We believe diversity and inclusion is incredibly important at Settle. We know we’re not perfect but we’re committed to taking action to make Settle a more diverse and inclusive organisation for staff and for the young people we work with. We have an ambitious strategy which is implemented by a working group and supported by the wider team. The working group meets quarterly to monitor the progress of the strategy and discuss any new ideas.

We’re pleased to see the efforts of this work begin to bear fruit. As part of our 3 year strategy we set ambitious targets to increase the diversity of the organisation across ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability. We’re pleased with our progress over the last year as we are now exceeding targets in gender, disability and sexuality of these areas and have made a significant improvement in ethnicity representation. We are also pleased to have increased lived experience of care representation with 33% of the board having care experience. Whilst diversity representation across the organisation is only one aspect of this work, and we still have work to do on increasing our ethinc diversity, we are proud of the diversity of the organisation. These changes show that change is possible with the right action taken.

Our principles for approaching EDI work within the working group and across the whole organisation include:

• Prioritising equality and inclusion as a service provider and an employer
• Committing to action, not just words
• Recognising and valuing the diverse and unique experiences of our young people and team
• Fostering a culture of transparency and openness whilst recognising the sensitive and personal nature of EDI work
• Having a creative approach to bringing the strategy to life and engaging the whole organisation

What we did in 2022/23

• Formed a working group with members of different teams and levels of the organisation to ensure consistent delivery of the strategy
• Began collecting equality and diversity monitoring data on our young people which has helped us to identify training needs for the team to better support those on the programme
• changed the way we collect recruitment equality and diversity monitoring data through our new website so that we have a much higher response rate and the data can be analysed more accurately
• Reviewed our recruitment processes to make them more inclusive following training and external advice
• Recruited a Settle programme graduate to the Board
• Increased our use of Slack channels to celebrate cultural events and share educational resources
• Included an introduction to Settle’s EDI work in the onboarding process
• Collected and responded to staff feedback on how to make Settle a more inclusive organisation

What challenged us in 2022/23

• Although we have reached - and even surpassed - our organisational diversity targets in some areas, we are still below target for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic representation. We are continuing to make changes to our recruitment processes to identify and eliminate as much potential bias as possible and to make the application process accessible to everyone, so we hope to see an improvement in next year’s statistics.
• Introducing a new system for anonymously collecting young people’s EDI data was challenging at first, but we used feedback from the young people to shape the questions and made sure it was clear why we were collecting the data.
• We discussed the sensitive and often personal nature of EDI work, which can sometimes be difficult for people to discuss. The working group will be bearing this in mind going forward to ensure we create open, inclusive spaces for meaningful conversations.

Our strategy for 2023/24:

Over the next year, our EDI strategy has 3 goals that we are proactively focusing on across our organisation:

1. To have an inclusive programme that prioritises creating opportunities for young people within Settle and that best supports young people's individual needs.

In 2022/23, we collected our first full year of young person diversity data via anonymised surveys, and we plan to use these learnings to drive partnership building with external agencies or support services we work with. For instance, on average one third of our young people have experience seeking asylum in the UK, so we are developing partnerships with immigration specialists and a translator service to ensure our programme resources are accessible.

We will explore creating more opportunities for young people to join our team as well as sharing and developing relevant opportunities with our community of alumni. We plan to do this by commissioning a young person involvement consultancy project to explore how we can create more opportunities for young people.

2. To ensure that Settle is an inclusive workplace for all employees and values lived experience.

We plan to review and improve the inclusivity of Settle as an organisation. In 2022/23, we increased care experienced representation on our board to 33%.

We are continuing to build on and implement learnings for diversity in recruitment, and last year, we maintained good representation of women, LGBTQ+, disability, and lived experience, but we acknowledge a need for improvement on diversity of ethnicity representation across our organisation.

3. To ensure that our internal and external communications are transparent and promote inclusivity.

Our EDI working group meets regularly and our whole organisation is involved in shaping our strategy for the next year. We also share learnings from our EDI work externally and update our team diversity data annually on our website.

In our approach to EDI at Settle, we strive to learn from our young people, team members and the wider community to improve ourselves as an organisation. If you have any questions about this blog, or if you’re from another organisation developing this and want to connect, you can get in touch with us at hello@wearesettle.org