Allyship is the “actions, behaviors, and practices that leaders take to support, amplify, and advocate with others, especially with individuals who don’t belong to the same social identity groups as themselves.” In the context of medical education and healthcare, inequities and systemic racism persistently impact various stakeholders, including patients, learners, and faculty members from marginalized groups as they go about their work. Faculty and medical learners have a privileged position to build communities within their various healthcare environments and can act against inequities and racism. Faculty and medical trainees should leverage their strength and privilege through allyship to move towards health equity and justice. We interact with individuals who may need uplifting and amplification to reach their full potential, such as patients, learners or colleagues from an equity-deserving population facing discrimination or oppression.

This workshop will define allyship in its many forms (e.g. ally to co-conspirator). Armed with this knowledge and an exploration of one's own power, privilege and positionality, our workshop participants will be empowered to explore their own potential as effective allies in medical education. Through case scenarios, participants will actively practice allyship. To conclude, participants will plan strategies for implementing allyship in their own educational environment. Resources will also be provided to support participants to continue expanding their allyship skills after the session. We aim to enable our participants to further develop their allyship skills for contributing to social justice through forming inclusive communities and making stronger interpersonal connections and supporting others.

Agenda & Methods
The 90 minute session with begin with an introduction (5 min) and a large group icebreaker exercise with participants expressing their understanding of allyship (10 min). We will review ground rules of this work and set the stage for psychological safety as this is required to create an environment to share in these complex and emotionally charged topics around privilege and discrimination. There will be a brief didactic session using principles of universal design learning (engagement, representation; action and expression). We will cover the definition of different forms of allyship with examples (10 min). There will be a participant exercise of a privilege challenge where participants privately (respecting privacy and potential vulnerability) score their privilege. The exercise will be debriefed as a large group through a facilitated discussion on any revelations experienced from the privilege challenge (15 min). The next step will be a small group exercise using case scenarios to make the different types of allyship for the given case (10min). Large group discussion follows around the case scenarios to consolidate learning about the nuances of the different types of allyship. There will be a brief didactic session on communication tools for allyship for example calling in, out and on (5 min). We will then move into small group activities of practicing allyship using the communication tools with role play and troubleshooting for one case from a list of 3 scenarios (15 min). The larger group will hear from the groups about each of the cases and their experience working through the cases(15 min). We conclude with a wrap up of the workshop (5 min).