35 ideas for improving inclusion and accessibility

Tackling inequality is at the heart of our mission and vision at the School for Social Entrepreneurs. But we have plenty more work to do to reach people from marginalised and minoritised communities.

This blog shares some of ways we’ve tried to become more inclusive and accessible in the past couple of years.

 You might take inspiration. You might think we’ve got it wrong or not gone far enough. We will only improve by listening and being accountable to our community – and that includes you. Let me know your thoughts @sophiehobson @SchSocEnt on Twitter, or over LinkedIn.

Agreeing what we wanted to achieve

“Becoming more inclusive and accessible” sounds good, but what does it actually mean? It’s hardly a SMART goal. Many of us had a gut feel we had work to do, but we needed to crystallise this into clear objectives and actions.

1.    We established an Inclusion Working Group in 2018, led by my brilliant colleague Amy Barbor, to agree our aims and priorities.

2.    We drew up an Inclusion Vision: what inclusion means to SSE and how we practice it. This was shaped by everyone in our staff teams in the UK, Canada and India. We also people in our community with lived experience of prejudice and/or expertise in inclusion.

3.    We developed an Inclusion Action Plan. It guides us with deliverables in four areas:

·       Culture – to be consciously inclusive and to champion the value of diversity.

·       Data – to analyse diversity data of our students (people we support), staff and trustees.

·       Policies – to review relevant SSE policies and make recommendations for change as appropriate to ensure they are in line with our Inclusion vision and commitment to action.

·       Practices – to develop, monitor and review our practices within SSE and on our programmes to ensure they are consciously inclusive and invite diversity.

Understanding where we’re at: the data bit

We needed to understand where we were underrepresented. We introduced new ways to monitor data and progress.

4.    We invested in a new system to give us a “live” picture of diversity data across our current student body, rather than depending on evaluations, which come with a time-lag.

5.    We overhauled our equalities monitoring form to inform this – a deceptively chunky piece of work!

6.    The above enabled us to identify where unconscious bias might be creeping into our student recruitment process. For example, if the proportion of people from a certain demographic who apply differs from the proportion who get a place, there may be bias in assessment.

7.    We introduced an annual equalities survey for our staff.

Addressing our culture

When you’re a team of people motivated by tackling inequality, it can feel uncomfortable when the data reveals you’re not as inclusive as you thought you were. We’ve found the following useful:

8.    Our MD Nicola Steuer has committed us to the EW Inclusive Culture Pledge (including learning events) for three years running.

9.    We’ve been honest. For example, Amy wrote about how “nice white progressives” dominate and influence our culture.

10.  We acknowledge how difficult it is to speak about our experiences of prejudice and/or privilege, to enable candid conversations. Some useful phrases I hear at SSE are:

o   “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable”

o   “Step boldly into the space”

o   “Let’s address the elephants in the room”

11.  A group of us recently completed the Adaway Group’s Whiteness At Work series, to help understand how anti-blackness, racism and norms of whiteness show up at work. The series encourages reflection and offers frameworks and prompts for conversations.

12.  We’ve signed up to the Diversity Forum manifesto, and I’ve joined the steering group to share learning among our sector.

13.  We’ve become a Disability Confident employer.

14.  We’ll soon publish our anti-racism action plan, after several months of consultation, which will apply across all areas of our work.

We don’t know what we don’t know: Learning, listening and partnering

Our dominant culture is white, able-bodied, middle-class, cis-gendered and straight. This doesn’t mean everyone fits into these categories. But these characteristics are most common.

Learning and training have helped broaden perspectives and understanding. We recommend the following:

15.  Training from Fearless Futures, which focuses on the root causes of inequality and takes as intersectional approach.

16.  We partnered with Diverse City, an award-winning organisation committed to diversity and equality in the arts, on our Creative Leadership programme. The team’s insights helped us recruit our most diverse cohorts ever.

17.  We ran internal learning events throughout Black History Month, hearing from Black social entrepreneurs in our community.

18.  We’re partnering with The Ubele Initiative for our Community Business Trade Up Programme, in partnership with Power To Change, as we want to support more community business leaders from Black, Asian and minoritised ethnic backgrounds.

19.  We provide Mental Health First Aid training for staff.

20.  We share learning about diversity and inclusion every fortnight in our internal bulletin.

Reaching a more diverse audience

We want more people from minoritised and marginalised backgrounds to access the support we offer.

21.  We’ve piloted new approaches to making student recruitment more inclusive. We’ll share this year’s learning in our annual report in January.

22.  We’re trialling application methods that don’t include a lengthy form – for example, submitting a voice recording or video recording.

23.  Digital can create barriers for some people, so we’ve tried some entirely non-digital approaches to student recruitment (e.g. posters and community events).

24.  We’ve worked with SSE fellows and outreach experts with deep reach and expertise in communities we’re keen to reach.

25.  We’re looking beyond our usual “tried and tested” friends in the sector to promote support offers. Instead we’re reaching out to organisations and media specifically serving communities of people who are underrepresented on our programmes.

26.  We learnt from Diverse City how important it is to be explicit that we want to reach certain communities. We now put inclusion statements and goals at the top of web-pages, and put accessibility info front and centre (e.g. if venues are wheelchair-accessible) – see an example here. We’ve taken the same approach on our jobs page. This info used to be buried deep in downloadable info packs – but who would bother reading that far, if they already felt excluded?

27.  We’re trialling inclusion targets. For example, we set inclusion targets for giving grants through the Social Enterprise Support Fund, and have exceeded all of them!

Making marketing and communications more inclusive and accessible

Language, imagery and media formats when people first encounter us are important indicators of whether or not we’re inclusive.

28.  We’ve codified in our brand guidelines the importance of diversity in imagery and photography.

29.  We aim to publish guidance notes for all our larger programmes in large print, plain text format. This makes them more accessible for people with visual impairments, reading disabilities or using screen-readers.

30.  We invite people to let us know if they need information in another format.

31.  We’ve tried translating course information into British Sign Language (BSL), as English may be only a second or third language for deaf people who speak BSL as their first language.

32.  We regularly review our language. We’re phasing out the acronym “BAME” at the moment.

33.  We’ve got targets to ensure the balance of people we spotlight in our communications (e.g. case studies, blogs) is at least representative of the UK population.

34.  We run blogs to show we champion diverse leadership – such as this blog about the experiences of LGBTQ+ social entrepreneurs, by our brilliant comms coordinator Henna Patel.

35.  Henna uses this Happy calendar to celebrate all beliefs’ days of significance on Twitter – not just Christmas and Easter!

Next steps

We’re far from perfect, but we’re committed. Improving inclusion and accessibility is a long game. We’ll keep sharing as go.

If you’re interested in our anti-racism action plan, marking the next milestone in our journey, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social @SchSocEnt.

Sophie Hobson is head of communications at the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), and a member of the Diversity Forum steering group. SSE helps 1,000 people a year develop the skills, strengths and networks they need to tackle society’s biggest problems. Share your thoughts about this blog @sophiehobson @SchSocEnt on Twitter, or over LinkedIn.