Research interests and methods
In conducting our work, as well as seeking to understand the experiences of BAME people in the charity sector, we have sought the perspectives of leaders of charities as well as those of ‘system-shapers’ within the sector – including funders, infrastructure bodies and regulators. We also have been focused on understanding the charity context and the significant body of recent work on charity sector diversity to situate this work well and to avoid duplicating other efforts.
More specifically, this report draws upon the following sources of data:
Landscape literature review: This included 56 items, including books, sector, government and corporate reports, newspaper articles and blogs. The review explored three main areas: (1) definitions of diversity and its features; (2) beliefs and attitudes about racial diversity; and (3) how current diversity initiatives operate.
BAME online survey: This survey explored the experiences of BAME individuals working in the sector in paid and voluntary positions. A total of 493 people responded in detail to the survey, providing quantitative and qualitative data covering their experiences in and insights about the sector.
Interviews: We conducted 24 semi-structured anonymised interviews between September and November 2019, 13 with charity leaders (including two BAME) and 11 with BAME charity staff.
Roundtables: Session 1 was with 10 system-shapers, including funders, infrastructure/membership bodies and other organisations with influence on shaping the debate and priorities within the sector. Session 2 was with 10 racial justice advocates and activists to explore and make connections between diversity, anti-racism and racial justice.
Though we have had inputs from people in different types of charities, from medical to international development to local charities, those who participated were those with an interest in doing so. Therefore, we cannot state that the findings of the research are ‘representative’ of the whole charity sector, or of the experiences of all BAME people in the sector. That said, we consider our evidence base to be rich and important in conveying some of the hitherto underexplored experiences of BAME people in the charity sector. We hope that our new findings will make an important contribution to the debate on charity diversity.
A word on language
Finally, in this introduction, we say a bit about language and the difficult nature of many of the terms used in the report, including ‘race’, ‘BAME’ and ‘diversity’.
First, the term ‘race’: this is a socially constructed term that has no basis in science1 and should not in any way be a basis for organising and constraining human life. It has been powerfully argued that the idea of ‘race’ did not lead to the invention of racism, and that instead racism led to the creation of the idea of ‘race’ (Denvir, 2018) as a means to categorise and dehumanise some populations. When we use the term ‘race’ we do so with inverted commas. If we use the term ‘racial’ – with respect to diversity – we do so to refer to the presence or absence of Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic (BAME) people in the charity sector.
The second term is ‘BAME’. Groups classified as BAME include people identifying as Asian/Asian British, black/African/Caribbean/black British, white Irish, Arab, Latinx,2 Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, or Gypsy or Irish Traveller, as well as those of multiple ethnic backgrounds.
Such a broad term has many limitations. It centres whiteness as ‘normal’ and labels everyone else ‘other’. At the same time, few people are likely to self-identify as BAME (Sandhu, 2018).
People may instead think of themselves in more specific ways, for example as British Chinese, black Caribbean or Bangladeshi. Others may feel affinity with broader identifiers such as African/African Diaspora, black/Black, brown or Muslim. Yet, these terms may be of limited use in talking about the experiences of wider populations categorised as ‘other’ who may also experience racism, e.g. people of East Asian, Arab, Turkish or Latinx background. ‘People of colour’ is used as a term that can potentially encompass multiple racialised and minoritised populations. However, this generates its own concerns – for example, that it comes from the United States and is less helpful in the UK context or that the term decentres Blackness.
Debates of this sort will no doubt continue. In this report, despite its imperfections, we do use ‘BAME’ in a particular and limited way. That is, to describe the aggregate experiences of (often) racialised and minoritised people categorised as other than ‘white British’. This allows us to then say things like ‘x per cent of the charity workforce is BAME, while the percentage of BAME people in the population is 2x’.
A third term in this work is ’diversity’. As discussed above, we take this to mean the presence or absence in a population – such as a workforce – of various elements of human difference, such as ‘race’ and ethnicity, gender, or perhaps class background.
Diversity applies only to a collective, not to an individual (Bolger, 2017). For example, sometimes a BAME person will be called a ‘diverse person’ or, if they are applying for a job, a ‘diverse candidate’. This is incorrect. By way of illustration, a black woman is not ‘diverse’ in and of herself. She is just a person like any other; but recruiting a black woman to a charity could make the organisation’s workforce more diverse as a whole.
Talk of diversity can provoke strong negative responses. Indeed, one member of our racial justice roundtable said that they never wanted to use the term (racial) ‘diversity’ again! For some advocates and activists working for racial justice, the term can seem a distraction, meaning that we don’t talk about racism. Furthermore, as stated above, the diversity agenda can legitimately be criticised as more orientated to talk than action.
While we do understand these concerns, we do use the language to represent a visible sign of progress, or the lack of it. However, as developed further in Section 3, diversity only becomes truly meaningful and actionable when paired with ideas of inclusion and race equity.
- For example, on announcing the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome, President Bill Clinton remarked that: ‘in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same’ (CNN, 2000).
- ‘Latinx’ is a gender-neutral term used predominantly in the United States to refer to people identifying culturally or ethnically as ‘Latin American’ or some variant of this.
