The Co-operative Foundation's £20,500 grant to Getting on Board will enable us to work in partnership with Action for Trustee Racial Diversity
Audere est Facere - to dare is to do - is the bold motto of Tottenham Hotspur - the currently underachieving football club I’ve loyally supported for more years than I care to remember! Watching them playing a sadly defensive style of football under the exalted Jose Mourinho, I was left musing, like many other Spurs supporters, at both the lack of dare and the unwillingness to do.
Making change
The wonderful grant which the inspiring Co-op Foundation has awarded to Getting on Board to work in partnership with Action for Trustee Racial Diversity has made me think hard about how most effectively the grant can help us strengthen the will to dare and the commitment to do within the charity sector so that it increases significantly the number of trustees from Black and Asian backgrounds. Our planned guide on how to recruit and retain Black and Asian trustees will share the learning and good practice we've acquired over the two years since the campaign began. Our database of Black and Asian network organisations will be a low cost resource and a model for charities on how to identify more diverse networks and local organisations. It’s blindingly clear that both are needed!
Partnership work
It’s also obvious that Action for Trustee Racial Diversity can’t and doesn’t want to campaign and spur (sic) action on its own. That’s why our partnerships with other key organisations - Getting on Board, Reach Volunteering, ACEVO, NCVO, the Young Trustees Movement, Beyond Suffrage, Trustees Unlimited, the Association of Chairs and to date a smattering of the more aware commercial trustee recruitment agencies is absolutely crucial to us for reaching the target of 9,000 additional Black and Asian trustees over the next five years. We celebrate these partners’ involvement and encourage other organisations to play their part similarly either by joining us or by setting and committing to their own racial diversity targets.
Successful networking
Readers of this blog will appreciate how enormously valuable social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter are both in getting important messages to much wider audiences but also in bringing people together in a common cause. We will be developing online networks for aspiring and current Black and Asian trustees so that their voices are heard much more than they are across the sector.
The recent Inspire List initiated by Wakkas Khan, is a brilliant example of this. The sixty five individual stories on the 2021 list will hopefully encourage others to follow in their landmark footsteps and convince charities not prioritising racial diversity for whatever reason that they’re not taking advantage of the huge social capital and creativity which this brings.
And finally, huge thanks to those supporters who have offered their congratulations to ATRD in partnership with Getting on Board for winning the Co-op Foundation grant. A plea also to everyone reading this. Share with your own networks to increase further our reach and impact and also share your own thoughts on how we can collectively achieve the long awaited goals of this campaign.
Malcolm John is the founder of Action for Trustee Racial Diversity @atrd_uk
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash