Today Voice4Change England and ACEVO release Home Truths: Undoing racism and delivering real diversity in the charity sector. Home Truths is the final report in the year-long Making Diversity Count project.
Home Truths is not a report that asks if there is a problem with ‘race’ equity in the charity sector. It has long been known that there is an under-representation of BAME people working in the charity sector, and that under-representation is worse in senior leadership roles. Instead, in this report we have sought to reframe the ‘diversity’ debate, saying that racism is a significant and unresolved issue in the charity sector just as it is in the rest of society.
In making this report we centred the experiences and expertise of over 500 BAME people who either responded to our online survey or took part in in-depth interviews. Those participating in the research shared their experiences of racism in the sector and also told us what they thought needed to change in order to create true culture change. Some key findings include:
- 68% of respondents said that they had experienced, witnessed or heard stories about racism.
- 50% of respondents felt that they needed to ‘tone down’ behaviour or to be on their ‘best behaviour’ in order to fit in in the charity sector.
- 30% of respondents had been treated as an intellectual inferior.
- Of those respondents that had experienced or witnessed racism, 74% said senior staff within their organisations had played a significant part.
Positively, there appears to be an appetite for progress and this report is intended to provide a supportive framework for those who want real change. The report lays out steps both to further open up the charity sector to BAME people and to re-orientate charity work towards building a racially just society.
Racism is a system of oppression that can be undone through transparency, accountability, and action. Home Truths contains a number of recommendations, one of the quickest to implement being publishing ethnicity pay gap data. This is not something ACEVO has previously done but we will be doing so within the next month. I hope many of our members will join us in adopting this, and other recommendations.
For ACEVO, we have also published our commitments to next steps, which you can find in the report’s page, and have also produced a podcast discussing the report and its recommendations. Our website also contains two blogs, one from me and one from Dr Sanjiv Lingayah, lead author of the report.
Lastly, I want to thank Voice4Change England, and particularly Sanjiv, for their work on this report. We plan to continue to work together to make sure that this is more than ‘just’ another report.