At Learning Disability Wales we want to make sure that our organisation represents and includes people from all cultures and backgrounds.

Our Chief Executive Officer, Zoe Richards is pleased to sign up to ACEVO’s eight principles to address the diversity deficit in charity leadership. We want to ensure that we embed these principles within our organisation with the people we work with and the people we work for.

Over the coming weeks we will create a working group and develop an action plan to address the most obvious changes we need to make. We will ensure we educate our workforce so that we are able to address the less obvious changes to our work also.

We will begin with training, education and change to how we recruit and build in further work through our action plan.

Visit ACEVO’s website or see more information on the principles below:

Eight principles to address the diversity deficit in charity leadership

In order to create stronger, more resilient charities ACEVO are asking charity leaders, and leaders from wider civil society organisation that want to improve diversity and inclusion, to sign up to eight leadership principles to address the diversity deficit in charity leadership. These principles are part of the Racial Diversity in the Charity Sector report, done in collaboration with the Institute of Fundraising.

As a leader I will:

  1. Acknowledge that there is a problem with racial diversity in the charity sector and commit to working to change that.
  2. Recognise the important role leaders have in creating change by modelling positive behaviour and taking action.
  3. Learn about racial bias and how it impacts leadership decisions.
  4. Commit to setting permanent and minimum targets for diversity that reflects the participants, donors, beneficiaries and the population of the area that my charity operates in.
  5. Commit to action and invest resources, where necessary, in order to improve racial diversity in my charity.
  6. View staff as the sum of many parts rather than a single entity and recruit to build a diverse group of talented people collectively working towards a shared vision.
  7. Recruit for potential, not perfection.
  8. Value lived experience, the ability to draw from one’s lived experience and to bring insights to an organisation that can develop its work

Note: ACEVO is the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary organisations. ACEVO is a membership body for the leaders of third sector organisations in England and Wales.