How can you sit there and talk about diversity when your board of trustees is not a diverse group?
Diversity is about a lot more than just what you can see on the outside.
Would we like to have a more diverse board of trustees in the future? Sure! But like many fledgling organisations, we came together around an idea and a set of values. Most of the team already knew each other, and we all live in the rural southwest – a predominantly white area.
Yeovil Diversity Project is brand new; our inaugral meeting was in August 2021. We need to work on establishing our name and our reputation within the local community. We cannot expect to attract candidates from minorities in our area without building up a level of trust with those we serve. Furthermore, we would never result to tokenism just to make ourselves look good.
That being said, our team is actually pretty diverse – just in other ways.
- The age range of our team spans 3 different decades
- We have different sexualities from across the spectrum
- 25% of our team are disabled
- We have trans, cis and gender non-comforming trustees
- Most of the team have lived experience of having a mental health condition, or are neurodiverse
We are at the beginning of our journey, and putting in the hardwork to engage with all of the micro-communities within Yeovil. As we grow, so will the diversity of the board of trustees.