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Vance Center Hosts Focus Groups on Racial Equity and Inclusion in South Africa
The Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice and its South African Legal Fellows Alumni Network, in partnership with the United States Mission to South Africa, recently launched a project to mobilize members of South Africa’s legal profession to advance racial equity and inclusion at the professional and community levels.
Over several weeks in June and July, the Vance Center hosted focus group sessions with legal professionals, regulators, and representatives of voluntary associations from across South Africa and beyond. The sessions sought to gain additional insight on the findings of a workplace survey published earlier this year and identify opportunities and strategies to encourage greater diversity and inclusion throughout South Africa’s legal profession.
The project aims to develop an equity and inclusion toolkit for legal organizations in South Africa, building on the results of a survey published in March as part of the Advancing Women in the Workplace mentorship initiative. The survey’s findings identified a need to address racial and gender-based disparities within the South African legal field and demand a fundamental transformation of historically entrenched culture and practices. The equity and inclusion toolkit will address these needs by providing practical guidance to assist different sectors of the legal profession in implementing and updating inclusive employment practices, helping create more pathways for greater inclusion and representation.
These focus group discussions were held over four weeks, from mid-June to July, with a dozen international participants representing Vance Center Committee law firms in the U.S. and UK, and over 50 legal participants from six South African provinces (Gauteng, Western Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Free State, Eastern Cape, and Limpopo). The conversations drew participants from a range of groups, included legal practitioners, experts on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices; voluntary legal associations, academia, regulatory agencies, and members of LGBTQ+ communities.
Discussion questions for the focus groups.
During the discussions, participants shared their personal experiences, provided insights on the nature of DEI, answered questions about the need for and concept of DEI, and offered input on proposed content, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation for the toolkits. The focus groups also provided an opportunity for representatives of these different fields to come together and strategize ways to advance racial equity and inclusion in the South African legal profession.
The Vance Center will collate the insights gathered from these conversations and use them to inform development of a comprehensive racial equity toolkit for law firms, companies and other actors in the legal sector. Focus group participants will have an opportunity to review the draft, which will then go through evaluation by industry experts before the toolkit is launched in several provinces in South Africa later this year.
These focus groups are part of the Vance Center’s ongoing efforts to support innovative ways to engage legal practitioners to take action to address some of the historical and systemic barriers that have prevented marginalized communities and individuals from full participation in the legal profession.