Ten EDI actions for your charity

Good intentions won’t tackle inequality. If we want to challenge longstanding issues like racism, classism, sexism, and ableism at work, we need to take action.

 

If you’re ready to kickstart equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) at your charity, here are ten practical actions you can take.

 

 

Review salaries

 

Who gets paid the most at your charity? And who is stuck on low-paying and precarious contracts?

 

If you have quality, disaggregated data about your staff (and you’re confident analysing it) then you are likely to spot gender, race, and class patterns around who is being paid the most and the least.

 

If you don’t have that data, now is the perfect time to start collecting it. You can use it as part of your annual diversity reporting.

 

 

Rethink annual leave

 

Annual leave policies send a powerful message about your charity’s culture.

 

Do you offer quality gender-neutral parental leave (including adoption leave), time off for miscarriage, mental health days, duvet days, and menstrual leave? That sends a signal that your staff’s mental and physical health matters. Plus, duvet days can reduce staff sick days, and parental leave policies help attract top talent.

 

Many organisations look to competitor charities and match what they’re offering. But why limit yourself? Consult your staff. Find out what they want and need. Then lead with the most generous, flexible leave you can possibly offer. It’s one of our most powerful, and often underused, tools for helping staff feel supported. 

 

 

Look at your training

 

So you’ve got great staff with great intentions. But do they know how to create an equitable and inclusive work culture?

 

Training is essential to get all staff up to speed on the importance of:

• Fair and open recruitment
• Promoting talented staff (without falling back on biased ideas of potential)
• Inclusive dress codes
• Religious practice (making sure staff can easily combine worship in specific places, at specific times of day, and religious holidays, with their workload)
• Unacceptable behaviour
• Flexible working (importance for everyone – not just parents)
• And many other aspects of workplace inclusivity

Review your training. Map out all the support – both informal and formal - that staff currently receive, and when they get it.

 

Try a simple survey: do staff feel they have the knowledge and skills they need? In which areas? Where are the gaps?

 

 

Check equal pay

 

This is different from reviewing contract types and salaries. For example, your staff of colour may be more likely to be on unstable contracts.

 

Equal pay means that staff doing similar work at a similar level get paid the same fair salary for their work. Check that all staff doing equal work have equal pay, benefits, and terms and conditions (like notice periods) in their contracts.

 

 

Analyse redundancies

 

With many charities starting to make redundancies, we need to ask: who is being made redundant?

 

It’s vital that you select staff for redundancy in a fair way. Otherwise, staff from minoritised communities are likely to be the first to be laid off.

 

 

Improve your monitoring

 

Change doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, changes to policies and strategies can take years to pay off. So it’s vital you gather:

• Baseline data, to show where you’re starting from
• Quality data taken at regular efforts, to show if your efforts are working

You can track the actual diversity of your staff (going beyond characteristics protected under the Equalities Act and including other important attributes like socioeconomic class).

 

You can also track their experiences (for example, of workplace discrimination). Where possible, make the survey completely anonymous. You might need to group data to help staff stay anonymous, especially in a small charity. 

 

Obviously, you need to track and analyse relevant data. If your staff is mainly White and middle class, then a survey might show that 80% of your staff have never experienced racism at work. That 80% is highly misleading. If you’re looking at racism, for example, you need to focus on the experiences of racially minoritised staff. 

 

 

Engage the board

 

If you’re not engaging your trustees, you’re missing out on a powerful source of change. Try our tips for getting your trustee board engaged on EDI. 

 

And it’s not just your workforce that needs to be diverse; your trustee board should include a broad range of life experiences and identities too.

 

Check out Getting on Board’s excellent guide, How to Diversify Your Charity’s Board.

 

 

Change how you communicate

 

Diversity, equity and inclusion should run through everything we do as charities. To become inclusive inside and out, we need to:

• Centre voices from minoritised communities
• Challenge harmful stereotypes
• Co-create content (so we don’t speak over or about marginalised people)
• Meaningfully partner with people from minoritised communities (so we’re not just engaging with them for the occasional awareness day, then abandoning them)
• Commit to being actively anti-racist and anti-oppressive in our storytelling
• Gather stories in an ethical, fair, and trauma-informed way

Looking for inspiration? Get motivated by some of the charities that are speaking out against racism.  

 

 

Educate on managing bias

 

Training your staff about unconscious bias is not a quick fix. In fact, just training people about unconscious bias typically does more harm than good.

 

It can leave people believing that injustice is something that “just happens” and that they have no responsibility for addressing the systems, structures and behaviours which perpetuate inequality at work.

 

What matters is managing bias. For example, creating fair and structured interview processes, then asking every candidate the same questions consistently.

 

 

Rethink holidays

 

“We’ll come back to this after Christmas - we can’t ask people to work to a deadline so close to an important holiday.”

 

While many people in the UK have annual leave around Christmas, that doesn’t mean that everyone celebrates it.

 

Staff who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist (to name just a few faiths) celebrate their most important holidays at other times throughout the year.

 

It’s essential that staff can take time off when they want it, so they can mark the moments that matter in their culture.

When you’re planning projects, work carefully with your staff to make sure that deadlines don’t fall around their important cultural or religious holidays. Make it as seamless as possible for people to take time out.

 

And consider your working week. Is it easy for Muslim and Jewish staff, for example, to take the time off they need on a Friday? 

 

Seemingly small details – like time off for worship – stack up. They help to create genuinely inclusive cultures.

And the research is clear. Equality and diversity isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the smart way to run an organisation that works.