Latest news with #belonging
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Working With Pride: Why Equity Is A Strategic Imperative
Real progress happens when inclusion is embedded in how we work, not just celebrated during one ... More month. Every year, Pride Month offers us a moment to reflect on progress, visibility and the responsibility we hold as leaders. I'm fortunate enough to be recognized on the global list of LGBTQ+ business leaders, and have seen firsthand how equity and fairness can power organizational transformation and support business goals. With markets navigating ongoing uncertainty and growing talent scarcity, fostering diverse thinking is a strategic necessity. This requires an inclusive approach that ensures that everyone has the opportunity to contribute their best and organizations can tap into the full potential of their people. A sense of belonging allows people to bring their best selves to work. When individuals feel accepted and valued for who they are, they are more innovative, more creative and more committed. It's in these environments that people go beyond just doing their jobs; they thrive, contribute new ideas and support those around them. Belonging is an enabler of performance and purpose. Recent global research underscores that a sense of belonging is now a decisive factor for many workers: more than half of talent globally (55%) say they would leave a job if they didn't feel they belonged and a similar proportion wouldn't join a company that didn't align with their social values. These aren't marginal concerns. They are indicators of whether people feel empowered to contribute fully. And they are shaping employment decisions across generations, industries, and geographies. Diverse teams, supported by inclusive organizational cultures, are proven to be more innovative and productive. In today's shifting economies, diversity, in all its forms, is incredibly important to business agility and long-term success. As business leaders, we don't have all the answers, but we do need to lead with intent, and this should not be a once-off, symbolic gesture, but a practical recommitment to shaping a more inclusive, and productive, future of work. Building a more inclusive world of work requires shared responsibility, awareness, education, and action. Here are four ways companies can move toward a more inclusive future: It's important to note that together, we continue to learn and evolve. But we know that real progress happens when inclusion is embedded in how we work, not just celebrated during one month. When inclusion is done well, it strengthens trust, boosts productivity and drives long-term value creation. That's the opportunity before us, and the reason to act.
Irish Times
28-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Irish Times
Ripeness by Sarah Moss: A captivating novel about the unwritten codes of Irish social interaction
Ripeness Author : Sarah Moss ISBN-13 : 978-1529035490 Publisher : Picador Guideline Price : £20 Have you no homes to go to? The line once used by Irish bar staff to clear a crowded pub at the end of an evening has a more unsettling ring in the modern age. What if you have no home to go to? What if you are not overly keen on going home? What if 'home' gets defined by someone else and not by you? Sarah Moss's latest novel, Ripeness, is, among other things, an extended meditation on what home or belonging might mean in a period of disruption and displacement. The narrative shifts between 73-year-old Edith, who has settled in the Burren, and her 17-year-old self, who ends up in a villa near Lake Como dealing with her sister Lydie's unwanted pregnancy. Edith and Lydie are the daughters of a French Jewish mother married to a northern English farmer. Edith inherits from her father an acute sensitivity to the changing moods of the landscape and from her mother – lost in the aftershadow of the Holocaust – an innate scepticism about the permanence of any form of belonging. Moss perfectly judges the prickly absolutism of the younger Edith, on her way to Oxford, a bookish teenager dealing with events in a foreign land that fast-track her to adulthood. Some of the most affecting pages in the novel describe the burgeoning sense of care she feels for her newborn nephew in the days before he is taken away for adoption, the carefully orchestrated outcome of the catastrophic circumstances surrounding his conception. READ MORE The older Edith memorably combines a clear-sighted forthrightness with the sarky petulance of advancing years ('we had a wireless at home but no record player, none of us feeling a need for music. It was only later that everyone started to have a taste in music, as if it were food or clothes, no opting out'). As an English woman in Ireland, Edith is continually aware of the trip wires of reproach, the random observation that is chalked up to colonial condescension or the accent that potentially makes any critical comment a hostage to the high-horsiness of empire. Forty years of married life in south Dublin and her subsequent move to the west of Ireland make for a long apprenticeship in the unwritten codes of Irish social interaction, where she notes 'friendliness isn't friendship'. Continually navigating the uncertainty of home and belonging is, as Sarah Moss's beguiling tale reminds us, an important skill Edith's northern English plain-speaking continually runs aground on the island shores of the unsaid and the unspoken. Questions around assimilation and integration come to a head when Méabh, Edith's closest friend, becomes involved in a local protest against the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers. This event coincides with the imminent reunion between Méabh and a newly discovered half-brother from the United States, another victim of an unwanted teenage pregnancy, having many years earlier been spirited off to the US for adoption. Edith contrasts the ready acceptance of the half-brother – who has never set foot in Ireland – as being of the place, with the rejection of the young asylum seekers – who actually live on the island – as having no right to be there. [ Sarah Moss: Irish dog-walkers are kinder than English dog-walkers Opens in new window ] Lying in bed with her German lover, Gunter, she wants 'another immigrant to agree that national identity isn't genetic, that blood doesn't give you rights of ownership'. To an ageing Edith, the malign legacies of blood-and-soil thinking are evidence not only of the dangers of forgetting but also of the foreclosure of possibility, the denial that newcomers have the regenerative capacity to 'belong by caring for people and places'. Moss's writing has always been characterised by its range, and the latest novel does not disappoint. Whether describing the shift of the northern Italian landscape from summer to autumn, the granular changes of light on a wet day in Clare, or the brittle exchanges between two damaged siblings, Moss's prose is unfailingly spare and alert. The images are often arresting: 'a bowl of brassy dimpled pears'. Equally, they are telling in their unfussy accuracy, such as when she evokes spring in the Burren, 'its tiny flowering in the crevices and rain-cups of sedimentary rock, in the pinprick markings of the planet's bone'. Part of the attraction of this captivating novel is Moss's curiosity about different ways of knowing. How the world looks through the lens of a different language – French or Italian, in this instance – and how you try to build another version of yourself in that language while foxed by the snares of grammar and idiom. Or how differently the world is felt and understood when it is measured out in steps, twists, turns and leaps, as is the case with Lydie and her ballet-dancer friends. The ripeness of the title comes from Edith's reading of King Lear . She contrasts Hamlet's insistence on readiness, on the triumph of the will, with Edgar's 'ripeness is all', which stresses how much is out of our hands, how much happens 'regardless of agency or volition'. Continually navigating the uncertainty of home and belonging is, as Sarah Moss's beguiling tale reminds us, an important skill if, in our fractious age, last orders are not to give way to last rites. Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
CBC
27-05-2025
- Sport
- CBC
Did you know Windsor has a blind darts program?
Windsor's new blind darts league is bringing blind and partially sighted people together "to feel like we just belong."
Wall Street Journal
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Generation Z Meets ‘The Breakfast Club'
'I can't believe they went without social media in the 1980s,' my student said. 'They get distance from the outside world.' She was referring to 'The Breakfast Club,' which I had just watched with my high-school freshmen. We had recently read 'The Odyssey' and I thought it might be fun to see a movie that also deals with identity and belonging. I hoped my students would see connections between 'The Breakfast Club' and 'The Odyssey' about the distance one gets and doesn't get from home. I was their age in 1985, the year the film came out.
