Section 2: Experiences of BAME people
This section is this report’s beating heart. We already know that BAME people are relatively absent from the charity sector. But the best way to know if the charity sector is ready for greater racial and ethnic diversity is to understand the experience of BAME people already inside the sector. And that is the focus of this section.
The participants sharing experiences in this project were largely self-selecting rather than belonging to a group drawn up on the basis of a ‘representative sample’. We therefore cannot pass comment on the extent to which their experiences, perspectives and insights reflect those of wider BAME populations in charities. That said, the accounts of life in the charity sector provided by BAME project participants are rich, textured and troubling.
As mentioned in the introduction, inputs from BAME people into the project took three forms (see data sources at the end of this report for more details).
The first of these was an online survey aimed at people self-identifying as one of the ethnicities under the umbrella category BAME. The survey was targeted at BAME people with experience in the charity sector as volunteers (including trustee and other roles), interns, employees and/or associates/freelancers.
There were 493 detailed survey responses that included information about the respondents’ role and their personal experiences of being in the charity sector – although these respondents did not necessarily answer every question. One-hundred and eighteen additional survey submissions contained fewer completed data fields; we cannot be sure why this was the case. Of the total of 611 respondents (giving detailed responses and not), 543 were engaged in the charity sector at the time of the survey and a further 29 had worked in the sector within the last five years. This latter group’s experiences were eligible for our survey, allowing us some access to people who perhaps felt that they had little choice but to leave the sector. A small number of people attempted to fill in the survey who had previously worked in the sector but more than five years ago; these respondents were screened out from completing the rest of
the survey, to ensure that all responses were based on relatively recent experiences.
The second element of input from BAME charity people came from 14 interviews with BAME charity employees – two of which were with people in formal senior management/leadership positions in their organisations.
The third source of perspectives of BAME people was a roundtable discussion involving racial justice advocates and activists. This group of 10 people work in different ways to transform society to make ‘race’ irrelevant to the kinds of lives people can lead. Some of these roundtable participants work in the charity sector but in specialist (sometimes BAME-led) equalities organisations rather than what might be described as ‘mainstream’ charities.
Below, we examine the experiences of BAME people in the charity sector and draw on these experiences and associated insights to generate ideas on how to transform the sector. Before continuing, we need to say that we are grateful to all those who came forward to give such thoughtful, honest testimony – particularly because it can be difficult to discuss negative experiences, especially those of racism.
We believe that we obtained such a quantity and quality of contribution in part because, until now, the BAME people most impacted by the lack of diversity in the charity sector have not been sufficiently included in discussions of the problem and its solutions. We hope that this report marks the beginning of intentional new practice in the charity sector: not simply to consult, but to ensure that the knowledge and specialisms of BAME people and organisations take centre stage in designing ‘deep-down’ diversity.
For the purposes of this report, we have taken an evidence base of several hundred thousand words and distilled it into a few thousand. In doing so we recognise that some detail will be lost, but we aim to highlight the key themes in the data. These are:
