At Two Ridings Community Foundation, people are at the heart of everything we do.

Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policy helps guide us so we can achieve our vision of a thriving connected North & East Yorkshire for all.

We have had an EDI working group since December 2020. This was formed to have a core collective of people (staff and trustees) accountable for our response to embracing diversity and ensuring we were treating staff, volunteers, partners and the people and communities we support fairly.

Through this group and other work (as part of the EDI Coalition of funders and via reviewing our Coronavirus grant making through the racial justice audit), we recognise blind spots in our organisation and are working on them and being an anti-racist organisation.

We comply with equality and anti-discrimination regulations but we also strive to promote and live by greater inclusion across all our working practises.

All our policies and practices are informed by EDI including recruitment and procurement, not just grant making

There is still a long way to go, but we are committed to addressing inequality and injustice throughout Two Ridings.

Our People

We know that the diversity breakdown of our board and staff team is not representative of the people of our region. We are working to gather further knowledge of our people so that we can gauge how to improve our diversity.

Staff team: As of January 2025, the staff team is composed of 84% white females aged between 25 and 59 and 16% white males aged between 25 and 59. We are currently in discussions with the team regarding their socio-economic backgrounds and disabilities.

Board of Trustees: As of January 2025, our Board of Trustees consists of 62% female members and 38% male members. We are currently conducting a diversity survey and will publish the results soon.

We will regularly review our diversity and document how we plan to improve and what we have achieved online and in further communication.

Inclusive grant making

At present our applications can be made online and we also offer word documents for those who would like them. ‘What alternative forms of ways to apply?’ is another question we ask our groups and ourselves. To do this we are going to talk to as many applicants as possible with our volunteer assessors.

How to get this right is something we are working on with a priority of working on ‘things that make the most difference to the most people’.

We are phasing out the use of PDFs from our additional information towards Word and Excel documents so that they are easier to read with a screen reader.

We know we can do better. This is an open assessment of where we are right now.