Diversity and Inclusion: how Bristol Beacon is changing

By Alison Williams

Engaging with your community

Like many organisations I’ve felt that Bristol Beacon had the policies and procedures in place but they were metaphorically sat on the shelf – it’s easy to talk the talk but less easy to put changes into action. How could we really attract different people to come and work with us?

When we put together our Transformation Promise around our name change, suddenly our pledges became real. And, by starting to articulate our challenges, I realised that we didn’t have to find the answers on our own. It’s about engaging with your community and talking to people who have the experiences that you don’t have to help you to unpick what’s happening in your organisation.

I also think there is power and vulnerability in opening up and saying “We’re not doing as well as we want to be – how can we be doing better?”

So it was really refreshing to speak with Katie and Aisha and for them to say “Well of course you don’t know how to do all this – and we’re not going to tell you either!” But they’re there to help us find out about where we are, what questions we need to ask ourselves and put in some positive actions to make change. It’s from there that you can grow and take those steps.

“Knowing that your staff feel like they belong is really important”

Alison Williams, Bristol Beacon, People Manager

Right now Katie and Aisha are helping us find out where we are as an organisation by working with us to design a staff questionnaire. And we’re already seeing positive changes. We’ve doubled the number of under 25s working in our organisation within the last year. And that feels really positive. That’s just one measure. We want to increase others such as representation of Black and Asian communities and people with disabilities.

We want to engage with people with real lived experience when discussing issues like women’s safety, or how we recruit and the questions we ask, and when we’re thinking about what our application form looks like. Aisha and Katie are helping us to see things through these individual and specific lenses.

We know that over the next 12 months we will need to ramp back up towards reopening and we’ll have a period of quite extensive recruitment across most areas of our organisation. And we know that inducting these people in the right way is incredibly important so I’m really glad that we’re doing this work now – we’re building a solid foundation of insight and knowledge on which we communicate what it’s like to work here. It feels like vital and exciting work.