Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Sustainability is the pathway to creating a better world now as well as in the future. It’s about achieving social justice, economic prosperity and environmental integrity. We believe addressing urgent climate and biodiversity crises also provides an opportunity to tackle systemic inequalities and foster inclusivity. We recognise that multiple forms of discrimination, oppression and marginalisation exist on the basis of many factors - sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, class, religion, family circumstances and indeed others. These often overlap and intersect. We need to repair historical damage, taking a regenerative approach to create more positive impacts rather than simply reducing our negative impacts.

Social justice is a critical part of sustainability. Whether it’s the continued existence of a gender pay gap, inequities in our supply chains or institutional racism across the charities sector, there needs to be a fundamental shift in how we operate both at EAUC and across the sector we serve. Our education system is currently part of the problem as well as a critical enabler of the solution – if we’re not actively reimagining the system in which we work, we won’t achieve our goals.

Our commitments

At EAUC, one of our core values is being inclusive: we centre equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in everything we do.

We strive to make our community a welcoming, caring and ambitious one for everyone. We work hard to ensure a ‘high performance, high wellbeing' culture for our staff and those we work with, creating an environment where people in our community can achieve their personal and professional goals.

We’re working to ensure we don’t just celebrate diversity but invite people with different viewpoints and experiences to shape our work. We want to ensure we create spaces for historically and currently marginalised individuals and communities to be seen, valued, heard and lead in the EAUC community.

We are committed to a programme of activity focused on enhancing our performance as an organisation and identifying opportunities to support the post-16 education sector's EDI work too.

We’re committed to equality of opportunity for all and are striving to be an organisation where all staff and volunteers are able to thrive and be their whole selves.

As part of our action on inclusion, diversity and equality, when we have job vacancies we encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented backgrounds and groups, including but not limited to, age, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, religion or sexual orientation.

We are a Disability Confident organisation and are dedicated to fair work and pay. We are active participants in the RACE Report and use our published transparency card to monitor progress and inform future work. We always pay at least the real Living Wage and do not offer any unpaid/non-credit-bearing placement opportunities or work experience.

Our recent activity

We are keen to ensure that EDI work isn't 'side lined' or seen as anything other than critical to our core work. With this in mind, we recently disbanded our EDI working group, instead embedding EDI across all our formal structures including board meetings, team meetings, staff objectives, and appraisals. We track and report progress on EDI initiatives through regular staff and board updates, participation in the RACE Report, and transparent sharing of progress and setbacks.

We’ve introduced a code of conduct for delegates and participants at our events, making explicit what we expect of people to ensure we’re creating an accessible, inclusive environment for all delegates.

Our staff team is currently under-representative of people of colour and disabled people. We are committed to ensuring we are representative and inclusive, so when we have vacancies we particularly encourage applications from those with these characteristics. We have an opt-in guaranteed interview scheme for candidates who declare a disability and/or are a person of colour and meet the essential criteria of the role profile.

We recognise our board is currently under-representative of people of colour, young people and disabled people and despite having made changes to our recruitment processes, are still struggling to achieve the representation we seek. Therefore, we’re currently analysing ways to enhance diversity throughout our governance structures.

What’s in the pipeline?

We know that like other organisations, we still have a long way to go. Each year we consider our progress and plan what we’ll do, in order to build on our work and do better in future.

In 2024/25, we are committed to the following actions:

Introducing mental health first aid training for line managers and team members.
Introducing accessible communications guidelines for use by all our of staff.
Investing in the EDI capabilities of our staff and board members.
Including an honest narrative about our EDI efforts and impacts in our annual report.
Setting team-wide EDI objectives as part of our annual performance and development processes.
Ensuring EDI is explicit in our recruitment and induction practices, and onboarding activities support new members of EAUC staff to our EDI work.
Introducing equality impact assessments in our project and event planning processes.
Reviewing and updating our policy portfolio and recruitment practices.
Joining the Diverse Sustainability Initiative to engage with broader networks and support.
Conducting research with our members to better understand where those we work with are on their journey towards more equitable and inclusive ways of working, and supporting a diverse workforce.

Resources and signposts

We’ve found the following resources valuable in informing and shaping our EDI work and also share some EAUC resources we’ve developed to help us and our members engage with EDI activity. We encourage you to explore the following resources to deepen your understanding and engagement with EDI practices: