We believe that embedding racial diversity in every aspect of our work; recruitment, staff development, due diligence, funding decisions, our non-financial support, governance structures and more, will make us a better, smarter organisation, truly able to implement our mission.

In August 2020 we started a Race Equity Taskforce internally to look at every aspect of our organisation and our work from a race equity lens, and identify recommendations for improvement. Those recommendations were unanimously approved by our Board in March 2021.

We are now starting the challenging task of implementing the recommendations well; we're ready for an exciting but also challenging journey of learning, discovery, missteps and joy ahead.

We’ve committed to

We have begun work on embedding racial diversity into all aspects of our work. Though each change has a corresponding target, we are mindful that targets are not the priority. They are a guide to help us to be a better organisation.

1. Increase our racial diversity

At Impetus

• Our governance: We believe that around 40% of our trustees and committee members should be from ethnic minority backgrounds by the end of 2024. We came to this target reflecting on the London population and taking into account that at least 40% of young people served by charities in our portfolio are from ethnic minority backgrounds.
• Our staff: We believe that around 40% of our staff should be from ethnic minority backgrounds as a London based charity (working from a current baseline of 30%). We have work to do to attract more talent from all ethnic minorities.
• We believe that young people must have a say in what we do: We are also focused on embedding youth accountability and representation in our governance structures and funding work.

In our partnerships

• We have added racial diversity to our core criteria in selecting new organisations for our multi-year, unrestricted charity investments.
• We are exploring how to effectively embed racial diversity in all aspects of our policy work.
• We know that policy partnerships and coalitions will be more effective if they are more diverse in background and experience. We recognise we have an important role to play in advocating for this and ensuring that when we commission research we look for partners who can demonstrate that they celebrate and “get” diversity and truly represent young people and the barriers faced in our mission.
• We recognise we need to grow, diversify and challenge existing and new networks across all areas of our work. This will make us a better, more informed organisation. We can’t fulfil our mission without this.

2. Embed diversity in our practice

At Impetus

• We have made diversity a key organisational KPI – in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, disability, sexuality, socio-economic class, geography and lived experience. We are now reporting against this KPI at senior management and Board level to ensure we keep learning and hold ourselves to account.
• Ensuring we embed and celebrate diversity in all our internal policies and procedures as a priority. This includes testing, learning and iterating what works in our recruitment processes, induction plans, training and development work, selection criteria for our charity investments and public affairs partnerships, and in our office culture, as well as communications content development and dissemination.
• Setting up an internal working group on diversity that reports directly to senior management and our Board to ensure positive change continues.

In our partnerships

• We are wholly committed to supporting our charity partners to diversify. We are discussing diversity in our Peer Learning Forums whilst pushing ourselves to better help our charities to build more diverse Boards, senior teams and proactively consider diversity in CEO succession. We are asking that race is added to their data collection and analysis for better impact management.
• We are committed to testing new types of charity support funding streams and investing in a broader range of organisations. Our work to embed lived experience, gender, disability, sexuality and many other aspects of diversity in all aspects of our operations and programmes is just the beginning.

We are acutely conscious that as a youth charity focused on socio-economic disadvantage, social mobility must be a golden thread running through all our diversity work. We have lots to learn, test, fail and build better in this area.

Actions we’ve taken so far

We can’t do this work alone! We welcome your partnership, your advice, your challenge and your questions on our ambitions. Please email info@impetus.org.uk or reach out to us on Twitter @ImpetusUK.