Section 3: Diversity alone isn’t enough
On one level, this report is about diversity, i.e. the absence or presence of BAME people in the charity sector. However, the testimony in the section above shows us that diversity alone does not represent progress if significant numbers of BAME people in the sector are experiencing harms. This situation means that there is work to do to examine and enhance conditions inside the charity sector for BAME (and all) people and to reaffirm why diversity should matter in the charity sector in the first place.
This is where inclusion and equity come into the picture.
These concepts and their connection to diversity are not necessarily widely understood. In this project, charity people (both BAME and white, and including leaders, racial justice activists and system-shapers) were aware – in some cases hyper-aware – of the presenting problem of a lack of BAME people in the charity sector. They could also envision how things could be different: specifically, that there would be more proportionate BAME presence on staff teams – including at senior levels – on boards, conference panels and so on.
However, while racial justice activists and BAME project participants had a relatively clear idea of what mechanisms of change were needed to deliver greater diversity this was less the case with white interviewees. And yet, in order to make progress on diversity, we need a widespread sense of how to build real change. Two critical building blocks are inclusion and equity.
Inclusion
Inclusion1 is at its core a set of actions and behaviours that invites and supports ‘difference’ in a setting. An inclusive organisation enables all of its people to fully participate in and influence the life of the collective.
Practices that may promote inclusiveness include highly democratic, participative and flat organisational arrangements, and commitments to institutional learning and dialogue on ‘race’ and racism. More open leadership styles with an emphasis on listening may also help, as argued by Stone (2016). Critically, research suggests that effective inclusive practices help to promote, among other things, people’s ‘psychological safety’ (Delizonna, 2017). This is the belief that one won’t be punished for being oneself or for speaking out and being creative.
While inclusion sounds warm and fluffy, it does also raise some concerns. In particular, there is the question of who decides whom to include. Inclusion can end up as a case of white-led organisations opening their doors to BAME people. This makes inclusion a gift of the powerful, and that can feel disempowering and demeaning for BAME people. This is not a reason to avoid building inclusion into the charity sector, but it is a reason to emphasise that inclusion of BAME (and all) people is a right, not a privilege; to include with depth and beyond token gestures; and to avoid doing so in ways that reinforce hierarchy.
The indications are that the charity sector has much more to do on inclusion. By way of illustration, our BAME online survey showed that 50 per cent of respondents (246 people out of 490) felt that they have needed to be on their ‘best behaviour’ in order to fit into the charity sector. This means that BAME people affected cannot bring their whole selves2 to work, and experience the draining and harmful work of coming to work in disguise so that they ‘fit in’ – which Yoshino (2006) describes as ‘covering’.
This in turn shows that diversity is not simply about upping BAME intake, if BAME people are then marginalised and feel that they need to exit once inside charity spaces.
- The definition here draws on ACF (2019) and D5 Coalition (2014).
- The ability to bring our whole selves to work is known to be good for mental health; for example, see MHFA (2020).
