Be the Change: How to tackle racial inequalities in health and care charities (National Voices, December 2023)

Summary

National Voices is committed to tackling racial inequalities – in healthcare, health status, within their own organisations and across the charity sector. With unacceptable statistics, like Black women are four times more likely to die around pregnancy than White women, and Black babies are almost three times more likely to die than White babies – still now, in 2023 – the need for effective action could not be stronger.  

Content

A few years ago, National Voices created an inclusion action plan to try to narrow the gaps in racial inequalities by driving improvements in their recruitment practices, organisational culture, influencing activities and work with people with lived experience.  

A key part of that plan was convening their members to learn from each other, so they organised a series of four members-only roundtables for focused, pragmatic and open discussion in the following areas: 

• How to effectively diversify Boards of Trustees and staff teams. 
• How to establish and maintain inclusive organisational cultures. 
• How best to work with people with diverse lived experience in insight and influencing activities. 
• How to ensure inclusive service delivery. 

This report, Be the Change: How to tackle racial inequalities in health and care charities, highlights the main learnings in each of these areas, and draws out general advice from all these conversations. They hope it will give colleagues in the health and voluntary sectors ideas for what they could do, alongside practical tools to take action.