GMCVO Case Study: Our Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Journey

In December 2022, GMCVO made the decision to join the Diversity Forum - we had heard about the Forum through peers in the Social Investment sector and felt that as a place-based funder, equality, diversity and inclusion were at the mission of what we do externally, but internally we needed to ensure that we embedded it into GMCVO, our work and our people.

When we first joined the Diversity Forum we didn’t know what to expect; we knew that there was a series of commitments and that we had to focus down on what we needed to change and develop to make the work meaningful for us.

We started by forming a committee that would steer the work and were surprised when nine people signed up from all across GMCVO, demonstrating how important our people felt this work was within the organisation.

Once we had formed the steering committee, we met and went through the commitments. At first this seemed very daunting, and it became apparent that we would need help to achieve what we needed to do and help the steering committee form into a task led group with a series of goals and milestones.

We applied to The Connect Fund run by Barrow Cadbury and funded through Access, The Foundation for Social Investment for a small grant to cover the costs of bringing in some consultants who worked with us to help us decipher what we needed to achieve and then put it into a plan. We were successful with the grant and after tendering, commissioned Civil Society Consulting and started to work with Sadia and Natasha.

Sadia and Natasha straight away started taking us through the process of working out ‘what does EDI mean for GMCVO’.  We knew from the beginning that we also wanted to look at belonging, and how we embed this into GMCVO. It was important to us that everyone feels they can be their whole self at GMCVO and that we foster a feeling of belonging.

We settled on a theory of change approach, working through the problems first along with what impact we wanted to see and then created a plan of how we would make the changes we would need to solve the problem and create the change we needed to see.

The steering committee meets monthly and sometimes smaller groups meet more to work on small projects. It isn’t easy at times; we are a small organisation and we are all doing this on top of our workload, but we are getting there and tasks are getting completed. We just have to be realistic about what we achieve and by when.

Using our Manifesto commitments, we are now working through the tasks to create the necessary impact. We use our different internal communications such as staff briefings to help the whole of GMCVO understand what is happening and how they will see this change.

We have created an EDIB (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging) statement for GMCVO that is about to be published and are now measuring the diversity data of our staff teams, board and investment committees and publishing this in our impact report. These reports have helped us understand who we are as an organisation and how we enable more diversity at management level.

The next stage is that the consultants will step out in May and by then we should be good to continue alone. We will have an EDIB champion in GMCVO who will hold us to account and make sure that we are still moving forward.

Looking back at the last 14 months, I would never have thought we would have made the progress we have made. Obviously, some organisations might do it faster than we have, but we are working to what we can do with our internal capacity and fuelled with lots of cakes and biscuits at meetings, we are excited about what happens next.

Cat Chrimes

Head of Investments