One year on – reflection on CRUK’s first organisation-wide EDI strategy

In January 2021, Cancer Research UK launched its first cross-organisational EDI strategy, with a vision to create a charity where everyone benefits from, and participates in the work we do, and feels like they belong. A year on we wanted to look back at our achievements, areas for improvement and priorities for 2022.

While there is still a long way to go, we are pleased to have made progress in:

• ?Reducing cancer inequalities through our work and in partnership with others
• ?Developing a more diverse and inclusive research community through the research we fund
• Building an inclusive and diverse culture for all our people – staff and volunteers – so they can succeed and feel like they belong
• ?Achieving diversity across our governance, advisory and leadership structures making sure decisions are made in an inclusive way
• Engaging with people in ways that are inclusive, relevant and accessible

Our work on reducing cancer inequalities included the publication of our tobacco and inequalities report ‘Making conversations count for all’ which outlined best practices for delivering smoking cessation guidance to different socioeconomic groups. In addition to this, we’ve reached over 50,000 people through our Health Community Engagement team, with a focus on people with the poorest outcomes living in the most deprived areas of the UK.

To address diversity and inclusion in the research community, we published diversity data on our grant funding, produced a specific EDI in research action plan demonstrating our commitments for change, and set up new career mentoring schemes to increase the representation of people from Black and disadvantaged backgrounds in cancer related fields.

We’re pleased to be achieving a gender balance of 50% at leadership level including the appointment of a female COO and other female senior leaders. The introduction of anonymous CVs, online inclusive recruitment training and a new recruitment process for head and director roles has enabled us to make progress in building an inclusive and diverse culture for all our people.

?We’ve surveyed our volunteers and are looking at how we can increase diversity in three main areas – younger people, volunteers from a low socioeconomic group and males – and in the autumn, we launched our new Valuing Difference campaign to celebrate the different perspectives that can enrich our workplace culture. Throughout last year we also continued to evolve and embed our workplace adjustment process and guidance, ensuring that we are promoting inclusion as part of our hybrid working model.

We’ve made progress in diversifying our Involvement Network, with 27% of new members from a Black or ethnic minority background, and we’re developing a new leadership behaviour programme as a result of feedback from our staff survey. We’ve also announced changes to our trustees, members and committees as we look to achieve increased diversity across our governance, advisory and leadership structures.

At Cancer Research UK, our information reaches millions of people every year, so we have a responsibility to make sure it is easy to access and understood by all audiences, something that we have worked hard on as part of our fifth and final strategic priority. To help identify audiences we may not be reaching with our information services, we’re collecting information on the people currently accessing Cancer Chat and About Cancer – available through our website – as well as the Cancer Awareness Roadshows and Cancer Awareness in the workplace.

We know there is still a long way to go in a number of areas. The pandemic, internal restructuring and the reduction of our workforce has impacted on our progress. In light of this we’ve made the decision to extend the timeline to achieve our demographic targets. We’re disappointed to have seen a reduction in the proportion of ethnic minority staff at the end of November 2021, and we recognise we have much more to do to improve the diversity of our senior leadership team.

During 2022 we’ll be focussing on:

• ?Scaling up our ambitions to diversify our research careers pipeline, expanding our partnership programmes to ensure more young people from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds can enter academia, and helping support and retain diverse researchers
• ??Progressing work we’ve started to address underrepresentation in clinical research, engaging with our research community and patients to help understand issues in underrepresentation in trials
• ?Publication of our next diversity data report on grant-funded activities with an update on our progress against actions
• Developing our ‘reducing inequalities’ strategy – we aim to develop our long-term strategy to reduce inequalities next year and we’ll be working alongside other organisations on joint approaches to inequalities
• ?Building our evidence base, policy portfolio and profile in cancer inequalities and continuing to work across the UK and globally to inform and influence policy to prevent cancer. This includes ensuring that the UK and devolved Governments deliver on junk food marketing and promotion restrictions, to inform the development on new tobacco and obesity plans across the four nations, and to support a growing policy interest in reducing differences in life expectancy that are caused by cancer
• Taking steps – based on feedback – to improve volunteer diversity
• Continuing to enhance our learning and development offer for all staff, including the roll out of ‘let’s talk about race’ workshops
• ?Addressing the barriers which different groups face, by launching a new targeted career development intervention
• Reviewing our recruitment and induction processes with a specific lens on disability, including reasonable adjustments during interviews, and workplace adjustments upon joining
• Conducting an internal audit on our current EDI policies and processes, to identify areas for improvement

We remain committed to change and will report on progress and challenges annually. We believe by putting equality, diversity and inclusion at the heart of our charity, and setting ourselves ambitious targets, that we will become the best charity that we can be, a leader in diversity and inclusion, and make the greatest progress in our collective fight against cancer.