A Guide to Diversity and Equality in the Voluntary Sector
The UK is a diverse and multicultural society with people of different heritage, beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and social backgrounds. They live side by side, but inequalities still exist.
Most voluntary sector organisations are there to make their communities a better place to live and are often forceful in their support for justice and equal opportunity.
For more than 40 years there have been legal moves to tackle discrimination and unequal opportunities. Alongside this there have been some exciting developments in equalities and diversity within the voluntary sector often aiming to improve support to frontlines organisations to overcome discrimination and abuse.
A guide produced by Olmec research that found a high level of commitment to equalities and diversity in the voluntary sector, but found key barriers to implementing good practice were time and resources.
The research found that voluntary organisations did not want the production of any more toolkits, nor any other quality standards on equality. What they wanted was:
• Assistance in selecting the most appropriate standard and toolkits for their areas of work.
• Definition of what equalities meant for them
• How to set equalities targets
• How to measure performance
• Better signposting to the available training, support and resources on equalities and diversity that are most relevant to them.
The guide below has been produced as a direct result of the research and recommendations from the research conducted by Olmec. It aims to address the time and resource constraints identified by the sector. Its main purpose is to:
• provide an easy to use reference resource for the third sector:
• enable third sector organisations to access relevant available support;
• ensure that resources available for the sector are easy to find;
• assist the sector in improving its performance on equalities and diversity;
• ensure that promoting diversity remains an achievable ambition of the sector.