Our anti-racism journey: from commitment to action

In June 2021, we made an organisational commitment to embed anti-racist approaches to our work and our organisation. Whilst a lot has changed since 2021, our commitment to anti-racism remains strong. Our new strategy is grounded in advancing systemic change with and for children and young people by shifting the underlying conditions that hold them back from thriving. We know we can’t do this if we don’t continue taking anti-racism seriously.

This blog provides a brief update on our progress against the commitments we made back in 2021. It surfaces some learning about our experiences, and outlines our priorities going forward.

Progress against commitments

In short, of the eight actions we committed to, we have made progress against six:

1. Designing, testing and adapting an anti-racism equity impact assessment into our research and design project work;

2. Implementing training and learning spaces within our organisation;

3. De-biasing our approaches to recruitment;

4. Increasing diversity of our board (broadly defined, including a focus on racial and ethnic diversity);

5. Nurturing a culture of inclusion and belonging; and

6. Integrating anti-racist practices into organisational policy.

We view all of these areas as being in an ongoing process of development. We are refining and adapting our equity impact assessment and examining how we better integrate it into our project work. We want to continue to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of our board and continue to deepen our work on inclusion and belonging.

We have made progress towards but not fully achieved two of our commitments:

1. Reporting annually against our progress - we managed to report every other year;

2. Establishing an anti-racism learning alliance - after identifying appetite amongst collaborators we didn’t follow through on setting the alliance up.

Learning over the last couple of years

When we looked at what has driven our progress in our anti-racism and what has inhibited that progress, we surfaced three key learning points.

Balancing learning and action

As we touched on in our last update, a key tension we’ve faced is addressing systemic racism and responding to harm experienced. Clearly both are required. It has taken us time to establish the right internal infrastructures to support this, to understand what we need to do to prevent a white framing of issues being perpetuated and to ensure those who experience and/or are impacted by racial and ethnic discrimination are being heard, respected and responded to. Navigating this work, whilst developing the infrastructures to support it, caused an additional burden for those from racial and ethnic minorities, as well as other marginalised and discriminated against groups. At times, we’ve needed to put in more time, effort or work than we were organisationally resourced or personally equipped for.

We’ve established new policies and practices to better respond to those that might cause harm, yet are still learning how and when to enact these.

Things that have worked well for us are having a dedicated chair of our anti-racism coordination group, integration of this coordination group with the Senior Leadership Team, co-creation of anti-discrimination policy and practices, and using regular Open Spaces, where the whole team convene and in which anyone can bring issues or challenges they are experiencing - in the organisation or in our work. People vote with their (virtual) feet and coalesce around anti-racism related topics.

Overcommitting is not helpful and being non-specific about goals hinders progress

Our ambitions in 2021 were filled with good intentions. As an organisation we have reflected deeply on our own positionality and the changes that we need to make to ourselves, our work and our sector. Some of our commitments required specific resources and time that we did not sufficiently factor into our work (nor are we funded to enact, such as development of anti-racist research and design approaches to our work). Some of our commitments did not specify what we were aiming for (such as the formation of an anti-racist learning alliance). Both of these resulted in commitments either not being delivered or it being hard to ascertain whether the progress we were making was happening at a satisfactory pace. Committing to specific goals aligned to fewer areas that we can be confident in resourcing is a key lesson we will take forward.

Maintaining commitments in light of external pressures requires organisational readiness and tough choices

Our commitments relied not only on us shifting how we work internally, but also on changes in how we work with others. We underestimated the work that this could entail and the buy-in that we would need from partners to undertake this work. Our work is directly funded by partners, so their support and adequate resourcing along with our commitment to prioritise and sustain this work is required for us to advance anti-racism with the quality, rigor and thoughtfulness that we expect across all our work. We’ve learnt that we need to be clear and transparent about what resources and backing is required from funders and partners in meaningfully embedding anti-racist practice in our work, and be confident in pushing back or stepping back if anti-racist values and practices cannot be meaningfully enacted.

Priorities going forwards

Our new strategy is focused specifically on advancing systemic change with and for children and young people. Anti-racism is unequivocally a central foundation to this - not only in understanding and tackling racism and the way it widens inequalities for children and young people, but also in relation to our own organisational positionality, approach to partnerships, and how we support and champion others.

Taking on board our learning since 2021, we have identified four areas of focus for which we will continue to develop and set targets for in the coming months. Our anti-racism priorities for 2025/26 include:

1. Continuing to champion and keep anti-racism on the agenda in the sector: We will share learning about anti-racist practice in research, design and systemic change. We will work with partners to generate resource to collaboratively create spaces to share learning, explore challenges and advance anti-racist practice in systemic change work. We will use the platform we have in the systems we work in to prioritise amplifying racial and ethnically minoritised voices.

2. Valuing different kind of partnerships that drive systemic change: We will value different kinds of resources through our partnerships and seek to partner with those that understand their own positionality. We will be upfront in our commitments to anti-racism and invite dialogue within our partnerships. We will be a generous ally in the sector, considering if we are the right partner for opportunities and connecting and supporting others when and where we can.

3. Updating our anti-racism framework: Translating the feedback and learning from the first draft of our ‘Equity Impact Assessment Framework’ into an updated, more flexible and proportionate tool, which we will share openly and integrate into our partnership and project set-up, ethics review and delivery.

4. Focusing on nurturing an organisational culture of inclusion and belonging: This will be supported by the continuation, learning and adaptation of our regular anti-racism Open Spaces, alongside development and implementation of an anti-racism learning log, ongoing collective refinement of our rhythms and rituals, and further development of our broader organisational EDI principles and strategy.

If you’re interested in supporting and collaborating in these endeavours, please get in touch with Tim Hobbs. If you would like to hear more about any learning events on this topic, or others, please consider signing up to our newsletter to be kept in the loop.