Sarah Golding, ACCESS Fellow was a runner up winner for C-DICE’s Unsung Hero EDI Champion Award

Congratulations to Sarah Golding, ACCESS Knowledge Exchange Fellow for coming runner up at the C-DICE (Centre for postdoctoral development in infrastructure cities and energy) National Postdoc Conference.

Sarah was nominated for the Unsung Hero – EDI Champion Award (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion). The award recognises a postdoc who has gone above and beyond to ensure equity, diversity and inclusion in their work, project, or journey to become a postdoc.

Sarah has a key role in the ACCESS Guiding Principles team looking at how we embed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Environmental Sustainability and Knowledge Co-production in our work. She and the team’s ambition goes beyond influencing the work of just the ACCESS team. They are also helping others interested in adopting these ways of working – the Academy of Social Sciences, government nature agencies and other public and private sector organisations. Sarah was responsible for researching and signposting existing EDI practices/materials and creating activity matrices across nine core areas of work.

In addition, as an unofficial EDI champion, she has run several EDI surveys, reports and recommendations for ACCESS Assembly events, Leadership College (LC) and the Flex fund (FF). Most recently she led the work on blind evaluation for the LC and FF to ensure shortlisting was more inclusive. She regularly works with the Communications officer to identify new EDI audiences on social media and email campaigns and regularly contributes to the ACCESS newsletter championing EDI events, training and funding opportunities.

Working with Sarah and seeing her talk about EDI is inspiring and empowering. Her passion, knowledge and drive to want to know more and for us all to do better is infectious. We are so pleased her work has been recognised beyond ACCESS .