George Floyd’s Murder sparked a movement that must never be allowed to stop. We look back on what REAL have achieved in terms of equality in the last 12 months and where we still need to improve.

Unfortunately, it’s wasn’t the first time that the world was shocked by police brutality against a person of colour. As we have seen since it was also not the last. However, the movement that was re-ignighted following the murder of George Floyd has begun to reshape culture, business and individuals perception of racism and brought into globally shift the attitudes towards it. The term anti racist was brought into the forefront of people’s minds and people generally (including myself) recognised their position of privilege and began to look at how they too could be more anti racist.

At REAL Fundraising we have always seen ourselves as being diverse and promoting equality but we also recognised that we could do more to truly champion equality best practice and become better allies.

What we have done

1. We created a space to discuss matters of diversity and inclusion chaired by people who represented non white identities.
2. We allowed time for people to vent & grieve as to what was happening globally and accepted we needed to be more vocal allies.
3. Directors asked for feedback and honest conversations to be had to start dialogue with members of REAL’s family.
4. A Diversity & Inclusion Advocate was appointed to head up our Anti-racism group on Slack which promoted educational pieces as well as content to reflect more diverse conversations.
5. REAL updated its analysis of diversity and compared it to the UK census whilst also identifying where we were excelling in being more diverse, and where we needed to improve(downloadable here) at both an employee level and management level.
6. We championed global awareness and diversity within the REAL Family and partner companies with our Diversity Fortnight (focussed around black history month).
7. A round table meeting was chaired by the advocate (without Director presence) to truly get honest dialogue with members of the REAL family and start to draw up an agenda for change.
8. The agenda for change was wholly accepted by directors and implemented into business strategy.
9. We wholly removed the word BAME from company documents and policies as the D&I group told us they did not identify with this acronym.
10. We committed to and became members of Race on the Agenda.
11. We created a “safe space” weekly zoom meeting for anyone to speak to the D&I Advocate about both concerns or suggestions which can be directly fed into the management team anonymously
12. Encouraged access to the F2F sector mentorship scheme for people who are not from positions of privilege.

What we still need to do.

1. Improve our representation of people who identify as Black and Asian in management positions(to match that of the company’s diversity split)
2. Diversify the Director team within the REAL Family.
3. Demonstrate the diversity within the business on our website and social platforms to attract more diverse talent
4. Keep listening to the D&I meeting feedback
5. Implement the remainder of the Agenda for change
6. target more diverse recruitment pools