Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Statement and Action Plan

At the Barrow Cadbury Trust we believe in the equal value of all people.  This fundamental belief drives everything we do.  We recognise that people are discriminated against at many levels due to disrespect of their identities, heritage or characteristics.  We understand that this is profoundly damaging to individuals, to groups and to society at large.  It is also compounded by discrimination over more than one characteristic, such as race, gender, age or income for example.  Discrimination takes many forms including violent hate crime, deliberate and overt discriminatory behaviour, actions due to institutional or organisational structures and culture and unconscious bias at the individual level.

We know and understand that no individual or organisation is immune from this and that it takes deliberation, self- examination and continuous effort to become less discriminatory and more inclusive, both at the personal and at the organisational level.  Power and privilege play out in all areas of our lives from the macro to the micro.  We believe in the broad and positive benefits of better DEI practice – to productivity, to individuals and to society itself.  We will be brave and transparent in speaking out about these issues.

Our board and staff pledge ourselves to examine our own power and privilege, not forgetting the discrimination experienced by any of us as well, with the intention to detoxify damaging behaviours, structures and attitudes.  We will take a ‘whole organisation’ approach to improvement, building on areas of work we have already engaged in.  This means looking more closely than ever before at all aspects of our organisation, its work and its heritage, including historic injustice.

We will critically examine further our governance, management, communications, internal operations, relationships with our partners, our programmatic work and our financial base (in our case an endowment).

We will draw up an annual action plan on DEI, seek and be open to challenge and feedback and transparent in our reporting on progress, both internally and externally.  Recognising that culture drives change more surely than does strategy, we will build on our existing organisational culture, ensuring that all voices can be listened to and heard as we move forward.

July 2024

Barrow Cadbury Trust Action Plan 2024-25

Governance: In 2024-25 we will:

• Further discuss the implications of the board awayday on anti racism.
• Audit our board diversity and take action to improve it, avoiding tokenism.
• Ensure all trustees have access to further learning on DEI issues by a variety of means.
• Include discussions of the Trust’s actions on DEI in our annual cycle of board meetings.

Management/ Internal operations:  In 2024-25 we will:

• Have an externally facilitated full staff team awayday on anti-racism and implications for our work.
• Redesign and DEI-proof our recruitment process.
• Publish our race and gender pay gaps.
• Audit our staff diversity and take action to improve it when opportunities arise.
• Ensure all staff have access to further learning on DEI issues by a variety of means.
• Include discussions of DEI issues routinely in our ongoing work.
• Explore our supply chains and switch to more DEI-friendly suppliers where possible.

Communications: In 2024-25 we will:

• Improve accessibility to our four websites.
• Ensure all our publications have DEI-friendly graphics and visuals.
• Encourage our partners to use DEI friendly visuals in reports they publish with us.
• Use our social media channels to promote work challenging and changing discrimination in all its forms.
• Take care to use plain English, avoiding acronyms and jargon in our publications and other text.
• Ensure our application process is transparent, straightforward and accessible.

Relationships with partners: In 2024-25 we will:

• Make efforts to acknowledge the power imbalance between those who have resources and those who seek them, with a view to maintaining open, honest and respectful relationships which value what each party brings to our shared goals.
• Be open to challenge and feedback on our behaviours where they fall short without being defensive.
• Participate in networks for learning and sharing of good practice.

Programmatic work: In 2024-25 we will:

• Review our grant portfolios again using the Funders for Race Equality audit tool and publish our results.
• Ensure DEI- lensing is a part of all our grant assessments and awards and that all funded partners explain the DEI implications of what they are trying to achieve.
• Ensure that work on all our programmes is informed by the input of people with lived experience of the issues being tackled by the programme and where those people are not acting in their own paid employment role, we will compensate them for their time.
• Not construct un-diverse panels at any of our events or those we pay for.

Finances: In 2024-25 we will:

• Take further steps to improve the DEI-friendly selection of our investments including with regard to historic injustice.
• Audit our social investments and take further steps to seek out opportunities to support DEI-led initiatives.
• Report on progress on the Diversity Forum manifesto.
• Ensure DEI components to our shareholder activism, pressing companies to implement better DEI practice. Promote the Pathway Fund’s Equity Scorecard.