Pride with #CharitySoStraight: key takeaways

To wrap up this year’s Pride Month, we invited the team at #CharitySoStraight to takeover the ACEVO Twitter profile for a few hours. They shared so many tips about leading with pride, being a proud ally and how to avoid pride washing, that we decided to gather some of the key messages on this blog.

Huge thanks to #CharitySoStraight – do follow them on Twitter. If you are a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and work in the charity/voluntary sector, join their Slack group.

Leading with Pride

There’s so much charity leaders can do to lead in a more inclusive way. The first thing is that leaders need to understand – and value – the benefits that diversity in the workplace can bring to their organisation. Inclusive leaders build teams, enable cultures that value people with different perspectives and create space and platforms to enable diverse voices to be heard.

It’s really important for charity leaders to ensure the organisations they lead are truly representative of the communities they serve. This is particularly relevant for charities that provide services directly to beneficiaries.

Inclusive leaders…

• Listen to their people and take employees’ feedback about diversity (and problems they may have experienced in the workplace) seriously
• Enable their people to learn about diversity issues and make the time and put resources behind this
• Don’t push diversity and inclusion down the agenda as ‘nice to do’ because they understand the value it brings, and they don’t put it in the ‘too difficult’ box, because they don’t shy away from tackling conversations that some people might find ‘difficult’
• Inform themselves and enjoy enabling their teams to develop too
• Ensure that diversity and inclusion is part of the business, not just mandatory training, and not just a priority for senior leaders or team managers
• Are comfortable with challenges, and are happy to ask themselves tough questions, such as:
  • Who do I go to for advice?
  • Do they all look and sound like me?
  • Do their views neatly align with mine or do they challenge my perspective?
• Remember that diversity and diversifying their workforce is a direction not a destination, and we’re all somewhere along that journey
• Consider what actions to take to move the organisation forwards, and to support, protect and champion LGBTQIA+ people every day

Diversifying your board

Diversity doesn’t end with your staff team – think about governance too!

A few tips to diversify board recruitment

• Stop and ask: why do we want to ‘diversify’? What problem are we trying to solve and how will diversifying our board help us to solve that problem?
• Consider where your organisation is on its EDI journey. What do you know about the diversity of your board as it is now, and what would a more diverse board look like?
• It shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise. It needs to be approached in a meaningful way!
• It’s so important that boards have a range of perspectives around the table, and while there is currently no requirement to report on LGBTQIA+ board diversity, it’s something that should be happening
• Always recruit openly. Having closed recruitment excludes so many people with protected characteristics
• Look at where you are advertising your trustee vacancies. If you always advertise in the same place, you will always reach a similar audience profile (check Queer Trustees)

How to be a Proud Ally

Everyone can be an ally to their LGBTQIA+ colleagues and there are some really simple steps to become a better ally.

• Educate yourself about issues that are affecting the Queer community right now, like transphobia or conversion therapy
• Challenge discriminatory language and behaviour in the workplace. Ensure you have robust policy and processes in place to support your Queer employees
• Listen and take their concerns seriously. Look out for any patterns in grievances and complaints to identify if there’s something going on that you need to manage more closely
• It’s so important for allies to use their voice to stand in solidarity with more marginalised communities – but it’s equally as important to know when not to take up space
• If you centre yourself, it’s likely that you’re excluding others, so, we would encourage leaders to step back and ensure you’re enabling other voices to be heard
• Encourage the use of pronouns in the workplace. This is a good indicator that your organisation is engaging with issues relevant to diversity. It also allows those who may be less comfortable being out in the workplace to feel safe when they’re considering sharing their own pronouns
• It’s also important to note that some LGBTQIA+ people might not be happy yet to share their pronouns – they may be exploring their identity or just want to maintain a level of privacy at work. And that’s fine too!

There are simple ways you can become more inclusive with the language you use:

• Instead of saying ‘guys’ consider using everyone, folks, friends, colleagues, team
• Use the word ‘partner’ instead of making assumptions about someone’s relationship status. Replace boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband with partner, unless you already know someone’s personal circumstances
•  If you do not know a person’s gender identity use ‘they’ or ‘them’ instead of ‘he/she’

What not to do

Call it what you will: Pink Washing, Rainbow Washing, Pride Washing. Charities failing to mention LGBTQIA+ folks for most of the year, and then changing their logos for Pride Month is part of the oppression and it matters a lot. Using a minoritised community’s identity and the symbols for profit is not ok. Businesses have been Rainbow Washing for years, but over recent years, there has been more and more charities doing the exact same thing.

Profiting from a minoritised community is the worst thing any brand could possibly do. That charity brands are doing this every June is unfathomable.

The good news is that there are many charities that get it right and engage with their Queer staff and service users, share their stories, acknowledge how their services touch Queer people’s lives and talk about this openly and sensitively. They provide resources specifically tailored to the LGBTQIA+ community. They engage with Queer stakeholders in a meaningful and authentic way, and share useful resources and authentic content, rather than carelessly adopting the rainbow flag for one month.