Our Statement of Solidarity: One Year On

External closing report

Just over one year on from publishing our Statement of Solidarity, this is our final public update on progress to date. We have been providing quarterly public updates on our progress and mistakes, to supplement the monthly internal updates we give our staff. From now on our reporting will become embedded into our overall organisational updates to the Save the Children UK Board of Trustees.

Since writing our Statement of Solidarity we have made progress in a number of areas but are acutely aware that there is still so much work to be done. This update looks back at the progress over the past year, but we wanted it to be a fair reflection of both the things that have worked, and those where we could have done better, and the things we have learned along the way. Thanks to the Save the Children BAME Network for reviewing and feeding back on this document. Going forward as an Executive Leadership Team we will be reflecting and working hard to drive further and faster change.

We have made some big shifts in how we speak and learn about issues of diversity and inclusion internally, how we are thinking about decolonising aid, how we want to work in partnership and how we communicate the work that Save the Children does. The following report is divided into progress we have made, things we have learned and areas that we want to focus on next:

Progress we have made

• Launch of our Free to be me: Diversity and Inclusion Strategy
• We have ringfenced funds to deliver on our diversity and inclusion commitments. 
• Our SCUK Youth Advisory Board has now launched with an 80% membership of young people of colour. The group are already posing challenges to the CEO and the ELT to help steer our work.
• We started a process to diversify our Board of Trustees in 2018 and Executive Leadership Team in 2019. We now have 45% BAME membership of the Board and 25% BAME membership of the Executive Leadership Team.
• Introduction of a Director of Diversity and Inclusion and supporting specialists in a Diversity and Inclusion Team
• We now have Diversity and Inclusion representatives in our Global Programmes and Fundraising and Marketing Divisions, to provide another avenue for staff to raise questions, concerns or share ideas. Our intention is to establish Diversity and Inclusion Representatives across all divisions.
• We have developed an action plan for 2021 to kickstart our thinking on how to make aid more equitable. DA Global, led by Degan Ali, a leading thinker on decolonising aid, are providing external support and challenge on this and we have had sessions with the Executive Leadership Team and Board of Trustees to lay the foundations for this challenging work.
• We’ve secured a commitment to making aid more equitable in the global Save the Children movement as part of the next strategy which will run from 2022 to 2024.
• We are also making changes to our work supporting children in the UK. This includes changes to how we talk about our UK impact work externally, plans to be more led by children and youth networks in our UK activities, and who and how we want to work with as partners (including in diaspora communities)​.
• A reduction in our overall mean pay gap from 4.38% in 2019 to 2.71% in 2020.
• Diversity and Inclusion performance objectives and workplace behaviours are embedded in all staff 2021 objectives
• Launched “Breaking Barriers” our new inclusive sponsorship and development program for under-represented SCUK colleagues in order to positively impact diversity at a senior level.
• First phase of work to acknowledge white saviourism and white gaze from our imagery and communications, including production of an internal language glossary written in collaboration with colleagues in East and Southern Africa and a self-check guide for content creators and launch of a new Direct Response Television advert.
• We’ve wrapped up the first phase of our diaspora communities project, which focused on how we can work with and learn from diaspora communities in our campaigning.
• Reviewed progress on our gender equality commitments during 2020 and underlined our commitment to do more in this area, including to address issues of intersectionality.
• Successful pilot of sharing questions before interviews to get the best out of a broad range of candidates, including neurodiverse people. However, there is more work to be completed before our end-to-end recruitment process is fully inclusive.
• We have updated and re-launched five key organisational policies, with tackling racism and micro-aggressions in mind.

Things we have learned

• Investing money and resources into Diversity and Inclusion work had been critical, as has giving the work focus and priority e.g. investment in a Diversity and Inclusion team that report to the CEO. Where we haven’t done this progress has been slow, burdened colleagues or failed.
• Our Staff Equalities Networks have gone above and beyond to support staff and challenge practice and decisions. We value everyone who works in the networks and need to be careful not to take them for granted or overburden colleagues with actions and leadership.
• We’ve learned a lot collectively and individually about issues that we need to consider, and that our learning needs to be constant and ongoing.
• We’re having more open and challenging discussions, but some people and teams are still more comfortable than others.
• We need to challenge tokenism and ensure that we are making systemic change, for example simply increasing the diversity of people at Save the Children will not full address a complex multi-faceted problem.
• We’ve learnt to measure what matters e.g. our pay gaps and evaluating our UK programmes through a Diversity and Inclusion lens.
• We conducted a review which has shown that our current supporter base and the media we buy to fundraise and engage campaigners is in line with UK racial diversity but confirmed that there is more we can do to progress diversity and inclusion.
• Discussions and learning continue across all teams. We recognise that teams are doing this in different ways, and some are more comfortable than others, but we don’t want to see any teams avoiding the issues.
• We need to be willing to take feedback and stick up for our values in the face of opposition e.g. salary transparency and trans inclusion.

Areas we need to focus on next

In some areas we’re taking longer to deliver than we would have liked or initially planned for, both due to the complexity of the issues we are tackling but also as our understanding of these issues evolves. We know we have so much more work to do:

• We need to move faster on parts of our action plan and in response to situations where we should stand in solidarity.
• We must address the organisational systems that oppress under-represented colleagues. While initiatives like the sponsorship scheme have been well received, it is important that we don’t place the imperative on individuals to overcome systemic issues.
• We need to do much more work to achieve our target KPI of 25% representation of under-represented groups (in line with our D&I strategy) at our broader Corporate Senior Leadership Team level.
• We need to continue tangible interventions to facilitate internal progression and external recruitment of more diverse colleagues. We are prioritising making changes to recruitment, career development and behaviours. 
• We need to address the real challenge we have in shifting our culture and business processes to prioritise greater and more equal partnership working, and that this is going to take time, and investment, and a coordinated approach across our global movement.
• We have more to do on our journey to decolonise aid.
• We need to continue our work to empower the communities we work with and ensure that all of our communications are anti-racist.
• We need to continue to participate and challenge to ensure that further and faster progress is made throughout the global Save the Children family.
• We must continue working across the international development sector with peer organisations and wider stakeholders to help achieve wider systemic changes.
• We must continue to strengthen and embed mechanisms to whereby we are seeking and listening to feedback from children, communities and partner organisations regarding our progress in shifting power.