NCB’s new corporate strategy 2024-29 United for a Better Childhood: Building Brighter Futures, outlines our ambition around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). We have now built on this with a much more detailed multi-year plan that addresses both internal and external elements of DEI – how we will apply these principles to our staff and working culture – and how we will apply them to prioritising and measuring the impact of our work.
Both elements will complement each other as we believe that to support our external work and to be able to develop the equity impact of our work, we need to ensure our staff group are more reflective of society and that everyone who works at NCB feels a sense of belonging. The NCB Board of Trustees have published their own statement setting out how they will reflect the principles of DEI and use their leadership role to ensure that these are embedded throughout NCB.
Overview
Internal
Ensuring everyone feels welcome, included, and wants to stay means that inclusivity is just as important as recruitment. The plan supports a culture of learning and questioning all aspects of inequity.
Examples of some of our internal ambitions include:
- Set up Mental Health First aiders to ensure we live our values of taking care of our staff
- Seek gaps in our knowledge or awareness to address. Draw on peer review materials and ensure managers are actively demonstrating anti-oppressive practices
- Establish a specific development programme for Black and Global Majority staff
- Establish a network of DEI champions for the organisation
- All teams to have an objective around DEI in their annual objectives for 25/26
External
We are committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation, so we look to address the systemic racism that we know children, adults and families face and compounds many of the other challenges we try and support them with – we want to take every opportunity to highlight this and offer evidence-based solutions that take an anti-racist approach.
Examples of some of our external ambitions include:
- Improve the diversity of our participation and advisory networks
- Improve the diversity of the member organisations in our specialist membership groups
- Improve the accessibility of language on our website
- Create specific prompts around equity of impact in organisational templates for bids, project management, risk management, SLT and Board papers
- Produce a “toolbox” for staff that draws together existing evidence and resources when considering equity impact of a new project
Measuring Success
We are not setting defined quotas but have targets we are aspiring to. Metrics will include analysing recruitment data, improving retention rates amongst our Black and Global Majority staff, exit interview responses, and comparing NCB to other organisations in the sector.
Measuring the equity impact of our external work will be more challenging. However, we will use quantitative measures such as the amount of Black and Global Majority representation in our work, and the uptake of services by persons of Black and Global Majority. Qualitative measures can be assessed through obtaining lived experience of how the implementation of our plan is affecting the young people and adults we work with. We run a quarterly impact report which will be able to tell us more about what data has and hasn’t changed since the implementation of our plan.