Recommendations for CEOs and senior leaders
- Learn more about racism and current anti-racist thinking
All charity CEOs and leadership teams should source coaching or participate in a programme of learning on leading-edge anti-racist thinking and practice. Senior staff, in particular, should be encouraged to do the same.1
2. Take responsibility for learning how learning about how racism can manifest in your organisation
In conjunction with the above, all charity CEOs and leadership teams should engage in an analysis of how racism can manifest in their institution. Key themes for analysis include the extent to which BAME people have power and influence in the organisation; how external patterns of inequality might be reflected inside he charity; and whether BAME people in the organisation feel supported in sharing experiences of racism (Charity So White, 2019).
3. CEOs (with board chairs) should lead on and be held responsible and accountable for progress on DEI targets
Charity CEOs – alongside the chair of trustees – should be held responsible and accountable for progress against their charity’s DEI targets, processes and outcomes. This includes reporting on how the charity is working towards DEI in the organisation itself and in board operations – in line with the Charity Governance Code (Good Governance Steering Group, 2018) – as well as developing and implementing race equity impact plans for the external work of the organisation.
Initiatives are not expected to always succeed, but progress against targets should be transparent and measurable. DEI performance should form part of senior leaders’ annual appraisal and, should the charity operate a performance pay policy, pay should be linked to improvements on DEI.
Recommendations for funders
- Funders should invest in a DEI Transformation Fund geared to BAME-led initiatives
The fund would pool money from different funders and could have three elements to support areas of development of DEI culture:
a. Learning strand: Producing new learning and stimulus materials on racism and race equity for the charity sector – open only to BAME-led race equity organisations and initiatives.
b. Innovations strand: Open to all charities to develop and test ‘radical’ DEI efforts with potential to lead to widespread change.
c. Accountability/support strand: Open to BAME-led race equity organisations and initiatives only – to enable them to advocate, challenge and support with new ideas sector-wide transformation efforts.
2. Funders should become more interventionist in supporting charity sector DEI culture and practice including changing application criteria to prioritise racial justice work
Funders should use their money and influence to reward ‘DEI-forward’ applicants and grantees – doing the work of enhancing DEI inside the organisation as well as through impacts in the world. This could mean that funders adopt a process where they: (a) guide applicants and grantees on DEI expectations; (b) invest to support specific improvements among grantees – e.g. external race equity impact plans; (c) assess regularly that progress among grantees is being made; (d) warn where DEI progress is insufficient and support (perhaps with money or specialist input) remedial action; and (e) in the last resort, divest in instances where there is still insufficient improvement (Chow, 2018).
Together, these recommendations for the sector collectively, for organisations, for senior leaders and funders represent a multi-level plan to move decisively towards DEI culture in the charity sector. Enacted in concert they can shift the ‘way of life’ in the charity sector and bridge the gap between the professed desire in the charity sector for a focus on BAME people and racial and ethnic diversity and the deficits outlined in this report.
At the same time, especially in periods of turbulence, the real question is not what should be done but whether different elements in the charity sector are willing to rethink and reconstruct who we are as a sector, how we work and what we do.
- See Seeing White on Scene on Radio, 2017: sceneonradio.org/ seeing-white
