Our vision is excellent fundraising for a better world. We are clear that to deliver excellent fundraising we need equal, diverse, and inclusive teams. Tackling all forms of race inequality, within our staff and volunteer team, and within the wider sector, is at the heart of that strategy.
Our Change Collective strategy sets out our rationale and plans for addressing all forms of inequality in the fundraising community.
Creating race equality is an integral part of that, with a specific project in partnership with Voice4Change and the University of East London looking at the intransigent, structural and systemic reasons for why there are so few BAME (black, Asian and minoritised ethnic) fundraisers. We will also map the ethnicity pay-gap in fundraising. We are developing a long-term partnership with Voice4Change and Leonard Cheshire which we hope will ensure there will be more BAME and disabled fundraisers in the future.
As a part of the Strategy we set up a new formal EDI sub-committee of the Board, chaired by Carol Akiwumi, which is charged with monitoring and guiding the implementation of our strategy, and guiding our progress towards our EDI targets. The Committee has 50% BAME representation.
The strategy sets out targets for us as an organisation to have a staff and volunteer team that is more than representative of the diversity of the UK population by September 2021. One third of our Board and a fifth of our staff team are currently BAME, while our volunteer committee members are disproportionately white.
Our role as a Chartered membership body gives a reach and influence across the fundraising profession and the wider charity sector. We will use that influence to speak about anti-racist ways of working on our causes. We will be asking members to sign an EDI Pledge. We will monitor the sector’s progress through repeating our “Who isn’t in the Room” survey every 3 years.
Our commitment to tackling issues around race led us to jointly publishing with ACEVO the report on Racial Diversity in the Charity Sector asking charity sector leaders to sign up to 8 leadership principles. Our CEO and Chair are also a part of ACEVO’s Creating Race Equity Programme.
We have supported their call for 20% of funding in response to COVID19 to be allocated to BAME led organisations serving BAME communities.
Internally we have achieved Inclusive Employers “Committed Standard” and are working towards achieving their Bronze standard this year.
Our Board has committed to attending racism training, which is mandatory for our staff team.
We know that we will make mistakes on this journey, but are committed to learning from them, and continuously aiming to do better.
Our ambition is for the fundraising profession to be a career of choice for people of colour, benefiting from their talent and experiences and reflecting their higher commitment to social causes shown by their levels of volunteering and polling data.
We aim for BAME fundraisers to be at least proportionately reflected within the profession, at all levels of seniority.
We will work to ensure the Chartered Institute of Fundraising to be an employer of choice for people of colour, across all areas of professional expertise.
More specifically we aim for our staff team to better reflect the diversity of London, where our head office is based, with BAME staff represented at all levels within the organisation.
We will work with our volunteer committees to ensure that our volunteers across all areas of our activity reflect the diversity of the UK population.
The fundraising profession as a whole will improve through greater diversity and inclusion. The Chartered Institute of Fundraising is committed to leading by example.