive.And welcoming diversity for the organization itself, and for hidden pagan communities? How to give people from marginalized groups of force. How to create safe space and share knowledge and tools to navigate the do’s and don’ts. Sarah. We would love to have thoughts on this, but maybe you first would like to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about the Pagan Federation.
00:02:57
Sarah:Thank you Frigga. I’m a witch and a healer from Derbyshire in the UK, and four years ago I see as president of the Pagan Federation. The Pagan Federation was born in 1971 out of a need for an organisation that would defend the rights of all pagans, particularly in the 70s. Here in the UK, the Anti Witchcraft Bill was about to be reintroduced and the spiritual lives of a lot of people were under threat and people behind the Pagan Federation wrote letters, got their community to write letters and actually ended up going to Parliament to try and get that squashed. And then was born the Pagan Federation, out of a need for a lack of discrimination, people for practising their beliefs while they weren’t harming anyone. There was a lot of misconception, a lot of misunderstanding. And the PF has done that ever since. We’ve been here to fight for people’s rights when it comes to practising their beliefs.
00:04:00
Jens: Thank you. Sarah. Before we dive into our actual topic about inclusivity, I think it would help especially our listeners outside the UK, if you tell a bit more about the Pagan Federation, because I think you’re quite well known in the UK, but outside not so much. Paint as a picture of what this organisation is, please.
00:04:20
Sarah: Okay, so I mean, we’ve expanded and grown so much over the years. We started, um, with a relatively small group of people wanting to help people, to find other people that had similar beliefs and practices, and that expanded and grew. So we started looking at groups within the UK, and that had expanded by the end of the 1990s to include most of the rest of the world. We had people in Scotland, Ireland, um, we had someone in the Netherlands, you know, it just grew and grew and grew. And now we have Pagan Federations in Scotland, in Ireland, in Germany and international as well. So the Pagan Federation really is here for all pagans across the world in some way or another.
00:05:08
Jens: Okay, let’s just start with a few facts then. How large are you currently?
00:05:13
Sarah: Here in the UK we have about 2500 members, but we have a reach of about 20,000 pagans in the community. Internationally, we cover probably about two thirds of the world. The other third being places that pagans still aren’t safe to practice. Um, so we don’t have a presence in those countries in order to keep people safe.
00:05:36
Jens: I understood that you’re a charity in the UK today.
00:05:40
Sarah: We are since March of this year, which has been a huge achievement. Getting paganism recognised on a national level in that respect is such a huge thing, and not just for pagans here in the UK, but across the world as well. That recognition, that understanding that we are a legitimate belief is, um, I can’t understate how huge it is, and especially off the back of the UN resolution around, uh, witch hunts being made illegal, um, across the world with the UN. So the legitimacy, the understanding of paganism is growing exponentially. And that can only be a good thing.
00:06:22
Jens: So being a charity, what is your actual charitable purpose?
00:06:26
Sarah: We have three purposes. One is the advancement of education of the general public about paganism or paganisms, should I say? Um, there isn’t just one path or tradition to follow. Another one is to promote religious harmony. So a lot of interfaith work, a lot of inter government organization work is required for that one so that we can create that harmony between pagans and people of other faiths. And the last one is to support the community and to ensure that they’re advocated for, supported, and that their pagan beliefs don’t exclude them from anything.
00:07:07
Jens: That sounds great, but still sounds a bit abstract to me. Could you tell us a bit about specific activities you’re doing there?
00:07:15
Sarah: So there’s a few key things that we’re doing in terms of let’s use advocacy as the first example. Um, so a lot of people still face that discrimination when it comes to practicing their pagan beliefs. A good example would be a case fairly recently about a couple who were facing discrimination in the family’s courts while they were undergoing a case regarding their child, and someone had stated that their pagan beliefs were a safeguarding risk to their child. And our advocacy officer spoke to the court system and said, look, this isn’t, this isn’t okay. Pagan beliefs are legitimate. They are not a safeguarding risk. This is not a viable case. And they managed to get it absolved out of court and got their child back and all was well. And we see a lot of cases of individuals in workplaces, for example. We had another case where one of our board actually had our own website banned in the workplace. They couldn’t access it over their work computers, but they could access, for example, the Church of England website and our advocacy officer successfully spoken to their bosses and got them to waive that and they were able then to access the Pagan Federation website. So there’s a lot of areas of life where people might face discrimination. Um, those those are a couple of examples. We’ve had people in the workplaces, uh, wanting people to take off their religious jewellery because they find it in quotes here offensive or dangerous, and we’ve successfully fought those as well. But other areas of work as well. We work to make sure that people can receive pastoral support at any point in their life. So we work with the Prison Service, with the Health Service to ensure that chaplaincy is available for people and not just any chaplaincy, but pagan chaplaincy, so that they have that spiritual understanding right at the worst moments of their life where they really need it. We work with government offices like counter-terrorism and the police to make sure that they’re trained and understand what pagan beliefs are and where it’s normal pagan practice, and then where it should be that they’re concerned about this practice. So we work to make sure that they have an understanding so people aren’t unjustly arrested or detained for their beliefs without any understanding behind it. So there’s a few examples of the work we do.
00:09:47
Jens: One you mentioned in our pre-chat, and which made me incredibly envious, was that you mentioned that you have some members in the local boards and the council who set the curricula for religious education in school.
00:10:03
Sarah: Yes, we do, we and we also work with the Religious Education Council and local authority. They’re called sacred committees, and they are involved with looking at the curriculum in their local area. So we do have some pagans that sit on salaries across the UK, and they’re involved in making sure that the curriculum is balanced. A lot of it is driven by census numbers. So where there are particularly large concentrations of pagans, they will try and make sure that paganism are on the national curriculum for religious education, and that it’s being taught in a balanced and moderate way.
00:10:42
Jens: That sounds fascinating and great. It also sounds a bit dry and legal. So are you a kind of pagan community in yourself, or are you mainly this administrative organisation who does all this advocacy?
00:10:59
Sarah: There’s almost two faces to the Pagan Federation. So there’s this, um, you’re quite right. It can be quite dry, but at the same time incredibly exciting, to be quite honest with you. This work is very administrative behind the scenes and very much kind of driven towards this very official kind of work. But then there’s this other face of the PF is completely the opposite, and we’re here for the community. So we run community groups. We have district offices that help people connect with people locally. We run events, conferences with talks and music and that sort of thing. So there are these very two different faces of the PF and that are very intimately intertwined. But yeah, we’re not just here for the dry administrative stuff. We have fun community stuff too.
00:11:46
Jens: Oh, wonderful. I think I have a picture of the Pagan Federation right now. I can dive into our actual topic. Frigga do you have any more questions about the PF?
00:11:56
Frigga: No, I’m familiar with the PF. Okay. Lots of fun memories of gatherings.
00:12:04
Jens: Okay, then let’s start to dive into and let’s start at the very head of the organization. So my first question is how does the board educate themselves on inclusivity?
00:12:17
Sarah: We’re a very diverse board and we have a variety of traditions. So we’re diverse in our organisms, but we’re also diverse in terms of need and ability. So we do have members of our board that have physical disabilities. We do have members of our board that neurodivergent, for example. One area that we could improve on is that we’re not very diverse in terms of People of Colour and of traditions outside of the UK. We’re very UK heavy, and I suppose that’s to be expected given. We’re a UK organization, but it is something that I would like to, I would like to change, but we do try and ensure that our board is as diverse as possible, because we do understand that that’s the only way to ensure that you’re hearing the voices of lots of different people.
00:13:13
Jens: Okay, that’s for the board. Then if we speak about the members, how does the board try to raise awareness with the members about inclusivity?
00:13:22
Sarah: We have a variety of ways. We do very periodically issue sort of, um, surveys that people can complete so that they’ve got an anonymous space to give their views. But we also run what we call our community support team. So we have, um, several teams that specifically look after pagans with a particular need in a particular area of their life. So we have the accessibility team, we have the children and families team, we have the LGBTQIA plus team. And we try and make sure that those teams are as diverse as possible in terms of, for example, the accessibility team. The accessibility lead is neurodiverse, and they also have experience with physical disabilities. And the team members will be diverse in terms of their need and ability. And the same with the LGBTQIA team. We try and make sure that the team members are made up of a diverse range of people as possible, and the same with the children and families team. Actually, they’re all either parents or siblings and family. They those families might look very different, so they might be your standard mum, dad, two kids, they might be two parents of the same gender. And we try and make sure that it’s as inclusive and as diverse as possible. When we’re recruiting, we will always look for the right person to do the role, but it’s it’s always great to have the ability to listen to these people and to have their experiences first hand, because then that informs the services that we do, the things that we do for our community.
00:15:03
Jens: Could you go a bit more into detail about what these teams are doing, maybe the accessibility team, what their purpose and function is?
00:15:13
Sarah: Yeah, they do a few things. So they spearheaded online festivals before they were even a thing. They started back in 2016 and we were the first organisation really to take any kind of faith practice online. We realised that a lot of our community couldn’t get out, um, get out into nature, get out to the sites that were local to them, that were of interest to them in terms of their faith and belief. Then manager started running online festivals, videos, text, blogs and that kind of stuff so that it was filled with ways of connecting with people that couldn’t get out of their homes for whatever reason. And what they also do now is they help other events organisers make sure that they’re accessible. They provide advice, and they provide advocacy for people with disabilities and accessibility needs. So if a pagan comes across an event that could be accessible but isn’t because the organisers aren’t thinking about how to make it accessible, then our team can help and support with that. The LGBT team also run an online pride festival, so again making sure there’s that inclusivity across the board. A lot of our LGBT members also have accessibility needs, so making sure that they can access safe drawers where they don’t have to be concerned about people that are around them or getting out of the house to manage it. But they also provide advocacy and signposting to other services should they be needed outside of the PF as well. And the families team, they do provide local meetups. They also provide a lot of online resources for families that are looking to bring their families up within pagan beliefs, so they have activity packs with these cute little patches that you can earn when you’ve done the park and all sorts of things. So, um, so they provide activities, they provide that support and advice for organisations, but also for the people that are within the community as well.
00:17:14
Frigga: This is really great to hear that there is this awareness and the attention that all these different committees, or how do you call them are as diverse as possible, because that’s what I said in my intro. It’s so needed to give the people themselves a voice. And would you be willing, as Pagan Federation, to provide other organisations which are not a member with with your expertise?
00:17:39
Sarah: We’re absolutely here for that. We do help other organisations with their policy. We do help other organisations with understanding what those needs are and how to fulfil them. We don’t often get asked for it. Um, since gaining the charitable status, we have been talking about how to make that more possible. We’d really like to see the community coming together a lot more working together for, for especially these things as well, for making sure that our accessibility is at the forefront of their minds when they’re organising their events and not just their physical events, their online events as well. We’ve had a few sort of reports of people not using subtitles, for example, when they’re using video, and there’s lots of ways that you can be a lot more accessible, and they’re always happy to talk to other organisations about it.
00:18:31
Frigga: That’s great, because there is no reason that all kind of people or organizations have to reinvent the wheel again, and the knowledge is there.
00:18:39
Sarah: Absolutely.
00:18:41
Jens: Speaking about knowledge, which is there, in our pre-chat, we talked about accessibility for neurodiverse people at actual events. And you came up with some very, very practical tips for that, which I would like to include in the official recording as well.
00:19:00
Sarah: Okay. You might have to remind me what they were, so I make sure I hit the points.
00:19:06
Jens: Yeah, the one was about the length of lectures and things like that, which tend to be quite long sometimes. So on the events I’ve attended, there was the general schedule overall, but the individual lectures would differ between 30 and 120 minutes.
00:19:23
Sarah: Yeah, I think there’s a lot that events organizers could learn from, from everyday society and anything, but it would definitely support neurodivergent people. When we run events, we try and keep our talks quite short. We realise that attention span and struggling with that is a huge thing for neurodiverse people. So we try and keep our talks down to less than, definitely less than 30 minutes. But if possible, you know, around 20 minutes because it’s a long time to sit and focus on something. When you’re neurodiverse, it’s it becomes uncomfortable and then it becomes inaccessible to them. So we’d much rather make sure that they even if it means splitting a talk 2 or 3 parts, perhaps we make sure that that is available for our visitors. And we also have things like making sure that sound levels are quite low. We don’t allow things like burning incense at our events because that can be overwhelming on a sensory level. So we’re very careful about making sure that our events are accessible not only to neurodiverse people, but anybody else who might have sensory processing problems or sensitivities to things like light and smell. You know, we we try and make sure that these things are tied in. And we also try and make sure that that ties in with our care and love for the environment as well. So there’s a lot of consultation that goes on with our environmental officer and our accessibility officer, and we try and make sure that it’s all kind of brought together in a, in a way that makes it accessible and sustainable and, um, okay for everyone.
00:21:05
Frigga: I really loved what you talked about how you work with circles in your meditation class. Could you tell about that? Great.
00:21:15
Sarah: So that’s my own thing. Um, when I, um, I teach meditation and I run circles, um, here at my home therapy room and workshop rooms. And one of the things that I was really keen on because my own, my two sons are neurodiverse, so is my husband. And they all said, we can’t meditate, we can’t meditate. And it took me a little while to figure it out, but I did. They can meditate. It’s just that they need to be moving, or they need to have their focus on something that they can pay attention to. So when I started the meditation circle that I run, I was very keenly aware. And of course, all this work around accessibility that we’ve been doing with the PF kind of kicked into touch. And it was like, right, so let’s make sure that this is accessible for everyone. I set up three circles to my meditation group. So the inner circle is for those who want to sit still and quiet with their eyes maybe closed, or at least softly focused on a particular image. Um, and then the next circle is those that need to sort of fidget or move or do something. So we have colouring sheets available and fidget toys and that kind of stuff. And then the outer circle is for those that need to move. So they need to get up and physically move. So maybe they walk or maybe they jump, or maybe they do whatever it is that will help them to focus and that allows them to meditate, which is a great thing, really.
00:22:36
Frigga: I love it due to my own lack of energy. It is mainly is is that I need to sit down during rituals and my own rituals. The whole group is sitting down. That means that I’m not the only one, or there’s only 1 or 2 persons. And the last couple of times we visit Eldering in Germany, I was really glad that now there are benches for the main rituals, and it feels so I’d say. Yeah, you feel more welcome, more at home, that you’re not the only one. And if I see how many people sit down, I guess that has have been actually way more people before this who needed to sit down and now feel comfortable to sit down. So you’re more or less have two circles and yeah, you feel more included.
00:23:27
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:28
Frigga: And not just included, but able to make your choice according to where you’re at on that particular day. You know, even some of the attendees meditation circle, they’ll sit quiet in the inner circle for one, maybe. But then they might get up and walk for another. So so it allows them that chance to explore themselves as well and explore what they need, which is which is great.
00:23:53
Frigga: I think it’s also about changing your way of thinking to end up in a ritual, because that is showing respect for the gods and the spirit. No, sitting down is no less. Whether you you sit up, you lay down or you stand up, that makes no difference at all.
00:24:10
Sarah: In my experience, the gods don’t care. The fact that you’re there and and paying them that attention and that respect within that circle is all that’s needed.
00:24:20
Frigga: Yeah I agree.
00:24:21
Jens: We talked a lot about things which are going well right now. But Skipped one of the things we would like to talk about, which is your social media groups. You told us a bit about that in the pre-chat. And yeah. What are you doing on social media in groups there?
00:24:41
Sarah: Okay, so all our community support teams have their own Facebook groups, which are very closely safeguarded, and very closely monitored. They are intended to be entirely safe spaces for people to not only find their pagan community, but also to speak with other people who have similar, for example, accessibility needs, or talking to other families about what they practice or finding, you know, ideas and thoughts and advice and accessibility. And we found that that’s not an easy thing to do when it’s a large community groups. So we have our large community group for and there’s probably about 7000 people in there at the moment for all things pagan, uh, whatever they may be. So that’s advertising their events. It’s people asking questions. It’s people recommending resources that they found. There’s lots of things that go off in there. But linked to that, we have these individual groups that are meant to be and are maintained as very, very safe spaces. So the LGBTQIA group is the people that come in there are always vetted as for their safety. So we will always go and find out about them and make sure that we’re not letting someone enter who isn’t safe for LGBTQIA people. And we do the same with, uh, with the accessibility and the children and families team, make sure that those are maintained a safe spaces and and should anyone misbehaving, if those groups then we have a no tolerance policy and then they’re soon asked to leave.
00:26:16
Jens: It sounds surprising to create a safe space on social media these days, usually what the so-called social media is not. But it seems that with a lot of work you may achieve this.
00:26:28
Sarah: Absolutely. And I think that was the thinking behind it, was that a lot of social media isn’t all that safe, and you don’t know if it can be. So we were determined to make sure that we could have even just the smallest corner of it that was.
00:26:41
Jens: Okay. Now, we have talked a lot about things which are going well and sound absolutely amazing, but there’s always several sides to a story. So what are things which don’t go as smooth as you would like them to go?
00:26:56
Sarah: Um.I think I already mentioned at the top of this when we were talking about the makeup of the board, that we’re not very diverse in terms of cultures outside of traditions. We’re not very diverse in terms of people of colour, and I think they’re the things that aren’t going so well because we feel like we’re not supporting those communities as well as we probably could. We want to know more about, the beliefs and traditions that are outside of the UK. We want to know more about other beliefs and traditions that are here in the UK, but that come from other places. We want to know how we can support and help those communities, and I think that’s one of the things that’s not going so well at the moment, and that we really need to address and look at.
And there’s some of the things about the press attention that pagans of all kinds get, is something that we’re working really hard to try and do something about, but as Frigga said at the top, this changing these things takes a lot of time. And that’s just something that we’re going to have to work on, really. The same with our communication with other places within the government. You know, some places we‘re welcomed with open arms and some places we‘re not. We’re still shut out effectively when other faiths have a voice. So there are some of the things that aren’t going so well at the moment. We have a particular challenge at the moment in that our Law Commission did a review saying that the marriage laws needed to be overhauled. Not just for us, but for many other people of faith belief, because they cannot get married in the way that their belief would make sense to them. And that is currently being challenged by one particular, they would call it non faith group. They are people of no particular faith, I think. But um, they’re challenging that at the moment and saying that they should be the ones to get the legal right for weddings and no one else really, because anyone can have one of their weddings and it’s like you’re really not grasping the need here. So that’s a big struggle. That’s a big uphill battle at the moment as well. Getting that that the pagan voice is listened to in that perspective in that area of their life, because legal hand fasting is something that people wanted for a very long time, and we really thought we were getting there. And then this challenge has come about. So that’s a big thing that we’re facing at the moment as well.
00:29:19
Frigga: Does that mean that a religious wedding is also a legal wedding?
00:29:25
Sarah: No. Not necessarily. So, for example, a Hindu wedding wouldn’t be a legal wedding here in the UK. A mixed faith wedding wouldn’t be a legal wedding here in the UK. And you don’t really have an awful lot of option in terms of legal weddings here. You either get a registrar to do it in a registered building, and that’s one of the reasons that pagan weddings can’t be legal, that it’s based on the venue. And at the moment the law states that it has to be an inside venue. But there’s also it’s a legal contract at the end of the day. So there’s aspects of a wedding ceremony that need to be identified as those bits that are legally binding. They’re the bits that make the contract. Um, and you have to have an officiant for a legal contract. And there’s all sorts of different bits that make it really difficult for most faiths to not have a legal wedding here in the UK. You kind of you have the ceremony and you have to have it officiated with a registrar later on down the registry office or whatever. And it’s not really, um, it’s not ideal. It’s not good.
00:30:27
Frigga: In the Netherlands it sounds the same. Now there are more venues. Now that and there is more. But to me it is important that you keep the legal parts separate from from whatever faith or non faith you want and you can have your ceremony in any way you want.
00:30:44
Sarah: That’s what we were hoping would be happening with the law review. But um, this particular group have taken it upon themselves to say, please don’t do that. Please just make it as a we can have legal weddings. And and they would then join the Church of England Catholics and a couple of others, I think in being able to have a legal religious wedding. And we’re hoping that whatever government, um, is sitting in Westminster will listen to not just us, but people of many other faiths as well when, you know, they say that actually it’s really quite important to have their own way of marrying proved in law.
00:31:24
Jens: So there are faiths in the UK which are allowed to do legal weddings, I understand, okay, because Germany, that’s a monopoly of the state and that’s on the other end, very, very deep in me. And I very much agree with Frigga on that, that that’s how it should be, that there was one legal registration which you can do nicely, hopefully. So where I live, one of the venues available is the local castle with their Mirror Hall there. So if you want to have a fancy nice shiny thing, you can have it there. But only the state does the legal weddings and what you do, your religion is just your thing and for me that’s the optimal version. But if some faiths are allowed to do legal weddings and others are not, yeah, that’s difficult.
00:32:09
Frigga: It should be or not at all. Or every religion.
00:32:14
Sarah: The Law Commission recommended that instead of it being based on the building, that it was based on the officiant, so that, um, there would be officiants that carried out the role of registrar that recognize that legally binding bit in a whatever wedding, and that they could officiate and make a wedding a legal thing. So that the venue didn’t matter so that you could be outside if you wanted in your local woods, you could be in a castle, you could be wherever you wanted to be. And it would open up weddings, sentimental, emotional connection, weddings because it is a very special event. So they should be able to, whatever their faith or belief or none for that matter, they should be able to have the wedding that they want to have, and putting it on the officiant rather than on the venue makes a lot of sense to me. And that was the recommendation from the Law Commission, but we’re currently fighting that.
00:33:13
Frigga: If for the legal wedding in the Netherlands, a venue can be pointed out by the local government for, you know, only a couple of hours or a day as an official place to wed, a family member or a dear friend can be installed as a official. Uh, well, I think then it still needs to be some kind of official person from the local government. But the ceremony can be held by anybody. By choice.
00:33:45
Sarah: That sounds exactly what we’re looking for.
00:33:47
Jens: I have to admit. I’m a little bit unsympathetic on this because I married during lockdown, but I’m still very happy that I’ve done it. What you said before sounds all great and like a very, very huge amount of work, which has to be done by a lot of people. How easy is it for you to find these people to do this work?
00:34:10
Sarah: Um.At the moment, not very easy. We’re here in the UK, not just us, but, um, we are facing a volunteer shortage. We have a cost of living crisis, or we have a lot of things going off in here in the UK at the moment, which isn’t conducive to allowing people to have the time and energy to volunteer. So we’re doing okay, but it isn’t easy to find people that are willing to give up their time and give up their energy to help fight the cause at the moment. We do inevitably end up finding good people, though, and especially over the last few years, the people that have been coming in have been nothing short of absolutely amazing. And they’re dedicated. They, you know, this is something that means something to them. So they don’t just give their time and energy, they give their commitment as well. We would like to have more volunteers. Of course we would. But we also understand the nature of the world at the moment and how it affects you, and that some people just don’t have the energy or the time, no matter how much they want to give their time. So in some ways we’re struggling, but in others, the people that we’re finding are absolutely committed and and dedicated to what we’re doing. So and that really helps when someone is committed to something, you know, they find the energy all day long.
00:35:27
Jens: You seem to be in a quite good place at the moment, especially as seen from other heathen organisations. I have to admit, again, I’m a little bit envious, but things are always changing anyway and the world is changing around us. How are you developing in the future? What’s your next projects for inclusivity?
00:35:46
Sarah: Um, I think what we’re looking for is to solve that problem of, as of the whole in our diversity would be the next thing that we’re looking to do. We don’t feel like we’re serving the community as fully as we could be, and we’d like to be a lot more supportive on the international stage than we are currently. So we’d like to support PF international to do better as well. So we would really like to gain better understanding and to broaden that reach in that respect. We’re not speaking for everybody right now, and that that would be the thing that needs to change.
00:36:27
Jens: That’s very abstract again. Do you have any specific things you’re working on at the moment for the future?
00:36:35
Sarah: At the moment, the main thing is getting the new strategy in place for the charity. We were only granted it two months ago and they gave us an extra purpose, which we weren’t expecting. So we’re having to shift and change our strategy at the moment. And we, um, we actually withdrew from that purpose. When we first meet the application and then when it got granted, we got given it, so we weren’t expecting it. The strategy that we’ve devised wasn’t complete anymore because they’ve given us this extra purpose. So we’re actually currently reviewing that at the moment. That’s our main piece of work right now. How do we make sure that we’re going to meet this purpose? And what changes do we need to make as an organisation to make that happen? So that’s our main thing at the moment. We’ve achieved the charitable status. That’s fantastic. But now it’s maintaining that and making it sustainable for the future, where, you know, the world out there is changing so fast right now that we need to make sure that we’ve got the strategy and the policy in place to make sure that we will grow and change and shift with it, as well as making sure that we’re meeting the needs of the pagan community. So that strategy really is of critical importance right now. And that’s our main focus.
00:38:01
Jens: Yeah, that’s very strategic. You told us a bit about your new website you’re developing. So I’m thinking about the very, very specific and daily things where as you’re on the very high level of the strategy and both is important. But how about your website?
00:38:17
Sarah: It all feeds into it. So as part of that strategy building, what we’re doing is we’re examining, we’re looking at each bit of what the PF offers. And does it meet those needs, does it meet those purposes? And if it doesn’t, what can we do to change them? So the new website is one of those things, um, looking at the community support teams and how we can broaden them and offer more is another one of those things. So the new website that’s coming up, again, accessibility and inclusivity is at the forefront of our mind. With that, we want to make sure that it’s easy to use, that it provides everything that it needs to provide, that our members have a safe space, again, to communicate with the rest of the community. So we’re looking at, uh, actually building our own social network on the member side of, um, of our website. Because we understand that a lot of social media isn’t very safe and in some places is even downright aggressive to pagans. So we’d like to do something about that. So the new website is quite important, and we are looking at our community support teams as well, and our district teams as well, to make sure that they’re all working together for the better, for making sure that the community is well supported.
00:39:37
Jens: One individual feature which stuck in my mind is that you want to be able to do more surveys with the new version.
00:39:44
Sarah: Yeah we do. We want to be able to reach out and talk to our community, which was one of the main purposes of the website rebuild. Um, that’s currently going on behind the scenes. We’ve tried lots of different ways of talking to our members and to the community, and we wanted to create one. And again, safety and an ability to hide someone’s identity. You know, our community is very much understanding about being in the broom closet and not telling certain people that you have the faith and beliefs that you do. And certainly a lot of the older members of our community as well. That is definitely the way that they began in their faith. So they find it very difficult to be very open. So making sure that we have ways that we can communicate with our members. So yes, surveys, but finding other ways that we can interact with them, finding other ways that they can express themselves safely, finding imaginative ways to ask them what they need and for them to be able to communicate that need is part of the drive behind the website.
00:40:51
Jens: Thank you very much. So it all works together, the big strategy and the very operational details.
00:40:58
Sarah: Yeah.
00:40:59
Jens: And we need both of that.
00:41:00
Sarah: Absolutely, absolutely. My job is very focused on the strategy and the bigger picture. But that filters down. And I’ve had roles across the organization. You know, I’ve been a regional coordinator in the district. I’ve been a national manager. I’ve been within the PF for almost every level possible. So I kind of had this entrenched understanding of what you need when you’re an officer, when you’re a volunteer, which has been so helpful. And so my job now is strategy, but I’m very keenly aware of how that strategy and the policy that you form from it and everything that we need to achieve informs everything as you move down the organization to the grassroots feet on the ground work that the districts and the community supporters do. And it’s really important that that’s not disconnected, that it all works together. Is that web, that structure that holds it all together, that allows it to work.
00:41:56
Jens: Yeah. That’s wonderful. And I’m thankful for the broad picture you gave us today with many details that can’t be complete one, but it’s that’s huge and broad and quite diverse. Well, then, Sarah, do you have any final words you want to say to us in this podcast?
00:42:15
Sarah: Um, yes. Thank you for having me and for chatting with me about what the PF does and how it works. Uh, it’s always great to talk to people about that.
00:42:24
Jens: Yes. and we have to thank you for this delightful episode. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
00:42:30
Sarah: Thank you.
00:42:31
Jens: So it’s time for me to say goodbye for this podcast episode. Thank you for everyone listening to us. You find us on the usual social media. I need to check which the usuals are at the moment, but where we’ve always been. Thank you and bye bye.
00:42:47
Frigga: Until the next time.
00:42:48
Sarah: Bye bye.
hat understanding that we are a legitimate belief is, um, I can’t understate how huge it is, and especially off the back of the UN resolution around, uh, witch hunts being made illegal, um, across the world with the UN. So the legitimacy, the understanding of paganism is growing exponentially. And that can only be a good thing.
00:06:22
Jens: So being a charity, what is your actual charitable purpose?
00:06:26
Sarah: We have three purposes. One is the advancement of education of the general public about paganism or paganisms, should I say? Um, there isn’t just one path or tradition to follow. Another one is to promote religious harmony. So a lot of interfaith work, a lot of inter government organization work is required for that one so that we can create that harmony between pagans and people of other faiths. And the last one is to support the community and to ensure that they’re advocated for, supported, and that their pagan beliefs don’t exclude them from anything.
00:07:07
Jens: That sounds great, but still sounds a bit abstract to me. Could you tell us a bit about specific activities you’re doing there?
00:07:15
Sarah: So there’s a few key things that we’re doing in terms of let’s use advocacy as the first example. Um, so a lot of people still face that discrimination when it comes to practicing their pagan beliefs. A good example would be a case fairly recently about a couple who were facing discrimination in the family’s courts while they were undergoing a case regarding their child, and someone had stated that their pagan beliefs were a safeguarding risk to their child. And our advocacy officer spoke to the court system and said, look, this isn’t, this isn’t okay. Pagan beliefs are legitimate. They are not a safeguarding risk. This is not a viable case. And they managed to get it absolved out of court and got their child back and all was well. And we see a lot of cases of individuals in workplaces, for example. We had another case where one of our board actually had our own website banned in the workplace. They couldn’t access it over their work computers, but they could access, for example, the Church of England website and our advocacy officer successfully spoken to their bosses and got them to waive that and they were able then to access the Pagan Federation website. So there’s a lot of areas of life where people might face discrimination. Um, those those are a couple of examples. We’ve had people in the workplaces, uh, wanting people to take off their religious jewellery because they find it in quotes here offensive or dangerous, and we’ve successfully fought those as well. But other areas of work as well. We work to make sure that people can receive pastoral support at any point in their life. So we work with the Prison Service, with the Health Service to ensure that chaplaincy is available for people and not just any chaplaincy, but pagan chaplaincy, so that they have that spiritual understanding right at the worst moments of their life where they really need it. We work with government offices like counter-terrorism and the police to make sure that they’re trained and understand what pagan beliefs are and where it’s normal pagan practice, and then where it should be that they’re concerned about this practice. So we work to make sure that they have an understanding so people aren’t unjustly arrested or detained for their beliefs without any understanding behind it. So there’s a few examples of the work we do.
00:09:47
Jens: One you mentioned in our pre-chat, and which made me incredibly envious, was that you mentioned that you have some members in the local boards and the council who set the curricula for religious education in school.
00:10:03
Sarah: Yes, we do, we and we also work with the Religious Education Council and local authority. They’re called sacred committees, and they are involved with looking at the curriculum in their local area. So we do have some pagans that sit on salaries across the UK, and they’re involved in making sure that the curriculum is balanced. A lot of it is driven by census numbers. So where there are particularly large concentrations of pagans, they will try and make sure that paganism are on the national curriculum for religious education, and that it’s being taught in a balanced and moderate way.
00:10:42
Jens: That sounds fascinating and great. It also sounds a bit dry and legal. So are you a kind of pagan community in yourself, or are you mainly this administrative organisation who does all this advocacy?
00:10:59
Sarah: There’s almost two faces to the Pagan Federation. So there’s this, um, you’re quite right. It can be quite dry, but at the same time incredibly exciting, to be quite honest with you. This work is very administrative behind the scenes and very much kind of driven towards this very official kind of work. But then there’s this other face of the PF is completely the opposite, and we’re here for the community. So we run community groups. We have district offices that help people connect with people locally. We run events, conferences with talks and music and that sort of thing. So there are these very two different faces of the PF and that are very intimately intertwined. But yeah, we’re not just here for the dry administrative stuff. We have fun community stuff too.
00:11:46
Jens: Oh, wonderful. I think I have a picture of the Pagan Federation right now. I can dive into our actual topic. Frigga do you have any more questions about the PF?
00:11:56
Frigga: No, I’m familiar with the PF. Okay. Lots of fun memories of gatherings.
00:12:04
Jens: Okay, then let’s start to dive into and let’s start at the very head of the organization. So my first question is how does the board educate themselves on inclusivity?
00:12:17
Sarah: We’re a very diverse board and we have a variety of traditions. So we’re diverse in our organisms, but we’re also diverse in terms of need and ability. So we do have members of our board that have physical disabilities. We do have members of our board that neurodivergent, for example. One area that we could improve on is that we’re not very diverse in terms of People of Colour and of traditions outside of the UK. We’re very UK heavy, and I suppose that’s to be expected given. We’re a UK organization, but it is something that I would like to, I would like to change, but we do try and ensure that our board is as diverse as possible, because we do understand that that’s the only way to ensure that you’re hearing the voices of lots of different people.
00:13:13
Jens: Okay, that’s for the board. Then if we speak about the members, how does the board try to raise awareness with the members about inclusivity?
00:13:22
Sarah: We have a variety of ways. We do very periodically issue sort of, um, surveys that people can complete so that they’ve got an anonymous space to give their views. But we also run what we call our community support team. So we have, um, several teams that specifically look after pagans with a particular need in a particular area of their life. So we have the accessibility team, we have the children and families team, we have the LGBTQIA plus team. And we try and make sure that those teams are as diverse as possible in terms of, for example, the accessibility team. The accessibility lead is neurodiverse, and they also have experience with physical disabilities. And the team members will be diverse in terms of their need and ability. And the same with the LGBTQIA team. We try and make sure that the team members are made up of a diverse range of people as possible, and the same with the children and families team. Actually, they’re all either parents or siblings and family. They those families might look very different, so they might be your standard mum, dad, two kids, they might be two parents of the same gender. And we try and make sure that it’s as inclusive and as diverse as possible. When we’re recruiting, we will always look for the right person to do the role, but it’s it’s always great to have the ability to listen to these people and to have their experiences first hand, because then that informs the services that we do, the things that we do for our community.
00:15:03
Jens: Could you go a bit more into detail about what these teams are doing, maybe the accessibility team, what their purpose and function is?
00:15:13
Sarah: Yeah, they do a few things. So they spearheaded online festivals before they were even a thing. They started back in 2016 and we were the first organisation really to take any kind of faith practice online. We realised that a lot of our community couldn’t get out, um, get out into nature, get out to the sites that were local to them, that were of interest to them in terms of their faith and belief. Then manager started running online festivals, videos, text, blogs and that kind of stuff so that it was filled with ways of connecting with people that couldn’t get out of their homes for whatever reason. And what they also do now is they help other events organisers make sure that they’re accessible. They provide advice, and they provide advocacy for people with disabilities and accessibility needs. So if a pagan comes across an event that could be accessible but isn’t because the organisers aren’t thinking about how to make it accessible, then our team can help and support with that. The LGBT team also run an online pride festival, so again making sure there’s that inclusivity across the board. A lot of our LGBT members also have accessibility needs, so making sure that they can access safe drawers where they don’t have to be concerned about people that are around them or getting out of the house to manage it. But they also provide advocacy and signposting to other services should they be needed outside of the PF as well. And the families team, they do provide local meetups. They also provide a lot of online resources for families that are looking to bring their families up within pagan beliefs, so they have activity packs with these cute little patches that you can earn when you’ve done the park and all sorts of things. So, um, so they provide activities, they provide that support and advice for organisations, but also for the people that are within the community as well.
00:17:14
Frigga: This is really great to hear that there is this awareness and the attention that all these different committees, or how do you call them are as diverse as possible, because that’s what I said in my intro. It’s so needed to give the people themselves a voice. And would you be willing, as Pagan Federation, to provide other organisations which are not a member with with your expertise?
00:17:39
Sarah: We’re absolutely here for that. We do help other organisations with their policy. We do help other organisations with understanding what those needs are and how to fulfil them. We don’t often get asked for it. Um, since gaining the charitable status, we have been talking about how to make that more possible. We’d really like to see the community coming together a lot more working together for, for especially these things as well, for making sure that our accessibility is at the forefront of their minds when they’re organising their events and not just their physical events, their online events as well. We’ve had a few sort of reports of people not using subtitles, for example, when they’re using video, and there’s lots of ways that you can be a lot more accessible, and they’re always happy to talk to other organisations about it.
00:18:31
Frigga: That’s great, because there is no reason that all kind of people or organizations have to reinvent the wheel again, and the knowledge is there.
00:18:39
Sarah: Absolutely.
00:18:41
Jens: Speaking about knowledge, which is there, in our pre-chat, we talked about accessibility for neurodiverse people at actual events. And you came up with some very, very practical tips for that, which I would like to include in the official recording as well.
00:19:00
Sarah: Okay. You might have to remind me what they were, so I make sure I hit the points.
00:19:06
Jens: Yeah, the one was about the length of lectures and things like that, which tend to be quite long sometimes. So on the events I’ve attended, there was the general schedule overall, but the individual lectures would differ between 30 and 120 minutes.
00:19:23
Sarah: Yeah, I think there’s a lot that events organizers could learn from, from everyday society and anything, but it would definitely support neurodivergent people. When we run events, we try and keep our talks quite short. We realise that attention span and struggling with that is a huge thing for neurodiverse people. So we try and keep our talks down to less than, definitely less than 30 minutes. But if possible, you know, around 20 minutes because it’s a long time to sit and focus on something. When you’re neurodiverse, it’s it becomes uncomfortable and then it becomes inaccessible to them. So we’d much rather make sure that they even if it means splitting a talk 2 or 3 parts, perhaps we make sure that that is available for our visitors. And we also have things like making sure that sound levels are quite low. We don’t allow things like burning incense at our events because that can be overwhelming on a sensory level. So we’re very careful about making sure that our events are accessible not only to neurodiverse people, but anybody else who might have sensory processing problems or sensitivities to things like light and smell. You know, we we try and make sure that these things are tied in. And we also try and make sure that that ties in with our care and love for the environment as well. So there’s a lot of consultation that goes on with our environmental officer and our accessibility officer, and we try and make sure that it’s all kind of brought together in a, in a way that makes it accessible and sustainable and, um, okay for everyone.
00:21:05
Frigga: I really loved what you talked about how you work with circles in your meditation class. Could you tell about that? Great.
00:21:15
Sarah: So that’s my own thing. Um, when I, um, I teach meditation and I run circles, um, here at my home therapy room and workshop rooms. And one of the things that I was really keen on because my own, my two sons are neurodiverse, so is my husband. And they all said, we can’t meditate, we can’t meditate. And it took me a little while to figure it out, but I did. They can meditate. It’s just that they need to be moving, or they need to have their focus on something that they can pay attention to. So when I started the meditation circle that I run, I was very keenly aware. And of course, all this work around accessibility that we’ve been doing with the PF kind of kicked into touch. And it was like, right, so let’s make sure that this is accessible for everyone. I set up three circles to my meditation group. So the inner circle is for those who want to sit still and quiet with their eyes maybe closed, or at least softly focused on a particular image. Um, and then the next circle is those that need to sort of fidget or move or do something. So we have colouring sheets available and fidget toys and that kind of stuff. And then the outer circle is for those that need to move. So they need to get up and physically move. So maybe they walk or maybe they jump, or maybe they do whatever it is that will help them to focus and that allows them to meditate, which is a great thing, really.
00:22:36
Frigga: I love it due to my own lack of energy. It is mainly is is that I need to sit down during rituals and my own rituals. The whole group is sitting down. That means that I’m not the only one, or there’s only 1 or 2 persons. And the last couple of times we visit Eldering in Germany, I was really glad that now there are benches for the main rituals, and it feels so I’d say. Yeah, you feel more welcome, more at home, that you’re not the only one. And if I see how many people sit down, I guess that has have been actually way more people before this who needed to sit down and now feel comfortable to sit down. So you’re more or less have two circles and yeah, you feel more included.
00:23:27
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:28
Frigga: And not just included, but able to make your choice according to where you’re at on that particular day. You know, even some of the attendees meditation circle, they’ll sit quiet in the inner circle for one, maybe. But then they might get up and walk for another. So so it allows them that chance to explore themselves as well and explore what they need, which is which is great.
00:23:53
Frigga: I think it’s also about changing your way of thinking to end up in a ritual, because that is showing respect for the gods and the spirit. No, sitting down is no less. Whether you you sit up, you lay down or you stand up, that makes no difference at all.
00:24:10
Sarah: In my experience, the gods don’t care. The fact that you’re there and and paying them that attention and that respect within that circle is all that’s needed.
00:24:20
Frigga: Yeah I agree.
00:24:21
Jens: We talked a lot about things which are going well right now. But Skipped one of the things we would like to talk about, which is your social media groups. You told us a bit about that in the pre-chat. And yeah. What are you doing on social media in groups there?
00:24:41
Sarah: Okay, so all our community support teams have their own Facebook groups, which are very closely safeguarded, and very closely monitored. They are intended to be entirely safe spaces for people to not only find their pagan community, but also to speak with other people who have similar, for example, accessibility needs, or talking to other families about what they practice or finding, you know, ideas and thoughts and advice and accessibility. And we found that that’s not an easy thing to do when it’s a large community groups. So we have our large community group for and there’s probably about 7000 people in there at the moment for all things pagan, uh, whatever they may be. So that’s advertising their events. It’s people asking questions. It’s people recommending resources that they found. There’s lots of things that go off in there. But linked to that, we have these individual groups that are meant to be and are maintained as very, very safe spaces. So the LGBTQIA group is the people that come in there are always vetted as for their safety. So we will always go and find out about them and make sure that we’re not letting someone enter who isn’t safe for LGBTQIA people. And we do the same with, uh, with the accessibility and the children and families team, make sure that those are maintained a safe spaces and and should anyone misbehaving, if those groups then we have a no tolerance policy and then they’re soon asked to leave.
00:26:16
Jens: It sounds surprising to create a safe space on social media these days, usually what the so-called social media is not. But it seems that with a lot of work you may achieve this.
00:26:28
Sarah: Absolutely. And I think that was the thinking behind it, was that a lot of social media isn’t all that safe, and you don’t know if it can be. So we were determined to make sure that we could have even just the smallest corner of it that was.
00:26:41
Jens: Okay. Now, we have talked a lot about things which are going well and sound absolutely amazing, but there’s always several sides to a story. So what are things which don’t go as smooth as you would like them to go?
00:26:56
Sarah: Um.I think I already mentioned at the top of this when we were talking about the makeup of the board, that we’re not very diverse in terms of cultures outside of traditions. We’re not very diverse in terms of people of colour, and I think they’re the things that aren’t going so well because we feel like we’re not supporting those communities as well as we probably could. We want to know more about, the beliefs and traditions that are outside of the UK. We want to know more about other beliefs and traditions that are here in the UK, but that come from other places. We want to know how we can support and help those communities, and I think that’s one of the things that’s not going so well at the moment, and that we really need to address and look at.
And there’s some of the things about the press attention that pagans of all kinds get, is something that we’re working really hard to try and do something about, but as Frigga said at the top, this changing these things takes a lot of time. And that’s just something that we’re going to have to work on, really. The same with our communication with other places within the government. You know, some places we‘re welcomed with open arms and some places we‘re not. We’re still shut out effectively when other faiths have a voice. So there are some of the things that aren’t going so well at the moment. We have a particular challenge at the moment in that our Law Commission did a review saying that the marriage laws needed to be overhauled. Not just for us, but for many other people of faith belief, because they cannot get married in the way that their belief would make sense to them. And that is currently being challenged by one particular, they would call it non faith group. They are people of no particular faith, I think. But um, they’re challenging that at the moment and saying that they should be the ones to get the legal right for weddings and no one else really, because anyone can have one of their weddings and it’s like you’re really not grasping the need here. So that’s a big struggle. That’s a big uphill battle at the moment as well. Getting that that the pagan voice is listened to in that perspective in that area of their life, because legal hand fasting is something that people wanted for a very long time, and we really thought we were getting there. And then this challenge has come about. So that’s a big thing that we’re facing at the moment as well.
00:29:19
Frigga: Does that mean that a religious wedding is also a legal wedding?
00:29:25
Sarah: No. Not necessarily. So, for example, a Hindu wedding wouldn’t be a legal wedding here in the UK. A mixed faith wedding wouldn’t be a legal wedding here in the UK. And you don’t really have an awful lot of option in terms of legal weddings here. You either get a registrar to do it in a registered building, and that’s one of the reasons that pagan weddings can’t be legal, that it’s based on the venue. And at the moment the law states that it has to be an inside venue. But there’s also it’s a legal contract at the end of the day. So there’s aspects of a wedding ceremony that need to be identified as those bits that are legally binding. They’re the bits that make the contract. Um, and you have to have an officiant for a legal contract. And there’s all sorts of different bits that make it really difficult for most faiths to not have a legal wedding here in the UK. You kind of you have the ceremony and you have to have it officiated with a registrar later on down the registry office or whatever. And it’s not really, um, it’s not ideal. It’s not good.
00:30:27
Frigga: In the Netherlands it sounds the same. Now there are more venues. Now that and there is more. But to me it is important that you keep the legal parts separate from from whatever faith or non faith you want and you can have your ceremony in any way you want.
00:30:44
Sarah: That’s what we were hoping would be happening with the law review. But um, this particular group have taken it upon themselves to say, please don’t do that. Please just make it as a we can have legal weddings. And and they would then join the Church of England Catholics and a couple of others, I think in being able to have a legal religious wedding. And we’re hoping that whatever government, um, is sitting in Westminster will listen to not just us, but people of many other faiths as well when, you know, they say that actually it’s really quite important to have their own way of marrying proved in law.
00:31:24
Jens: So there are faiths in the UK which are allowed to do legal weddings, I understand, okay, because Germany, that’s a monopoly of the state and that’s on the other end, very, very deep in me. And I very much agree with Frigga on that, that that’s how it should be, that there was one legal registration which you can do nicely, hopefully. So where I live, one of the venues available is the local castle with their Mirror Hall there. So if you want to have a fancy nice shiny thing, you can have it there. But only the state does the legal weddings and what you do, your religion is just your thing and for me that’s the optimal version. But if some faiths are allowed to do legal weddings and others are not, yeah, that’s difficult.
00:32:09
Frigga: It should be or not at all. Or every religion.
00:32:14
Sarah: The Law Commission recommended that instead of it being based on the building, that it was based on the officiant, so that, um, there would be officiants that carried out the role of registrar that recognize that legally binding bit in a whatever wedding, and that they could officiate and make a wedding a legal thing. So that the venue didn’t matter so that you could be outside if you wanted in your local woods, you could be in a castle, you could be wherever you wanted to be. And it would open up weddings, sentimental, emotional connection, weddings because it is a very special event. So they should be able to, whatever their faith or belief or none for that matter, they should be able to have the wedding that they want to have, and putting it on the officiant rather than on the venue makes a lot of sense to me. And that was the recommendation from the Law Commission, but we’re currently fighting that.
00:33:13
Frigga: If for the legal wedding in the Netherlands, a venue can be pointed out by the local government for, you know, only a couple of hours or a day as an official place to wed, a family member or a dear friend can be installed as a official. Uh, well, I think then it still needs to be some kind of official person from the local government. But the ceremony can be held by anybody. By choice.
00:33:45
Sarah: That sounds exactly what we’re looking for.
00:33:47
Jens: I have to admit. I’m a little bit unsympathetic on this because I married during lockdown, but I’m still very happy that I’ve done it. What you said before sounds all great and like a very, very huge amount of work, which has to be done by a lot of people. How easy is it for you to find these people to do this work?
00:34:10
Sarah: Um.At the moment, not very easy. We’re here in the UK, not just us, but, um, we are facing a volunteer shortage. We have a cost of living crisis, or we have a lot of things going off in here in the UK at the moment, which isn’t conducive to allowing people to have the time and energy to volunteer. So we’re doing okay, but it isn’t easy to find people that are willing to give up their time and give up their energy to help fight the cause at the moment. We do inevitably end up finding good people, though, and especially over the last few years, the people that have been coming in have been nothing short of absolutely amazing. And they’re dedicated. They, you know, this is something that means something to them. So they don’t just give their time and energy, they give their commitment as well. We would like to have more volunteers. Of course we would. But we also understand the nature of the world at the moment and how it affects you, and that some people just don’t have the energy or the time, no matter how much they want to give their time. So in some ways we’re struggling, but in others, the people that we’re finding are absolutely committed and and dedicated to what we’re doing. So and that really helps when someone is committed to something, you know, they find the energy all day long.
00:35:27
Jens: You seem to be in a quite good place at the moment, especially as seen from other heathen organisations. I have to admit, again, I’m a little bit envious, but things are always changing anyway and the world is changing around us. How are you developing in the future? What’s your next projects for inclusivity?
00:35:46
Sarah: Um, I think what we’re looking for is to solve that problem of, as of the whole in our diversity would be the next thing that we’re looking to do. We don’t feel like we’re serving the community as fully as we could be, and we’d like to be a lot more supportive on the international stage than we are currently. So we’d like to support PF international to do better as well. So we would really like to gain better understanding and to broaden that reach in that respect. We’re not speaking for everybody right now, and that that would be the thing that needs to change.
00:36:27
Jens: That’s very abstract again. Do you have any specific things you’re working on at the moment for the future?
00:36:35
Sarah: At the moment, the main thing is getting the new strategy in place for the charity. We were only granted it two months ago and they gave us an extra purpose, which we weren’t expecting. So we’re having to shift and change our strategy at the moment. And we, um, we actually withdrew from that purpose. When we first meet the application and then when it got granted, we got given it, so we weren’t expecting it. The strategy that we’ve devised wasn’t complete anymore because they’ve given us this extra purpose. So we’re actually currently reviewing that at the moment. That’s our main piece of work right now. How do we make sure that we’re going to meet this purpose? And what changes do we need to make as an organisation to make that happen? So that’s our main thing at the moment. We’ve achieved the charitable status. That’s fantastic. But now it’s maintaining that and making it sustainable for the future, where, you know, the world out there is changing so fast right now that we need to make sure that we’ve got the strategy and the policy in place to make sure that we will grow and change and shift with it, as well as making sure that we’re meeting the needs of the pagan community. So that strategy really is of critical importance right now. And that’s our main focus.
00:38:01
Jens: Yeah, that’s very strategic. You told us a bit about your new website you’re developing. So I’m thinking about the very, very specific and daily things where as you’re on the very high level of the strategy and both is important. But how about your website?
00:38:17
Sarah: It all feeds into it. So as part of that strategy building, what we’re doing is we’re examining, we’re looking at each bit of what the PF offers. And does it meet those needs, does it meet those purposes? And if it doesn’t, what can we do to change them? So the new website is one of those things, um, looking at the community support teams and how we can broaden them and offer more is another one of those things. So the new website that’s coming up, again, accessibility and inclusivity is at the forefront of our mind. With that, we want to make sure that it’s easy to use, that it provides everything that it needs to provide, that our members have a safe space, again, to communicate with the rest of the community. So we’re looking at, uh, actually building our own social network on the member side of, um, of our website. Because we understand that a lot of social media isn’t very safe and in some places is even downright aggressive to pagans. So we’d like to do something about that. So the new website is quite important, and we are looking at our community support teams as well, and our district teams as well, to make sure that they’re all working together for the better, for making sure that the community is well supported.
00:39:37
Jens: One individual feature which stuck in my mind is that you want to be able to do more surveys with the new version.
00:39:44
Sarah: Yeah we do. We want to be able to reach out and talk to our community, which was one of the main purposes of the website rebuild. Um, that’s currently going on behind the scenes. We’ve tried lots of different ways of talking to our members and to the community, and we wanted to create one. And again, safety and an ability to hide someone’s identity. You know, our community is very much understanding about being in the broom closet and not telling certain people that you have the faith and beliefs that you do. And certainly a lot of the older members of our community as well. That is definitely the way that they began in their faith. So they find it very difficult to be very open. So making sure that we have ways that we can communicate with our members. So yes, surveys, but finding other ways that we can interact with them, finding other ways that they can express themselves safely, finding imaginative ways to ask them what they need and for them to be able to communicate that need is part of the drive behind the website.
00:40:51
Jens: Thank you very much. So it all works together, the big strategy and the very operational details.
00:40:58
Sarah: Yeah.
00:40:59
Jens: And we need both of that.
00:41:00
Sarah: Absolutely, absolutely. My job is very focused on the strategy and the bigger picture. But that filters down. And I’ve had roles across the organization. You know, I’ve been a regional coordinator in the district. I’ve been a national manager. I’ve been within the PF for almost every level possible. So I kind of had this entrenched understanding of what you need when you’re an officer, when you’re a volunteer, which has been so helpful. And so my job now is strategy, but I’m very keenly aware of how that strategy and the policy that you form from it and everything that we need to achieve informs everything as you move down the organization to the grassroots feet on the ground work that the districts and the community supporters do. And it’s really important that that’s not disconnected, that it all works together. Is that web, that structure that holds it all together, that allows it to work.
00:41:56
Jens: Yeah. That’s wonderful. And I’m thankful for the broad picture you gave us today with many details that can’t be complete one, but it’s that’s huge and broad and quite diverse. Well, then, Sarah, do you have any final words you want to say to us in this podcast?
00:42:15
Sarah: Um, yes. Thank you for having me and for chatting with me about what the PF does and how it works. Uh, it’s always great to talk to people about that.
00:42:24
Jens: Yes. and we have to thank you for this delightful episode. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
00:42:30
Sarah: Thank you.
00:42:31
Jens: So it’s time for me to say goodbye for this podcast episode. Thank you for everyone listening to us. You find us on the usual social media. I need to check which the usuals are at the moment, but where we’ve always been. Thank you and bye bye.
00:42:47
Frigga: Until the next time.
00:42:48
Sarah: Bye bye.