Bond’s work on anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion: what have I learned after a year in the job?

A year ago this week, I started at Bond as a new, fresh-faced CEO.

Although being a Bond staff member was new for me, Bond’s work wasn’t. I had been very engaged in the organisation’s external work on anti-racism in my previous role and had learned a lot from joining action learning sets, and Bond’s first CEO anti-racism group.

That’s why one of the first things I did when joining Bond was to start a new process of examining our internal work on anti-racism and equity, diversity and inclusion (AEDI), and developing a new action plan we aim to share with staff, our board and members. That action plan is still under development, but I’ve learnt a lot in a year.

This blog aims to share some of that learning in the hope that it can also support others.

Hard lessons

The first thing I’ve learned is that this work is hard.

I knew that already, but it has been doubly brought home to me through this process. But, it’s easier if you expect it to be hard, and are prepared for difficult and uncomfortable conversations, with the right facilitation support in place. Accepting that we are all learning and trying, and that we live in a society where racism is ingrained and pervasive, is important.

We need to be humble, to listen and learn from each other in a spirit of openness and trust. We’ve heard that some of the spaces that staff have set up to address anti-racism have been harmful, with a negative impact on some people of colour involved. We need to recognise and apologise for that, and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again, while also acknowledging that those spaces were created with the right intentions. The onus is now on us to train up staff to be better equipped for some of these difficult conversations.

Another big learning for me is how much the external context impacts on our staff, and how much, as managers, we need to support them in this. As a white, British, middle-class woman, I can read and be horrified by what I see in the news, but it doesn’t impact me personally. I don’t have family living in conflict zones. My parents live in small town Suffolk and my in-laws live in what looks like a chocolate box in rural Switzerland, about as far from danger as you can get.

I’m not faced with racism on the street, and I don’t see people rioting against those who look like me, as my colleagues have done. Ensuring that managers support our teams and respond to these events, giving them the time they need to process them emotionally, is important.  Showing solidarity and compassion is essential and can mean a lot.

Recognising intersectionality

An ongoing challenge for us is how to deal with different dimensions of AEDI, and avoid an ‘oppression Olympics’, in which different characteristics end up pitted against each other. This has been a tricky issue for us, ensuring that we respond to all the different ways in which our staff may face discrimination and marginalisation, including around characteristics that may not be visible, such as mental health or disability.

Ensuring that we respond to all of these characteristics appropriately and don’t rush to quick judgements about diversity has been an important learning for us. We’ve also realised we need to do much more training and shared learning to ensure we are all on same page and using the same language.

Getting buy-in

I’ve learnt that there can be a mismatch between policies and procedures and staff perception. We need to do more both to communicate policies to staff and to increase their confidence in them. We’ve taken this on board, and are doing much more to share our policies with staff and increase their confidence that policies will be properly followed. We also recognise that we still have further to go on the policies themselves to ensure they better support inclusion of all our staff.

And finally, our board, in particular the People Committee, have been vital in this process. Making sure we have proper external scrutiny and accountability for our work has been essential in ensuring that we stay on track, while the board’s guidance for me as a new CEO has been invaluable.

We’ve agreed that our People Committee will hold us, and me personally, accountable for the progress we make and the extent to which we implement our action plan. This will also help us to ensure that the Senior Management Team are also seen as an essential part of the organisation, who have their own characteristics, protected or otherwise. We need support as well. This is going to be long road, and it isn’t an easy one.

This is going to be long road, and it isn’t an easy one. I’m also learning and growing, and am hugely grateful to everyone within Bond and our membership, in particular Bond’s CEO anti-racism group, who has helped to guide me this far. I’m committed to sharing more of our journey as our action plan firms up, and we make our own little bit of progress towards a more just and equal world.