The FPR has launched its Year Two Report and this year we received a B grade. Despite having much to learn, the FPR has influenced our thinking on equity and social justice, resulting in a commitment to equity and social justice training for staff and trustees from May onwards.
The FPR examination has identified areas for improvement, including the lack of publicly available staff and trustees’ demographics on our website, the increased need for transparency pay gap data and the implementation of a whistleblowing policy. The foundation is taking steps to implement these changes and improve our practices.
Before the launch of the FPR we established an equity and social justice working group (made up of a mixture of trustees and staff). We have been developing projects to increase our impact in equity and social justice, as we see it as an important strand towards a fair economy and better world. You can read what we have been doing here.
Not publishing a diversity plan with targets has generated reflections and discussions within the team. We are conscious that we do not want to be performative and believe that by undertaking awareness training we are able to equip ourselves with sufficient knowledge to develop this work. Furthermore, we are quite keen to explore culture change and how best to implement this. This will take time.
Finally, the feedback might have seemed daunting at first, but as the report highlights, every criterion can be achieved. The FPR has highlighted the need for our sector to adapt and move faster or we could be left behind by other sectors such as the business and public sectors. The work takes time to plan, execute, review, and reflect to make improvement. This fundamentally is about improving our practices and we can only do this through learning. We are looking forward to being reassessed again.
