During the last week, the UK has seen a surge in racist rhetoric and disinformation build to a series of violent incidents in communities across England and Northern Ireland. As an organisation, we condemn the attacks on minoritised groups.
We’ll support any volunteers impacted. Below we’re sharing some guidance and support available.
Prioritise your safety and wellbeing
If you’ve been affected by these events, please prioritise your physical and mental safety and wellbeing. We understand you might be feeling vulnerable, scared and unsafe. And this may impact decisions to volunteer, travel or attend in-person events, meetings or activities.
The safety and wellbeing of our volunteers is paramount. And we encourage you to avoid any volunteering duties you don’t feel comfortable carrying out.
Keeping our community safe
If you’re organising in-person activities or events in the coming weeks, you may wish to consider moving these online, to ensure members of our community or your volunteering team feel safe. If that’s not possible and you’re in an area that might be affected, we suggest you consider cancelling due to unforeseen circumstances, to be on the safe side.
Communication guidance
We advise you to avoid sharing information about the riots in your communications, including on social media. There’s so much misinformation and disinformation around, it’s hard to know what’s true. Communicating about it (particularly from an ‘official’ MS channel) could contribute to this or cause offence to the community.
If you do decide to post about this via your own personal social media account, please ensure you don’t reference the MS Society on your account.
Zero tolerance of racism
The racism and violence we’ve seen is horrendous and has no place in our communities. As an organisation, we don’t tolerate any form of discrimination, intimidation, bullying or harassment.
We expect everyone to act as an ambassador for us, so please ensure you’re mindful of your actions and don’t say or do anything which might bring us into disrepute. You can remind yourself of our Code of Conduct here.
If you have a concern about anyone’s safety or welfare, please take a look at our Safeguarding guidance here.
Support is available
Please check in on your fellow volunteers this week. If you need support, you can reach out to our Volunteer Support Team by calling 0300 500 8084 (option #3) or by emailing [email protected].
If you’re feeling anxious and would like a confidential chat with our Support and Wellbeing Facilitator, Barbara, just send her an email at [email protected].
We’ll continue to monitor the situation, and we'll add any additional guidance to the Volunteer Website as needed.
To find our external statement and additional sources of support, please visit the MS Society website.
