CDEG elects new Chair for 2022

The Community, Diversity and Equality Group is very pleased to welcome our new Chair, Oliver Jenkins. 

We asked him to tell us a little about himself, and what his involvement in this group, and community work more generally, means to him. 

I’m Oliver Jenkins and I’m the new Chair of CDEG. As someone with autism especially I feel passionately about the need to ensure our libraries are champions of equality and diversity in their patrons and staff. Libraries have always been a cornerstone of our communities and the crucial status of that role has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’m the librarian of a through school for 11–18-year-olds, a role I’ve carried out for three years now. I’ve had no official training thus far, everything’s been on the job and I’ve made it up as I went along. While I may be green, I’m also incredibly keen and over recent years have been steadily discovering and increasing my CPD, to now becoming Chair of this group and setting off on my Chartership journey.

Our school has a mainly caucasian cohort, so representation of the full spectrum of humanity has been a key concern. A year ago I submitted an entry to Penguin’s Lit in Colour giveaway initiative and won a wide selection of books featuring BAME authors, characters and issues. Every year I try and include new stock of not only BAME representation but also disabled and LGBTQ+ authors, characters and issues. Of the latter, our display for LGBTQ+ History Month recently gathered great interest and members of the community have been rushing the desk to take out books ever since. I run book groups for Reading Rampage and Carnegie that help introduce students to viewpoints that they might not have considered before. I’ve also involved the school over the past few years in the Empathy Day initiative, which also supplies students with a great mixture of books from different cultures and perspectives.

I wanted to join CDEG because of both my personal investment in equality and diversity being a person with autism and also because I know that libraries are essential hubs for the communities they serve, and because of that should reflect and promote the acceptance and celebration of the diversity of those communities. This is a cause I think is particularly important in a time where people are becoming more and more divided and less understanding of others.

I don't have any particular ideas or goals as of yet, but a general wish to further the use of libraries as a crucial cornerstone of communities and a vital force for championing equality and diversity within those communities. I'd also like to bring more people that don't currently use libraries to libraries so they can discover their wonder and brilliance for themselves.

There’s a somewhat brief introduction to me and what I do. It’s an honour and a privilege to be given the responsibility of such a position and I look forward to seeing what we can achieve together in the future.

We look forward to upcoming opportunities for Oliver to get to know our members and learn more about the great work they are doing.