Diversity

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

It’s not my place as a white, middle aged, straight, cisgender, well educated man to start telling people a lot about diversity. 

From having to write the sections on a lot of bids, I at least have a few ideas to get you going:

You’ll need some clarity from the project regarding its targets

If the funder knows what they’re doing, they’ll be aware that the experiences of LGBT+ people of different generations or of disabled people from different BAME groups can be very different. So, if the service says it’s going to be delivering to “BAME people”, that might not tell you enough about the specific groups who’re likely to come through the door or their issues.

A lot of projects which target diverse groups work through referral partnerships, and/or have outreach into specialist services. That immediately skews your project – it’s not really a BAME project so much as one targeting people from the Somali diaspora, say. As such, it’s hard to make great headway in pulling things together / pulling the bid together until issues like that have been clarified.

Dig around for reports and toolkits

As ever, there’s been a huge amount that has been done, you just have to find it. I’ve found plenty of the ones that weren’t online at the British Library. If you’re struggling with more modern materials, it’s worth looking at things from the ‘90s: there used to be a lot more money for specialist services and therefore more studies into them.

Be as specific as you can, for the reasons mentioned above.

Getting good population data can be a challenge – as for example, the experiences of young Somali women are different to those of young women from neighbouring diasporas, but they can be lumped in under “African” at top tier local authority level in the Census. You may need to combine census data, reports and some word of mouth.

Easier ways to adjust services models

Staff training

If you can’t do much more, staff training is a cheap, easy thing to write in. However, there’s growing evidence that awareness training can be actively counterproductive in that it encourages resentment in people who don’t agree. So, training needs to have a very specific role, enabling people who are clearly on board, to behave more skillfully. (What does change attitudes positively, I understand, is to work with people from the target group, as equals.)

Specific written materials / webpages for service users

Written materials can be produced at limited cost and mean you’re providing some kind of specific service. I’m sure that, as someone who’s read a lot of pages of advice on this site, the limitations of written materials are clear to you! That’s even more true if people are in their situation because they lack confidence or communication skills, say. However, it’s better than nothing and you can signpost onwards in the materials.

There are increasing numbers of tools you can use to make the language appropriate. For example: you can paste the text into free online websites to make it gender neutral at a deeper level than substituting “them” for “him”. You can use Word to check the reading age. A younger reading age is more accessible to people with English as a Second Language and people with mild learning difficulties.

Using volunteers to help deliver the project

If the project budget doesn’t stretch to staff with the necessary characteristics, involving volunteers can bring in a lot of expertise by experience and provide an engaging face for the work. You need to have checked that this is realistic, though. Some groups, for example BAME mothers, can be so time poor they don’t volunteer as much. You also have the issue of engaging them.

You can also use the volunteers to help shape and/or steer the project. At Back Up we have a very large, diverse (and talented) volunteer group and volunteers with the same characteristics as the target group have played a key role every time we have developed new work addressing the needs of a different specific group.

Partner organisations

This is the direction quite a few intensive diversity initiatives go and can be the “gold star” approach. From a narrow fundraising perspective, it can create an enormous amount of extra work before the bid goes out and you’ll have to split the money. A “partnership lite” version you might be able to suggest is to give another charity a couple of £k a year to sit on a steering committee and to provide expert advice and some referrals/ access for outreach.

Publicity materials

This doesn’t create a genuinely accessible service, but using the right language, case studies and photos gives you a more accessible image. Services don’t always see beyond equalities as being an engagement issue, so if that’s as far as they get, they might need a little prod…

Look for common sense certainties

This is more a writing point, but as I’m doing diversity issues on this page…

A proportion of trustees are likely to be skeptical about specialist minority provision. The ways I’ve tried to address this are:

• Focus where you can on clear, concrete certainties about the need (e.g., “When we ran mixed gender sports events, not a single woman turned up. This reflects X report, which found that exercise take up in Somali women was only Y% of that in the mainstream community.” – Rather than leading with “Discrimination and cultural issues make it difficult for Somali women to access sport”).
• Clear proof is all the more important that solutions work.
• Try to say things that would seem common sense even to your bigoted relative. (If you feel a little triumph that you’ve got to share one of your deep felt political sensibilities on paper, there’s a fair chance it’s the wrong argument!) Even though some of the big trusts are more liberal/socialist/sensitive inclusive, not all are and anyway, that kind of language isn’t really “bid speak”.

Addressing issues

An accessible project is accessible because it works practically, amongst other things. The Big Lottery Fund had a brilliant grid for looking at these issues from lots of angles, meaning you can present the work as well thought through. I’ve adapted in the following download:

Monitoring

My advice is usually to capture equalities data at service user registration. There can be two issues with this:

• Staff can feel uncomfortable about asking (one issue where training could help – ensuring staff have the right wording to use).
• Staff can think that service users will be uncomfortable. I think this is something you can address with reassuring words (“We’re actively trying to improve our work for different groups. Please can you tell us about yourself, so we can check that the service really is reaching everyone it should and providing them with a good service.”)

The alternative is to run occasional surveys. The advantage is that, because people are anonymous, they might be more open. However:

• Response rates can be low
• You only know whether you’ve engaged people, not whether they got a good service, because you can’t compare outcomes with equalities data

Training for you

My advice to you would be to have a minimum of half a day’s awareness-type training, over the years, in each of the following:

• Race, ethnicity and faith
• Gender
• Ageism
• Sexuality
• Mental health issues
• Disability (then preferably: visual impairments; hearing impairments)
• Learning disabilities
• Class, if you can find a course

It’s all good orientation, giving you a bit more of a frame of reference and getting you actively thinking about the issues for a bit.

Implicit bias tests

If you have no passion for particular equalities issues, I recommend doing some of Harvard University’s Implicit Bias tests, available online. What people often find is that they had some degree of bias that they’d never realized – meaning that you’re a little bit the problem, rather than the solution. It’s then up to you to learn more about the issues. It worked for me, at least.

Referencing your Diversity policy

As Robyn McAllister, my editor, pointed out, you do also need to reference your Diversity policy and maybe your Equal Opps policy. Thanks, Robyn.