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At the Community Foundation, one of our core values is embracing diversity and treating everyone fairly. We comply with equality and anti-discrimination laws and regulation, but we also seek to go beyond legal requirements to understand, implement and promote greater diversity, equity and inclusion. We also want to make sure we tackle prejudice, discrimination and unconscious bias at the Foundation and across everything we do.
In October 2019, we announced a focus on philanthropy’s role in addressing equity and inclusion. In March 2021, we published a set of Vital Signs reports on diversity, equity and inclusion. We’ve also taken time to look at our own practices. Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy came as a result of listening to and consultation with our membership of individuals, voluntary organisations, businesses and public bodies.
Our strategy to 2025 has further commitments to address diversity across our goals. As one of our objectives for 2021-22, our Board has agreed and published the first set of benchmarks for the diversity of our staff and trustees looking at gender, disability and ethnicity. You can read about that and other aspects of our work on our website.
As well as working to add benchmarks for age, sexual orientation and socio-economic background, our priorities are to encourage more disabled people and more people from Black, Asian and other non-White ethnic backgrounds to apply for our Board vacancies when they arise in the next 6-18 months. We will also continue to seek and support diverse candidates of all background for any staff roles that come up. We are also working on diversity, equity and inclusion in our grant-making. Using data from our new grants system, we plan to analyse and publish further information about our reach to diverse communities and how well that reflects where we think we should be.
As ever, none of this means our conversations are not over – but we hope what we are saying and doing shows our commitment to addressing inequalities and injustices.