Jen Long, our Senior Operations Manager, leads our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion working group with the support of our EDI Officer. This year our EDI Officer was one of our Senior Coaches, Ismay Bartholomew.

In 2023/24, we worked hard to deliver our ambitious EDI strategy. The direction and implementation of the strategy is led by the EDI working group, with involvement across the whole team as we know how vital it is for EDI to be at the centre of all of our work.

Jen took some time to reflect on the achievements from the last year, as well as the challenges, and shares the priorities for our 2024/25 strategy.

ACHIEVEMENTS

• We continued to collect diversity data from young people which helped us to understand the backgrounds of the people who participate in our programme. Using this data, we were able to identify training needs for the team and translate our key programme resources into the most common languages spoken by our young people.
• The advocacy project took shape, giving us the opportunity to hear more from young people with lived experience of care and homelessness.
• We delivered a number of varied and team socials to make sure they were inclusive for everyone, such as painting and community gardening.
• We remained above our targets for representation of staff who identify as disabled and LGBTQ+.
• We attained the level one Disability Confident Employer accreditation and signed up to the Halo Code.
• With the help of New Ways, we explored what ‘belonging’ means to Settle and reflected on how we can make sure everyone feels like they belong in the team.
• We reviewed and updated our recruitment processes to make them as inclusive and accessible as possible.
• Diversifying delivered Trans Inclusion at Work training to the whole team.

CHALLENGES

• When collecting EDI data from young people, we want to provide flexible options so that they can respond and define themselves in a way which feels comfortable. However, sometimes this means that the data is difficult to collate for funder and partner reporting. We've updated this to keep flexible options for young people, while aligning with sector data standards to ensure we can use and collate this data.
• Despite our overhaul of our recruitment processes, we are still under our representation target for ethnic minority staff. We are continuing to reflect on this and have included some ideas for improving the diversity of the team in this year’s strategy.

24/25 Strategy Overview

With a new year ahead of us, we have reviewed our EDI strategy and here are the main changes we’ve made alongside our priorities for the year.

We have replaced ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ in the name of our strategy. We believe this is a more meaningful term because equality means every individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities, whereas equity recognises that each person has different circumstances and needs.

Here are the goals and objectives for 24/25:

• Goal 1: To have an inclusive programme that prioritises creating opportunities for young people within Settle and that best supports young people's individual needs
• Goal 2: To ensure that all employees feel a sense of belonging at Settle and different forms of lived experience are valued.
• Goal 3: To ensure that our internal and external communications are transparent and promote inclusivity.

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