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 break down of the diversity of our board and staff team are 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: At present in July 2022 the team is 100% white female aged between 25 and 59.  We are in discussions with the team around their socio-economic background and disability.

Board of Trustees: At present in July 2022 our Board of trustees are 62% female and 38% male. We are in the process of undertaking a diversity survey and will be publishing the results shortly.

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

Inclusive grant making

At present our applications can be made online and we also offer word documents for those that 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.