Best bits of the 2025 Diversity conference

We hosted our last conference of the year a couple of weeks ago, marking the 4th consecutive year DSC has run From Here to Diversity. Delegates from a wide range of charities joined us to listen and share knowledge about issues related to equality, equity, diversity and inclusion (EEDI). We’ve written a short summary of the conference in case you missed it. Here’s what happened!

Power and privilege

Sufina Ahmed, Director of the John Ellerman Foundation, opened our conference with a brilliant speech on power and privilege in the charity sector. She explored the paradox of charities being simultaneously part of the solution and part of the problem, proposing accountable leadership as a framework to ensure that the sector is a force for good. For more about this topic, check out Sufina’s blogs:

• Applying the personal to philanthropy and the multi-crises of social, economic and environmental inequalities
• Let’s talk about leadership

Following the opening keynote, Louise Calvey, Executive Director of Asylum Matters, outlined her organisation’s mission to transform asylum in the UK. She highlighted the power of community-based campaigning, centred on the leadership and voices of people with lived experience of the asylum system, which is the foundation of Asylum Matters’ theory of change. To illustrate this, we looked at how communities across the UK were amplifying Asylum Matters’s ‘Lift the Ban’ campaign. She also showed us Catherine’s (who has lived experience) excellent argument about why we should lift the ban on people seeking asylum from working. This strategy shifts the centre of power away from the charity and towards the people that matter.

Workplace culture

Next up, Ama Afrifa-Tchie, founder of Inclusion Agilist Consultancy and former Head of People, Wellbeing and Equity at Mental Health First Aid England, chatted with us about psychological safety. Google’s Project Aristotle identified this as one of the five most important features of a productive workplace. Ama stressed that psychological safety enables employees to bring their authentic selves and talk about what’s on their minds without fear of backlash. Ama particularly focused on the role of leadership in cultivating psychological safety, linking her advice to Sufina’s opening speech.

The importance of EEDI

In the afternoon, Katie Miller, Research Lead at the National Housing Federation, and Anna Gomez, Senior Business Adviser at ACAS, discussed how to measure and monitor diversity. They argued that doing so leads to increased diversity, making organisations more representative of the communities that they serve. However, they noted that safety and privacy must be carefully considered, and that it is vital to inform staff why data is being collected. Finally, they reminded the audience that measuring and monitoring diversity is only worth doing if something happens as a result!

But the big question of the day was, does EEDI still matter in this current environment? We welcomed the following guests to a panel discussion to answer this question:

• Judeline Nicholas, Director of her own consultancy firm specialising in diversity and inclusion
• Richard James, CEO of YMCA St Paul’s
• Jeff Banks, CEO of Lightyear Foundation
• Adam Freeman-Pask, CEO of Fulham Reach Boat Club

Not surprisingly, the panel all agreed that EEDI does matter! Paying attention to EEDI is an important factor in charity success, both in serving your beneficiaries, and financial outcomes.

Mind your language!

Judeline Nicholas delivered an excellent session on eliminating microaggressions. To show how destructive microaggressions can be, watch this video that Judeline showed us. Now, watch this video of a Black girl athlete being made invisible at a medal ceremony and reflect. The effects of microaggressions are, in actuality, macro because they perpetuate harmful hierarchies. We can prevent them from occurring by acknowledging our unconscious biases, attending educational events on EEDI-related issues and being active bystanders.

For those of us wanting to improve our written communication to influence, Paul Brollo, DSC Associate Trainer, shared some excellent tips. Contextualising his session with current affairs, he warned against divisive messages built on ‘us’ vs ‘them’ narratives, demonstrated how different people can interpret our language and how to overcome barriers to listening.

Hope and optimism

To close the conference, Jabeer Butt OBE, Chief Executive of the Race Equality Foundation (REF) reminded us of reasons to stay hopeful and optimistic in the face of growing inequality and increasing levels of racism. He told us that we must tackle racism intersectionally (i.e. in consideration of other inequalities like sexism, ableism, and classism) to improve life for everyone. He highlighted useful measures and tools charities can use, such as the Race Equity Maturity Index, an innovative self-assessment tool created by the London Anti-racism Collaboration for Health that REF is promoting to the wider charity sector. He further explained that the UK is expected to expand pay gap metrics beyond gender to measure disparities across ethnicity and disability status. These examples drawn upon by Jabeer show how we can change society for the better by using our power and privilege. Injustice is not inevitable but political.

Check out more of our free EEDI resources – There’s our EEDI hub, your destination for all our articles and guidance related to EEDI. We’d also love for you to read our latest resource, Charities Against Hate – providing practical actions that your charity can take to tackle racism and other forms of hate.