Scope's progress on equality, diversity and inclusion

This week is National Inclusion Week. At Scope, everything we do is about fairness. We want a society where all disabled people enjoy equality and fairness. But we can only do that if we include everyone.

At the start of 2023, we launched our equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategy. We set out our ambition to put EDI at the heart of everything we do at Scope.

We wanted to take this opportunity to share with you some of the progress we’ve been making. Over 3 years, we will be working towards the following 4 goals.

A more diverse team of colleagues and volunteers.

Our first goal is about diversifying our workforce. This includes having more marginalised people in leadership roles, and across our trustees. So far, we have made changes to our recruitment process to make it more inclusive.

• We have introduced anonymous applications.
• We have started sharing interview topics with all candidates ahead of time.
• We have improved accessibility of our job adverts and application forms.

We have also met with the gender equality network to share the latest gender pay gap data and discuss ways to keep closing the gap.

Making EDI everyone's responsibility

We've taken lots of steps to make EDI everyone's responsibility at Scope. This includes:

• Our Executive Leadership Team (ELT) have been taking part in an EDI learning programme, focussed on inclusive leadership.
• Our Board of Trustees have taken part in 3 EDI workshops.
• We have created an EDI self-guided learning resource for all colleagues.
• We have delivered accessibility training to all teams.
• We have made disability equality training mandatory for all colleagues.
• We are carrying out a learning needs survey to understand what other training our colleagues need.
• We have continued to hold monthly EDI roundtables since the EDI strategy launch covering topics such as:?neurodivergence in the workplace, social class and the charity sector, race and disability in South Asian communities.?

A culture where inclusive ways of working are the default

So far:

• We have reviewed and republished our EDI policy . The policy now applies to all colleagues, volunteers, members and trustees.??
• We have introduced an anonymous reporting tool for colleagues to share incidents of discrimination, including microaggressions. This is alongside our non-anonymous reporting routes.??
• We have created a template for equality impact assessments, and guidance for completing these.??
• We have launched 3 new colleague networks: our carers network, social mobility network, and young colleagues’ network. These run alongside 4 existing networks: disabled colleagues' network, equality in race network, LGBTQ+ network and gender equality network.

Meeting the needs of people facing multiple marginalisation

Our work needs to better meet the needs of disabled people facing multiple marginalisation. So far:

• We have conducted an audit to monitor the diversity of our 2 member Assemblies. We have now identified areas of underrepresentation.?
• We held a successful event for our members in July focussed on the intersection of disability and ethnicity in the South Asian community.??
• We are working to embed EDI in the forthcoming Scope organisational strategy.
• We have worked with the communications team to embed EDI in all our communications as well as mark awareness events. For example, we published a successful series of videos for social media throughout Pride month.

Tracking progress

We want our EDI strategy to be as impactful as possible. We have a great team of colleagues working hard to deliver the strategy. But we also want to be challenged and stretched. So we have set up an EDI strategy steering group made up of representatives from our colleague networks alongside external representatives. Our first meeting is this week, so we’ll let you know how we’re getting on in our next update.???

Equality, diversity and inclusion is all about culture change. And all culture change takes time. We know the hard work is only just getting started, but we are in it for the long haul.??